The Accident (35 page)

‘No!’

The bed shakes violently and I feel weight on my shoulders and back then hear a thud, like bodies falling to the floor and the sound of men grunting and metal scraping across paintwork. I try to stand up, to free Charlotte from the weight of my body, but there’s a searing pain in my right arm and then everything goes black.

Chapter 33

‘Do you recognize this woman?’ The lawyer, Gillian Matthews, hands me a photograph of a slightly overweight young woman with dark hair, hazel eyes and a beautiful smile.

I shake my head and push it across the desk towards Brian. ‘No, should I?’

‘Not unless you were watching the news twenty—’

Brian gasps and we both turn to look at him.

‘What?’ I say.

‘Can’t you see it?’

I shake my head. ‘See what?’

‘The resemblance. She’s the spitting image of you when we met.’

There’s a vague similarity; the hair is certainly very alike and our mouths have a similar shape but her eyes are prettier than mine and her cheekbones higher.

‘Interesting that you should say that, Mr Jackson,’ Mrs Matthews reaches for the photograph and tucks it back in the paper wallet in front of her.

‘Why? Who is she?’

She leans her weight on her forearms and looks me straight in the eye. ‘The prostitute James Evans murdered twenty years ago.’

I stare at her in disbelief. ‘What?’

‘My God.’ Brian reaches a reassuring arm around my back and I wince as his hand makes contact with my shoulder. My arm’s been in plaster for seventy-two hours but I’ve already taken a week’s worth of painkillers. ‘You said he was dangerous and I didn’t believe—’

‘James murdered someone?’ I can’t stop staring at the paper wallet in front of the lawyer. What else is in it? A photocopy of the card he enclosed with the booties? Shots of Charlotte’s blood-splattered room? A photo of the severed artery in his leg? ‘When? Who was she?’

She flicks open the notebook that’s lying beside the wallet. ‘Sarah Jane Thompson. The autopsy states the date of her death as 2 October 1992.’

‘That’s three weeks after I left him.’

‘Yes,’ she looks down at her notes. ‘The police say they tried to contact you but no one knew where you were and there were a lot of Susan Maslins on the electoral register. The search was stopped after a few weeks and they went to trial anyway. Evans pleaded not guilty but the police had enough evidence to convict. Apparently he spent a while looking for a prostitute who fitted his precise requirements,’ she looks back up at me, ‘someone who looks like you it seems.’

‘But he got out.’ I shake my head. ‘How can that happen? How can he murder someone then be set free twenty years later to come after me? How is that even possible?’

She shakes her head. ‘He served his time and fulfilled the conditions of his release by reporting to his parole officer once a week. He even had a job,’ she checks her diary again, ‘working in a nightclub in Chelsea. Greys
.
Apparently he was very popular, particularly amongst the VIPs.’

‘Keisha!’ I say. ‘How is she?’

A dog walker found her naked body, bloodied, beaten and barely recognizable, in woodland near Devil’s Dyke. She hasn’t been able to tell the police much but what she did manage helped fill in the missing pieces of what had happened.

James found out that I was married to Brian and living in Brighton by searching Google – it was that easy. Once he had my new surname and the town where I lived it was easy for him to track down the Facebook profile Charlotte forced me to create a year ago to prove I ‘wasn’t living in the dark ages’. I hadn’t looked at the thing in months so wasn’t surprised when the police told me that my security settings were so poor James had access to all of my updates, photos and, worst of all, a link to my daughter’s page. Her page was as public as mine and when he read that Breeze
was her favourite club it was the link he needed to wheedle his way into her life. He already knew Keisha, he’d been one of her clients when she was sleeping with the footballers and rock stars that frequented Greys
and she’d liked him enough to tell him she was leaving London because she’d met a great guy in Brighton who managed a club called Breeze. He visited the club on the pretense of being Keisha’s friend but, when he spotted Charlotte and Ella, and Keisha told him that Ella had a crush on her boyfriend he’d made his move – he told Keisha that unless she introduced him to them and kept her mouth shut he’d tell Danny about her past. She thought that was it, and it was for a while as James got to know Charlotte better and lent her his spare room so she and Liam could lose their virginity to each other. She had no idea that James would use that most intimate of moments to blackmail her.

‘Keisha’s not great,’ Mrs Matthews closes her notebook, ‘but she’s stable. Twenty-four hours longer and she wouldn’t have made it.’

‘My God.’ I press my hands to my forearms but my warm palms do little to flatten the goosebumps that have appeared on my skin.

‘We need to go and see her,’ I look at Brian. ‘If she hadn’t told me what she did. If she hadn’t told me—’

‘Sssh.’ He pulls me towards him again, but his time I don’t complain at the pain in my shoulder.

‘When will the recording be destroyed?’ he asks the lawyer, his tone hushed. ‘If Charlotte wakes up we want to be able to tell her that it’s gone.’

‘When?’ I say. Yesterday her eyelids fluttered when I told her there was no need to be scared of ‘Mike’ anymore. The doctors say I mustn’t read anything into it, not when she’d just come out of an operation to reset her nose and little finger, but I know it’s a sign. She’s trying to come back to us. She’s fighting harder now she knows it’s safe.

‘Recording?’ The lawyer frowns at Brian. ‘The sex tape, you mean?’

He cringes at the description. ‘Yes.’

‘I’m afraid the police will have to hang on to it as evidence. Evans was threatening to send it to the papers and post it on the internet. If he’d done that he’d have done more than tarnish Charlotte’s reputation,’ she looks at Brian, ‘he’d have destroyed your career too.’

‘But why try and pass her off as a prostitute?’ he says. ‘That’s what I don’t understand.’

She shakes her head. ‘All part of his plan to get revenge on Mrs Jackson, I’m afraid. When I spoke to DCI Carter he said Evans’s initial idea was to seduce Charlotte and convince her to run away with him but when he realized that most fifteen-year-old girls wouldn’t look twice at a forty-three-year-old man, he decided to play the part of a lonely gay man and become her friend that way. Once she trusted him enough to go back to his flat he blackmailed her about the sex tape and then forced Keisha to pass her off as a prostitute at Greys. We don’t know what he was going to do after that although I’ve got a pretty good idea it wouldn’t have been very …’ she purses her lips, drawing a line under that line of thought.

‘My God,’ I breathe the words as the full impact of the situation hits me, ‘no wonder Charlotte did what she did.
She’d broken up with Liam, fallen out with Ella and she couldn’t trust Keisha anymore and there was no one left for her to talk to so …’ The words catch in my throat as I look at my husband. ‘Brian, Charlotte tried to kill herself because she couldn’t confide in us.’

‘No.’ He tightens his grip on my hand. ‘She did it because she was trying to protect us. She knew what would happen if Evans’s recording got out. It would have been all over the papers – “Politician’s Daughter in Underage Sex Scandal”. Charlotte was so sensitive, there’s no way she would have wanted to put me in that position.’

‘But none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for me, if it wasn’t for my relationship with him. He never would have found us if I hadn’t, if I hadn’t—’

‘You stopped him, Sue.’

‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘You did.’

Brian had left Oli at the counter of Millets with an armful of supplies and a promise that it wouldn’t take him long to pop back to the hospital to get the wallet he’d left in Charlotte’s bedside drawer. Ten minutes he’d said but, instead of walking in, grabbing the wallet and walking out again, he’d burst into the hospital room to find his daughter fighting for her life and his wife about to lose hers. He’d launched himself at James, knocking him to the floor. Seconds later, alerted by the noise, several nurses came rushing in to find him sitting astride his chest, thumping him repeatedly in the face.

‘No, Sue.’ He presses his face into my hair. ‘You knew Charlotte hadn’t just had an accident and you refused to let it lie, even when I took you to the doctors, even when your mother died, even when no one believed you. Even when,’ he pulls away and looks at me, ‘I didn’t believe you. I put you all in danger. You, Charlotte and Oliver, you’re my family. And you protected us. Alone.’

I touch my left hand to the side of his face and wipe a tear away with my thumb.

‘Excuse me.’ Mrs Matthews delicately clears her throat and we turn to look at her.

‘So are we clear?’ she says, closing her notebook and laying the pen on the top of it.

‘Clear?’ I shake my head.

‘Yes. The toxicology report suggests that Evans died as a result of MRSA rather than the wounds inflicted by Mrs Jackson,’ she looks at Brian, ‘or the head trauma inflicted by Mr Jackson. As a result, and in the face of overwhelming evidence that you both acted in self-defence, the prosecution are dropping the manslaughter charges against you both.’

I reach for Brian’s hand and squeeze it tightly. ‘So does that mean …’

The lawyer smiles for the first time since we stepped foot in the police station. Her mouth opens and closes as she talks, looking from me to Brian and back again, but I only hear one word.

Free.

Book club questions for
THE
ACCIDENT
by C.L. Taylor

1. As Susan searches for the truth behind Charlotte’s accident she realises she had no idea what was going on in Charlotte’s life. Was that her fault, or Charlotte’s, or is it normal in a mother/teenaged-daughter relationship?

2. The novel alternates between the main storyline and Sue’s diary entries from fifteen years earlier. How effectively do you think this works as a literary device in this novel?

3. Brian lies to Susan several times throughout the course of the novel. Was he justified in doing so, or should he have been completely honest with his wife?

4. There are several clues in Susan’s early diary entries that James is controlling. At what point did you notice the warning signs?

5. Discuss the theme of ‘secrets and lies’ in the book and impact they have on Sue’s attempt to find out why Charlotte stepped in front of the bus.

6. How does forty-three-year-old Sue change over the course of the book?

7. Sue won’t go to the police because she doesn’t think they’ll take her seriously (because of an incident that occurred during one of her PTSD ‘episodes’). At which point would you have gone to the police?

8. Susan sees a mirror of her relationship with James in Keisha’s relationship with Danny. Is she justified in being concerned?

9. Could young Sue’s friends and co-workers have done more to help save her from James?

10. What do you think would have happened if Charlotte had woken up before Liam admitted to Sue that they’d been sleeping together in ‘Mike’s’ house?

11. Susan doesn’t turn to her friends for help during her search for answers. Why do you think that was?

12. At the end of the novel, when James and Susan face each other in Charlotte’s hospital room, Susan asks if he ever really loved her. Do you think he did?

13. What did you think of the ending? Would you have liked it to end differently?

14. What do you think the future holds for Susan and her family? What effect do you think what happened will have on their relationships?

15. What other books would you compare this to? What books would recommend to other readers who have enjoyed this book?

A conversation with C.L. Taylor

Q. Where did you get the idea for
THE ACCIDENT
?

I was pregnant with my son when the idea first came to me. I wanted to write a novel about ‘keeping secrets’ but I had no idea who would be keeping the secrets or what those secrets would be. Then one day, when I was walking back from the supermarket – waddling along under the weight of my groceries – the first three lines popped into my head:

‘Coma. There’s something innocuous about the word, soothing almost in the way it conjures up the image of a dreamless sleep. Only Charlotte doesn’t look as though she’s sleeping to me.’

I heard Susan’s voice as clear as day and I knew immediately that she was the mother of a teenaged girl who’d stepped in front of a bus. I kept repeating those three lines over and over again as I walked home so I wouldn’t forget them, then frantically scribbled them down. I kept writing and, less than two hours later, I had the first chapter.

I didn’t write any more until a couple of months after my son’s birth. As a new mum in a new town I was lonely, and very sleep deprived, and I missed writing so, in his naps, I started plotting the rest of the story. I finished the first draft in five months.

Q. How did your personal history inform the novel?

Like Susan I was once in an abusive relationship. Unlike Susan it wasn’t physically or sexually abusive but it was emotionally abusive and, over the course of the four years it lasted, it changed me as a person. It took me a long time to find the courage to leave the relationship, and even longer to heal from it.

When my son was born I was overwhelmed by how protective I felt of him. I barely slept for fear something might happen to him in the night and I watched him like a hawk in the day. When I started plotting
THE ACCIDENT
I began to wonder how I’d react if my son was in danger from something very different from SIDS or choking or falling or any of the other ‘normal’ dangers. What if there was a person who meant him harm? I never really believed that that would happen but I channelled those fears into Susan who’d been through a much more horrific experience than me. What if she’d taken something precious from her abusive ex and he wanted revenge? And what if that revenge was wreaked on her own child?