Among the many jostling feelings inside her – the anger, the fear, the horror, the disappointment – there was one, quiet but persistent, which took her by surprise. It was relief. Relief she had failed. Relief that her plan had misfired so completely. Relief that she was not a murderer. That she was not a killer. Because Jess now had in her possession the evidence that Jackson Crane was.
There was a point up ahead where the path crossed over a little stream, a hump-backed wooden bridge over the water. At the top of the bridge she stopped, removed her mask, fiddled loose the knot that held her robe on, and let them both fall down into the darkness, the cloak a deeper patch of shadow for a moment on the surface of the water, the whiteness of the mask disappearing as the stream closed over it. Somewhere up ahead on one of the roads a Land Rover screeched past, its headlights sending the shadows of the trees moving, the music on its radio distantly audible. Jess rubbed her eyes. She wished it was possible somehow to reach inside her head and rub her brain.
Even now, when she pictured the face next to Jackson’s in the front of the vehicle he had been driving that night, it was Georgia’s face she pictured. Even now. Which meant that all these years, whenever she had thought she was recalling the night of her parents’ death, refusing to forget what she had seen, refusing to believe she had forgotten a single detail of that moment, her brain had been at work, embroidering, reordering.
The lights in the corridors of the staff accommodation were turned down, the corridors themselves deserted, the blue light of someone’s television showing under their shut door the only sign that anyone was awake. Just as well, probably, given how spattered with mud Jess was, how incapable she felt of any kind of normal human interaction right now. Back in her room she locked the door, pulled the curtains closed, sat in the darkness on the corner of her bed, and brought out her phone.
The second time she’d watched the footage on Jackson Crane’s memory stick, once she had realized exactly what it was she was seeing, she had begun to film it on her mobile – holding the phone as steadily as she could, using her other arm for additional support, walkie-talkie turned off, terrified any minute that footsteps would come crunching up the drive to the cabin, someone would start knocking on the door.
Once she had finished she had removed the memory stick from the side of the TV, wiped it down and placed it on Jackson Crane’s bedside table. Let the police make of that what they would, she thought. The proof at last that what she had been saying all those years ago had been the truth. The proof that Jackson Crane was a murderer and his wife had gone along with it.
Or was it?
It is bizarre, the relationship between our eyes and our brain.
Now that she had been told the dark-haired woman was not Georgia Crane, it was amazing that she had ever believed it was. For one thing, this was a much taller woman than Jackson’s slight wife. And her hair was much longer than she had ever seen Georgia Crane wear her hair – it went all the way down her back. She didn’t walk like Georgia, move like Georgia, had none of the delicate, fluttering hand gestures Georgia used for emphasis. Her chin, when her face was briefly visible in profile, was even at a distance far more prominent.
Jess paused the footage with her thumb. She peered at it more closely. She pressed play again.
Even on her phone, even in this footage in which the woman was so often so frustratingly just out of shot or visible only so fleetingly, it was all the ways that this woman was clearly not Jackson Crane’s wife that kept leaping out at her. Georgia Crane was an outspoken supporter of PETA. This woman was wearing what looked very much like a real fur coat. Nor would Georgia Crane ever have worn a pair of big hoop earrings like that, unless for some film role. Georgia Crane’s stunt double this woman might have been. Georgia Crane she was not.
Which meant all this time Jess had been directing her hate at the wrong woman.
A type, Georgia had said. My husband has a type.
The footage came to an end. Jess pressed play again. Again the couple burst into the room, Jackson first, the woman following. Again Jackson made his way straight to the liquor cabinet, made a drink for himself, and didn’t offer to make a drink for her. Again Jess watched her pace, toss her hair, ignore Jackson as he ranted and burbled and snarled, slumping ever deeper in his armchair, spilling ever more drink down his chin.