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Sometimes I ask myself—if everything had been fine between me and Gabriel when Joseph entered our lives, if Gabriel hadn’t started rejecting me both physically and emotionally, would I still have become obsessed with Joseph? If Laure hadn’t turned up and, with the mention of Pierre’s daughter, unearthed the feelings of profound ecstasy I’d experienced on the night of Beth’s conception, would I still have become obsessed with him?
Joseph became my guilty secret. I could have chosen to spend my days helping in the garden, just to be near him, and endured the combination of agony and ecstasy. Instead, I watched him surreptitiously from behind the bedroom curtain, waiting for a glimpse of him walking to and from the walled garden. And then, the moment I had never imagined, when I saw him staring up at my window and dared to think that my feelings were reciprocated. I would never have acted on them, but I was flattered that he felt the same way about me as I felt about him.
Until I heard him having sex with Laure, and knew I’d been deluding myself. The humiliation of realizing that he hadn’t been waiting for me each morning, and the injustice of it, tore me apart. After all I’d done for Laure, in becoming the object of Joseph’s desire, she had betrayed me in the cruelest way possible.
Thoughts of them together tormented me. Memories of what I’d heard on the other side of the shed door plagued me. I began to hate Laure. I wanted her out of our lives, out of Joseph’s life. And I had a new fear to contend with. I might have laid the seeds for her to beblamed for Pierre’s murder, but what if she were able to prove that she hadn’t killed him? What if his murder was eventually traced back to me?
I didn’t kill her on purpose. The day after the storm, when I heard her and Joseph arguing, I decided to go after her. Gabriel had already mentioned that Joseph seemed to be tiring of Laure; he had seen him trying to disentangle himself from her embraces more than once, and I thought this might be my chance to get her to leave. Earlier that day, she had asked me to go for a run with her and I’d refused. But when I saw her leave, I hurried to the bedroom at the front of the house and called to her from the window.
“Laure!” I called. “I’ll come with you. Wait for me at the stile.”
She turned and gave me a thumbs-up.
It was then that I saw Joseph running toward the gate. At first, I thought he was going after Laure—but he turned left onto the road, not right, something I didn’t mention to the police later, because by then, it suited me not to.
I was changing into my running gear when Gabriel called to check on me. I told him I was going to take a long bath. I’m not sure why I didn’t tell him that I was going for a run with Laure, but maybe some instinct for self-preservation had subconsciously kicked in.
Five minutes later, I left the house and, as I approached the stile, Laure turned and smiled at me.
“Have you seen how muddy it is?” she asked pointing to the track over the fields. “There’s no point in going for a run. Maybe we should go back to the house and wait until tomorrow.”
“Why don’t we go through the woods? It will be drier there. We could even run around the quarry,” I suggested.
She raised her eyebrows in two perfect arches. “I thought we weren’t allowed to go there.”
“But people do, apparently. They go to pay their respects to Charlie. I’ve heard that some of them throw flowers down to where he fell.”
“A shrine to him. That’s lovely.”
“Shall we go?”
She broke into a jog. “Why not?”
We ran through the woods to the quarry, then followed the path that took us up to the top. The grass was wet with rain and our ankles quickly became soaked. At one point, Laure slipped and almost fell.
“Let’s stop for a moment,” I said, panting after the upward climb. I pointed deep into the thicket of trees on our left. “I think this is where Charlie’s bike must have left the path.”
She peered into the woods, frowning. “Are you sure? Wouldn’t his bike have hit at least one tree before he arrived at the edge?”
“Yes, I suppose. Maybe it was further on, then.”
“Unless he meant to do it.”
I stopped walking and turned to her. “What do you mean?”
“Just that maybe he rode over the edge on purpose. I don’t know—maybe he had an argument with someone and it upset him.”
I stared at her, my heart thumping so hard that I was sure she could hear it. I tried to push away the image of her tumbling over the edge of the quarry, but it remained lodged in my brain.
“So you mean he came in here, threaded his way through the trees, like this?” I plunged into the darkness, drops of rain falling on me as I brushed against branches, and traced a path to the edge of the quarry.
“Yes,” she said, following behind me.
“By the way,” I said, as we neared the edge. “I had a call from Samantha Everett this morning.”
“Oh!” she squealed. “Did you get the contract?”
I turned and looked at her. “No, I didn’t, because I didn’t get back to her when she left a message asking me to contact her. And the reason I didn’t get back to her was because you didn’t give me the message.”
