His & Hers

While Anna is the text’s “hers,” Jack is the “his” and Anna’s ex-husband. His point-of-view sections develop the story, and his position as the lead investigator provides behind-the-scenes access to the murder cases. Like Anna, he is stuck in an unhappy stasis after the death of their three-month-old daughter, Charlotte. He moved back to Blackdown and into his childhood home with his sister and her daughter after the divorce. He depicts himself as a “forty-something-year-old man, living in a house with a mortgage [he] can’t afford, a toddler [he] can’t keep up with, and a woman who is not [his] wife but nags [him] anyway” (11). These details combine to make him feel as though he’s “sleepwalking through a loaned-out life” (11).

Also like Anna, Jack’s acidic self-criticism accompanies a pronounced tendency toward survival and self-preservation, no matter the cost. His instinctive reaction is to hide his sexual relationship with Rachel and his meeting with her the previous night even though it might bear on the timeline of the investigation. He reasons that his “best course of action is to act normal, do [his] job, and prove that someone else killed Rachel before anyone can point the finger at [him]” (32). Also like Anna, he rationalizes his actions and lies to himself but is less self-aware about it. His corruption of the case increases steadily as he tries to thwart the murderer’s attempts to frame him.

Unlike Anna, Jack’s self-preservation isn’t accompanied by calculated ambition. His final assessment of his life is rosier than his initial complaint but still highlights his tendency toward passivity: “I don’t really know what happens next. But maybe I don’t need to. Maybe life already has a plan for us all […] Charlotte’s death broke us […] But sometimes when things get broken, they can be fixed. It just takes time and patience” (279). Nowhere does he mention effort.

We never learn Mrs. Andrews’s first or maiden name. She is solely identified as Mrs. Andrews and Anna’s mother. While her self-conception is more nuanced, she prioritizes her roles as a former wife and mother and filters the world through these primary relationships. She killed her abusive husband and assumed that the disappearance of her father led Anna to leave home for boarding school. When she discovers the truth about Anna’s experiences as a teenager and learns that Anna lost her temporary position as an anchor, she determines, “That’s when I understood that by punishing the people who hurt her in the past, I could give her a happier future. I had to kill them all. I did it for her” (301). Obsessive commitment to her daughter’s happiness leads her to devalue the lives of others. She kills even Cat, who is also a victim but has the job Anna wants.

Mrs. Andrews has flexible relationships with truth and identity. As the unidentified murderer, she says, “I have spent a lifetime trying on new skins like new clothes, seeing which version of myself suited me best, shedding the ones that didn’t […] People often see what they want, rather than what is really there” (166). The people in Mrs. Andrews’s life reduce her to their expectations, which she uses to her advantage. In her words, “Nobody suspects a little old lady with dementia of killing people. I’ve never really had a problem with my memory. If there are things I’ve forgotten over the years, it’s because I chose to forget them” (298). In a text full of unreliable narrators, one of the surprises is that the person who’s depicted as the least reliable source of truth is the only person who knows the full story.

Priya Patel is Jack’s partner in the investigation and the most cipher-like character in the text. The text never reveals Priya’s interiority. It alternately suggests her as a suspicious character, a pitiable admirer, a likable friend, and a penetrating detective. It never provides a way to gauge the depth of any of these personas. At the end of the novel, Mrs. Andrews suspects that Priya intends to investigate her, and Mrs. Andrews seems to decide to kill her, but the text never indicates whether Priya is in danger.

Most of her presence in the text is filtered through Jack’s perspective, which focuses on her possible attraction to him. His initial description mocks her conservative appearance. To himself, he calls her “a walking Marks & Spencer catalog; lamb dressed as mutton” (55). As the case progresses, she experiments with contacts and loose hair, all of which he portrays as directed at him. When he confronts her about it, she insists that she’s just lonely because she’s new in town. The moment this explanation strikes him as credible, he responds by kissing her, inviting her back into the position of admirer. Her actions immediately thereafter again confuse the issue. She admits that she considers Jack a suspect and shoots him when he tries to call her bluff.

Cat Jones is the adult, married Catherine Kelly and the anchor whom Anna replaced for two years. Both the teenage Catherine and the adult Cat serve as foils for Anna. Because Anna saw her own loneliness in Catherine, she tried to include her in her teenage social group. Both received transformative makeovers from the other girls, and both had home lives defined by a single, devastating loss. Anna’s loss of her father disordered her world, and the death of Catherine’s sister warped her family’s world. Anna and Catherine were also victims of the same people. Rachel groomed Anna and bullied Catherine, and both were sexually assaulted the night of Anna’s birthday by men who paid Rachel. Anna abandoned the unconscious Catherine, a choice that left one with guilt and the other with resentment years later.

As adults, Anna doesn’t recognize Cat but sees her as the embodiment of the life she’s been denied. The two were pregnant around the same time, but Cat’s daughter is still alive. Cat’s the official anchor, and Anna’s the substitute. She and Anna both dye their hair red. Anna once had an affair with Richard, who is Cat’s husband. In their final confrontation, Cat explains her perspective. She accuses Anna:

You ruined my life […] You pretended to be my friend […] You ruined my childhood. You followed me to London, pretended not to know who I was, so I pretended too. But then you tried to steal my job. And then you tried to steal my husband, and now— (272).

The sound of a gunshot stops Cat before she can accuse Anna of Mrs. Andrews’s crimes, which include briefly kidnapping Cat’s children, killing Richard, and framing her for all the murders. This succinct narrative is interesting because of how plausible it is. Cat not only serves as a foil for Anna but also provides the text with an alternative interpretation of Anna.