“When you came back from Las Vegas with Ned,” Hunter begins, “I believed what everyone else believed, that you’d been in a secret relationship with him for months.”
“But you knew about his attack on Justine at that point; you knew what he was. Why didn’t you say anything to me?”
“I thought you’d married Ned because you loved him. I thought you’d been playing with me, and I was annoyed.”
“But you must have seen the way Ned was with me during that press interview. You were standing behind us, you must have seen that I was trying to get away, go to Carolyn. If you had helped me, I might have been able to save Lina, save Carolyn.”
“Their deaths weren’t down to you, Amelie. Lina would have gone to the house no matter what. And I’m sorry, but as far as I was concerned, you were Mrs. Hawthorpe.”
“Never,” I say through gritted teeth. “I was never Mrs. Hawthorpe. I was going to kill Ned. The night we were kidnapped, I planned to go to his bedroom when he was asleep and use his phone to call the police. If he refused to give it to me, I was going to kill him. I couldn’t think of any other way out; I was scared that if I didn’t kill him, he would kill me.”
“Which is exactly what he planned to do.”
With the light coming through the open door behind him, it’s hard to see his face. “What? When?”
“That same night. But I need to rewind a bit.” He pauses. “Wouldn’t you rather do this outside, in the sun?”
“I’m fine where I am.”
“Okay. After Lina died, Carl found a file in her apartment with the names of five young women, all ex-employees of Exclusives, who Ned had sexually assaulted, along with details of payments Ned had made to buy their silence. There was also a recording where four of the girls had detailed what had happened to them. Carl passed the file on to Mr. Smith. Coupled with the disappearances of Justine and Lina, it was a step too far, and an order came for Ned to be handed over before he could do any more damage to the foundation. Carl knew it meant Ned would be killed, but he didn’t care; on the contrary, he thought Ned was getting off lightly. He wanted to make Ned suffer for Lina’s murder physically, mentally, and emotionally and told Mr. Smith that he wanted to keep Ned for a while before handing him over. Mr. Smith agreed. But there was a flaw; if Ned suddenly disappeared, the police would look for him, and if he was eventually found murdered, the police would dig to find out why he’d been murdered, and the foundation would be damaged anyway. Mr. Smith asked Carl to find a solution.”
He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “The night of my fake murder, I was booked on a flight to New Zealand. All I wanted was to get on that plane and leave everything behind. But when our plan to rescue you failed, everything changed. I couldn’t leave until I knew you were safe. I wanted to go and get you that same night, but Carl was worried about me blowing my cover, and possibly his, and asked me to wait a couple more days while he thought of a way to get you out. He said you were safe, keeping to your room, out of Ned’s way—”
“Only because Ned had locked me in,” I interrupt. “And that was after he almost killed me,” I add, not caring about the shock on his face.
“What do you mean?”
“He suffocated me like he suffocated Lina. Except he didn’t go all the way to the end, because he still needed me.”
He rubs his hand over his chin. “Christ, Amelie, I had no idea—”
“Carry on,” I interrupt, my voice hard.
He nods. “By then, Carl didn’t care about spying on Ned. That night, the night we kidnapped you, he had listened in to a call Ned made to Amos Kerrigan. Jethro Hawthorpe had been at the house and Ned was angry, he said you’d made him look a fool and that he wanted to get rid of you. He told Amos to go to the house and kill you, and make it look like a burglary gone wrong. Before I could panic, Carl said that he had a plan. He was going to kidnap Ned, and take you as well, because you were the perfect solution to the problem of how to make Ned’s disappearance pass unnoticed. I asked what he meant, and he said that if he kidnapped the two of you, he could make it look as if you and Ned had gone on vacation together and that way, nobody would know that Ned had been kidnapped. He could also make it look as if the reason Ned had gone away was because he was being hounded by the press over the sexual assault allegations, which in turn would lead to him supposedly taking his own life. And rather than tarnish the foundation, his death would be met with sympathy.”