Page 57 of The Fall

‘Where is she?’ I asked. This was all shockingly quick. I’d thought discussions would continue today, once everyone had calmed down, that we might come to some sort of agreement with Kitty, obtain some answers from her.

‘Olly’s driving her to the station.’

‘Where will she go?’

Sasha looked up at me. There was a sheen of sweat on her forehead. I noticed she wasn’t wearing make-up, which was unusual.

‘Anna,’ she said. ‘You must learn not to be such a pushover. Kitty terrorised you. She’s toxic. Do you really care where she goes?’

I blinked at her. I did care, a bit, even after Kitty’s betrayal. But I was afraid to say so.

‘Or do you want her here, to do it all over again?’

Sasha’s expression was harder than I’d ever seen before. She got to her feet and stood close. I felt intimidated. ‘Answer me! Are you really so submissive that you want her to stay here and continue to make your life hell? Have you learned nothing from me? Have I wasted my time trying to help you?’

Her hands were shaking. I was shocked by her vehemence and struggled to find the words to reply. The energy in the room had changed from bad to something worse. It felt as if violence was hovering there. I took a step back.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry. Of course, Kitty must go. Thank you for all of this.’ I gestured to the room. ‘Can I help?’ I felt obliged to offer though I didn’t want to. What I wanted was to get out of there. Kitty’s downfall was hard to bear even in theory, let alone to observe the aftermath. Until last night I’d felt attached to her, I realised, because she’d been a thread connecting me to my old life with Nick.

Sasha’s expression melted into something kinder and more familiar. ‘No, I’msorry,’ she said. It was like she was a different person. ‘I’m just so angry that Kitty was working against you. I can’t believe I didn’t figure it out and do something about it sooner.’ She took my hands in hers. She’d stopped shaking, her grip was gentle and firm. Of course, she was right, and I was silly to cling onto old ideas.

‘You didn’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m glad we found out when we did. Before she did anything more, or worse.’

‘You were brave last night,’ Sasha said. ‘I was proud of you.’

Those words warmed me. I decided I would help her. To run away would be unsupportive and she deserved better. I made a start on the kitchen, pulling pots, pans, crockery and cutlery outof the cupboards, and scrubbed everything. The meagre contents of the fridge went into a black sack, and I threw it all out. It felt like a waste but realistically which of us was going to want to eat Kitty’s food? We’d have had to choke it down. I was almost finished when I saw the bread bin. It was one of those on-the-counter ones, made from wood, its door hinged. I opened it. Inside, was a small red bag, with a shoulder strap. I recognised it immediately. It was Kitty’s bag, the one she carried with her always, because it contained the insulin, pens and needles that she needed to control her diabetes.

I opened it. It was stuffed full, with more vials of insulin than she normally carried – it could be a week’s worth, at least a couple of days’ – and two of the pens she used to inject herself with, one for the day and one for night. The bag contained at least twenty needles, too. They spilled out all over the countertop in their little containers.

I knew what everything was because she’d explained it to me once. I’d been fascinated by how she managed the condition when I first met her but hadn’t thought about it for years. She seemed to manage it effortlessly, so long as she had that bag by her side. If she didn’t have it, she told me, it wouldn’t take long for her to become very sick indeed.

I stared at it. Why didn’t she have it now, if she was on her way to the station? There was so much insulin in it, I could only think that this was all she had.

I heard Sasha calling me. Something, a sort of creeping panic, made me stuff everything back into the bag and replace it in the bread bin, and I didn’t tell Sasha about it. Together, we pulled the furniture back into the house. I looked more carefully at the floor this time and at the bathroom. I wondered why Sasha had felt shehad to scrub everything so hard but couldn’t bring myself to take that thought to any conclusion. It was too outlandish, too horrific.

Olly joined us soon afterwards but didn’t help for long. He said he was tired, and he went back to the Manor. Sasha didn’t stop him. I was virtually mute, as if my voice had deserted me. I felt as if asking questions might open a can of worms because I kept wondering: did they do something to Kitty? But that was surely my silly brain running riot.

I hung up the bedsheets and we closed the place up. It was spick and span. Later, after a strange, queasy sort of afternoon where Sasha and I avoided each other and everyone was uncharacteristically silent, I walked back over to the Coach House and took the dried bedlinen off the line. I wanted to take it back to the Manor and iron it. It was the last job we had to do, the final purge of Kitty. Everything had changed in a heartbeat, it felt.

I couldn’t resist going back into the Coach House while I was there. It wasn’t locked.

Kitty’s bag was gone, and the bread bin scrubbed clean like everything else.

The diary ends there. Hal shuts it. ‘Why’s she telling us this now? Is it something to do with Tom Booth’s death?’

‘Maybe she’s been waiting to tell someone all these years. She’s probably been scared to death, isolated in the Manor, and now we’re here, on her doorstep, and she sees an opportunity.’

‘Maybe,’ Hal says. He knuckles his eyes.

‘Let’s find Kitty, then,’ he says. ‘The first Kitty. Then we’ll know whether this is a load of hokum or not. But let’s not forget, our priority is to find Tom Booth’s murderer.’

41

THURSDAY

Olly

Olly photographs every page of Anna’s journal, which doesn’t take him long, because there aren’t many. She’s only filled about a third of the slim notebook; the rest is blank. He knows he should return it as soon as possible, but he can’t resist looking at the last entry. He needs to know if she described the events around Kitty’s disappearance, because he and Sasha could be in danger, if the police get their hands on this.

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