Page 49 of High Season
But then, she imagines the rise and fall of the waves. The cool, clean water.
“I can probably move a few things around in my diary,” she says, with a slight upturn of her mouth that shows him what he surely already knows. That Josie doesn’t have things to move around in her diary. That she doesn’t evenhavea diary.
Nic raises his beer.
“It’s a date,” he says.
Josie raises hers back.
“It’smaybea date,” she says, but he’s already clinking his bottle against hers.
They order another round of drinks, and Josie can feel the world growing soft and dappled around them. Nic undoes his top shirt button, ruffles his hair. He looks good. She thinks how easy it would be to go home with him tonight, how uncomplicated. Someone who knows her past without her having to tell them. Without having to worry what they will think of her.
“So we don’t have to talk about it, if you don’t want to,” says Nic. “But you coming back—is it anything to do with a certain documentary?”
Josie swallows the last bite of crab.
“You know about that?”
“Everyone knows about that. It’s created a bit of a buzz round here, actually. Lots of people not happy about it. Not exactly good for business, your town being infamous as the site of a murder.”
Josie wipes her fingers on a napkin.
“Maybe you’re right,” Josie says. “Maybe we don’t have to talk about it.”
“But that’s why you’re back?”
“Sort of,” Josie says.
And then she surprises herself by telling him everything.
She tells him about getting an email from the producers a few months back, before the newspaper article that had changed everything. Their excitement about the social media storm that had revived the case. Their promises thatpeople were starting to see things differently now.The way they had suggested, so casually, that Josie might be able to get hold of her case file.
You’re the only person who can access key documentation about the investigation, the email had read.And believe me, we’ve tried! We think that this, combined with the renewed interest in the case, could shift the public’s perception of what happened to Tamara Drayton.
She told him how she had initially ignored the email. The people from the production company were not the first who had contacted her. She had, when she had first been released from prison, agreed to a few interviews, hoping to be able to scrape together enough money for a new start. She had felt idiotic and humiliated when she’d seen the results. The worst had been a magazine spread by a journalist who had seemed so kind when they’d met up but had written the article as if they were entirely convinced of Josie’s guilt.When I meet Josie Jackson she has the look of someone who has seen and done the darkest imaginable things,read the opening line. After that, Josie had decided that she would talk to nobody. So far, she’d stuck to her decision.
And yet, in spite of her insistence to Calvin that she wouldn’t be participating, Josie had found herself filling out an application form to access her case file. She had told herself that it was nothing to do withthe documentary. That it was a part of her legal history. No different, really, from how other people kept copies of their birth certificates or marriage licenses. That she would probably be denied access anyway. When she got a phone call to say that the file was awaiting collection, she had been as shocked as if she had never applied for it in the first place.
“And then when I got it, it just sat there, staring at me,” Josie says. “Or at least, that’s how it felt. All this information, and what was I meant to do with it? All this stuff that people have talked about, and posted about in stupid online forums, and speculated over for years, and now I had it. It would be mad to just keep it in a desk drawer, wouldn’t it?”
“But you don’t want to do the documentary?” Nic says.
“IthoughtI wanted to do the documentary,” Josie says. “When I came back here, with the file, I’d sort of talked myself into it. Like, what did I have to lose?”
Nic nods.
“Right.”
“But when I met up with that producer and she was asking me if I did it… it just sort of brought it all back. All the questions, and all the people doubting me. Why would I put myself through that again?”
“But you gave them the file.”
“I didn’t want it. In fact, I wanted it as far away from me as possible. And they wanted it, and… I don’t know. I suppose it made sense, in the moment.”
Nic leans in closer.
“But what if this documentary could actually be a good thing? It feels like these people are taking it seriously. What if this could change people’s minds about what happened?”
