“It’s going to be a classic he said/she said, textbook case decision by jury,” says a reporter in Erin Kelly’s new thriller. “Half the female jurors are already in love with him... It always sounds convincing until the defence cross-examine the victim and they shredded her.”
Kelly’s He Said/She Said hinges on the alleged rape of Beth Taylor, but the incident is described largely from the perspectives of Laura and Kit, a young couple who have travelled to Lizard Point in Cornwall to watch the 1999 total eclipse of the sun. Eclipses are Kit’s passion, and this is the first he is sharing with Laura. But the experience pales beside what they encounter next: rounding a corner, Laura stumbles upon a couple having sex, the woman’s face contorted, desperate with fear. They call the police and end up testifying as witnesses in court, a decision that, 16 years later, results in them living in fear, hiding their identities.
Kelly is the author of the bestselling thrillers The Poison Tree and The Burning Air. She steps it up a level with this creepy, tangled, disturbing tale. As well as splitting her story between Laura and Kit, the narrative also alternates between 1999 and 2015, a present where Laura is living with crippling anxiety, a secret she can’t reveal to anyone, and continuing thoughts of Beth: “Beth is a trapdoor; one thought of her and I lose my footing and fall ... I often wonder if she lives, like I do, with our history bubbling constantly in the background, spilling over only when an eclipse is coming.”
We have the tension of 1999, as details of what really happened at Lizard Point emerge, and more in the present, as Kit sets off alone to watch an eclipse in the Faroe Islands, leaving a heavily pregnant Laura in their London home, Googling obsessively and spiralling into panic. “I look for FAROES ECLIPSE STABBED TOURIST CRAZED WOMAN DIES KILLED CHRISTOPHER MCCALL BETH TAYLOR,” Laura says.
Kit ramps up the sense of impending doom. “In the moments when I allow myself to think about the past, which is not often ... it seems that life since the Lizard has been lived as though under a malfunctioning neon light. A subtle but constant vibrating strobe that you learn to live with, even though you know that one day it will trigger some kind of seizure or aneurysm.”
Kelly is on fine form here, great on the start of Kit and Laura’s relationship, compelling on eclipses from Cornwall (“A wall of night pressed in towards us from the Atlantic, a black veil being dragged across the sky”) to Zambia (“The moon was a black disc covering the sun and streamers of plasma flared out, like a gas ring being ignited”). Kit and Laura’s eloquent, intelligent voices are a little difficult to distinguish from each other at times. But Kelly is a master at drip-feeding us the details, keeping us guessing about the truth, and the many shades of grey it contains, right until the end.
• He Said/She Said by Erin Kelly is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
