The Rose Petal Beach

  ‘My friend said she’d never felt anything like the heat, the electricity, the passion spinning through her veins. It’d never been like that with a man. Not even her husband who she loved dearly.’

  ‘I thought you’d never kiss me. I wasn’t sure if you were interested. I’ve wanted to kiss you since that first time we passed and you turned around and looked at me while running backwards. I thought that was so cool. If I’d have been a bit braver I would have chased after you right there and then.’

  ‘If I had the slightest clue how I felt I’d have let you catch me.’

  ‘A few weeks later, when they went to bed, my friend thought she was going to die afterwards. She finally, finally understood about love and sex and what it felt like to be satisfied. Complete.’

  ‘I only realise now that I’ve never made love before. I’m still tingly from what you’ve done to me.’

  ‘I’ve never made love like that before, either. You’re everything to me.’

  ‘But she’s got children, hasn’t she? My friend can’t up and leave her husband because she wouldn’t be able to see her children every day. And that would kill her. So she sticks around, falling deeper and deeper in love, having the most amazing sex, and feeling for the first time that she knows who she is.’

  ‘I hope you realise how much I love you.’

  ‘Deeper and deeper my friend falls until, one day, she notices that the beautiful woman has had her head turned. She just senses it, you know, like you do with the people you love. Something’s changed and she’s not quite sure what.

  ‘Until the beautiful woman mentions a name, someone who she can now go running with because of course the beautiful woman can be seen with whoever she wants and she can flirt with whoever she wants. She can do whatever she wants, but my friend, my poor friend, has to keep up appearances in her life: perfect mother, perfect wife, perfect employee.’

  ‘Tami’s great. You should meet her sometime. We can all go to a bar or something one night. I’ve convinced her to come running with me once a week.’

  ‘Is she the one married to that Scott character?’

  ‘Yes, but she’s lovely, really she is.’

  ‘I think you should stay away from her. If he’s bad news, she will be too.’

  ‘She’s not at all like that. Truly. When you meet her you’ll see what I mean.’

  ‘The beautiful woman doesn’t even think what it’s like to have to sit on the sidelines and watch as she starts a friendship with this new running partner. And my friend, who’d been so happy, who’d felt alive again, started to realise that she was scared. Scared of losing the beautiful woman and scared of losing her family. But then, the beautiful woman starts to tell her about the problems she’s having again with the man at work who’s connected to this new running partner.’

  ‘He’s been OK-ish since I became friendly with Tami, but since we started going running, it’s like, BANG! he hates me again. It’s worse than before. Nastier, more threatening without it ever being overt. He’s started with the porn scenarios, too.’

  ‘I think you should do him for sexual harassment.’

  ‘I love my job.’

  ‘Yeah, and he’ll get sacked and you can keep your job.’

  ‘Right, because that’s what happens all the time. Women aren’t painted as lesbo, humourless troublemakers if they report a bloke and he isn’t seen as a good man who went a bit too far with the jokes and should be given a slap on the wrist. Can you tell I’ve been here before?’

  ‘That’s when I know that it’s going to be OK after all. Because why would the beautiful woman even think about taking anything further with the running partner when she’s being harassed by the running partner’s husband? But no, it’s not all right. The beautiful woman is so enthralled by the running partner, she can’t give her up. Not even when the running partner’s husband tries to rape her.’

  Tamia Challey’s whole body contracts in horror. She doesn’t like to think about it, does she? She knows he did it, but she likes to pretend that it was OK to continue to sleep in the same bed as a rapist. She needs to tell herself she didn’t know, she didn’t think him capable, she did the right thing in the end. Stepford all the way.

  ‘The beautiful woman was almost destroyed by that. I spent so much time holding her while she cried about what happened and what to do. She didn’t want to hurt her running partner, but she didn’t want him to get away with it. Especially when the running partner had no idea. So she got up the courage to report him. I … my friend made sure she got the case, she wanted to prosecute the man who had done this to the beautiful woman, to the love of her life. She knew it would be the end, too, of whatever was going on between the beautiful woman and the running partner.’

  ‘If you had seen her at the beach crying her eyes out … Poor Tami. I feel awful.’

  ‘It’s him who should feel awful. And her, if she doesn’t know what a criminal she’s sleeping with.’

  ‘She’s known him half her life. How’s she supposed to understand what he’s really like? I mean, the man had the due date of the baby they lost to miscarriage engraved on the back of their wedding rings. How is she supposed to believe a man who can be that thoughtful would do this?’

  ‘Men like him don’t just do this out of the blue. I see it all the time. It starts off with small deviant acts that get worse and then as they get older – and in his case more successful – they just don’t bother to hide it because there are less sanctions against him. None of this is your problem, though, you have to concentrate on doing what’s right for you.’

  ‘But no, the beautiful woman can’t go through with it. She can’t stand what the investigation is doing to the running partner. She doesn’t back out for herself, for me and how much pressure I’m under, but for the running partner. The worst part is what it does to m—to my friend. My friend begs her to change her mind, to think about what it’ll do to her career: her bosses never wanted her to go after such a well-known businessman even if he was guilty because the things he was into – the extreme porn, the womanising – were things they dabbled in as well. But my friend pursued him because it was the right thing to do and now she was going to have to watch him walk away Scott free. Ha-ha. Did you see what I did there?

  ‘The beautiful woman won’t change her mind. All she cares about is the running partner, the running partner’s children. The beautiful woman hasn’t behaved very well in her distant, distant past so she’s trying to do something right. She doesn’t want to destroy an innocent person and her children like she did once before. What about me? What did I ever do to her? What did my children ever do to her?’

  ‘And that’s why you killed her?’ Tamia Challey asks, the picture of innocence as if this isn’t all her fault. She doesn’t get it, does she? She doesn’t understand what life was like for me – falling in love for what felt like the first time in my life, finally understanding what that part of me that was missing was about. I wasn’t broken, I wasn’t odd – I simply hadn’t met the right person. I was watching everything slip away from me: my job would be unbearable if I let him get away with it. All the men who looked at me with suspicious eyes because I wouldn’t join in the blokey banter and I wouldn’t turn a blind eye to stupid, sexist ‘jokes’ would be making comments about me being a man-hater; they’d feel justified in calling me a man-hating carpet-muncher (they called me that because I wouldn’t flirt with them) who had it in for a decent bloke who liked a bit on the side, which wasn’t a crime.

  Tamia Challey doesn’t see that while the beautiful woman was trying to save the running partner’s family, she was ruining my friend’s life.

  ‘It couldn’t go on. My friend was desperate. She kept trying to make the beautiful woman see sense. That’s what happened. She was only trying to make her see sense. But the beautiful woman wouldn’t. She kept saying this was her chance to atone for what she had done in the past. How she had let down the one person she had loved with all her heart and so now
she was trying not to ruin someone else’s life, even if it meant the end of her own.’

  ‘If I stop those girls from hurting, from having to go through the hell of a police investigation and a trial, maybe it’ll be OK. Maybe something in the universe will shift, everything will be righted and she’ll love me again. Like she did before. She’ll look at me at me how she used to and I’ll finally have her back. I wish you could understand, she is everything to me, I want her to love me again. I’ll give anything for her to love me again.’

  ‘I … my friend knew the beautiful woman was talking about the end of her professional life and of her life on Providence Close, but my friend realised that it really should be the end. She had gone around to see if the beautiful woman was all right, if she could change her mind, and there she was, barely dressed, and letting the running partner into her house. She wasn’t even discreet about it. While my friend waited for the running partner to leave, she thought about what the beautiful woman was going to give up and she realised it wasn’t enough for the running partner to lose everything material, she had to know what it could feel like to lose everything.’

  ‘You’re not listening to me. I need you to make a new statement. Say they threatened you, say you were scared of how it would hurt Challey’s children, say anything, I’ll say I saw her leaving just now—’

  ‘So you were out there. Have you been watching me?’

  ‘Not how you mean.’

  ‘Which means yes.’

  ‘Will you stop changing the subject? My bosses want to go after you for wasting police time, this is serious. You need to go back on the record.’

  ‘You’re not listening to me. Which means there’s no point talking to you any longer. I’m going to take a bath.’

  ‘No, you’re—Put your dressing gown back on. Get back here. Don’t you walk away from me. Don’t you ever—’

  I try to forget what happened next. I try not to think about it because it could have gone differently if she had listened. Everything would have been better for all of us if she had done the right thing.

  ‘Arrgghh! What are you doing? You almost pushed me under then. Can you leave? I have nothing more to say to you.’

  ‘Well I’ve got plenty to say to you.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear it.’

  ‘Who do you think you are? I’ve put everything on the line for you – at work and at home.’

  ‘I know, I know. I’m really grateful but—’

  ‘There are no buts in this. I will do anything to protect my career and family, and if that means hurting you, that’s what I’ll do.’

  ‘Hurting me? Are you threatening me? I think your bosses will take a very dim view to that, don’t you? I think you should go before you get yourself into any more t—’

  ‘She really did love y—the running partner. She had every chance to live, but she gave up her life for you. I’m sure you’re very pleased about that.’

  Tamia Challey is staring at me with those doe eyes she must have used on Mirabelle a thousand times to turn her head. The look turns slowly to disgust. I liked it better when she was that tiny bit afraid of me.

  ‘She didn’t mean me,’ Tamia Challey says quietly, scorn now added to her disgust. ‘She meant her daughter, Fleur. She wanted her daughter to love her again. Leaving her was the very bad thing she did in the past. I’m guessing she thought that if she could somehow balance the cosmic scales, do something for my children, she’d be allowed to be a bigger part of her daughter’s life once more.’ Tamia Challey takes an age to blink, to shake her head a fraction, to wind her fingers around her bare ring finger. She isn’t moving in slow motion, the world is. The world has slowed down with what she has said.

  ‘You never bothered to ask what the very bad thing she did in the past was, did you? You thought it was some crime she committed so you didn’t ask in case you were forced to report her. It’s ironic that you were so hard on me for being in denial about the man I love when you essentially did the same about the woman you loved.’

  Tamia Challey is lying. She has to be.

  ‘What’s even more ironic is that you’ve behaved exactly how Scott used to – only concerned with your needs, your wants, your sexual satisfaction. You just assumed Mirabelle meant me – another potential lover – because that’s what you would mean. That’s what you would do.’

  Tamia Challey shakes her head at me again, still in slow motion. Her daughter. The words are crawling around my brain, eating through my mind like maggots devouring a rotting corpse. I have seen that, of course. I have seen that and hundreds of other things just as terrible, just as disgusting. And that is what is happening inside me at the moment. She was doing it to get her daughter back.

  When I saw that room at her house, which was basically a shrine to her daughter, I’d been as stunned as anyone who didn’t know her. But I knew she was a free spirit, that in a divorce she would have been brave enough to leave her child with her dad.

  ‘Did you ever even ask about her life away from you? Her hopes, her dreams? What had happened in her past? Or was it all about what she did for your life, your sexuality, your this, your that? You, you, you.’

  Every trace of fear has been erased from Tamia Challey. She is talking to me as if I am just anyone. ‘Careful you don’t topple off that high horse of yours, Challey, it’s a long way down.’

  ‘Oh I know. I know.’ She stands, obviously ready to make her sweeping exit on a dramatic one-liner that is meant to put me in my place.

  I could never understand what Mirabelle saw in her. Every time I encountered her I was surprised again that she had Mirabelle enraptured. Mirabelle was like the air you breathe. She was the woman who you could not live without once you became involved in her world. She was so beautiful, her body divine, her mind incredible. I could not lose her once she was mine. I could not let her go. Not for anyone. Not even for Mirabelle herself.

  Why would Mirabelle want Tamia Challey? The best answer to that Tamia Challey could come up with was that she didn’t, that everything she did was for her daughter. That made sense. Everything made sense if you looked at it through Tamia Challey’s eyes.

  ‘No high horse,’ she says. ‘But I don’t have to live with being a murderer.’

  Is that it? The best one-liner you can come up with?

  Who would want to look at the world through Tamia Challey’s eyes?

  I roll my eyes at the drama queen and pick up my book again. I can do this. Tamia Challey has every reason in the world to lie about who Mirabelle was doing it for. Why wouldn’t she? She knows that no one has anything on me, and she knows that she’s the reason Mirabelle is dead. If I was her, I’d lie and lie again. Everybody lies, especially to themselves.

  Tamia Challey was trying to hurt me in the only way she knows. I don’t care if it all made sense once she said it. Why Mirabelle said more than once she felt awful about what we were doing to my family. Not awful enough to stop it. But if she really was doing it for her daughter then that would put a different spin on things. I might even have understood if she had explained why she was doing it, but to let me believe it was Tamia Challey, even as I held her under the water …

  This would have turned out differently if Mirabelle had been honest with me. This is Tamia Challey’s fault, of course, and she has to pay for that. When they found her ring, I thought it was a gift from the heavens. I could put her in the house on the night of the killing. But she managed to wriggle out of that one. I will make her pay for this. I will.

  ‘Wade!’ I say when he approaches the table and sits down where Tamia Challey sat. ‘What are you doing here?’

  He stares at me as if I am a stranger, his face stern and serious. He is like a brother to me, we work almost without words – we know what the other is going to say, we can guess what tangent the other is going to go along. I haven’t liked keeping the other side of me away from him, but he wouldn’t understand. He understands facts, he understands motives, he does not understa
nd passion and love and the need to save yourself no matter what the price.

  ‘I told her she was crazy,’ he says, his tone has that evenness he uses when he starts an interview with a suspect. ‘That’s why I told her where you’d be. Crazy woman with a messed-up life trying to mess up everyone else’s life, too. I told her to go and talk to you and that I would stand over there out of sight because it was going to be a short conversation. I told her, afterwards, she was going to be arrested for wasting police time and attempting to pervert the course of justice.’

  ‘She is crazy. She does have a messed-up life.’

  ‘I watched her sit down. I watched as she didn’t get up. You didn’t tell her to go away. You talked to her. You explained. She didn’t even say anything to me as she left, she simply looked at me like she had stared in the face of the devil. You know what that’s like, we’ve done it enough times.’

  ‘You’ve got it all wrong, you know, Wade. I admit I did know Ms Kemini outside of the case. It wasn’t the wisest move to—’

  ‘I don’t want to hear it,’ he interrupts, rising to his feet. He removes his handcuffs from his belt and places them on the table. ‘We can do this the easy way or the hard way.’

  ‘Wade, this is ridic—’

  ‘I mean it, Harvan, I don’t want to hear it. Stand up.’

  ‘No. This is all a big—’

  His hand is on my biceps then, dragging me to my feet. His handcuffs are in his other hand, then one half is linked around my wrist, the other is linked around my other wrist.

  ‘Erica Harvan, I am arresting you on suspicion of murder and attempting to pervert the course of justice. You do not have to say anything, but it will harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’