He’s spinning, away from me, his hands at his chest. Even as he turns I can see that he’s wide-eyed, terrified; within a second or two he’s lying on the ground against the opposite wall of the alley. Stasis returns. There’s a whistling in my ears, but all else is quiet. I look at the gun. There’s a faint smell, dry and acrid, like nothing I’ve known before. Nobody moves. Nothing happens. I can feel my heart beat.
And then a red smudge blooms on his shirt, the world of sound crashes back in, and everything happens at once.
I step back, feel the cold wall against me. Lukas speaks; it sounds unnaturally loud now that my hearing has returned, yet still it’s little more than a thin, reedy noise in his throat. ‘You stupid bitch! You fucking shot me!’
My courage has gone, my bravado has disappeared. My hand goes to my mouth.
He’s panting, looking down at the blood that’s beginning to seep through his fingers. He cries out. I can’t make out what he’s saying, it’s little more than a rasping moan, but he looks from his bleeding chest to Anna and there seems to be a name in there. It sounds like ‘Bella’.
The word seems familiar, vaguely, but I can’t place it. I look over at Anna. Help me, I want to say. What have I done? But she’s looking at me. Her face is cold. Her eyes wide, as if in shock, yet at the same time she’s wearing half a smile.
‘Bella,’ he says again.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ she says. She takes a step forward. She moves slowly. She is utterly calm.
I look at her. I’m incredulous. I don’t know what to say. My mouth opens, closes. She looks at me.
My world is imploding. I can’t work out what is happening. Everything seems too bright, as if I’ve been staring into the sun. I can only make out outlines, shadows. Nothing is solid, nothing seems real.
‘Where’s Connor? Where is he?’
She smiles, but says nothing.
‘Anna? What’s this about? We’re friends …? Aren’t we?’
She laughs. The name begins to float to the surface. I’ve heard it before. I know I have. Bella.
I just can’t yet place it. I look to the body at my feet, desperate for help. ‘Lukas?’ He looks up at me. He’s gasping, pale. His eyes close, open again. ‘Lukas?’
He tries to take another deep breath, to speak, but the words fracture and fail.
Anna speaks. It’s difficult to tell, but it looks as though she’s begun to cry. ‘The police will be here soon, Julia.’
I look at the gun in my hand, at the man I’ve just shot. The truth begins to emerge, yet still it’s distorted, not yet in focus.
‘I didn’t mean to kill him.’
‘You never do—’
‘What—?’
‘Yet people still keep dying …’
I don’t know what she means. ‘What? Anna—!’
‘Oh, Julia. You still haven’t worked it out, have you?’
I begin to sob. ‘It’s your gun. Yours. You’re the one who told me about it.’
‘But I’m not the one who pulled the trigger.’
‘He killed my sister!’
She smiles, then, and steps forward into the light. ‘No, he didn’t.’
Her voice is utterly cold, her words sharp enough to sever flesh.
‘What?’
‘It was me she was meeting that night. I said we needed to talk. But not here.’ She looks at Lukas, lying silently on the floor. ‘At his place. He said we could use it.’
‘What?’
‘But she was late. She stayed for one more drink. So I bumped into her here. Right where we’re standing.’
‘Kate?’
She nods. ‘I told her it was time. We’d tried everything, but you still wouldn’t give Connor back. So I said we ought to tell you the truth.’
A wave of dread wraps itself around me, around my throat. I fight for breath.
‘It was you? Persuading her …’
‘Yes. I said we should tell you about Connor’s father. Tell you that he had family, family that would look after him. Not just Kate—’
Again I look at Lukas. ‘Him?’
‘Don’t be so ridiculous. He was just some bloke I was fucking.’ She shakes her head. ‘I mean me.’
I take a step back. The gun drops to my side. I don’t believe what I’m hearing.
‘But—’
‘She wouldn’t listen. She said she wasn’t telling you. It would hurt you too much.’ She shakes her head. ‘As if you getting hurt matters in the slightest, after what you did. We fought.’
‘What …? Who are you?’
‘I didn’t mean to push her over.’
‘You killed her!’
She looks at me. She raises her chin, defiant. Her hate is almost physical; sticky and cloying. It penetrates deep within me. She looks at me and I can see that I disgust her.
‘I pushed her over. She hit her head. I was angry, I wanted to stop, but …’ She shrugs. ‘I didn’t know she was dead when I left her. But yes. I left her here and I went round to his place’ – she looks again at Lukas – ‘and then the next day I found out she was dead. And I was glad. You know that? Glad I left her here, alone.’
My sobs turn into scalding tears. They run down my face. I raise the gun.
‘I’m glad because that’s exactly what you did to my brother.’
‘What …?’ I say, but an image comes. The last time I’d stood over a body, a dying man. And then finally it snaps into focus. I remember the name Marcus had had for his sister.
‘Bella … You’re Bella.’
I see it now, the thing I’ve failed to see all this time. In certain lights, from certain angles. She looks a little like her brother.
Suddenly I’m back there. I see him that night, his face ashen, bloodless, yet filmed with sweat. He looked unreal somehow, made of rubber. Spittle fringed his mouth; there was vomit on the floor. ‘Go!’ said Frosty.
‘No. I can’t.’
She looked up at me. She was crying. ‘You have to. If they find any of us here—’
‘No.’
‘—it’ll be over for all of us.’ She stood up, she held me. ‘There’s nothing we can do for Marky now, honey. He’s gone. He’s gone—’
‘No!’
‘—now you have to go, too.’
And then I’d seen it. The truth. The people’s lives I’d ruin by staying behind with a man it was too late to help.
‘But—’
‘I promise I’ll let them know he’s here.’ She kissed me, the top of my head. ‘Go, go now. And look after yourself.’
And then she went back to Marcus and, with one final glance at his body, I turned away and left him behind.
I look up at the woman I’d thought was my friend Anna. At the woman who’s been pretending to be my son’s girlfriend. ‘You’re Marcus’s sister.’
No response. My hands shake.
‘Look. I don’t know what you think—’
‘Marcus was coming home. You know? We were going to look after him. We loved him. His family. Not you. You weren’t even there. You left him.’
‘He overdosed, Anna! You might not like that, but it’s true. He’d been clean for weeks, he took more than he could cope with. It was nobody’s fault.’
‘Is that right?’ She shakes her head slowly, her eyes narrowed with bitterness. ‘You were selling your photographs, buying him drugs. I know that—’
‘No. No.’
‘And then when he couldn’t take it any more, when he overdosed, you left him to die.’
‘No! I loved him. I loved Marcus …’ I’m sobbing now, my body convulsing, my tears mingling with the rain that runs down my face. ‘I’ve never loved anyone like I loved him.’
Her cold gaze locks with mine.
‘You don’t even know what happened. He was dead already. I had to leave. Marcus had … we were … I just had to go.’
‘You left him there, dying on the floor. You ran away. Back home to start your new life, with your lovely little house and your oh so fucking successful husband. And your son. Darling Connor.’