Am I Guilty?: The gripping, emotional domestic thriller debut filled with suspense, mystery and surprises!. Jackie Kabler

so I said no …’

      Her voice tailed off and she took a deep breath, her fingers still massaging the scar on her wrist, eyes flitting around the room, looking from one occupied table to the next. I followed her gaze, but nobody seemed to be listening. At a window table, an elderly couple were having a semi-heated discussion in hushed voices – a mild dispute over something in their garden, I had gathered, from the odd audible phrase – and a few tables away, a group of six middle-aged women were chatting and giggling over bottles of red wine, engrossed in their gossip. The only other diners were a young couple in the far corner, holding hands over a shared, extra-large pizza.

      ‘It’s OK. I’m pretty sure nobody can hear us,’ I said quietly.

      Flora looked back at me and nodded.

      ‘Well, anyway, that was it, for a while. I finished off what I had to do, then came down to the kitchen to get a cold drink. It was after six by now, but still ridiculously hot. I remember hearing raised voices and looking out into the garden – Greg and Rupert seemed to be having a fairly intense discussion about something, but I couldn’t hear what. Probably just football or something, knowing them.’

      She gave me a slight smile, and I tried to smile back. Gosh, this was torture. Come on Flora …

      ‘Anyway, I went back to the dining room to file away the papers I’d been using, and that’s when I heard somebody shouting out on the street. I went to the window, just being nosey really, and there was a couple … well, I don’t know if they were actually a couple, but a man and a woman, standing next to Thea’s car – she’d managed to find a space right outside the house for once. Doesn’t always happen. Anyway, they were sort of peering into the car, into the back window. And the man kept looking round, and shouting “Whose is this car? Who owns this car?”, all frantic and kind of scared sounding, you know? And he was waving his arms around …’

      She waved her own arms in the air, eyes wide now, as if she was replaying the scene in her head, then continued, her voice low and urgent.

      ‘I had a sudden sick feeling in my stomach. All I could think was, why are they looking in the back of the car? And I sort of knew then, you know? I just knew that it wasn’t going to be good, when I went out there. I started running … I grabbed the car keys from the hall table as I went … and then I got to the car, and I just pushed past them, the couple – I was shouting something, I don’t know what, but I think I was just screaming at them to get out of the way probably – and then I saw it too. I saw what they were looking at. I don’t even remember opening the car door, but somehow I did it, and then I was fumbling, my hands wouldn’t work properly, fumbling with the seat belt, trying to get him out … and I knew. I knew straight away. It was obvious …’

      There were tears in her eyes now, and I suddenly felt dizzy, my chest tightening. I gripped onto the edge of the table, wanting to stop her, not wanting to hear the end of this, the horrific outcome of Thea’s day out, but I couldn’t speak, and anyway she was still talking, the words pouring out of her, as if it was a relief, as if she’d been holding all of this inside her for too long, and now the dam had finally broken and the torrent of pain and anguish and emotion was unstoppable.

      ‘I pulled him out, and I shook him and called his name over and over, but he was completely limp, Annabelle. His eyes were wide open, his little face was bright red, and he looked like a doll, a little floppy doll, not like a baby at all. And he was … he was so hot. His skin was hot to the touch.’

      The tears were rolling freely down her cheeks, her voice now barely a whisper.

      ‘And that’s when I knew for definite. He was dead. Zander was dead.’

       12

       THEA

      ‘No, that’s all right, I understand. Thank you so much anyway.’

      I put the phone down and sighed, raking my fingers through my unwashed hair, wiping a bead of perspiration from my forehead, suddenly feeling sweaty even though the room was chilly. Another child modelling agency, another polite refusal to help me. I desperately needed to organize a photo shoot, needed pictures of my new spring stock for the website, but since Zander died, since all the publicity, it was proving nigh on impossible to hire any models at all. The refusals from the places I’d used previously were always gentle, always diplomatic, but the meaning was clear.

      ‘It’s just, Mrs Ashfield, in the light of events, you know …’, and ‘It’s a little tricky, you see, Thea, to persuade parents to allow it, you understand, after …’

      That kind of thing. Parents didn’t trust me around their children anymore, and why on earth would they? I asked myself for the hundredth time why I was so determined to keep doing this, why I didn’t just close the company, questions that so many people, some I knew, many I didn’t, had asked in recent months.

      ‘Who’s going to buy clothes for their kids from a woman who killed her baby?’

      ‘You’re probably going to be in prison soon anyway. Why bother? Give it up, Thea.’

      ‘Don’t you have enough to worry about with the trial coming up? You need time to prepare your defence. You don’t have to close it down for ever, just take a break.’

      This last comment was from Isla, and I knew she was probably right, but something in me just didn’t want to let it go, not now, not unless I really had to. I needed my work, needed the distraction, something other than alcohol to fill the long days when Nell was with Rupert. Something to make me feel that I wasn’t just a sick woman who had done something unspeakably evil, that I could still do something good, support myself and my child. And maybe, in some small way, forcing myself to keep the business afloat was another way of punishing myself. I deserved the abuse I got, understood it completely. I wouldn’t let someone like me, someone who’d done what I’d done, near my child.

      I was disgusting, a monster. A child killer. A vile excuse for a mother. A woman who was on police bail, awaiting trial, after being charged with the manslaughter of her own baby. I mean, who the hell would want to even talk to me, never mind work with me? I was amazed the modelling agencies were so civil. I doubt I would have been, in their position.

      I ran my fingers over the soft alpaca wool of the poncho that was folded on the table in front of me, a sample just in from Bolivia, trying to calm myself down, then pushed my chair back from the table and walked to the window, staring out at the wet, dull morning. On the pavement outside my front gate, two elderly ladies, one clutching a red umbrella, the other wearing one of those transparent, plastic headscarves, were chatting animatedly. I wondered if they were talking about me, if they realized whose home they were standing outside. The worst mother in Britain. The woman who drank so much champagne she forgot about her baby and left him to die in a hot car.