She’s just about to turn away when she spots a man’s ankle through the gap in the curtains: the trouser leg of a navy blue suit and smart black shoes. Whoever it is looks like they’re pacing and, yes, yes, it looks like a dog. A big dog.
‘Olivia?’
She turns at the voice behind her. Her mother is standing in the garden. She must have followed her here. ‘What’s going on?’
Her mother’s face is crinkled with worry. ‘I think he’s lost the plot. He’s been backed into a corner.’ She clutches Olivia’s hand and tries to pull her away from the door. ‘It’s not safe. Please, we need to leave.’
‘What?’ Who is her mother talking about?
‘It’s Jay. He’s lost it.’
Olivia stares at her mother in horror. ‘Jay Knapton? What’s going on? Is he hurting Jenna? Please, Mum. You can’t let this happen.’
Suddenly the patio door is thrust open and Jay is standing there. Her mum drops Olivia’s hand.
‘About time,’ says Jay, coldly, addressing her mother. ‘Why don’t you come in and explain yourself, Stace?’
Stace? Only Maggie ever called her that. Everyone else, including Wesley, shortens her name to Ana.
Olivia watches, frozen to the spot, as her mother steps reluctantly into the cabin. And then she sees Jenna sitting wide-eyed and terrified on the sofa, her arms crossed as though for protection.
Jay turns to her mother with a malevolent look. ‘Do you want to tell them about the night of the accident? Or shall I?’
49
The Night of the Accident
It was late. Way past her bedtime. Stace liked to wait up for Olivia to get home. She was only just eighteen and had never been a particularly outgoing girl. She had only got into drinking and partying in the last few months. She was sure that was Tamzin’s influence. Since Leonie and Griff had split up their only daughter had become even wilder.
Things were never quite the same between her old gang of friends after Thailand. They rallied around her, of course – probably because they felt sorry for her being alone and pregnant, with John-Paul banged up in a Thai prison. But she always felt like she was hiding a part of herself from them.
Or, rather, someone.
Derreck Jason Knapton. Her Jay. The love of her life.
After the night they slept together and John-Paul had beaten him up, Derreck had told her everything: the drugs that were in the ornaments, the business he was in, the real reason he had so much money. ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you before,’ he had said, in the bedroom, as she attended to his wounds. ‘I never expected to fall for you in such a big way.’ At least he was being honest with her, she had reasoned. She insisted he tell her everything and he did. He had smuggled drugs for years, mostly cocaine. He didn’t deal it, he said. That had been John-Paul’s role and that was how they had met. He had asked John-Paul to come to Thailand so they could carry on working together – but John-Paul had resisted. Kept changing his mind. The Goa episode had knocked his confidence. So Derreck had tried to persuade him to get into smuggling instead. He’d wanted to use Stace and her friends too, thinking it would be less risky if they each had just the one ornament: a token of their holiday.
Before she’d met Derreck her knowledge of drugs was limited to TV dramas and films. But Derreck made her see it wasn’t necessarily like that, and normal everyday people could make a lot of money from what he called ‘distribution’。
The money was more than she could ever have earned working for her parents in their riding stables, but she knew it was more than that. She was so infatuated with Derreck she’d have done anything he asked.
When she returned to England, pining for Derreck and guilt-ridden at what had happened with John-Paul, she found out she was pregnant. When she broke the news to Derreck over the phone he assured her that it made no difference: he still wanted to be with her. That he loved her. Not long afterwards he moved his ‘distribution services’ to the UK so they could be together and they met up regularly in different seaside bed-and-breakfasts around the country. She wanted to keep Derreck and his distribution business away from Olivia so he became her secret. She never even told Maggie and the others about him, and in the end she could almost convince herself Derreck was just doing a bit of courier work on the side, a well-paid delivery man. After he got arrested in Dover in 1982 he started going by his middle name, Jason. Until she suggested shortening it to Jay. Like her hero, Gatsby. She loved him so much she closed her ears to his dodgy deals and the many businesses he’d set up to clean the money he’d made through drugs.
In the last eight months he’d even begun visiting her in Stafferbury on the odd occasion – although they were very careful never to be seen together, usually holed up in the little Airbnb apartment he rented under a false name. She was looking forward to seeing him tomorrow night as he was in Stafferbury on ‘business’。 At first, she’d been terrified one of her old friends would recognize him but it had been nearly eighteen years since Thailand and he had changed a lot, losing most of his lovely blond hair and growing a beard. He was still sexy to her, though. He always would be.
Just as she was turning off the TV the headlights of a vehicle swept across the room. Olivia was home later than usual. Stace loitered in the hallway, expecting to hear the key in the front door. She waited but there was no sound. She didn’t want Olivia to think she was waiting up for her so she tiptoed to the front porch to see what her daughter was doing. Maybe she had a boy in the car with her – perhaps that Wesley Tucker she’d been hanging around with. Stace didn’t want to pry but when she cupped her hands around her face and peered through the glass, instead of Olivia’s little Peugeot she saw a white van. She wondered if it was Derreck but he’d never just turn up because of Olivia. Maybe she would tell Olivia about him one day but she knew he – like her – preferred to keep their relationship separate from everyone else. Derreck wasn’t the marrying kind and that was fine by her as long as he was in her life. Other couples lost their heat, their lust for one another, but not them and that was, at least in part, because she didn’t have to pick up after him and wash his dirty pants. Theirs was a love that took place inside luxury hotel rooms and quiet little Airbnbs, having sex in bath tubs with champagne on the side.
Someone was getting out of the van. It was a man she didn’t immediately recognize, although there was something familiar about the way he walked, the curve of his back, the arms hanging limply at his sides. And then he stopped and looked directly at her, with haunted brown eyes, and she knew straight away who it was. A ghost from her past.
She grabbed her coat from the peg and rushed outside, still in her slippers. The ground was wet although the rain was slowing.
Why was he here?
‘John-Paul? Is that you?’
‘Stace …’ His voice was thick, like he was dehydrated. As he stepped closer the light from the porch illuminated his ravaged face, his hollow cheeks, his closely cropped hair and wild beard. She hadn’t seen him since that terrible afternoon when he was arrested at the airport. Nearly nineteen years ago.
‘What … what are you doing here?’ She couldn’t keep the shock out of her voice.