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Nicole
Nicole tries calling Jen, to tell her what she’s just heard about Olly and Sasha, but she doesn’t pick up. She tries Detective Steen instead. He takes a while to answer, so long that she’s considering calling 999, but he does eventually, and she breathes a sigh of relief and gives Anna a thumbs-up. Since she woke Anna with the news, Anna hasn’t left her side.
Steen sounds groggy, as if he was asleep, and the dissonance of that, when every nerve in Nicole’s body is humming, feels startling. She blurts out the story about the camper. ‘It’s Olly Palmer,’ she says. ‘He was here the morning Tom died.’
For a moment she wonders if he’s still on the line, but then he says, ‘I’m on my way. I’ll see you in about forty minutes.’
She hangs up. ‘He’s coming,’ she tells Anna.
‘Good,’ Anna says. She looks tense, and Nicole knows she’s worried about Steen, afraid that he’s not going to listen to them, convinced that the police won’t take them seriously.
‘So, we wait,’ Nicole says. She shudders.
She feels a breeze on her arms and remembers that she left the doors open when she stepped out to the pool earlier. She should shut them. It was stupid of her not to have done it before. She hurries through, closes them and locks up, feeling relief that she remembered. She peers out to the front and sees headlamps coming down the drive. The squad car does a slow turn then creeps away. It’s reassuring, though she’s glad it wasn’t here when Ben, the camper, came by. What if he’d been frightened off before he told her what he saw?
‘Do you want something to eat?’ Anna asks when she returns to the living area.
‘I couldn’t eat.’
‘Me neither.’
They sit together. ‘I suspected it,’ Anna says. ‘I suspected that Olly and Sasha could do a thing like this, but I didn’t think anyone would believe me.’
Nicole doesn’t ask her why she didn’t say anything. She understands how broken Anna must have been.
She thinks about Olly and Sasha, how they present as so charming when one or both might be cold-blooded killers. They’re certainly liars, telling the police they were at the Manor House all morning last Saturday.
Though none of us are what we seem, she thinks. Kitty was Anna. And I, she thinks, have killed, too. Though it was different. Granny was old, and sick. It was almost a mercy.
She used to go to see Tom’s granny every week, even when she was dog-tired, even when Tom made an excuse not to. She brought Granny her shopping and her weekly Lucky Dip lottery ticket, helped Granny out with jobs, listened to her complain about everything Nicole did. She did it out of a sense of duty and for Tom, because he loved his granny, but Granny made her life a misery. Never grateful, increasingly demanding and unpleasant. She only wanted Tom. Nicole felt like a servant. No, a slave.
Tom never saw it. He loved Granny too much. Nicole was careful not to complain about her because she wanted to protect him from the hurt of them not getting on. But it got to her. Things might have carried on like that if she hadn’t overheard Tom talking to Granny on speakerphone. He tried to turn it off, dropped his phone in his eagerness to, so they ended up both listening, the phone spinning on the floor at Nicole’s feet as Granny explained how much she disliked Nicole. Tom snatched it up and ended the call but it was too late.
‘She loves you, really,’ Tom said, some difficult hours later. He was pleading with Nicole not to give Granny a piece of her mind. ‘Honestly, she does.’
‘Why didn’t you defend me?’ Nicole asked.
He winced. ‘It’s easier to let her vent. I don’t agree with her, but she’s my only family apart from you. It’s just what she’s like. She’s not going to change now.’
It’s just what she’s like. She’s not going to change now. Granny’s words haunted Nicole. They eroded the good and wonderful thing she and Tom had together, they were contemptuous of the hours and hours of effort Nicole had made with Granny, andshe didn’t see how age was any excuse for being horrible, but she loved Tom and wasn’t prepared to give him a ‘me or her’ ultimatum, so she tried to carry on as normal.
The next time she visited Granny, though, she couldn’t help remembering what she said, and thinking of how many years Granny might live. She was sick, but not at death’s door. As she emptied Granny’s sharps bin and restocked her medical supplies under Granny’s beady eye, as she plumped her cushions, made her dinner and cups of tea just how she liked them and poured the perfect amount of sherry in Granny’s favourite glass and handed her the TV remote control so they could watch the lottery results, because Granny didn’t like Nicole to change the channel, Nicole felt less able to tolerate these behaviours as eccentricities and saw malice in them, as she was sure Granny intended her to.
She decided to give it one more week. If nothing improved, she would tell Granny that if she couldn’t be more pleasant, Nicole would not come again. She would tell Tom that he would have to do it all on his own.
It was a rainy Saturday night. Tom was playing darts with his mates. Nicole forgot her umbrella, had trouble with the buses. She arrived wet and late as a result and found Granny snappish and horrible, picking fault with everything. By the time they settled down to watch the lottery results, Nicole was burning with resentment but tongue-tied and afraid to confront Granny. She knew Granny would bite back.
Tucked like a bitter old crow in her armchair, Granny fixed her beady eyes on the television. Nicole felt a profound contemptfor her. I hate you, she thought. I always have. It was as if something had snapped inside her.
‘Have you got the ticket?’ Granny asked.
Nicole held it up. This was her job. To hold the lottery ticket and check off the numbers. Granny’s eyesight was too bad. Though Nicole suspected she could see more than she claimed to.
She barely listened as they reeled off the numbers.
‘Well?’ Granny said. ‘Wake up! What have we got?’
Nicole cleared her throat. She looked at the ticket, and then at the TV. A shower of glittering silver confetti was released onto the set. The numbers were displayed on the screen. She looked back at the ticket. ‘Well?’ Granny said. She poked Nicole’s arm. Nicole looked at the TV and at the ticket once more. They had all the numbers, every single one.
