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I feel tears stinging my eyes when he says that, remembering the way Jess hugged me so unexpectedly on the doorstep on Wednesday evening when she came round to drop off the food box.
‘Poor Jess,’ I say. ‘All she wanted to do was help. It’s so sad, so bloody unfair …’
‘It is,’ Mike says, and there’s a look of real sadness in his eyes, a bleakness, and I wonder if he might have been a little bit in love with Jess, and my heart twists.
‘Anyway, I’ll leave you in peace for a while,’ he says abruptly. ‘We’ll need to get a formal statement from you, maybe on Monday? Take the weekend to try and get your head together. I can’t even imagine how stressful the past few months have been for you. And give our best to Mr Chong, won’t you? We’ll need to chat to him too, when he’s feeling up to it, but we’ve already reassured him he won’t be facing any charges in relation to the assault on DCI Warden.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Mike. You take care.’
When he’s gone, I walk slowly upstairs to the lounge and curl into a corner of the sofa, pulling the grey blanket we keep on the side over my legs. I’m going to go and visit Pete again this afternoon, and while part of me is longing to see him, anxiety is nibbling at the edges of my mind, anxiety that’s been building since he staggered out of his bedroom and saved my life.
He hasn’t said a word about it, not yet. But is it possible that he heard some of what I told Steph? About me not being Mary Ellis? About my real identity, and what I did?
He appeared on the landing justafterI’d told her, I know that. But what were her last words to me?
‘Bye bye, Mary. Or Amanda. Or whatever …’
Hemusthave heard that, surely? It was just seconds before he attacked Steph. And yet, when I visited him last night, all he did was tell me again that he’s realised he loves me, and not just as a friend. He told me that if there’s any chance I might feel the same, that he wants to try and make a go of it, as a couple. And I wrapped my arms around him, and told him that there’s nothing I want more, because, to my own immense surprise, that’s how I feel now. I still don’t know where it’s come from, why our feelings have changed so much, why it didn’t happen years ago. But I’m too happy to question it, and they do say – whoevertheyare – that the best relationships are the ones that start with friendship, don’t they?
And so I snuggle under the blanket and try to force the thoughts from my head. Pete had been drugged, after all. His recollections of the whole night are incredibly hazy, he says; he just remembers waking up to feel a heavy weight across his body, pushing poor Jess off him, and then becoming aware of some sort of altercation on the landing. He says he vaguely remembered that I was in some sort of danger, although he couldn’t remember exactly what, but he decided he needed a weapon and grabbed the snow globe from his drawer, before stumbling to the door to see Steph about to bring his tennis trophy down on my skull.
If he did hear what we were talking about, he’d surely have mentioned it by now, I reason. Which means it’s just Steph who knows, and clearly she hasn’t told anyone about it yet, because Mike would definitely have said, wouldn’t he? So there’s nothing I can do except wait for her to tell and then deny it. She’s clearly crazy, after all, so I just stick to my plan and say I made it up. I would have said anything to save my life when I knew she was about to kill me, wouldn’t I? I’d have lied through my teeth to her …
And I’m good at that, of course. Lying. I’ve been doing it for years, to everyone. Even now.
Because I lied to Steph too.
Not about everything, of course. But, once again, I altered the story a bit. I had to. That story about Mary, and the fire, and what I did afterwards, well, that’s actually not ahundredper cent true.
There’s more.
