The Other Side of the Door, Nicci French [new reading .TXT] 📗

‘Go on.’

‘Did you love him?’

I replied before I had time to stop myself: ‘I don’t know. But sometimes I miss him so much that I’m not sure how to bear it.’

Before

I followed Hayden up the hill. I could see the muscles in his back working under his thin top. His shoulders were broad and strong. As if he could feel my eyes on him, he turned and his face softened in a slow smile.

People say ‘just sex’. They say just sex, just desire, just a physical thing. I don’t know what that means. Desire ran through me in a stream; sex transformed me and made me feel alive, every nerve in my body singing with the sheer physical joy of it.

I drew level with him. We didn’t touch but the space between us throbbed. My summer days, no before and no after, just now, just him.

After

At first it was awkward, almost embarrassed—as though we couldn’t confront the enormity and folly of what we had done and had retreated into a kind of social formality. Nobody seemed to know how to behave: Neal was solemnly pissed, Sonia was coolly impersonal towards him, and I was concentrating on not breaking into wretched fits of giggles again, although my eyes were stinging and my chest ached.

But there was something strangely comforting about being a threesome. I knew it was dangerous. Perhaps it meant the secret would spread out through the cracks. But for the time being, sitting in Neal’s cosy house, I felt less afraid, as if the fear had been shared out. I looked at them both—Sonia in her grey soft-cotton trousers and a white T-shirt, her face grave and handsome, Neal, sitting with his head propped on his hand and his fingers pushing his dark hair into comical tufts—and thought about what they had both done for me, or in Neal’s case, what he had thought he was doing for me.

When Sonia had arrived, I could almost feel the passion coming off her. It was all the more powerful for being contained. She seemed to pulse with it. ‘Tell me,’ she said, when I met her at the front door.

I took her into the garden because I wanted to be alone with her when I told her. Through the lighted window I could see Neal sitting in the living room. I told Sonia everything, leaving nothing out: the brief fling with Neal, which she half knew about anyway, the affair with Hayden, the violence and obsession of it, my certainty on discovering the body that Neal had done it, and done it for me. It didn’t take long, after all, and when I had finished there was a silence between us.

‘I was protecting you,’ she said at last.

‘I know.’

‘You let me think you’d killed him.’

I didn’t say anything. She was right, after all.

‘You misled me, Bonnie.’

‘I didn’t want to but I couldn’t tell you. You see why, don’t you?’

‘Maybe.’ Her voice was still very controlled. ‘So I did all this for Neal? Who I hardly know?’

‘I’m sorry, Sonia.’

Her face was closed and inscrutable in the half-light.

‘I guess we need to talk,’ I said.

‘You want to go to the police?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘“Want” is the wrong word. But maybe it would be for the best, in all ways—for a start, and this is way the most important, they could concentrate on the real killer. We’re in their way. They’re suspicious of me. They know I lied to them. It’s better if I tell them before they discover it for themselves. Better for all of us, I mean. Neither of you needs to be involved. I can just say I found the body and got rid of it because I panicked.’

Sonia shook her head. ‘How are you going to explain doing it all by yourself?’

‘I can say I helped.’ Neal leaned forward in his chair. ‘It’s almost true.’

‘You’re worrying about the lies you’ve already told and now you’re planning more. It’ll never work.’

‘So what do you suggest we do, Sonia?’

She was silent for a long while, her face heavy with thought. ‘Nothing,’ she said at last.

‘Nothing?’

‘I don’t want you to tell the police. You keep finding new ways of getting yourself deeper and deeper into the mess. And me with you.’

‘This wouldn’t be a new way. This would just be the truth. We can’t obstruct their investigation. Someone killed Hayden and they need to find out who.’

‘Yet you didn’t think that when you believed it was Neal.’

‘Because I thought Neal had done it by mistake—and for me,’ I said miserably.

‘It’s complicated,’ she said. ‘And I’m scared.’

I looked at her in consternation: somehow I’d thought Sonia was never scared. She was my rock and I leaned on her, knowing she wouldn’t give way.

‘I’m so sorry about everything,’ I said. ‘I wake up every night feeling as though there’s a great boulder on my chest that’s stopping me breathing. I don’t know if I can bear it much longer.’

‘I don’t want to stop the police finding out who did it, of course I don’t, but I don’t want to go to prison for you either.’

‘You won’t have to.’

‘You can’t know that, Bonnie.’

Neal stood up and went to the window that gave out over his garden. ‘Let’s try and see this from another angle,’ he said. ‘I tampered with the evidence and then you two didn’t just tamper with it, you got rid of it, including the body.’

‘That’s not a different angle,’ said Sonia. ‘That’s just restating our position.’

‘What did we see?’ asked Neal, as if she hadn’t spoken.

‘We saw Hayden.’ I didn’t say that I saw him still. He had become my ghost and was haunting me. I woke at night and he would be standing at the bottom of my bed, looking down at me.

‘We didn’t see the same things.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What you saw wasn’t what I saw because I messed everything up and made it look different. You didn’t see the real crime scene, but the artificial one.’

‘You’re right.’

‘And