deep end – small talk would get them nowhere.
“I didn’t know anything about it,” she said. “Honestly, I didn’t. To me, you were just the boy from the duck pond. The last few years have been…well, busy. I’ve not exactly been keeping up with current events, and I had no idea what Patrick was talking about earlier. But thanks to the magic of the internet, now I do. Or at least one version of it.”
He was silent, waiting for more. Ben had been expecting this all day, from the minute her oik of a brother had recognised him – expecting to get his marching orders, or to be asked for his autograph. He’d known both to happen. When she didn’t continue, he asked, “Okay. So now you know. Why are you here? Have you come to ask me to leave?”
“No,” she replied simply. “I said I know one version of it. Now, I want to know yours.”
He smiled at her, but to Pippa it looked like a bitter, twisted thing, full of frustration and controlled fury. His eyes were downcast, his hair falling across his forehead. Beneath the thin jersey of his shirt, she could see packed muscle bunching and releasing in tension as he breathed hard and fast. His large hands were clenched into fists, and he was biting down on his lower lip, as though he was trying to keep angry words inside. No, McConnell wouldn’t have stood a chance. And neither would she, if he went all Hulk on her right now.
“Why do you want to know?” he finally said, reaching out and snapping the lid of the laptop shut with a dull thud. “And why should I tell you? I’ve kept quiet all this time. The only person I tried to talk to about it…well, she made her feelings quite clear. She left me as soon as I was found guilty. She didn’t want to know the truth and after that I decided there was nobody else important enough to tell. Certainly not reporters or complete strangers, even one I threw in a duck pond once upon a time. Why should I tell you?”
Pippa leaned towards him, which was harder than it looked in the squashy chair. She stared him in the eye, wanting him to know that she wasn’t going to give up.
“I want to know because you’re living here, with us,” she said. “With my family. With people I love, people it’s my job to protect. That’s the only reason. Believe me, I’ve no interest in the dirty details, or sharing anything with the rest of the world. As I think we’ve already established, I’m not exactly plugged into the rest of the world. I just need to know that I can trust you. My instinct says I can, but I need to hear it from you before I can relax and allow you to remain here with us.
“I’m sorry you were hurt, but that was nothing to do with me, and that’s not my burden to carry. My responsibility to the kids is. So I need you to tell me why you did it. That simple.”
He looked up, surprised at her choice of words. Simple? Nothing about it was simple, he thought. She sat there, swamped in that stupidly chintzy chair, dressed like a homeless teenager, hair falling over her shoulders and back like a yellow waterfall. One flip-flop dangling half off her foot. Her eyes were direct and clear, her expression calm and still. She was waiting for him to reassure her, to tell her his version of events. Wanting him to back up her instincts, but wary. A tigress looking out for her cubs.
Not simple at all – but at least, he supposed, she was giving him a chance. She hadn’t made up her mind, not like Johanna and her family. And, he realised, he believed her when she said she wasn’t looking for the dirty details. She wasn’t prying – she was safeguarding her territory. Could he blame her for that? Wasn’t that what any decent mother would do? It was certainly a better motivation than pure nosiness.
He raked his hands through his hair, reminded himself that he needed to get it cut. Without the need to head into an office every day, these things had a tendency to slip. He sipped the whisky, grimaced as it burned down his throat.
Finally, he looked up. Met the cornflower-blue gaze, glanced at the determined tilt of her head, the stubborn set of her full lips. A child, really. That’s all she was – and yet she was having the strangest effect on him, making him feel calm and settled at the same time she made him feel hyper-aware of her physical presence. The way his body was responding to it. It was hard to think straight and unlikely to get any easier the longer he let this moment linger.
“Some of the stories were right,” he said, staring off through the window into the still darkness of the courtyard. He hadn’t told this story before – not properly – and he needed a small sense of distance to allow him to get the words out.
“It was partly the pressure. I’d been prosecuting for while by then, and I did the best I could. But you always feel the dice are loaded against you. The paperwork, the bureaucracy, the loopholes. McConnell got to me and I shouldn’t have allowed him to. Maybe a year earlier, he wouldn’t have done, who knows? But that case…he was so clearly guilty. He’d destroyed the lives of so many people, older people who’d worked hard all their lives. People like my granddad, who lost his farm to the banks when he couldn’t make farming work any more. Maybe that’s why it touched a nerve, I don’t know.”
He paused, poured himself another drink. God knew he needed it. Pippa remained still and quiet, her legs tucked beneath her as she listened. The neon-orange flip-flops had dropped to the floor, lying there criss-crossed.
“I always knew it would be hard to make the case,” he continued. “The evidence was flimsy, when it came down to it. He’d been clever, covered his tracks well. I knew, his lawyer knew, the jury knew that he’d done it. But the way our system works, we couldn’t make it stick. It was depressing and even before I’d been thinking of quitting. I couldn’t take it much more and watching him walk was the final straw. I thought it was – at least. Until that night, when he found me in my office. He was drunk, been out celebrating his freedom.
“He came to gloat, to push, to confess. Rub my nose in it. He actually laughed about the man who killed himself, said it was survival of the fittest, that he’d done his wife a favour, because at least she had the insurance money now. There was no remorse – he didn’t even see them as people. Just old, weak victims.
“What can I say? I lost my temper. I hit him. He hit me back. We fought. You know what happened next. I shouldn’t have done it – I know that. I’ve always regretted it, not just because of what happened to me, but because it was wrong. Stooping to that level, it made me as bad as the people I’d been trying to put away. The papers can talk as much as they want about me being on the side of the angels, but I was wrong. I’d never done anything like that before and I never will again. Afterwards, when I looked down at him crumpled on the floor of my office, when I called the ambulance and saw my knuckles were scraped and scarred and my hands were covered in his blood, I was sickened. Sickened by what I’d done. What I’d allowed myself to become. And I’ve regretted it every single day since.”
He stopped, looked at her, his eyes shining with the pain of the memory, his voice rough, tense, his breath coming in fierce bursts, as though he’d worn himself out forcing the words she’d asked him to share.
“Is that what you wanted to know?” he asked, as she studied him intently, still silent. “Because I can tell you more…I can tell you how many times I hit him, how it felt when my fist slammed into his jaw; how hard it was to control myself and stop…or do you want to know what prison was like? How I’ve walked outside every single day since I got out, to try and clean myself of the memory? Do you want to know what my fiancée said about it on the day she left me there? Is that what you want to know?”
“No,” Pippa replied quietly, getting to her feet and tugging her top down, tucking stray hair behind her ears. She slipped her feet back into the flip-flops and looked up to face him. “That’s enough. That’s all I need. Thank you for explaining. I know it was hard for you, but I needed to hear it.”
