Page 70 of You Lied First
H ome from Cleeve Hill, Margot and Guy go their separate ways.
When she hears him start to work through the list of phone calls on his to-do list, she grabs her keys and nips into town to pick up her parcel at the lockers.
It’s an incongruous place to collect an item, especially one that could prove to be her husband’s downfall.
Still, she doesn’t want Guy to know that she’s contacted Di and asked her to look through the camping gear for a camera that may or may not have got tangled up with the other stuff.
That may or may not prove that he killed Celine.
Guy’s no stranger to opening Margot’s mail.
Heaven forbid he were to open the package with the camera and watch the footage before her.
The package is an encouraging weight, and she smiles to herself as she slips it into her shopping basket and buries it under a loaf of sourdough and the flowers she picked up in Marks.
The bag swings on her arm as she hurries back to the car.
Thank goodness Di’s such an innocent. She’d swallowed the story that they hadn’t gone to the desert and she hadn’t put two and two together when Margot asked her to look for, ‘anything that may have got tangled up with the camping gear in the boot of the car including – maybe? – “Flynn’s” camera?
’ A ll Margot had to do was intimate that Guy was furious that Flynn had lost it, and Di was on board and happy to keep the secret. Maybe others notice his temper, too.
Back home, Margot arranges the flowers and tries to get on with her work but her mind’s racing.
Will there be any footage at all? Was the camera running that night?
Did the battery last long enough? What will the footage show?
The biggest question of all: what will she do with any information she discovers?
Finally, Guy shouts across the landing that he’s going to the gym.
Margot hears him clatter down the stairs and then the front door clicks shut.
She listens as his feet crunch over the gravel, then the car door slams, the engine rumbles and the gravel scrunches more consistently as he drives away, pausing at the gates.
She peers out of the window to check the gates close behind him then springs into action.
She opens the parcel with shaking hands then turns the camera this way and that, confused: it doesn’t have a viewing screen.
Quickly, she googles how to view the footage on the damn thing.
Aware of the fact she has less than two hours – and that’s only if Guy stays at the gym for a shower – she researches how to access the content, locates a USB cable and manages to connect the camera to her laptop.
After a false start, she manages to get the file transferred over to her laptop, and gasps as she sees the date is December and the opening image is in darkness. Could it really be?
‘Breathe, Margot,’ she says. ‘Be methodical.’
Her heart skitters like a goat on a mountainside.
The answer to everything could be right there.
She doesn’t even ask herself now if she wants to know.
There’s absolutely no question of her not looking at the footage.
It could be the only way out of her marriage.
With a trembling finger, she clicks on the first video and, oh, God, there’s the campsite.
She’d fixed the camera to a table where it gives a view of the area where they’d eaten and danced, one of the four-wheel drives and the entrance to one of the single tents, which Margot remembers is Celine’s.
Eyes peeled, she scrolls through the short clips of video, as the camera’s triggered by little scurrying things, with eyes lit up white, in the night-view vision.
She realises she’s going to have to work more quickly, so she fast forwards in bursts, trying to find something that looks larger.
Then there it is, on the screen in front of her, clear as day: Celine emerging from her tent, stumbling about, opening a beer and slumping into a chair.
In the next burst of video, a figure crosses the sand and joins her.
She watches as the two figures interact and then, with her heart battering her chest, Margot sits back in disbelief.
Well, well, well.
She finally knows who killed Celine Cremorne.