Free Remember Me This Way by Sabine Durrant Page B

garden is thick with shadows and windy. I watch Howard disappear into the complicated gloom of the bushes. When I find my chair again, I sit up straighter than before. A muscle in my leg starts shaking. ‘I wrote him a letter,’ I say. ‘And when I got there, it was opened. He’d read it.’
    ‘What letter?’ Jane says.
    ‘What did you write?’ Hannah asks.
    ‘We’d been going through a tricky patch, you know, with me not getting pregnant, and Zach . . . I had been finding Zach a bit . . . possessive. I wrote things perhaps I shouldn’t have. I said I wanted to separate.’
    Each word creates a new catch in my throat. I cough and then I try to laugh. I rub at an old mug ring on the table, and when I am doing that, Jane puts her hand on mine and holds it. Her nail polish is pale grey, like a nun’s habit.
    ‘Have you got the letter with you?’ Hannah asks lightly.
    ‘No. I burned it.’ I don’t look at her. ‘The one thing I was grateful for was that he hadn’t read it before he died. But he had, you see. He must have reached Gulls earlier than he said. He must have been there. You see? He reached the bungalow – that’s how his laptop got there – and he read the letter. He was so angry, he broke up the studio.’ I turn to Jane. ‘It was in pieces, Jane. And OK, not blood – but paint on the walls. Like someone had gone wild in there. But then he must have pulled himself together. He lied to me on the phone. He left me a private message on a painting.’
    ‘On a painting?’
    ‘A “private” message?’ Hannah adds. ‘You mean in code?’
    ‘In charcoal. He’d drawn himself setting off on a new life without me. He knew I’d see it. He knew I’d understand what it meant. And then he locked up the house . . . And then he . . .’
    There is an expression on Jane’s face, like it’s being tugged. Her eyes are full and her cheeks have flushed. I look across at Hannah and her lips look funny, twisted. Jane’s taken her hand away from mine and is holding it across her mouth. Her eyes are full of alarm. Neither of them says anything.
    ‘So you see,’ I say again.
    Hannah nods very slightly. ‘He read the letter and was devastated. He drank too much to drown his sorrows. And then he set off towards London. It explains the direction of travel. He hadn’t doubled back. He was driving home to confront you, a bit angry, a bit too fast. Maybe . . .’
    Jane takes her hand away. ‘Oh, poor Zach. He—’
    ‘NO,’ I shriek. ‘I know what you are about to say. He didn’t kill himself. It wasn’t suicide. He wasn’t in the car. It wasn’t him .’
    Jane pushes her chair back and crouches next to where I am sitting. She puts her arms around me. I’ve started crying properly now.
    ‘No body,’ I say. ‘There wasn’t a body.’
    ‘But there was,’ Jane says. ‘Sweetie, there was.’
    ‘No. No.’
    Hannah stands up too. I’m aware of her moving around the kitchen. She opens the back door. She must have let Howard in, because he noses around at my feet, rests his face on my knee. His beard is wet and grainy. I hear the kettle being filled. Eventually, Hannah sits back at the table, and puts the teapot down.
    ‘We didn’t need to do a DNA test, did we? Listen, Lizzie. That’s because we were sure, weren’t we? His mobile phone was in the car. There was CCTV footage of him getting petrol earlier in the afternoon. You told us he was in the car that night. We only authorise a test when there is doubt. And there was no room for doubt.’
    I think about her coming to the door. The questions she said she had to ask, standing there with her neat ponytail, her clean uniform. Who did the car belong to? Did I know who was driving? Was I sure? I know now she was seeking proof, confirmation. But her words died in the air. I put my hands out to stop them from coming. She held out a CCTV picture of Zach taken at a service station. ‘Is this him?’ I crumpled it up, tried to push her out of the