No Longer Safe(89)

He switched on the oven, unhooked an apron from the kitchen door and tied it around his waist.

‘Help yourself,’ he said a few minutes later, putting a pot of coffee, orange juice, granola, muesli, cornflakes and a plate of hot croissants between us on the table. The aroma of buttery pastry won me over and I took a croissant and scooped a teaspoon of black cherry jam on to the side of my plate.

‘Thanks for this,’ I said.

Stuart sat back looking at me, his eyes wrapping me in a glowing warmth as I ate.

This was what true attachment felt like and it came to me then that our little group – Karen, Jodie, Mark and I – were connected only through a volatile tangle of secrets, bribery and deception.

‘I can see how people get taken in by Karen,’ he said, as if reading my mind. ‘She’s very charismatic.’

‘When I first knew her she was like a warm apple pie giving off an aroma that drew people towards her before they had any inkling as to what was happening.’

‘And how do you feel about her now?’ he said.

‘Regardless of what you find out about her,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel the same way anymore.’

I was still beholden to her because of what she’d done at Uni, that was true. But the adoration was over. Since being here, I’d seen things afresh. Our association wasn’t really a friendship at all; it was a trade-off, based on a series of subversive errands I’d felt coerced into running, because I thought it was the only way to be accepted. I’d been a performing monkey in her little troupe of followers.

I tried to explain. ‘Coming to the cottage has been like a time-travelling exercise,’ I said. ‘Throwing the four of us in the ring together: Mark, the cocky layabout, Jodie, the insecure wannabe, Karen, the shining light, and me. I used to be everyone’s puppet, but not anymore. The dynamics have shifted.’

Mark didn’t scare me anymore – I could send putdowns straight back to him and he had nothing more substantial in his arsenal. Jodie was taking anti-depressants, trapped in a subservient role with Mark. And Karen? I was no longer under her spell – she wasn’t enviable to me anymore. She seemed unhappy and there was an undercurrent of aggression and manipulation about her. She was little more than a bully.

‘I’m not sure there’s any genuine friendship left,’ I went on. ‘It’s all an odd kind of barter system.’

I thought about the ten thousand pounds I’d found in the attic room. Surely it must play a part in this too? I recalled Karen’s words: leverage – never give up leverage easily, Alice, she’d said.

I wondered if blackmail was involved. Perhaps Karen was making Mark pay in order to keep secret other misdemeanours I knew nothing about.

Stuart’s phone rang at that point and he took the call. ‘It’s Jim,’ he said.

I cleared the dishes, catching snippets of his end of the conversation. I knew they were talking about Karen; I heard certain key words, sentence…Holloway…guilty. When he ended the call and turned to me, he looked concerned.

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘You need to hear this.’

I dropped heavily into the chair, staring at his face.

He hesitated. ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘What did she do?’

‘In February 2008, Karen gave birth to a baby girl. The child cried a lot and…when she was nine months old, Karen shook the child to make her stop. She shook her so violently that she died.’

I felt like I’d wandered blindly out of a safe dugout onto the frontline, with bullets flying at me from all sides. ‘Oh, my God – she killed her own baby?’

Stuart’s words kept coming at me. ‘It used to be called “shaken baby syndrome”; now it’s known as “non-accidental head injury”. She was sent to Holloway prison in 2009. She came out in May, this year.’

Now it made sense. Of course Karen had changed. She was completely removed from her former self. It was suffering I’d seen. That’s what it was – suffering – dragging at her face. Now I knew why. In the years I’d not seen her, she’d been locked away behind bars. All that guilt. She’d had all the softness hammered out of her.

I couldn’t stop staring. ‘Why didn’t I hear about it?’

‘Her case was overshadowed on the news at the time by another big story – remember the Arvon Bank data scandal in 2009?’ It vaguely rang a bell. ‘Jim said that computer discs containing bank details and National Insurance numbers went missing. It left millions of households susceptible to identity theft. Karen’s case didn’t even hit the local London news.’