The Other Half Lives

27

‘A stupid mistake,’ says Mary. ‘You said “Go to your parents’ house”. You meant Cecily’s house, didn’t you? I could see from your face that you knew. You’re a bad liar.’

Pain burns all the way through me. There’s a bullet inside me, metal in my body. I saw it coming towards me, too fast for me to move. I’m lying on the floor. I reach out for Aidan’s hand, but he’s too far away.

‘You’re a… good liar,’ I manage to say. ‘You’re Martha.’

‘No. Martha died. Her heart stopped. Her mind stopped. You can’t die and be the same person afterwards. I’m one of the few people alive who knows that’s not possible.’

‘Abberton… the names…’ I try to raise my head, to look down at my body, but it hurts too much. I can’t move and think at the same time, and I have to think.

‘What about them? What about the names?’

‘Aidan didn’t destroy your… paintings. You did it to him. You bought…’ I can’t go on.

She looks down at me. I feel light; not a person any more but a weightless flow of pain. My mind starts to hum; it would be easy to fall into that comforting sound, allow it to roll me away. ‘He did it,’ Mary insists. ‘He took all my pictures and he cut them to pieces.’

‘No.’ I gasp for air. ‘The names… boarding houses…’

‘No!’ Mary raises her voice. ‘I’d never do that. He did it. He did it to me.’

‘You bought his pictures using those names.’ Each breath is a struggle, but without the struggle there would be nothing, no energy to stay alive. ‘You… made him come here…’ My mind fills with words that would take too much effort to say. He didn’t want to see you again, but you bribed him: fifty grand for a commission. ‘He stopped painting because of what you did.’

Scenes from the story Mary told me drift back into my mind. One half true, the other half lies. The cottage door left open, as she said. Aidan walking in, looking for her. Finding her standing on the dining table with a rope round her neck, his ruined paintings on the floor in front of her. Did she tell him what she’d done and then jump? Two shocks for him, locked together in one moment for devastating impact. That’s why he couldn’t move at first, why he didn’t rush to save her life. He was traumatised, paralysed.

‘My gardens.’ Every word wrings sweat from me. ‘Not Aidan. You did it. One last summer, to punish me for… Saul’s gallery. I frightened you. You hate not… being in control.’ The second after Charlie Zailer spoke to you on Monday and told you I was Aidan’s girlfriend. You’d given me Abberton as a gift, without knowing: another loss of control. Another punishment.

‘What about your dead boyfriend?’ says Mary impatiently, leaning over me. ‘What about what he did?’

I close my eyes. I know what he didn’t do. He didn’t lie to me. Not until later. Even then, he didn’t lie outright. To the police, yes, but never to me. ‘He killed Mary Trelease,’ I breathe. ‘Years ago.’ He was telling the truth when he told me that, at the Drummond Hotel. It was before I mentioned Abberton, before his confession had made me freeze, when he trusted me without reservation.

The woman I can only think of as Mary bends over me, using the gun to push her hair away from her face. ‘What Mary Trelease are you talking about?’ she asks. ‘Who do you mean?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Exactly. None of this involves you. You should have gone away. I sent you away.’ I hear this as an accusation of ingratitude. She’s appalled by me. ‘Whatever you think you know, you’re wrong.’

Anger kicks in, as intense as the pain. ‘I know everything but who she was. She lived at 15 Megson Crescent. Aidan killed her there.’ In the front bedroom. Her naked, in the centre of the bed, Aidan’s hands round her throat…

‘He killed her, and let his stepfather take the blame,’ says Mary patiently, putting her face in front of mine so that I can see her telling me. ‘His stepfather’s been in prison for twenty-six years, and Aidan’s left him there to rot, never visited him or written to him, not once. How do you feel about him now, now that you know that?’ Her words drift past me without taking root.

‘The house,’ I say, my lungs aching with the effort. ‘That’s why you bought it. Why you changed your name to hers.’

Mary points the gun at my face. I close my eyes, wait for her to shoot, but nothing happens. When I open them, she hasn’t moved. Neither has the gun. ‘Why?’ she says.

I can’t answer. I don’t know how much blood I’ve lost, though the sensation of losing it is constant. I feel transparent. Hollow.

‘It’s up to you. You can talk or you can die.’

‘No! Please, don’t…’ I try to turn my head away from the gun.

‘Did you think that was a threat?’ She laughs. ‘I meant that if you talk, if you start to tell a story, you won’t let go until you get to the end. For your mind to keep working, your heart has to keep working. You have to stay alive.’

She’s right. Not everything she says is a lie. The story of Aidan and Martha, right up until the point where she hanged herself, that was all true. Except… yes, even the part about Mary writing to Aidan, berating him for treating Martha badly. Not literally true, but symbolically accurate, as accurate as she could be without revealing her true identity. There are divisions within every person. Especially those who are forced to bear unbearable pain. The Mary who wrote angry, accusatory letters to Aidan-though she wasn’t called Mary then-was the intelligent part of Martha Wyers, the part that could see the truth: that the relationship was going nowhere, that Aidan didn’t love Martha the way she loved him.

No surprise that he didn’t. Hard to love a woman who proclaims undying love one minute then savages you the next.

‘Tell me the story you think you know about me,’ says Mary. She sits down beside me and draws her legs up to her chest, balancing the gun on her knees. If I could move my right arm, I could grab it.

I worked it out, put it all together in the taxi on the way back here. I have to do it again now, force my brain to keep going. ‘Phone an ambulance,’ I say. ‘You can’t let us die.’

‘Aidan’s been dead for a while,’ she says matter-of-factly.

‘No,’ I moan. ‘Please. It might not be too late.’ Martha came back to life. Aidan can’t be dead. I won’t believe it.

‘Look at us. One bleeding body, one corpse, and a husk who’s been half dead for years. No one who took an objective look at this room could think it was anything but too late, Ruth. For all of us.’ She twists her hair into a spiral.

‘Private detective,’ I whisper. ‘Told you… Aidan’s stepfather… in prison for killing Mary Trelease. You’d seen the painting…’ No. Can’t get it wrong, can’t waste words or breath. ‘You’d bought it-The Murder of Mary Trelease. Bought it and… destroyed it, like you did all of them.’

‘No.’ Mary’s voice is firm. ‘I’m an artist. I don’t destroy art.’

In my head, I see a picture of a man and a woman in a bed. Naked, or the woman is. The man’s hands round the woman’s neck. The man recognisable as Aidan, so that Mary-Martha-knew Len Smith wasn’t the killer.

‘Why did he kill her?’ I mouth the words, not sure if I’m making any sound at all. I feel deathly cold all over my body. Like ice.

‘He’d have told you if he wanted you to know.’ Mary smiles.

‘Martha. Wasn’t. Alone. Any. More,’ I exhale one word at a time. I can do it. I can get to the end. ‘An ally… another woman Aidan had… hurt. Mary Trelease.’

Mary puts the gun down behind her and leans back on her hands. ‘Show me anyone who’s survived an ordeal and I’ll show you a shrink in the making,’ she says. ‘Ally is a good word. What about you, Ruth? Aidan’s hurt you too, hasn’t he? Playing games with you, messing with your head. And Stephen Elton hurt you.’ She pulls a packet of Marlboro Reds and a lighter out of her pocket, lights one. ‘All women whose lives have been ruined by men are my allies. All of them. If we organised ourselves, we could be the world’s most powerful army.’

‘You called yourself Mary Trelease. You bought… house…’ I have to talk, to stop myself thinking about my own helplessness.

‘Shall we speed this up?’ says Mary impatiently. ‘I moved to Spilling when I found out Aidan lived there. What sort of man moves back to the town where he spent his miserable childhood? You might want to think about that.’ I turn my face away from her cigarette, breathing is hard enough without the smoke. ‘Fifteen Megson Crescent is the house he grew up in. I had to have it, obviously, so I bribed the owners out.’

‘You called yourself Mary Trelease.’

‘I changed my name legally. I am Mary Trelease.’

‘You started painting because painting… was his,’ I murmur, pulling my mind back as it starts to drift. Get to the end. ‘Wasn’t… enough that you’d destroyed his work. Everything that… had been his…’

‘What? Ruth!’

She’s patting my face. ‘I’m still here,’ I say. Reassuring her. She wants to hear the story. ‘Painting. You… took it away from Aidan. Made it yours. You were good at it. Better.’

‘Yes,’ Mary stresses the word. ‘I was better than him. He gave up. I never give up. You only need to look at our backgrounds to understand why. The shrink I saw, the one who told me to write my story in the third person-you know what else she told me?’

I try to shake my head, but it won’t move. My body is numb, detaching from the pain. I can’t feel anything but my thoughts: frail, flickering threads I’m trying hard to hold on to.

‘Ninety-five per cent of her work is undoing psychological damage done to people in childhood, by their parents. Ninety-five per cent.’ Mary sounds angry. ‘Can you believe that? I was in the other five per cent, the tiny minority. I started from a position of safety and happiness: an adoring mum and dad, before I disgraced them and brought suicide and madness to the family. Money, and the best education it could buy. I’ve always believed in my own talents and abilities. Aidan never has. His childhood was an eighteen-year prison sentence.’

‘Why?’ I fight to stay conscious.

‘I suppose it wasn’t so bad before his mum died. Even then, they were dirt poor and lived in a slum. You’ve seen the house-it’s a slum, right? You wouldn’t keep animals there, let alone use it to house human beings. Aidan’s stepfather, Len, the one in prison-he was drunk all the time, violent. The sort of person you’d expect to find on a council estate-all my Megson Crescent neighbours are versions of Len Smith, or his family.’ I hear her laugh. ‘Knock on any door and there’s someone waiting to sell you a gun and teach you how to use it. From the day Aidan was born, he was in danger from his surroundings. That’s why he gives up so easily. That’s why he’s dead and we’re not.’

‘No…’

‘He gave up as soon as Gemma Crowther let me into her flat. Saw me and gave up.’

‘You shot her. Not Aidan.’

‘She had my picture. He gave her my picture.’

I force my eyes open, aware that what I’ve just heard is an admission.

‘I’m afraid I forgot all about you when I saw it,’ says Mary. ‘You and her, I mean-the history. I remembered too late, once she was already dead, that she ought to have suffered, ideally, instead of dying straight away. You’d have preferred her to suffer, wouldn’t you?’

There are some punishments no one should have to endure, not even Gemma Crowther. Death. Torture. No one deserves those things. No one has the right to mete them out.

‘No?’ Mary sounds irritated. Her face is a blur; I can’t see her properly any more. ‘In that case, you’ll be relieved to hear that she didn’t feel a thing.’ She giggles, high-pitched, like a little girl. ‘I did my best for you, anyway,’ she says. ‘Or, rather, I gave Aidan instructions and saw to it that he complied. He’s the framer, not me.’ She laughs, a low, raw noise from deep in her throat. ‘There’s nothing wrong with wanting and taking revenge. It’s the most natural thing in the world. Do you know what Cecily said? She and Martha had a huge row on the way home from Aidan’s private view, after Cecily had bought one of the paintings. Not that she got to keep it for long. It met with an unfortunate accident. Before Martha worked out how she was going to put a stop to Aidan’s success, she told Cecily she wanted him to fail. She wanted none of his pictures to sell, not a single one. She wanted him to fail more than she wanted to succeed herself. That’s the question the journalist from The Times should have asked, not life or work. Your own success or someone else’s failure. ’ In the short silence between ‘Survivor’ finishing and starting again, I hear the faint crackle of Mary’s cigarette as she inhales.

‘Cecily quoted some famous writer or other who’d said that writing well was the best revenge. “You’ve got your writing, Martha. Aidan’s talent doesn’t threaten yours. You don’t need him or his failure to prop you up. You can succeed without him.” That’s what she said. Have you ever heard anything so stupid? Writing well, the best revenge? What a load of shit! Is it a better revenge than killing someone, or fire-bombing their house? I don’t think so.’

Eighteen empty frames. Aidan made frames for the paintings he’d lost, the ones Mary destroyed. Why won’t she admit it?

‘I know why,’ I tell her.

‘What? You know why what?’ I can feel her face close to mine, her breathing. I twist my mouth into a smile. I want to hurt her.

I can only say it in my head, not out loud. I can tell the story to myself. Mary’s painting might have been a way to get revenge on Aidan at first, to prove she could beat him at his own game, but it came to mean more to her than that. She was good at it-not just good; brilliant. It gave her something she recognised, even in her misery, as being valuable. After a while-maybe months, maybe years-cutting up painting after painting of Aidan and adding it to the pile wasn’t enough for her. She could see she was getting better. Painting wasn’t Aidan’s talent any more, it was hers. She stopped feeling as if she was attacking Aidan when she carved a canvas to pieces with a knife, or hacked at it with a pair of scissors; she was attacking herself, her own work. She didn’t want to do that any more. Something had to change.

She started to paint other pictures that weren’t of Aidan, ones she kept. The ones I saw in her house, of the family who used to live on her estate, and the Abberton series. Those might not have been of Aidan, but they were about him. About what she did to him. They mattered to her. They were the story of her life.

‘You… got scared.’ I stop, try to fill my lungs with the air I need to carry on. ‘You understood…’ I want to tell her I know how she felt.

‘What? What did I understand?’ She shakes me, and I let out a howl of pain. My body throws out a last spurt of energy to fight it. I use it to get more words out. ‘You understood… how it would feel to have your pictures… destroyed. The worst thing… what you’d done to Aidan. You felt guilty.’ That’s why you won’t admit it. The guilt, once you felt the full horror of what you’d done, was more than you could bear.

‘I don’t believe in guilt,’ says Mary quickly. ‘My therapist said it was an unproductive emotion.’

I see how it must have happened: her guilt and shame transmuted into paranoia, that Aidan would find out about her-where she was living, what she was doing. That he’d do to her what she’d done to him. She couldn’t risk it. The only way to make sure it never happened was never to sell any of her paintings, to maintain absolute control. She was terrified of what Aidan might do to her, of the punishment she felt, deep down, that she deserved from him. At the same time, she couldn’t resist the impulse to close in on him, once she knew where he was-to infiltrate his life, lurk on the edges of it, where he might just notice her.

She took her paintings to Saul to be framed, knowing Aidan had worked for Saul, that Saul had bought a picture from Aidan’s exhibition. Mary had to have whatever had been Aidan’s, including Saul’s support.

You’re not a shrink.

I could be. Easily. I don’t believe I’d need any training whatsoever. All I’d need is experience, which I’ve got, and a brain, which I’ve got.

I know I’m right. Mary set out to steal Aidan’s life as a punishment, because she believed he’d stolen Martha’s. She moved to the same town, lived in his old house, did the work he used to do, mixed with people who had been his, like Saul-all without him realising. It was about proximity as much as punishment; she wanted to be close to him. Her plan worked perfectly, until I ruined it, until Saul sent me to Aidan to ask for work. That was when the past and the present crashed into one another. She must have known they would, eventually.

What was supposed to happen? I want to ask her how she imagined her and Aidan’s story would end, before I came along and disrupted her plans, but my tongue has sunk to the floor of my mouth like a lead weight. Something else has changed, too. The song has stopped: ‘Survivor’. Stopped for good. It’s still playing inside me, the lyrics and music imprinted on the dark walls of my mind, like gold letters left on the night by sparklers.

How can it have stopped? Mary hasn’t left the room. She doesn’t seem to notice the silence.

‘Stand up slowly and raise your hands above your head.’

Stand? I can’t move at all. Then I realise it was a man’s voice I heard, not Mary’s. He was talking to her.

Help. He’s going to help me.

I drag my eyes open and at first see nothing but Mary’s hair spread across her back. She’s turned away from me. Then she growls and lunges and I see him crouched down in the corner of the room. He’s got the gun. He knocks Mary to the ground.

Waterhouse. DC Waterhouse. He speaks to me without taking his eyes off Mary. ‘It’s all right, Ruth. There’s an ambulance on the way. You’re going to be fine. Just hold on.’

Mary crawls across the room like a spider, grabs the hammer that’s lying near Aidan. I blink at Waterhouse, my eyes watering until I can hardly see.

‘What are you planning to do with that hammer, Mary?’ He sounds calm. I like hearing his voice. ‘Put it down.’

‘No.’

‘If you try to use it on anybody, I’ll shoot. Without hestitation. ’

A few seconds later I hear a crunch of bone. All I can see is greyness.

‘There. I used it on myself, and you haven’t shot me. You were lying. Shall I carry on? I’ve got nine other fingers: Abberton, Blandford, Darville, Elstow, Goundry, Heathcote, Margerison, Rodwell, Windus.’ She giggles hysterically.

‘Try to accept that it’s over, Mary,’ says Waterhouse.

I hear footsteps, too heavy to be Mary’s, then her voice. ‘I wouldn’t bother. If he’s got a pulse now, he won’t have for long.’

My mind clears in a flash. Why did she say that? She told me Aidan was dead. Was she lying?

I wait for Waterhouse to say the words I’m desperate to hear, but he says nothing, and I’m too weak to ask.

If he’s alive, then he’s about to die. Mary thinks he’ll die. This might be my last chance.

I don’t blame you for not trusting me, Aidan. I don’t deserve your trust.

If I pretend he and I are the only people left in the world and force my words into his mind, maybe he’ll hear me.

In London, when you told me about Mary Trelease, I didn’t say what you needed to hear. I didn’t say I loved you no matter what, even though you’d said it to me. And then the next day, when I told you I’d seen the picture: Abberton, by Mary Trelease, dated 2007… I told you you couldn’t have killed her. I’d met her. I described her, described Martha Wyers. You recognised the description-the hair, the birthmark under her mouth-and you knew. In that instant, you must have seen it all: that Martha had assumed the name of the woman you’d killed. It had to mean she knew what you’d done. She knew, and she was in Spilling, she’d been to Saul’s gallery. She was moving in closer. You thought I might be hers, not yours-I might have been part of her plan. Another trick. Like your sell-out exhibition, the success you’d believed in until she showed you the truth.

You’d seen the lengths she’d go to in order to destroy you. What if she went to the police? And now you’d confessed to me-someone you no longer trusted. What if, between us, she and I could send you to prison for murder?

It won’t have taken you long to see the problem with that theory: it was too simple. Mary hadn’t gone to the police, not so far. She couldn’t have-the police had shown no interest in you. I didn’t go to them either, after what you told me in London, not straight away. And I loved you: you could see I loved you. You could feel it. You started to hope that maybe it wasn’t an act, maybe I was telling the truth. Was it a test, sending me to her house for the painting? If I was innocent, if I wasn’t conspiring with her against you, then surely I wouldn’t be able to get my hands on it-was that what you thought? When I came back with Abberton, what did you think then? That it all seemed a bit too easy: the artist who’d refused to sell me her painting suddenly decides to give it to me as a gift? Even then, you couldn’t bring yourself to believe I was on her side, because you loved me.

Was it revenge you had in mind at first? Do what she’d done to you? Did you want to get your hands on her picture so that you could obliterate it? Or did you only want to see it? You hadn’t known she was a painter until I told you. Did you want to see her work, see what it was like? Whether she was any good? Did you fantasise about killing her when you heard she’d called her painting Abberton? She was taunting you. You knew that, Mary being Mary-being Martha-she’d see it through to the end, that Abberton would be followed by Blandford, Darville , Elstow and the rest: the buyers who’d never existed and never bought your work, named after the boarding houses at her school.

What you said to me at the workshop after Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer left, about seeing the future: that if you hadn’t killed Mary Trelease already then maybe you were going to-was that the threat Mary took it for? Did you want me to tell her you’d called her a bitch and said she should get out of Spilling, go somewhere you wouldn’t find her? No, it was more than that, even if that was part of it. Waterhouse had just told me how the real Mary Trelease died-strangled, naked, in a bed. You never wanted me to know the terrible details of what you’d done. I think that was the moment you realised: if I stuck around, if we stayed together, I’d end up finding out the whole truth. You wanted to protect me. You knew I’d be terrified if you started talking about seeing the future-you wanted to drive me away so that I wouldn’t be sullied by you or your past crime. And maybe you wanted to frighten me because you were angry, too. I didn’t trust you enough to tell you the full truth about so many things. I told you I went to the police, but I didn’t mention that it was Charlie Zailer I’d spoken to, the woman whose face is all over my bedroom wall. I never told you why I stopped working for Saul, not really.

You didn’t need to try to scare Mary, if that was your intention. She was afraid of you anyway, obsessively so. She called the police to Garstead Cottage regularly, made them check you weren’t hiding in there, waiting to take your revenge. She couldn’t believe retribution wasn’t lying in wait for her, couldn’t conceive of a world in which a person might get away with a crime as serious as hers. She doesn’t care two hoots about what she did to Gemma Crowther-that, in her eyes, was justice. It’s what she did to your paintings that she can’t bear. That’s why she can’t stand to hear me say the nine names, why my asking ‘Who’s Abberton?’ at Saul’s gallery had the effect on her that it did.

At the art fair, at your insistence, I described the picture I’d seen on TiqTaq’s stand: the outline of a person, not recognisable as male or female, stuffed with what looked like scraps of painted cloth. Pieces of your pictures: that’s what she used to fill in the human form. Did you want me to get Abberton for you to prove I wasn’t lying about having seen it, or because it had those pieces in it and you wanted your pictures back, even in shreds? Maybe both. I think you wanted to have the scraps of your work rather than let her keep them.

I hear another bone-splitting crunch.

‘Don’t do that,’ says Waterhouse. ‘How can you do that to yourself?’

‘Easy. I don’t paint with my left hand.’

When I told you Saul had given me Mary’s address, the look on your face… you hadn’t realised until then that she was living in your old house, where you killed the real Mary Trelease. You must have been able to see that I was telling the truth, that the address meant nothing to me, but it’s hard to banish doubt once it’s crept in. You didn’t believe my love for you was unconditional, not after the way I’d reacted to your confession. And Mary-Martha-knew what you’d done. You knew that eventually she’d use that knowledge, use the power she had over you.

‘Hold on for the ambulance, Ruth. It should be here any minute.’ Waterhouse is talking to me. All I want is to know if Aidan’s alive or not. Why won’t he tell me that?

‘You’re not as clever as you think you are,’ I hear Mary say.

‘How clever is that?’

‘I followed you to London. You were following Aidan. You didn’t see me, did you? You took me straight to Gemma Crowther’s flat.’

‘You killed her,’ says Waterhouse.

‘Not me. Aidan.’ She knows I’m too weak to contradict her. She’s enjoying it: lying in front of me, knowing I can’t stop her.

‘You’re holding the hammer you used to knock her teeth out and hammer nails into her gums,’ says Waterhouse.

‘Aidan did those things. Why would I kill her? He wanted revenge for what she did to Ruth. Anyone would.’

‘If he was the one holding the gun on Monday night, how come he ended up getting shot?’ There’s a pause. ‘You’ve got no answer for that, have you?’

‘I’m not saying I didn’t shoot him. I’m saying I didn’t shoot Gemma.’ He’s made her angry. ‘You’re no Sherlock Holmes, are you? It’s okay, you don’t need to be. I can tell you what happened. ’

‘Go on.’

‘Where do you want me to start? Aidan had to find out about Gemma and Stephen for himself. Ruth told him nothing-can you believe that? No communication whatsoever. A relationship like that can’t last. If Ruth didn’t want him to know, she shouldn’t have kept so many trauma keepsakes. That’s very common, to do that. Did you know that?’

‘No.’

I feel as if I’m hearing the conversation from a distance. It’s like listening to a far-away radio. I could so easily drift out of the range of the voices.

‘Aidan found a box full of souvenirs under her bed, everything she’d kept from Gemma’s trial.’

When? I want to ask. I can guess the answer: after the art fair, after he moved in with me. He searched my house, looking for evidence that Mary and I were in league against him.

‘He looked Gemma and Stephen up on the internet and found what he expected to find,’ Mary tells Waterhouse. ‘Their attack on Ruth, all that. But the name Gemma Crowther kept coming up in another context too-on Quaker websites. That’s how he found out which meeting she went to. He started going too. He wanted to find out if she was the same Gemma Crowther who’d nearly killed his girlfriend.’

‘Told you all this at gunpoint, did he?’

‘He didn’t have to say anything he didn’t want to. Neither do I. I’m telling you because I want to, no other reason.’ Mary’s voice is full of scorn.

‘Did he find out, then?’ Waterhouse asks. ‘That she was the same Gemma Crowther?’

‘Not at first. Not until she mentioned that she used to live near Lincoln. Then he knew. He asked her why she moved to London. That was the test: to see if she’d changed. If she had, he said, she’d have told him the truth: what she’d done to Ruth, and that she was sorry, that she was a different person now. At the very least she’d have mentioned having been in prison, even if she didn’t say what for. But she didn’t. She lied-made up some story about wanting a change of scene and career. He knew she was a fake when she told him that.’ Mary laughs. ‘She was a healer, did you know that? What a fucking hypocrite! No loss to the world, that’s for sure.’

‘Why did Aidan give Gemma Crowther your painting?’ Waterhouse asks.

Silence. Or else they’re talking but I can’t hear them any more. When I hear Mary’s voice, I’m relieved. ‘He said they deserved each other. Gemma and the picture.’ She’s crying. ‘As if a painting’s a moral agent, as if it can deserve anything. Monday night was going to be the last time he saw her-he told me. He wanted nothing more to do with her, or me. He was going to leave Abberton with her because it seemed appropriate, he said. And then he’d be rid of us both for ever, me and her.’

‘Makes sense,’ says Waterhouse. ‘That’s why you made him lock Abberton in the boot of his car before forcing him at gunpoint to drive here. It wasn’t only about framing him for Gemma’s murder, was it? It was symbolic. You wanted to show him he couldn’t shake you off so easily.’

He’s right, isn’t he Mary? You wanted the police to find something of Aidan’s and something of yours together: his car, your painting.

Aidan knew he couldn’t shake you off. That was one lesson you didn’t have to teach him. It’s why he went to the police and confessed, as soon as he saw I was planning to involve them. Thinking about it, I’m sure he followed me that day. I told him I was going to the dentist, but I’m a poor liar. He was right not to trust me. He’d confided in me and I betrayed him. Not straight away, but eventually, when the uncertainty became too much for me. He’d been convinced I would, ever since our night in London-it was only a matter of time. And when the time came, he was ready with his official confession. It was the only way he could keep control of the situation.

He as good as sent the police straight to your house, Mary, to see if you’d tell them. If you were going to ruin his life again, he wanted you to get it over with. He was trying to force your hand. You could easily have told Waterhouse or Charlie Zailer the truth: that your name used to be Martha Wyers, that Mary Trelease was the name of a woman Aidan had killed. You could have told them about the painting in his exhibition, The Murder of Mary Trelease.

What was in that picture, Mary? I know you remember. How annoyed you must have been when you found out from your private detective about Mary Trelease’s death. You’d had, in that painting, evidence of Aidan’s crime-had it and destroyed it. How good was it, as proof? What story did the picture tell? I’m surprised you didn’t have a stab at recreating it yourself, since by that point you’d started your new life as a painter. You must have remembered it detail for detail. Did you do a sketch of it and put it somewhere safe, so that you wouldn’t forget what you’d seen and what you knew?

No answers come. No one can hear the questions going round in my head.

What was in the picture, Aidan? Nothing obvious. You’d only have risked calling it The Murder of Mary Trelease if it wasn’t too much of a giveaway. It can’t have been a painting of you strangling her in which you were recognisable as the killer-people like Jan Garner and Saul Hansard would have asked questions. So what was it?

You told the police you’d killed Mary, told them how and where you did it. But the woman you described was Martha-the woman you knew they’d find alive at 15 Megson Crescent. That was the point where you can’t have been sure. It was a gamble: either she’d tell them everything, produce whatever proof she had, or she wouldn’t. She’d say nothing. And the police would dismiss your story as the ravings of a deranged man, a man who could look them in the eye and insist that he’s murdered somebody who isn’t dead. You wanted them to think you were crazy. You didn’t want to go to prison.

You regretted telling me you’d killed Mary Trelease as soon as the words were out and you saw the horror on my face. But you couldn’t take it back, not something as big as that. You couldn’t say you were joking. I wouldn’t have believed you. I could see the state you were in. Your only hope was to turn your confession into one you knew could be disproved-disproved by the existence of a woman calling herself Mary Trelease.

As much as you wanted to protect yourself, you also wanted to confess. And you did: finally, you went to the police and told the truth. Even when you had to lie, when you had to withhold so much of the story that you ended up telling a different story altogether, you were still able to say the main thing that was true: that you’d killed Mary Trelease, that you’d strangled her in bed, in that room. It must have felt good to say it, after so many years of guilt and silence. Unburdening yourself, but with a safety net in place to give the lie to your confession-the presence of a real live Mary in the house where you told the police they’d find her body.

She didn’t tell them what she knew. That would have meant handing control over to them, and there was no way she’d do that. You saw she hadn’t done it-no detectives came back to you to ask about the other Mary Trelease, the real one. But it still wasn’t over. Martha Wyers wasn’t going to disappear; you knew how doggedly clingy she was, how determined she was to latch on to your life as if it was rightfully hers. She was still there, at 15 Megson Crescent. She still knew what you’d done. It would never have been over, not unless you’d killed her, and you couldn’t do that. You weren’t a killer. I don’t know why you killed a woman years ago, but I know you’re not a killer.

‘Me, frame Aidan? He’s a murderer-a cold, calculating murderer. He strangled a woman-he told you so himself and you were too stupid to listen.’

Martha’s right: you wanted to know if Gemma Crowther was sorry for what she’d done to me, if she’d changed. You can’t change unless you face up to what you’ve done. That’s what you tried to do in London, at the Drummond Hotel. Maybe you’d have succeeded if I’d given you the support you needed instead of letting you down.

You wanted Gemma to show you she’d changed so that you could believe that sort of change was possible. If she could redeem herself, so could you. You must have wondered about Martha, too. Yes. That’s why you told her about Gemma, about wanting to see if she regretted what she’d done. Did you hope Martha would apologise for the terrible thing she’d done to you, even while she had a gun pointed at your face? Yes. I know the way a victim’s mind works, being one myself. You can accept that someone has damaged you beyond repair, and maybe that they will again. What you can’t accept is a total absence of regret.

Martha didn’t say she was sorry. Of course she didn’t. Did you know then that you were better than her? Or did you start to wonder if anyone, any human being, was any good at all? Maybe you were as bad as Martha and Gemma-a killer who hadn’t had the guts to face up to his crime, who’d let someone else take the blame. Did you say whatever you needed to say after that to make Martha shoot you? Was it a relief when she did?

‘Which woman did Aidan kill?’ Waterhouse’s voice swims under the surface of my consciousness. ‘Mary? You said he killed a woman. Which woman?’

‘Me! He killed me!’

‘Simon!’ A third voice. Not mine. A woman’s. I have to open my eyes again. When I do, I see Waterhouse turning, Charlie Zailer at the window, Mary lunging for the gun. No…

She’s got them both now, the gun and the hammer, one in each hand. There’s something wrong with the way she’s holding the hammer.

‘Bussey’s alive, Seed’s dead,’ Waterhouse says.

I breathe in, breathe out. I think to myself that I ought to stop if I want to die. Suicide: a sin. Does it count if all you do is stop breathing, when breathing’s so hard? If there’s a God, does he have a view on that?

‘Aidan’s not dead,’ Mary says quickly. ‘If he were dead, I’d be dead, and I’m not.’

‘Put the gun and hammer down, Mary,’ Charlie Zailer says. ‘There’s an ambulance outside. This has to stop now.’

‘Aidan’s not dead! Check.’

I hear movement; then, a few seconds later: ‘She’s right. There’s still a pulse.’

Relief washes through me. There’s an ambulance outside, Aidan. Just hold on a little bit longer.

‘Stay away from me!’ Mary growls like an animal. She’s behind Waterhouse, pressing the gun against his head. Her hand is shaking, her finger wobbling the trigger. ‘I’ll kill him if you come any closer.’

‘That’s my fiancé you’ve got there,’ says Charlie. ‘Did you know that? Remember, we talked about him? You wondered why I wouldn’t choose to paint him, if I had to paint somebody.’

‘I don’t care who he is. Stop where you are, or I’ll shoot him. I mean it!’

‘I love him. We’re supposed to be getting married, even though everyone we know thinks it’s a really bad idea.’

‘Shut up!’

‘It isn’t a bad idea, though, because I can’t be happy unless I’m with Simon. And after what I’ve been through, I think I deserve to be happy. You know all about what happened to me, right? You told me you did. I’m just like you, Martha. My life was in pieces, all because of a man…’

‘Don’t call me that!’

‘… but I was lucky enough to find a way out of my despair. I’ve got a chance to be happy now, and… well, the thing is, Simon and I haven’t actually been happy together yet, even though we’ve known each other for years. All we’ve done is waste time.’

Mary swings the gun round, points it at Charlie. The hammer falls from her left hand. That’s right: she broke her fingers.

‘Put the gun down, Mary,’ says Waterhouse.

‘Keep quiet!’ Her voice is shaking so much, I barely recognise the words. ‘Or I’ll shoot you so you die, like Gemma. Not like these two. I never wanted to kill them. Ruth’s my friend.’

‘You didn’t want to kill Aidan?’ Charlie says. ‘You shot him in the chest.’

‘I shot him in the shoulder. I… I meant to aim higher. I didn’t want to shoot him at all, but he wouldn’t…’

‘Wouldn’t what?’

‘He wouldn’t admit that he loves me.’

I hear a series of noises that are painful to listen to: shrill one minute, rasping the next. Can they all be coming from Mary? They don’t sound human.

‘The medics need to come in here and help Aidan and Ruth,’ says Charlie gently. ‘You’re going to let them do that, aren’t you, Martha?’

‘Martha’s dead!’

‘You said you didn’t want to kill them…’

‘If I do what you’re asking, what will happen to me?’

‘Prison. You know that. You’re not stupid. You’ll be able to paint there, though. Or write, if you want to. I’ll make sure of that. I’ll look after you, but first you’ve got to put the gun down.’

‘What about my paintings, the ones in my house? What will happen to them?’

There’s a pause. It seems to last a long time.

‘Nothing. They’ll be waiting for you when you get out. And you will get out. You’ve got to trust-’

‘How long?’

‘I don’t know exactly. With extenuating circumstances taken into account, perhaps five years.’

‘You’re lying!’ Mary waves the gun in the air as if she can’t decide who to aim for. ‘Five years for a murder and two attempted murders? That’s too little. How long? Tell me the truth.’

‘You’ll be allowed to keep some of your paintings with you on the inside,’ says Charlie. I hear fear in her voice for the first time. ‘I’ll do everything I can to make sure-’

‘I wouldn’t be able to take them all with me, would I? All my pictures?’

‘Hand the gun to me and I’ll make sure they go with you, every single one of them.’

‘You’ve seen how many there are.’ Mary’s voice shakes. ‘They won’t fit in a prison cell. I can’t not have them with me.’

‘There are prisons that have other kinds of accommodation, not only cells. Women’s prisons especially. Some prisoners have their own rooms, or they share with one other person, but the rooms are a decent size.’

‘Sounds like a Villiers dorm.’

‘It’s true, Mary,’ says Waterhouse. ‘We’ll make sure you have the space you need for your paintings.’

‘You’re lying, both of you,’ she says, sounding calmer. ‘That’s okay. I won’t hold it against you.’ She lifts the gun, holds it to the side of her own head. When she speaks again, I can hear that she’s smiling, even though her face is turned away from me. ‘Now, Martha,’ she says. ‘No mistakes this time.’

‘No!’ Charlie screams.

‘I think yes,’ says Mary, and pulls the trigger.