Page 90 of The Guest

She stared at me for a moment, then clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide with horror. “Oh my God, Iris, I’m so sorry!” she said, removing her hand from her mouth and reaching out to me. “I completely forgot. I know that sounds awful but I—”

“Did you though?” I interrupted. “Completely forget? Or did you forget to tell me on purpose?”

“What? No, of course not! How could you even think that?” The reproach in her voice made me suddenly angry.

“Because you’re selfish, Laure. Because you never think about anyone but yourself. It’s time you left. Me, Gabriel, Joseph—we’re all tired of you.”

“Joseph? You know about me and Joseph?”

I laughed. “You’re hardly discreet, Laure. I’ve known since the day I was meant to be going to London with Esme. You didn’t want to come with me, remember? You said you were going to look for a divorce lawyer but what you really wanted was to be alone with Joseph. At the station I changed my mind, and came home. I went to look for you in the garden and I heard you and Joseph in the shed.” She flushed. “When did it start? Before you went to Paris to see Pierre?”

She looked shocked. “No, of course not. But that day, I wanted to talk to Joseph about Pierre not turning up. I hadn’t had a chance before as Gabriel was always around. So I went to see him in the shed. And it just happened.”

“It just happened,” I mimicked. “And now it’s over. He doesn’t want you anymore.”

“No, you’re wrong, he does want me. He wants me to move into his cottage with him.”

“No,” I said. “I heard you arguing.”

“Yes, because he wanted me to tell you about us. He’s been asking me to tell you from the beginning, he said I needed to be honest with you, but I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you and Gabriel would be angry that I’d moved on so fast from Pierre. But I’ll never be able to forgive Pierre for not turning up when he asked me to go to Paris. He’s a coward, and I can’t be with someone who’s a coward.” She paused. “There was something I thought of, a reason why, when it came down to it, he couldn’t bring himself to tell me the truth. But I didn’t want to believe it, so I pushed it from my mind. But now, I’mwondering—the day I spoke to Beth on FaceTime, a couple of days before I went to Paris, there was something about her that reminded me of Pierre. I might not have noticed it before, but because he was adamant that Claire wasn’t the mother of his child and he wouldn’t tell me who was, I’ve realized the truth. Is that what Pierre couldn’t bear to tell me, Iris? Is Pierre Beth’s father?”

My heart was thumping so loudly I was convinced she could hear it. “You’re mad,” I said. “Mad and delusional.”

“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t think I am.” Her eyes narrowed. “Maybe we should go and ask Gabriel what he thinks.”

“No, no, you can’t!” In my panic, I raised my arm and took a step toward her. Her eyes widened, she took a step back, and then another—and then she was falling, her arms flailing uselessly as she toppled backward over the edge of the quarry.

I can’t remember if she screamed. I can’t remember running back home, hoping desperately that I wouldn’t meet anyone as I climbed over the stile and jogged the last thirty yards to the house, my mind already spinning the story I would tell Gabriel if he’d arrived home before me. I would tell him that I’d decided to go with Laure after all and that I’d taken the path over the fields, thinking that’s where she’d gone. But I hadn’t come across her, so had come home.

Fortunately, he wasn’t there, so I hurried upstairs and ran a bath with lukewarm water. While it was filling, I shrugged on a bathrobe and went to the garden to see if Joseph had come back to work. If he had, he would think I’d just got out of the bath. But he was nowhere to be seen, so I went back to the house, up the stairs to the bathroom, took off my bathrobe, and got into the bath. Gabriel arrived less than ten minutes later, and during those ten minutes, I realized two things. The first was that once Laure’s body had been found, with a carefully placed word or two, I could make Joseph look suspicious because suddenly, I wanted to hurt him. I wanted him to suffer, even if it was only for a while, because of what Laure had told me as we’d stood at the edge of the quarry, that he’d wanted her to move in with him.

The second thing I realized was that the one flaw in my plan to frame Laure for Pierre’s death had now been erased. If Laure was dead, she had no voice, no way of defending herself.

It was easy to pretend to Gabriel that I’d been in my bath for so long that the water had got cold, and later that evening, to pretend I was annoyed with Laure for not turning up for dinner. It was easy to pretend that I was upset she might be having dinner with Esme and Hugh, and, as the night drew in and the next storm unleashed its winds and rain, it was easy to pretend concern at Laure being somewhere out there. When I went to look for her with Gabriel the next morning, I insisted on going to the quarry and made sure I wore exactly the same clothes and trainers I’d been wearing the previous day—which I’d dried overnight, in case I’d left any traces behind. And in the days that followed, I continued to pretend, to Gabriel, to the police, to Esme and Hugh. My finest hour was when PC Locke told me that Joseph had been taken in for questioning. But then Esme phoned to tell us that Hamish had been born, and when I heard that Joseph had been present at his birth and realized he had the perfect alibi, I quickly had to swallow my bitterness.

I also pretended to Gabriel that the reason I told the police he’d arrived home earlier than he actually had was so that I could be his alibi in case they started looking at him as a possible suspect. In reality, I was giving myself an alibi, because when the police questioned his whereabouts that afternoon, he had to say, because of my lie, that he’d arrived home at four fifteen and that I’d been in the bath.

My phone buzzes again.It’s over.Going for a drink with Hugh and Esme. I’ll let you know when we leave Winchester.The message, and the garden slowly coming into focus, startle me. Had I really been standing at the window that long, for the length of time it took to bury Joseph? Maybe his funeral hadn’t lasted long, unlike Pierre’s, which had seemed to go on forever.

I move to the bed and lie staring at the ceiling, my thoughts going back to the days after Laure died. The relief I felt was incredible.Pierre and Laure were out of our lives, my secret was safe. Now I could concentrate on Gabriel and Beth. Joseph was out of our lives too. He hadn’t been back to work since Laure’s body was found in the quarry, and I didn’t expect him to ever come back. I could put my humiliating encounter with him, when he’d found me in his bed, out of my mind. Yes, his bed. He had found me in his bed, not on the sofa.

The relief I felt was short-lived. Guilt over Pierre’s murder and Laure’s death consumed me. I was so scared of giving something away that I stopped talking to Gabriel altogether. I didn’t know how I was going to get through the funerals of the two people I had killed. I managed to get out of going to Laure’s on the grounds that she had killed Pierre. But I had no excuse for not going to his.

I don’t know how I got through the service. The scene in the storeroom played over and over in my brain on a loop. I couldn’t get the puzzled look on Pierre’s face, when he realized that I’d stabbed him, out of my mind. And then, on the train on the way home, Gabriel dealt me another blow when he told me Joseph would be coming back to work in the walled garden.

For the next couple of weeks, I stayed out of his way and tried to put everything behind me. When Beth decided to defer her university place for a year, it felt like a reward for all I had done to protect her and Gabriel. With Beth around, Gabriel would snap out of his depression, and I would finally have the chance to bond with her. I began to relax.

The chance encounter in Markham with Hugh the week before the christening, when he mentioned how well Beth and Joseph were getting on, made me uneasy. But it was only when Beth told us she had decided to go traveling in Asia, and Gabriel told me why Joseph had been sacked from St. Cuthbert’s, that a new fear gripped my heart. I tried not to reveal my anxiety to Gabriel, but the knowledge that Joseph might be a predator who had now turned his attention to Beth made me sick to my stomach.

There was another reason for the revulsion I felt. I might have despised Joseph by then, but not long before, I had dreamt about him,watched him, desired him. A burning humiliation flowed like lava through my veins. I couldn’t let him get to Beth. I would have to go and see him, appeal to his better nature.

It was the Tuesday before the christening, a few days after Beth had told me and Gabriel of her plans. She was at Esme’s, and Gabriel was out, so I went to the walled garden. I was shaking as I walked over to where Joseph was working, his anger at me still vivid in my mind.

“Can I talk to you a moment?” I asked.

He turned and looked at me, and in his eyes there was such contempt that my breath left my body.

“What do you want?”

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