Trust No Bitch: Part 2

Alice Jenkins

Does it make you a bad person? To dread returning to your family's £9,000,000 Kensington townhouse? Because Alice despised the place, white, lofty and florid, a near replica of every other house in her street not too different from Lilly Philipp's Hampstead dwelling. She hated the narrow, high-ceilinged hallways and she even hated the perfect, sempiternally green lawn, only that way due to the unfathomable number of hours slaved away on it by the underpaid gardner, come both the diurnal torrent of rain and occasional spurt of shine. And she knew it was ungracious to hate it, she knew that full well. But it was a lonely place. Just there to fool the world into thinking that their family had some kind of solidarity, which they most certainly didn't.

"George! George! For Christ's Sake, George Vladislav Jenkins, where the hell are you?" She called out into the dusky hallway she hated so much the second she entered the house, unable to see into the kitchen at the end of it, the staircase to her right also deluged by shadow. It was so long since she'd been home, that she forgot about the family cat, Rosie, starting as it rubbed itself against her ankles. Bending down to briefly stroke it, she frowned and called out again for George, her voice brusque, abrasive, even; it was a tone that wouldn't be out of place leaving the mouth of their mother. She wanted to speak with George quickly, however, both to avoid having to weave her way out of the crowd of hammered 18 year olds, who had yet to arrive and also in order to spend as little time in the house as she could. "George! I know you're home, just-"

"Alice?" His reply was complimented by a stomp, stomp, stomp, each bang of the foot on the wooden floorboards louder than the last as his familiar silhouette appeared at the top of the staircase. His perplexity only became visible once he'd arrived at the bottom of the next flight of stairs, by which time Alice was already pocketing her front door keys and bustling him into the kitchen. "What are you doing home? What's wrong?" He asked, watching Alice busy herself around the room, switching lights on, making sure windows were shut, dropping blinds, momentarily catching her panicked reflection in the window as she did so.

"What do you mean, what's wrong? Have you not looked at your phone? I called you about 90 times!" She wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him; George was one of those people, who as intelligent as Alice was told he was, had always been unable to assimilate the concept of urgency into his world view of getting what he wanted mere moments after first asking for it. "You haven't called me back once or even texted to let me know you're okay."

"My phone broke weeks ago, I was just going to take it to get repaired tomorrow. You need to chill out, Alice. Don't tell me you've come home, literally just to tell me off for not answering my phone. How did you even know I was here? Did you see about the party? Were you stalking my Facebook profile or something?" He continued to watch, brows furrowing as she moved the radio over to the countertop next to the window and switched it on. "Alice, what the hell's wrong? You're acting like nan off her bloody medication!" Angrily, Alice span round to face him, throwing her bag onto the table and finally releasing the vexation that had compounded with every jaunty repeat of his voice mail she'd heard over the last several days.

"You, George. You are what's wrong." The baffled stutters that her statement obtained didn't stop her. "You saw Cleo King the night she died and you didn't even think to tell me-"

"What? I have no idea what you're-"

"Don't bother lying to me. I've seen the security footage from outside the Little Chef. Just tell me that you didn't hurt her or anything, please, and I won't let anything happen to you for it, I promise, just tell me what happened!" She had spoken so quickly and with such fervour that she couldn't find the words or the breath in her to carry on, just hoping she wouldn't need to plead with George anymore. She didn't have that security footage anymore, Clara had destroyed it and there was no real obligation for George to admit to anything. She couldn't shove the footage in his face and make him say it, make him quash the unjustified guilt she'd been experiencing, make him say that even if he had done it that it hadn't somehow been her own fault, nor make him solve it all. Put the thought to rest that if he had strangled Cleo, he was her killer, and therefore that he was, by implication, the Supplier, meaning he had tried to strangle her too, was the one who had ran Clara off the road, thrown acid at Gemma and done all the other shitty, shitty things that had happened to them since the discovery of the body. Watching him open his mouth to reply, it felt like she was stood at the open doorway of a jump plane, 12,500 ft in the air, just waiting to be pushed. She'd never done skydiving before, but she just knew, somehow, that the level of fear would be similar.