A Fall from Grace (Part Two)

His thoughts drifted back to that day. The glorious April sunshine bathing the lush fields; the enticingly smoky aroma of a nearby hamburger stall as they waited on the ground; the roar of the gas cylinders stretching his frayed nerves to breaking point, and the terrifying sight of terra firma slowly disappearing as the balloon rose steadily into the cloudless sky, all came instantly to mind. The more painful memories he tried harder to supress, but they surfaced, nonetheless. 

It had felt like the best of days once they were airborne. The fear had soon subsided and as they glided serenely over the stunning Oxfordshire countryside, a glittering rock in his top pocket and Gracie nestling into his shoulder, life had seemed perfect.

“Penny for them, Sam?” Kirsty pulled him back to the present. She narrowed her eyes. “Life’s pretty good now, yes?”

Yes, life was pretty good now and he didn’t need ghosts from the past jeopardising what he’d made for himself.

“What is it you want here, Kirsty? Are you actually a journalist or was this whole thing just a ruse?”

“A ruse? Makes it sound like a jolly little game. It’s not a game, Sam. I’m not here to play games.”

“What are you here for then? Because you’re beginning to sound a little threatening and I can’t for the life of me think why that would be. Is it to do with Grace? If you know the full story of how your sister and I parted, you’ll know I was the wronged party.”

Kirsty smiled, “Wronged party? Yes, you were undoubtedly the wronged party and I’m sure that’s eaten away at you ever since. You must have felt such humiliation. What an awful thing for her to do.”

“Ancient history,” he said.

“Maybe, but is that the sort of history you ever fully get over? A very public marriage proposal three thousand feet in the air, followed by the shock of rejection. It must have been torture in that crowded basket. And then to discover Jack had taken her to the Lake District the week before, hired a rowing boat on Lake Windermere, and popped the question. The same Jack she’d told you had died the year before. That stuff’s not easy to forget – or forgive.”

No shit, Sherlock. In truth, the shock of it had made him ill. He’d thought of himself as mentally strong, impregnable, easily able to absorb any emotional blow; instead he’d discovered he was incredibly vulnerable and fragile. His friends had urged him to move on, to put it behind him, to try to see the funny side, but he wasn’t that person and it had taken him many months to even begin to function normally again and years before he could bring himself to think about trusting a woman.

“No, and it wasn’t easy to forgive her family and friends for fooling me – for not telling me the truth about Jack.”

The unwavering discipline they all showed in throwing a deceptive shroud over Grace and Jack’s past and never allowing the light of truth to penetrate it, was, in a warped way, impressive.

“You don’t understand, she’d only ever seen her future with Jack and she was humiliated when he ran off with that little slut. The only way she could see to get through it was to symbolically kill him off. She did it to protect herself and we knew how fragile she was so we did everything we could to shield her.”

“And if there’s a bit of collateral damage along the way,” he shrugged. “Who cares, eh?”

Her heel was tapping nervously against the bottom of her chair leg, adding to his own unease. He wished he knew what she wanted from him.

“You’re still angry, aren’t you? Some form of revenge can’t have been far from your thoughts.”

She was right, of course, but wouldn’t that be normal, understandable even?

“Where are you going with this?” he asked.

“It takes some sort of cold-hearted bastard to wait twenty years, though. Don’t you think?”

“What do you mean?”

She shook her head and looked away, staring at the wall for so long he thought she’d gone into some sort of trance. Eventually she turned back to face him.

“Three months ago, on the 17^th of April – her Birthday, as I’m sure you remember - Grace disappeared. I mean completely vanished from the face of the earth. Nothing has been seen or heard from her since. Nothing. Her mobile hasn’t been used, nor have her bank cards. All that was left was one sheet of A4 with a message saying nothing much more than ‘I’m leaving, don’t bother looking for me’. Obviously forged or written under coercion. But you know all this, don’t you Sam?”

“What? What are you taking about? Jesus! Have you … I mean … are the police involved?”

He ran his fingers through his thinning hair and shifted in his chair.

“Very convincing, Sam.”

“For God’s sake, Kirsty! Even if you assume she hasn’t just upped and walked out on her life, because thousands do you know, what makes – “

“She wouldn’t.” Kirsty interjected. “She wouldn’t do that. Even if she and Jack were having problems she would never walk away from mum and me like that, without a word. It’s not possible. I can’t begin to tell you what this has done to mum. It’s completely destroyed her, and Grace would know that. She would never do that to her.”

Sam sighed, “Ok, but accepting all that, what on earth makes you think I’m in any way responsible for her disappearance? Because that’s what you seem to be implying. It makes no sense. Have you, or the police, looked at the obvious person - Jack?”

She threw up her hands and laughed. “What sort of stupid question is that? Of course we have, everyone’s been looked at microscopically, everyone apart from you, but that’s all changed. I must admit, until recently I hadn’t really considered you. It was all so long ago, and Grace barely mentioned you again after the breakup. You were an irrelevance, a minor footnote to our family’s history. But then I recognised you on a YouTube video being interviewed with Callum and the penny dropped - all these songs are about Grace.”

Sam blew out his cheeks, “Is that so?”

Kirsty slipped her hand into the bag on her lap and felt for something. Seemingly reassured, she said, “You loved her didn’t you, Sam? I mean, truly loved her, and she did that to you. I’m pretty sure you’ve never come to terms with it.”  

He hadn’t fully. It still burned like acid.

“Look, Kirsty, I realise you’re worried beyond reason about Gracie, but this all seems like desperate straw clutching to me. It was so long ago, and I haven’t seen or heard from her since. Why would I choose to do something now?”

She rubbed the end of her phone under her chin and shrugged. “I don’t know, Sam. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with your newfound success, though. Not sure what or how – maybe you reached out to her when the record came out, perhaps you even met up, with all good intentions, and things went horribly wrong. Or maybe you’re just a sick and twisted soul who thought this particular act of vengeance was best served cold. Who knows? Well, you do, I suspect.”

When she was about five years old his daughter had startled him by asking whether, if you wished for it hard enough, you could jump forward in time, out of your current day and into the next one. He thought wistfully about that now.

 “Listen to yourself, this is ridiculous. It was a story as old as time - young love burns brightly then, for whatever reason, fizzles out – happens day in day out. I admit I was hurt, but it’s not a reason for murder, because that is what you’re suggesting, Kirsty, isn’t it? You’re seriously suggesting – “

“It hardly fizzled out did it?” she interrupted again. “And yes, that’s exactly what I’m suggesting. The letters you sent to Jack – the police have finally cracked it.”

“What letters? I haven’t sent any letters.”

“No, of course not, Sam, of course not. Ok, let’s go through this charade if we must,” she said. “A couple of weeks after Grace disappeared Jack received a typed, unsigned letter. It was a long, rambling thing, not about anything specific, occasionally mentioning Grace, but not really making a lot of sense. Upsetting for Jack, of course, but we put it down to an irritating crank. A couple of days later another one arrived. Similar sort of thing, wittering on about nothing. Sent from a different post code, of course. This carried on over the next month – a letter every few days, always from a different post code. Eleven letters in all. They stopped arriving around three weeks ago. The police were convinced by the attention seeking crank idea, but we pushed them to take it seriously and look into it.” She paused and seemed to be waiting for him to respond. He raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

“And?” he said.

“Well, they hadn’t been able to get anything significant from them forensically - you were too thorough for that - so we pushed them to consider a different angle. The letters didn’t appear to make much sense, so perhaps they were in some sort of code.”

“Code?”

“Yes, Sam. Code. And what do you know, some bright spark down at the station managed to crack it. Not too difficult, as it turned out, no need for Bletchley Park for this one.  If you take the first and last letter of each message and put them all together, they spell out a sentence. What do you think it said?”

He shrugged and widened his eyes. “I wouldn’t have the first idea.”

“It said ‘Poor Jack rowing boat sank’.”

Sam could feel his heart thumping against his chest.

“Cruel,” he said, holding her gaze.

“Exceptionally,” she agreed. “The act of a psychopath, would you say?”

“Or a crank.”

She shook her head. “No. How would some random crank know the details of her marriage proposal? It had to be someone she knew well.”

“Family, friends?”

“No, I don’t think so, Sam. We’re looking at someone who is emotionally bound to that event. Someone for whom that beautiful proposal on that perfect spring day is symbolic of the misery and humiliation he has endured for twenty years.”

Carrying this thing with him all these years was always going to catch up with him – he could see that now.

“Congratulations, Miss Marple,” he said, clapping sarcastically. “As flights of fancy go that one is right up there. What have the police got to say about your crackpot theory and why aren’t they banging my door down?  You have run your little fantasy by them I take it?”

“Not yet, no.” She leaned forward and tapped him on the knee with her phone. “Be honest Sam, there’s a part of you that wants me to know what you did – how you pulled it off, how you finally got the ultimate revenge – not only on Grace, but on everyone who loved her.”

Sam shook his head. “You’ve completely lost it.”

“If and when I do tell the police they’ll be all over you, all over your life and your movements of the past few months. I can’t imagine it will be too difficult for them to piece it all together. But I want to hear it from you – I want you to tell me exactly what happened and I’m not leaving until you do.”

“Kirsty, this is absurd. I think you might need to talk to somebody – to get some help.”

“I don’t need help; I just need you to tell me what happened to my sister.”

Her hand went into her bag again.

“Why the preoccupation with your bag?” Sam asked.

She hesitated. The courage to do what she’d set out to do seemed to be deserting her. He thought he saw doubt in her eyes, but if it was there it was fleeting. She bit down on her bottom lip and pulled out what she’d been cradling.

Sam looked down at her lap, blinked a couple of times then pulled his gaze back up to meet hers. He’d never seen a gun up close before. Wouldn’t be able to tell a replica from the real thing.

“That’s not real,” he said, with what he hoped sounded like confidence.

“Isn’t it? Are you sure?”

“And even if it is you couldn’t use it, in cold blood like this. Kiss goodbye to your freedom for the rest of your life, for nothing more than a misguided act of revenge? That’s not you.”

“You don’t know me.” She lifted the gun and released the safety catch.

“No, you’re right, but I knew your sister. And she wouldn’t have wanted that for you.”

“You knew her? Past tense?”

“Yes, I knew her, a long time ago, in a past life. Please, Kirsty, you’ve got to start thinking clearly.”

Sam stared into her eyes - eyes that had earlier blazed with intensity but were now fat with tears.

Kirsty’s grip tightened on the gun and Sam wondered who, or what, had sucked the air out of the room as he struggled for his next breath.

The trigger finger squeezed harder – beyond the point of no return. Sam flinched and closed his eyes.

Click!

“Bang!” Kirsty said, softly.

Sam opened his eyes and looked at the gun, then at Kirsty. His knuckles turned white as he gripped the sides of the chair.

“I can’t believe you did that, I’m –” He was halted by a knock at the door.

Callum appeared and said, “Sorry to interrupt, Sam, it’s the police – they want a quick word.”  

Kirsty smiled and said, “Poor Sam, looks like your balloon’s been popped.”

 

End.