The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
Epilogue
August 2018
Liam takes off his sunglasses and puts them in the pocket of his shirt. He looks upwards at the house where the sun shines blackly off the curtained windows, before crouching down to lift the edge of a large blue planter; a woodlouse scuttles out of its hiding place. He grabs the object hidden there and takes it to the front door.
Inside, the house is cool and echoey. Everything is as the Jacqueses left it last summer, but there is the stillness, the held breath of an unlived-in home. He feels the echoes of the moments he has spent in this home: the ricochet of privileged laughter off the white walls, the anticipatory clank of a wine bottle being taken out of the fridge in the kitchen, the slap of the dog’s heavy paws across stone flooring, the smell of Scarlett’s perfume, the strange old lady scent she always wears. It’s all still here, but muted, dreamlike, a small ghost of a lost, enchanted world.
But there is also blood in the still air of the house: a heady, noxious undercurrent of death. As Liam passes from room to room, scenes flash through his head. Chilling memories of that night last year, at the end of January when Scarlett had called him. The desperation in her voice.
‘Boobs, I need you. Something’s happened. Please come.’
He left immediately, of course. He never wasted a beat when it came to Scarlett. She was his lifeforce, his meaning. He was nothing before Scarlett and he would return to nothing after her. When she needed him, he came to life, like a marionette taken out of a box.
He found her on a lounger by the pool, her arms wrapped tight around her body, rocking gently.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘I think I’ve been raped.’
She wouldn’t tell him who, when, how, where. Just that.
I think I’ve been raped.
Liam had felt his soft core go hard. Every element of his physical being had been primed to kill. With his bare hands if necessary.
He stayed that night, and the next and the next, waiting and waiting for Scarlett to tell him. His father called him constantly, demanding that he come back to the farm, insisting that they needed him. But Scarlett needed him more and nothing, not even the threat of familial excommunication, could make him leave her side. For weeks he stared at every man he crossed paths with, every student, every teacher, the man in the Co-op, the vicar from the parish church. Who was it, he desperately needed to know, who did this to my girl? Which one of you dared hurt her, tried to break her? He lived those weeks inside a tightly furled paroxysm of violence, ready to burst.
In late February he took the job at Maypole House offered to him by Jacinta Croft and he moved into his room with its balcony and its views across the woods. And it was from there that he saw him, six weeks later: an old man from a distance, but on further inspection a forty-something man with a bald head.
Guy Croft, Jacinta’s husband.
He’d moved away some time previously, amidst talk of adultery, of them having split up. Once a familiar sight walking the grounds of the school with his Labrador, Guy Croft had not been seen for a while, but now he was back, walking from the rear of his cottage and into the woods with an urgency, almost an insanity in his pace.
Liam immediately left his room and followed him through the woods. At the other side of the woods he saw him unlatch the back gate into the grounds of Dark Place, and then from a hiding place out of sight, he heard him talking to Scarlett.
‘Let me in. Please, let me in. I’ve left her. OK? I’ve left her. For you.’
‘I didn’t ask you to leave her. I told you. It’s over.’
‘No. No. You said, you said you didn’t want to be with a married man, Well, I’m not married any more. OK? I’m free.’
‘Oh my God, Guy. Please, just fuck off.’
‘I’m not going anywhere, Scarlett. I’ve given up everything for you.’
And then Liam saw Guy Croft lay his hands against Scarlett’s shoulders, saw him push her, neither hard nor gently, but firmly, back into the house. ‘Everything,’ he said again. And then he took a step forward, his arms out again. Liam heard Scarlett say, ‘Get off me, Guy. Just fucking get your fucking hands off me.’
Liam moved, fast enough to leave skid marks in the ground where he’d been standing, three, four, five bounds and into the door, his hands on Guy’s arms, yanking him back, away from Scarlett, throwing him backwards, on to the ground and then straddling him where he lay; then an awareness of his fist against the skin of Guy’s head, his jaw, the rasp of his stubble against his knuckles, and then the hot stickiness of fresh blood, the slackness of flesh surrendering to trauma, the flop of a head no longer held proud by a neck, the realisation that he was pounding away at something that held no resistance, like pounding at a pile of mince. And then, and only then, the awareness of a voice above his head, saying, ‘Nonono, Liam, STOP,’ and hands against his clothing, tugging at the fabric of his shirt. A flock of swifts in a lazy formation passing through the cool blue of the sky overhead. His blood pumping through his ears. His breath hard in his chest. A dead body between his legs.
There was a time when Liam would have done anything Scarlett asked him to do. But that was before she abandoned him here, alone, estranged from his family, his plans in tatters because of all the sacrifices he’d made for her; before she left him without even saying goodbye.
Until a frantic phone call two days ago, over a terrible echoey line, Scarlett’s voice in his ear for the first time in over a year.
‘Boobs, the thing that happened at the pool party last summer, the thing. It was real. It happened and it was a bad thing. And Mimi knows about it and she’s told Lex. Lex will tell Kerryanne. Kerryanne will tell Tallulah’s mum. Everyone will know soon. I need you to sort it out. It’s in the same place. The thing. The same place as the thing that you did. The lever is under the big blue pot by the front door. Please, Boobs. Get rid of both the things. Get rid of them. Completely. And then lock it and get rid of the lever. Take it into London or something, throw it in the Thames, put it in a bin, just get it away. Don’t leave any trace of anything, Boobs. Please. I’m out here, in the middle of nowhere. Mum’s losing the plot. She’s gone mad and she’s drugging me and I’m scared I’m going to die out here. I just want to come home. Please make it safe for me to come home. Please.’
Now he wends his way through the kitchen, to the back hallway and into the old wing of the house. He goes to the tiny anteroom outside the turret and pauses, just for a moment, before twisting the latch and entering. It is cold and dank in the turret. It does not feel like August. He pulls the ancient lever from his back pocket, the same one they used to open the tunnel that shocking day in April, and he prises off the cover.
He steps over the body and then, using his phone as a flashlight, he walks down the tunnel for almost a mile, until it ends and there is no further to go. Overhead a slab of stone in the ceiling lets in a trickle of grey light from whatever is above. He takes the bottle of petrol from his shoulder bag and he pours it over the shrunken form of Guy Croft’s remains and then drops a match on to them. He watches the flames begin to lick around Guy Croft’s crumbling bones and steps away when the heat starts to overwhelm him. As the flames subside he pokes at the ashes with the metal lever. He sees finger bones, still intact, a jawbone, large lumps of old rag and charred leather and he pours another slug of petrol on to the pile, drops another match on to it.
He feels nothing for Guy Croft as he watches him turn to powder. All his feelings are held inside him like a fist and they are all for Scarlett. All of them. Scarlett who uses people as mirrors, to better see herself. Scarlett who picks people up and drops people as and when it suits her. Scarlett who waited until Liam was over her, finally over her, ready to go home and get on with his life, before reeling him back in and using him again, as a comfort blanket, a lap to sit on, a person to see her as she wishes to be seen and not as what she really is. And what Scarlett Jacques really is, he now knows, is a vessel.
He’d allowed himself to be used by her as a plaything, a pet, no different from her precious dog. He’d even let her give him that terrible nickname – Boobs. He hated being called Boobs, but he’d let it happen. He’d allowed Scarlett and her hideous mother to use him as a handyman, a plumber, a chauffeur. He feels red-hot anger pass through him at the memory of Scarlett’s mother passing him a spade and a plastic bag one hot summer’s morning and asking him if he wouldn’t mind clearing the dog’s shit off the lawn because the gardener was off sick and it was starting to stink.
After he killed Guy Croft for her, they went to bed and had sex that was so raw and pure that he’d cried afterwards.
‘I love you, Boobs,’ she’d said, her body wrapped around his. ‘You know I’m going to love you forever, don’t you?’
And then the doorbell had rung the next morning and she’d said, ‘Fuck, Boobs, quick, you have to go, you have to go now. It’s Tallulah. She’s early. Get dressed. Quickly!’ And, being an obedient puppet, he’d done as she said, thrown on his clothes, and left. He’d killed a man for her and she’d thrown him out the next morning without even saying goodbye, then given herself over immediately and entirely to her pursuit of Tallulah. And now this. A year of radio silence and suddenly she needs him again.
Please, Boobs, please.
Angrily, he pokes again at the remains of Guy Croft. The lumps have burned down now to rubble and dust and he sweeps them with the small brush he’d brought down with him, on to sheets of tinfoil which he wraps into warm parcels and puts into his shoulder bag. He will take them to the shady pond on the edge of the common when the sun has set tonight and empty them into the stagnant waters there for the ducks to pick over.
He passes the light of the phone across the floor of the tunnel, stooping to pick up what looks like a molar, which he slips quickly into his trouser pocket.
And then, as he turns to leave, he hears what sound like footsteps overhead, and then voices, thin, muted through the gap around the stone slab in the ceiling.
‘So, what do you think, Sophie? Can you imagine it? Coming to live here with me? Being the head teacher’s wife?’
Then a woman’s voice in reply. ‘Yes, yes, I really can. I think it’ll be an adventure.’
Liam turns and heads back down the tunnel. As he nears the exit he glances down at Zach Allister’s body, the body Scarlett thinks he’s going to get rid of for her, and he steps over it.
Then he climbs the stone steps back to Dark Place, pulls the slab over the hole and slides the lever back into his pocket, the lever that he won’t be throwing in the Thames for Scarlett, or disposing of in a far-flung bin, the lever he’ll be keeping safe in his home until he decides exactly what he’s going to do with it.