‘So I started playing nice with the food and the hot bath and all that. Smiling and listening and talking to you. I was as scared as you when he appeared, never ran so fast in my life. When you left me in those trees I didn’t think you were coming back. After that it all started falling into place, I could see what you were thinking, what you were trying to do and it suited us perfectly. Until you decided to go to the police. I went along with you, followed you here to the flat hoping that I might talk you out of it but I was thinking on my feet and I didn’t really know what I was going to do then. I even considered seducing you just to stall you. And then Slater turned up and the other guys and everything went crazy. After I got out of Gresham’s place and that guy drove me home I made him take me straight to Ben’s place. The whole thing was just a nightmare but you’d already told me what you were planning by then so as soon as you told me that you had convinced George to help you we figured that we were through the worst of it.’
Campbell listened to Sarah’s confession in silence. He had dropped into a chair at the table and could not take his eyes off her as she spoke, could not fathom how dispassionate she was about the whole thing, could not understand how completely he had been used, deceived and manipulated. Since he had made the shocking discovery about Sarah and her fiance he had wondered how much she had been involved in the plan. Was she merely tagging along with the two other men, a passenger? Or was her role in this more active? He had found himself hoping that it was the former, that she was the kind and decent person that he had come to see her as. But as he had stared at the picture of her with her fund-manager boyfriend taken less than two months ago he knew that it was not true.
Listening to her now Campbell’s initial shock was tempered by a growing sense of detachment. Hearing her talk about what she had done with not a shred of remorse, about how she had felt all through, how she had suffered. She was indifferent to Campbell’s own fate. He noted that her observation that he may not return when he had left her to tackle their attacker on the Cornish clifftop held no sense of regret, no suggestion that she had been upset by the prospect. She had simply noted it, remarked on the event, the outcome of which seemed to hold little interest for her.
‘Pleased with yourself Daniel? Filled with self-righteous pride? The good guy? You’ve taken us all down and put money in the pockets of Gresham and Slater instead. Violent criminals, guys that kidnapped you and beat you up, threatened your friends and family.’
‘Well at least they were honest about it. At least with them I knew what I was dealing with Sarah.’
‘Oh Daniel. The heart weeps,’ she said, making no effort to mask her contempt.
They looked at each other in silence then. Long moments passed without words as he looked at her, seeing the pretty, smiling woman he had met in Griffin’s offices, seeing her expression when she’d seen his own bruised and swollen face, the nervous edgy person unpacking groceries in the kitchen like a schoolgirl with a crush. None of them was really Sarah. Sarah didn’t really exist.
‘Get out,’ he said finally.
Her lips were pressed thin and her eyes narrowed. With a final poisonous look she turned slowly, picked her coat up from the end of the sofa and walked out of his flat, the door closing loud and hard behind her.
For a long time after she’d left, Campbell stared at the space in the room that she had been standing. He noticed that the chair he sat in had been the one where he’d sat and held her only days before, her arms around him and drawing him into her.
He stood and walked into the kitchen, staring at the clean floor, the pristine surfaces, the small gap beneath the oven. In the glass of a cupboard door he caught his reflection. The swelling around his eye was going down now and the black lines on his cheek and lip where he had been cut were smaller and not so obvious. He hoisted his t-shirt up to see the bruising on his chest and ribs was softening into lighter shades of green and red. Walking back into the living room and stretching out on the sofa Campbell closed his eyes and listened to the silence.