Dying for Christmas (34 page)

‘That worked out fine in the end, didn’t it?’

‘Only because I came up with that stupid story about Dominic getting a friend of a friend to pretend to be you so the police would drop their murder investigation. As if Dominic has friends!’

‘And you came up with another perfectly good story when I changed the Christmas Plan, as I knew you would. I have faith in you, Jessica. I just wish you’d do me the same courtesy.’

Unbelievable. She’s actually making out she’s the wounded party.

‘But we had it all worked out,’ I remind her. ‘We even role-played the phone call. How hard could it be?’

In the original plan, I was supposed to escape while Dominic was out of the flat. The idea was that Natalie would call him on the last day of our twelve-day festive love-in, claiming to work for an upmarket design company that had gone bust and giving him eight hours to price up its stock and clear it out. Dominic and I were supposed to have switched off our phones as part of his ‘immersing ourselves in each other’ vision. But Natalie insisted his need for control meant he would cheat, and she was right. Whenever I sneaked into the spare room where he’d stashed both our phones, his was on silent. And he checked it every hour or so when he thought I wasn’t watching.

Natalie’s brief was to make this offer too good to turn down. All the staff of this mythical design company had state-of-the-art Apple Macs, she was to tell him. There was lots of original artwork on the walls. The snob in Dominic would have leapt at the offer. Natalie was a good actress but even so, I made her try out on me her phone voice with a flat Lancashire accent so I could reassure myself he wouldn’t recognize her.

Then while he was out of the flat, tearing up the motorway, she would sweep in with all the props we needed for the story. There were the presents she’d carefully wrapped using the thallium she’d ordered off the Internet (‘Thank god for the Silk Road,’ she said, and it took her ages to convince me there actually was a site where you could buy drugs and illegal chemicals and have them delivered to your door like a pizza). Then there were the brushes she’d painstakingly made from her own hair, and the candle from the fat that had been liposuctioned from her stomach and thighs. Then there was the wash she insisted on slapping over the paintings in the flat. God knows what that was made of (I couldn’t even
look
at those lumps). I was convinced it would never dry out in time, though in the event it was a few days before the police ran a check on the artwork. She never told me who she’d got to make the chess pieces from the bits of bone she’d sneaked out of the clinic. Perhaps she really did know some very dodgy people.

I knew Natalie was genuinely terrified of Dominic but I couldn’t help feeling part of her was getting off on the melodrama of it all.

The point is, Natalie had very strict instructions. We hadn’t left anything to chance. She was supposed to bring with her the presents for my family I’d bought on Christmas Eve and left in her car after she drove me from Oxford Street to Dominic’s flat. And the sketchbook containing the handwritten fictional account of what happened that I’d laboured over for days (and ultimately ended up having to hastily add to when the ending suddenly changed). She was to bring the DIY tattoo kit we’d also bought off the net (she told me she’d done it before. She lied). And of course, the extra thallium.

I’d smuggled a tiny bit in with me in the pocket of the jeans I was wearing when I arrived on Dominic’s doorstep on Christmas Eve and I’d started taking it on the tenth day, rubbing it into my skin, and especially my scalp. It was almost funny watching Dominic freak out when he grabbed my hair and a great big hank came off in his hand. ‘It’s stressful being blackmailed,’ I told him. ‘It’s a wonder I’m not completely bald.’ But I needed to take a serious amount more to give credence to our story of being slowly poisoned over twelve days. ‘You’re sure it’s not going to kill me?’ I kept asking her as we planned it, but we’d both done the research, so we would be equally to blame if I died a horrible, lingering death. I even ended up adding it to my drinks as well, just to make doubly sure it had an effect.

In the event, Natalie did bring all this stuff just as agreed. Except she never first made the call that was to take him out of the flat and allow for my escape.

‘What possessed you?’ I say again now, reliving the moment when, lying awake in that dog kennel, with the metal cuff around my ankle tethering me to the bed frame, listening to Dominic’s rhythmic breathing, I froze, hearing the sound of a key turning in the front-door lock.

‘Will you stop going on about it?’ she says. ‘There were too many things that didn’t add up. Like his phone. Remember?’

She means that he would still have had his mobile on him when he came back to the flat to find it swarming with police after I’d managed to raise the alarm. While he was showering I’d managed to delete his call history and any messages between him and me, but we had no idea what else was on that phone. It was a gamble. As it was, we’d ended up tossing both phones – his and mine – into the Thames, another bit that had to be added into the written account at the last minute.

I don’t believe Natalie’s excuses. She didn’t let herself into the flat while Dominic was still there, on Epiphany Eve, as I’ve now learned it’s called, just because she was worried about us being caught. She did it for revenge. I understand now she’d always meant to do it. Dominic Lacey had abused and degraded her, just as he did me, but instead of lying down and taking it as I had done, she wanted her pound of flesh.

‘You’re lying,’ I insist. ‘You enjoyed it. I was there, remember? You enjoyed hurting him.’ Saying it out loud, even in the empty street as I walk home, it sounds preposterous.

‘Yes, well, I didn’t see you holding back either, Jessica Good as Gold.’

Instantly I feel cold. My body temperature plummets. This is what I’ve blocked out until now. This, more than anything else, is what I cannot face – what happened after Natalie arrived.

In my memory I see Dominic’s face, ghostly white in the moonlight. After unshackling me, she’d picked up his flick knife and forced him from his bed and out on to the balcony where we would leave, she explained to me afterwards, less forensic evidence to worry about. During her enforced exile in Scotland she was addicted to a television programme called
CSI
, she told me. She’d picked up a thing or two, including wearing latex gloves. He’d been at first shocked, then angry when she’d drawn the first blood and he realized she meant it – finally he’d been scared. Natalie liked that. She’d liked seeing him fearful and cowed. We’d both enjoyed seeing him that way. By this stage I’d been locked away with him for eleven days. My body was covered in bruises and cuts that wept when I moved.

He’d called it fun. ‘I know you secretly get off on this, Jessica,’ he said.

‘You have to help,’ she told me. ‘Get a knife from the kitchen.’ By the time I came back with the other knife, she was cutting his throat. I stood in the doorway, frozen.

For the long days I’d allowed myself to be incarcerated with him as his sexual plaything, I’d subliminated my feelings, knowing I could only get through by scrunching them up into a hard, compact ball and making my body into a detachable shell that was completely separate to me. But watching Natalie run her blade across his neck like she was slitting open a banana brought me erupting back to life.

‘Now you,’ she said, gesturing towards the kitchen knife. ‘We both have to be in this together.’

When I remember how it felt plunging it into his chest, the momentary euphoria followed by the wave of revulsion, my brain freezes with the horror of it. And as for what happened next, after Natalie smashed the urn and selected a shard as matter-of-factly as if she was choosing a cut of meat at the butcher’s, my mind only allows me to see it in snatches, as if viewing the past through my own fingers.

‘It makes more sense in terms of your narrative arc,’ she said, gazing down at the jagged piece of china sticking out from her husband’s neck. ‘For when you write up your account.’
Narrative arc
, I kid you not.

Reminded of all this, my voice on the phone is petulant. ‘I never would have done it if you had just stuck to what we agreed.’

I hear a noise in the background, like a door shutting.

‘Hang on, don’t—’ Natalie yells.

‘Who’s there with you?’ I demand.

But Natalie has gone.

Chapter Forty-Four

In the doorway of the hospital room, Kim hesitates. It’s almost physical, this revulsion she feels, a barrier holding her back from entering. Her lips are dry and she licks them at the same moment she glances over and catches him staring at her with those intense, close-together eyes. Instantly she regrets the gesture, instinctively aware Lacey will assume it is for his benefit.

As she approaches the bed, her heart is thudding so wildly in her chest it is as if it has come loose from its moorings. She keeps reminding herself that he is just another man, a weak man who has something missing in his head, a gap where his sense of right and wrong should be. Labelling him a monster like the commentators on Twitter and other online forums have done gives him too much power. He is just a human being whose psyche was deformed early on. Still, when she forces herself to meet his eyes she has to hold back a shudder.

When the Super called her into his office to tell her that Dominic Lacey had started to speak – or at least write – and had asked for ‘the policewoman with the pretty eyes’, causing much confusion until the grey-haired doctor worked out he meant Kim, at first she was flattered. Who doesn’t like being singled out as special? But in the intervening two hours, she’s become increasingly nervous. Martin is with her, and Robertson too. But when the figure in the bed holds up his hand to stop them coming further, they remain just inside the doorway and Kim alone moves forward. As she comes close to him, he opens his mouth and a sound emerges such as she has never heard before – a croaking, gravelly noise that she struggles to understand. He reaches for the notepad on the bed next to him and writes, his fingers moving the pen laboriously over the paper. She wonders how much his brain injury is holding him back.

After what seems like for ever, he finishes and pushes the notebook towards her. She picks it up. At first the writing is hard to decipher, the letters misshapen and badly formed, but when she gets used to them she is able to read what it says:
pink was better
. Instantly she feels her face burning. When she came to the hospital the time before, she was wearing a pink jumper and black trousers. Today she has on the same trousers but with a grey shirt and black jacket. Dominic Lacey watches her face carefully, soaking up her reaction. Even here in the hospital, surrounded by police and medical equipment, with his neck still bandaged and a drip attached to his arm, he is still playing power games. The doctors have told them he is heavily dosed up with morphine and his movements have that sluggish quality. He gestures vaguely towards the chair next to his bed, and she reluctantly sits.

First she reads him his rights and explains that, despite the circumstances, this is being treated as a formal interview and will be recorded.

He keeps his eyes trained on her as she speaks and she starts to feel flustered, regretting the grey shirt.

‘I need to ask you some questions, Dominic,’ she says then, following the script she and Robertson have already agreed. ‘I need to ask you about what happened in your apartment with Jessica Gold. She has alleged you kept her prisoner in that flat against her will and subjected her to various forms of abuse, including a slow form of poisoning, until she attacked you with a knife in self-defence to save her own life. Does that conform to your own version of events, Dominic?’

His eyes never move from her face as she speaks and she presses her fingernails into her palms to force herself not to look away. The tall doctor with the grey hair and nice shoes is standing over the other side of the room by the window, discreetly keeping watch over her patient. She looks tired today. Kim wonders what she thinks of the man in the bed. Doctors are trained to be objective but surely there must be some people who get under their skin?

‘Nah!’

When the noise comes – the rasping croak from the back of Lacey’s damaged throat – it takes her by surprise.

She glances at the doctor to see if she can translate. The doctor shrugs almost imperceptibly.

‘Can you try again, Dominic?’

‘Na–ah!’

She can see he is struggling, the muscles of his face straining.

‘I’m afraid I can’t understand you. Can you write it down?’

He picks up the pen once more, but this time his movements are slow and he winces when he tries to press the nib down on the paper. Kim waits for him to make his laborious marks on the notepad.

Lacey stops writing and drops the notebook on to the mattress before falling back against the pillows.

She stares at the writing, trying to make sense of the jagged black markings that start off large and get smaller as they cross the page before tailing off into almost nothing. At first she fails to notice it, seeing only a ridge of mountain peaks. Then, magically, they reassemble themselves into a word:

Natalie.

‘What does this mean, Dominic?’ she asks him. ‘You want to see your wife, is that it? Do you know where she is?’

He stares at her, impassive. And then he closes his eyes.

‘I think that’s enough for now,’ says the grey-haired doctor, coming over to check a reading on a monitor.