‘What I mean is, I know that’s what Simon told me – that she’d died – but maybe she just left him, or he chucked her out and she’s not dead at all. But then that would be a really sick thing for him to do: play a grieving widower when he wasn’t, and to ask my advice about what to tell Cara. God, what am I thinking?’ I put my head in my hands. ‘Of course he wouldn’t do that… but then breaking into our house and setting the clocks to a time that could only have a significance to someone who knows what happened to Beth is sick too.’
‘Louise Strallen is definitely dead, Jess.’ Ed says, looking at me worriedly. ‘If you give me a minute I’ll get the obituary details up online for you to see, but I need to phone a locksmith first. And as soon as I’ve done that we’ll work out what we have to tell the police that’s concrete, and won’t make them think we’re just being paranoid and weird. Not that I’m saying you’re being paranoid and weird,’ he adds quickly.
‘OK. So you’re going to make a few calls?’
He looks up at me sharply. ‘Yes. Why do you say it like that?’
‘I just mean if you’re going on your phone, can you take it in the other room so you don’t wake up James?’ I look at him, surprised at his tone. ‘We’re right under him here, aren’t we?’
‘Oh right – I see. Yeah, sure. I’ll do that then.’ He gets to his feet, scraping his chair noisily on the floor anyway, and leaves the room.
I stay sitting at the table, hands clasped as I bite my lip and stare down at the pattern on the plastic tablecloth. Someone used my keys and let themselves in. They could have been in the house while I was here.
They certainly know exactly what they want to say to me, that’s for sure. Five past ten. There is no mistaking that message. They want to talk to me about Beth.
They evidentially have blame to lay at my door, but what else? I think about the mirror wobbling precariously above my son before beginning to fall… retribution? Revenge? If they want to hurt me, nothing could cause me more pain than something happening to James.
They must be the person on the bicycle. Someone posing as a stranger, while fully aware Sandrine would be frightened enough to tell me what they’d said to her – and exactly what that message would mean so personally to me.
‘Unless it’s you, Beth?’ I say suddenly. ‘The messenger on the bike, the clocks, the mirror – you’re not trying to tell me something? Or warn me? Are you angry with me, maybe?’
There is silence. I can only hear the thumping of my heart as I sit very, very still and wait.
‘Or you, Mum?’ I try instead. ‘Tell me what you’re trying to say.’ But again there is, of course, absolutely nothing, and I suddenly hear and see myself – the absurdity of a woman in her forties sitting at her kitchen table, desperately talking to her dead 5-year-old daughter, and mother. A wave of intense anger crashes over me.
I said I wasn’t going to make mistakes this time; that I was a different woman, and yet I’ve already let this person – whoever they are – get inside my head, when they’ve only just started their game.
Chapter Seventeen
‘You alright?’ Ed rests his book down on the duvet and turns on his pillow to look at me as I lie staring up at the ceiling in one of his old T-shirts.
‘Not really.’
‘I can see that.’ He folds down the corner of his page and rolls over to give me his full attention. ‘The locks are changed, Jess. Even if someone had copied the keys, they can’t get in now.’
‘I know that whoever it is didn’t steal anything, but I’m actually finding it more chilling that all they did was alter the clocks, when I can’t see what else they might have touched, or done… Apart from possibly the mirror. In any case, it’s still trespass, Ed, and that’s a criminal offence.’ I speak quietly so as not to wake James. ‘We should have called the police tonight. It doesn’t matter that we don’t know who might have done this, that’s their job, not ours. I want to contact them in the morning. Yes, of course, I can hear myself saying to them: “I think someone took my keys but nothing is missing; a mirror fell off the wall and all of the clocks have been changed”. I know how that sounds, but I also know this is about protecting all of us. Especially James and Sandrine.’
‘Do you still think it’s Louise Strallen doing this?’ Ed asks. ‘Even though I showed you her obituary?’
‘No,’ I confess. ‘I’m not worried it’s her, now. I’m quite glad I wasn’t the only one to consider her still being alive a possibility, though?’ I glance sideways at him.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, it must have crossed your mind too, for you to have already checked so thoroughly that she definitely died that Sunday night.’
‘Oh, right.’ He falls silent. ‘Well, yeah, I wanted to know exactly what had happened. Do you want me to sleep in with James tonight, or you can – or we’ll bring his cot in here with us if you’re still feeling frightened?’
‘I’ll go in there with him in a minute.’
Ed hesitates. ‘Jess – there’s something else. I heard you talking to Beth in the kitchen earlier, asking her if she’s trying to get a message to you, or if—’
‘Can I stop you right there?’ I interrupt quickly. ‘I don’t want you to think that I’m in danger of becoming overwhelmed by this to the point of—’
But before I can finish my sentence, he suddenly blurts: ‘I lied to you, Jess, about the person on the bike who approached Sandrine. When I asked next door, they hadn’t seen anyone, but they also hadn’t received a leaflet through from a church group either. I picked that up from our old recycling pile in the hall. It’s been there for days. I was trying to protect you from the place I knew your mind would go to.’
I jerk my head round to look at him. ‘You deliberately misled me?’
‘And I need to tell you something else.’ He swallows. ‘I can’t phone the police about what happened today because I did send someone to the Strallen’s house to have a word with Louise. They went there the night after she attacked you and Simon came here.’
I gasp, and pull back from him on the pillow. ‘That was the night she died.’
He nods slowly.
‘Oh my God… what the hell were you thinking?’ I wriggle up to a sitting position and stare down at him in shock. ‘I can’t believe this! I asked you outright about it, and you got really angry. You said you weren’t in the Kent mafia—’
‘Shhhh! I was thinking that some woman who threatened my wife with a knife had attacked her again, called her a whore – and then almost certainly found out where we lived, thanks to her husband as good as leading her by the hand, right here. I’d talked to Dan, remember, and he said legally there was nothing we could do. I was beside myself.’
‘Who did you send?’
‘A mate of a mate.’ He looks at me, nervously. ‘Not someone I actually know; I’m not that stupid. I made it clear that they were not to physically hurt anyone at the house at all. They spoke to her, warned her off – and then left.’
‘And yet when Simon came home, Louise was dead in their bathroom, with a head injury. Jesus Christ.’ I put my hands up to my own head in disbelief. ‘So for all you know, it escalated – she was gobby and drunk with this bloke, he got angry – and then this person you’ve never met, but paid, might have killed her?’
‘Yes.’ He stares up at the ceiling blankly as if he can’t quite believe the words he’s saying. ‘I’ve checked though, and her cause of death was written up as natural causes, not a head injury, which means they think something “malfunctioning internally within the body” caused her death – which is good, seeing as otherwise I could be looking at conspiracy to commit GBH or us being joint accomplices in a murder.’ He exhales shakily. ‘The bloke I paid swears blind he didn’t lay a finger on her, but when he found out she’d died, he made it clear to me – via some other bloke I had to meet in a car park – that if the police came knocking at his door asking questions, he’d say I told him to kill her, so they better not come knocking at all. I gave him some more cash as a sweetener, but at the very least if it comes out I’ll be looking at conspiracy to blackmail; around four years in the nick.’
‘Blackmail?’ I’m appalled. ‘How?’
‘The offence would be my trying to force someone to do something against their best interests, because blackmail isn’t apparently just about obtaining money, it’s to gain an interest for yourself.’