Page 72

Chapter 71

Anna

The teapot and mugs act as barriers between me and Margot. I clear my throat, trying not to give away how anxious I am. I don’t want her thinking she has the advantage in this long-overdue confrontation.

Her text message – a curt See you at mine at 11 on Sunday – wasn’t an invitation or a request, but an expectation. Drew told me to ignore it and not to go. But I’m done with being controlled by him or anyone else.

‘What did Drew tell you before he tried to kill you?’ I begin.

‘What, no “How are you?” or “I’m sorry for what happened”?’ Margot asks with mock offence.

‘I think we’re beyond pleasantries, don’t you?’

‘ Your brother ,’ she says pointedly, ‘told me who you both really were the morning of the bonfire.’

‘How? Where were you?’

‘We were in his flat.’

‘His flat?’ I repeat. I think the smoke inhalation must have fogged her brain. ‘Drew doesn’t have a flat.’

‘He rents a bedsit above a Turkish restaurant on the Wellingborough Road. Liv wasn’t mistaken a few months back when she thought she’d spotted me leaving the restaurant. If she’d passed me a few seconds later, she’d have seen Drew was behind me.’

This catches me off guard.

‘But why would you go to his ...’ The penny drops, along with my jaw. ‘My brother was the man you were cheating on Nicu with?’ She nods, although there’s no pride in her expression. ‘But he hates you.’

‘I see that now,’ she says with a cold laugh. ‘Drew was conflicted. I think he hated himself more for falling in love with me.’

I shake my head. ‘No, he would never have fallen in love with you.’

‘He told me that he had, many, many times. It’s why I had to break it off with him.’

Margot recounts how they met on a dating app months earlier.

‘After Christmas, Nicu and I were in a dreadful place, and I think I was trying to prove to myself that if he didn’t want me, there were others who would,’ she explains.

Neither had used full-face profile pictures. She recalls how my brother was flirty and funny and, like Margot, only looking for no-strings-attached fun. After a couple of days of messaging, each realised who the other was. They swiftly blocked one another.

‘I’d never once looked at him as anything other than your scruffy, sullen husband,’ she adds. ‘And then at Frankie’s party, we kept catching each other’s eye. Our shared secret became a kind of connection. Anyway, Drew must’ve unblocked me before I unblocked him, because when I did, there was a message waiting for me, asking if I wanted to meet him for a drink. I used a different SIM card for our conversations, as I didn’t want to get caught.’

‘But you thought he was married to me,’ I say. ‘Why would you have an affair with your friend’s husband?’

Margot raises the remnants of an eyebrow. ‘Are you about to lecture me on morality?’ she replies, and I back down. ‘He told me you two were leading separate lives and had an understanding that you could do whatever you wanted with whomever, as long as you didn’t tell the other. Which I suppose wasn’t that far from the truth. Anyway, we’d been seeing each other for a few months, once or twice a week when work and family permitted, when one afternoon, out of the blue, he admitted he loved me. I told him that he wasn’t allowed to because we could never be anything other than what we were. I suppose I wasn’t being entirely truthful with him. You don’t spend that much time with a person without feeling something. But I wouldn’t give in to it. I wasn’t going to trade my life with Nicu, as flawed as it was, to live in a bedsit with a delivery driver.’

‘Given all you know now, do you really think he felt that way?’ I ask. ‘Because you don’t try and murder the one you love.’

‘Yes, you do,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘They’ve even got a name for it. A Crime of Passion.’

‘They’re murders committed in the heat of the moment. Yours was pre-planned.’

‘Look,’ she snaps. ‘A lot of men have fallen for me over the years. I know the difference between someone who says it because they mean it and someone who just wants to get me into bed. Your brother definitely meant it. And he took my rejection badly. He bombarded me with messages, begging me to change my mind. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.’

‘When did he tell you who he and I really were?’

‘I agreed to meet him one last time on November the fourth,’ she recalls. ‘A kind of farewell, I suppose. I felt I owed him that. We had a few drinks and one thing led to another and I stayed over at the flat because Nicu and the kids were still living away at that time. In the morning I was woken up with a stinging sensation in my arm. Drew was standing over me, injecting me with a needle. I tried to fight him off but he overpowered me and told me the truth about everything. And that’s the last thing I remember before I fell unconscious.’

I’m scared to ask the next question because I don’t know how I’m going to respond if the answer is no.

‘And did you remember us? What you did?’

For the first time today, Margot breaks eye contact.

‘You’ve been impossible to forget.’

A long breath escapes me. I’m completely aware of how weird it is to admit I’m grateful for this response.

‘You had a different surname then, didn’t you?’ she asks.

‘Khan. We changed it to Mason when Mum’s sister and her husband legally adopted us.’

‘They called you Joanna and Andrew in the newspapers. I followed your story.’

‘Why?’

‘I wanted to know you were okay. I’ve searched for you online over the years but never found any trace of either of you. Now I know why. If you’d moved here with those names I’d have recognised you and I’d have put my house on the market the same day.’

A silence passes between us as she allows me to process her recollections.

‘The night of the bonfire,’ I begin. ‘Was what you told me true when you were being carried into the ambulance?’

She nods, almost apologetically. ‘Yes.’

‘How can I be sure?’

‘I have no reason to lie to you, Anna. When your brother told me who he really was, I remembered him being spoken about. Andy, as he’d been known to our gang, was the one who tipped us off about the contents of your parents’ safe. If it wasn’t for him, we’d never have broken into your flat.’