Page 51 of A Face in the Crowd
Melanie stops trying to lunge for it and steps away until she’s in front of the fridge. ‘Don’t play that game with me,’ she snarls. ‘This was nicked off my line and now you’re here, literally red-handed.’
I can’t deny that it’s a good line. When she snatches for the anorak a third time, I let her pull it away. She glares volcanic fury at me and my anger of moments before has suddenly gone.
‘It was stolen off your line?’ I say, softer this time.
‘Aye – and now I know who did it.’
‘Why would I steal your coat?’
Melanie lets out a breath of such force that it’s like a llama spitting at a selfie-taker. If I’d been closer, I’d have got a face full. ‘You’re the one who’s been stalking me,’ she shouts.
It’s now my turn to splutter. I can barely get the words out. ‘What are you on about?’ I say.
‘I’m in the park – and there you are,’ she says. ‘I’m having a quiet moment on a bench – and there you are. This week of all weeks. Can’t you leave me alone? Don’t you think you’ve done enough?’
We stare at one another. She’s so convincing that I wonder if, somehow, Iamthe stalker.
‘Don’t you have anything to say?’ she adds.
‘I thought you were stalkingme,’ I reply.
‘Oh, I get it.I’mthe crazy one.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
We stand on opposite sides of the kitchen and the buzzing fridge makes it seem as if the entire room is vibrating.
‘Get out,’ Melanie says, nodding towards the front door.
She’s right – I should go – so I step past her into the hallway, although I stop almost immediately. There’s a photo on the wall of Ben that’s so haunting, it feels as if I can’t move past it. He’s precisely how I remember him – in a vest with the long tattoo along his arm that he’d only had completed a month or so before the crash. He’s tanned, which makes the scar under his Adam’s apple more apparent, and he has an arm around someone who looks like a younger version of him. It’s Alex, of course, his brother. And, yet, in the few times I met Alex I never remembered them looking so similar. There were five years between them. Alex lacks the tattoo and the scar, but from this angle, in this light, they are strikingly similar.
‘Look alike, don’t they?’ Melanie says.
She’s uncomfortably close, yet I’d somehow not noticed. There’s a smirk in the corner of her mouth as she enjoys my discomfort.
‘When was this taken?’ I ask.
Melanie shrugs and then, seemingly without thinking, her gaze glances towards the ceiling. I follow her line of sight, but there’s nothing there.
‘Why was Alex on the train?’
My question takes Melanie by surprise. She steps backwards into the kitchen: ‘What?’
‘When Ben left in the morning, he never said he was getting on the train with his brother. There’s no reason for him to have kept it to himself – so why was Alex on the train?’
Melanie bites her lip. ‘I want you to leave.’
I think about it and even take half a step closer to the door before turning back. ‘He tried it on with me.’
‘Who did?’
‘Alex.’
It’s as if the back door has been opened. A chill bristles along the hallway from the kitchen. Melanie is lost in the gloom.
‘At a barbecue,’ I add. ‘It was the weekend before the train. He groped my bum and said he could see what his brother did.’
‘You’re lying.’ Her words say one thing but the tone says something else. She knows it’s not beyond the realms of something that could have happened.
