“No, Amelia. You were the other woman. We were going to live together and be happy. But you just couldn’t let him go, could you?”

“He was mine!” I shouted.

“No, he wasn’t. Years of you torturing him saw to that.”

The only thing stopping me from racing over to Kim and trying to drag her over the cliff face was my woeful lack of confidence in my own footing. I thought Harry had decided to leave me of his own volition, but he was stolen from me, as I’d always suspected. This harlot was jealous of how strong our love was and decided to take it for herself. She had snuck in under my nose and started poisoning Harry’s mind, and I couldn’t look her in the eye any longer. I started cautiously, making my way over to Kim, who raised her hand to signal that I should stop.

“I’m going to have to insist you stay there, Amelia,” Kim said matter-of-factly.

“You can’t control me,” I replied through gritted teeth.

“If you come any closer, I’ll just walk away from this. And I won’t tell you what I know.”

“Spit it out then.”

“You are insufferable. You’ve constantly played the victim and lied the entire time. I’ve been waiting for you to confess what you’ve done, but you won’t! You won’t even admit it to yourself.”

“Admit what?”

“Your part in Harry’s death. I can’t keep the pretence up any longer.”

“Kim, you are beginning to bore me.”

“I reconnected with Harry again when he started his new job. It was the day after you broke his finger. Do you remember that?”

“Yes.”

“Call it fate or coincidence, but it turned out I was his assistant. He was at the lowest point in his life, and I helped him through it. In the days after that, we started a relationship.”

“You mean an affair?”

“No, a relationship. Because once he escaped you, we were going to move back here to Filey.”

“Oh, and live happily ever after, right?”

“Something like that. Until you stepped in.”

Kim had no idea what she was talking about. I didn’t know the motive behind her decision to bring me down here, but I didn’t think she knew either. All this time, she thought she had been manipulating me into making some shock confession that I’d taken Harry’s life or driven him to suicide. But she didn’t even know half of what was going on here. I would have kept up my own pretence longer, but the urge to tell her the truth and see her face in response was immeasurably irresistible. Kim clearly thought a lot about herself, but did she think I was this naive? My resting grimace cracked into a smile; I relaxed my shoulders and burst out laughing madly.

“Give it a rest, Kim. I knew he was having an affair,” I chuckled.

“Like you keep saying. It was just your paranoia—"

“No, Kim. I knew he was having an affair. I got wind of it all as soon as it started. I just didn’t know who with. Until now.”

“What are you even talking about now?”

“All these little discoveries we made about Harry, I more or less knew about them all,” I chucked, “Do you think that was the first time I’d been to his flat? Or visited Becky’s house? I just wanted to figure out who he was cheating on me with.”

“That can’t be true,” Kim sobbed in disbelief.

I loved Harry. I loved him more than anybody else, especially Kim. When Harry started acting suspiciously and all of a sudden began disappearing for hours at a time, I decided to take matters into my own hands and started following him. At first, I thought he was having an affair, but when I saw him go to the Broadheads with Steve, I knew something even more sinister was going on. Harry was a gentle soul, and I couldn’t stand back and let people take advantage of him. What kind of wife would I be if I did? I didn’t know the full extent of what had happened, but I knew he was getting involved in something that was bad news.

I was his loving wife, and I did what any loving wife would do. It was implausible for me to physically follow him around everywhere he went, so I put a GPS tracker on his car. When he took a detour on his way back from Filey to visit Becky, I had convinced myself that he needed the Broadhead money to fund an affair with her. I had no idea she was blackmailing him with a fictitious son. I just thought she was some tramp he’d started seeing. But I didn’t confront him. I wanted him to man up and freely admit what he had been getting up to. But Harry became even more secretive and started being increasingly protective of his mobile phone. I could constantly hear it buzzing, but whenever I got the brief chance to check it, there were no messages. There was only one reason, in my mind, that he would be deleting the text messages. I became convinced he was having an affair with Becky, and I drowned the paranoia will pills and alcohol.  

When I discovered realised that he was only going there for five or ten minutes, sometimes before work, I realised something else altogether different. But before I got to the bottom of it, Harry had stopped going. I later found out about the blackmail, and I hoped Harry had got wise to it and that he would stop the payments. The bigger issue was the constant trips to Filey and around Leeds. It was usually too far for me to follow and be able to ensure I’d get back before he did, so I had to rely on the tracker most of the time. Even though he told me he was going to nip into his old office or he had an errand to run for Steve, I could physically see he wasn’t doing what he had said.

I began to get more and more agitated that he wouldn’t own up to what he had been doing behind my back, and I started using the pills and drinking even more to compensate. After our little tussle when he’d started his new job, he became a new man overnight. Call me stupid, but I thought I’d got through to him. I thought I had the old Harry back, and he was the loving and affectionate man I’d married. We’d just moved into our new home, and as far as I was aware, he was ecstatic that we could potentially be parents. I thought I’d stopped him slipping away, but he carried on lying about his travels to Filey when he said he was going to work.

I had an epiphany, and I knew he wasn’t going to stop.

And I couldn’t have that.

“I’d been tracking him for months before you and he reconnected. I just never caught a good look at your face,” I giggled.

The expression on Kim’s face was every bit as satisfying as I thought it would be. I did suspect her at first, but I couldn’t believe the Kim would have the gall to insert herself into my life with this little plan of hers. Kim had started to cry, probably because her whole pathetic plan was crumbling into dust in front of her. She had no idea who she was messing with. I’d often thought about what I would do to the woman who tried to take Harry away from me. Most of it involved some form of gratuitous violence, but I never thought I would be inflicting it on Kim.

“You do realise he was using you, right?” I added.

“He wasn’t. He loved me.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so. He was using you to get over me, that’s all.”

“He loved me. More than he ever loved you,” Kim sobbed.

Apart from the constant spray of the sea pummelling my back, the heavens suddenly opened, too, and we were quickly soaked through. I could barely hear Kim, the little mouse, squeaking above the weather we found ourselves in, and it was enough for me to decide the time for talk was over. I started making my way over to Kim, and she stood her ground at first, but I saw the fright seize control of her eyes when I was only a few feet away, and she put her hands up in defence.

Not very ladylike, I know, but I punched her in the face as soon as I was within hitting distance, and she went down immediately. Her nose looked like it had exploded, and a crimson waterfall of blood started to run down her face. I grabbed her sodden, blonde bun and dragged her by her hair slowly towards the cliff face as she kicked and screamed violently. I lacked the physical strength to throw her from the Brigg by her hair, but it didn’t stop me trying. I could feel the fistful of hair I was grasping, stretching and snapping as each strand gave way under the weight. After a few fruitless attempts, I decided to get on top of her and moved my hands down her face to her throat.

“Did you think you would actually get away with it?” I screamed in her face.

“Stop,” Kim panted.

“If Harry killed himself, it’s because of you. You got involved in something you didn’t understand.”

“Please,” Kim gasped, uselessly grasping at my hands as I increased the pressure.

“You will pay for what you’ve done. For what you’ve done to Harry and me.”

Kim mustered every shred of oxygen left in her blood to try and reduce the pressure on her neck, but she lacked the strength to break free.

The light in her eyes started to slowly fade.

XVIII

THE HIGH PRIESTESS