Evening
Only, thinking about it, he did fool me, didn’t he? When he told me that he’d spoken to Rachel on the phone, that she sounded fine, better, happy almost, I didn’t doubt him for a moment. And when he came home on Monday night and I asked him about his day and he talked to me about a really tiresome meeting that morning, I listened sympathetically, not once suspecting that there was no meeting, that all the while he was in a coffee shop in Ashbury with his ex-wife.
This is what I’m thinking about while I’m unloading the dishwasher, with great care and precision, because Evie is napping and the clatter of cutlery against crockery might wake her up. He does fool me. I know he’s not always one hundred per cent honest about everything. I think about that story about his parents – how he invited them to the wedding but they refused to come because they were so angry with him for leaving Rachel. I always thought that was odd, because on the two occasions when I’ve spoken to his mum she sounded so pleased to be talking to me. She was kind, interested in me, in Evie.
‘I do hope we’ll be able to see her soon,’ she said, but when I told Tom about it he dismissed it.
‘She’s trying to get me to invite them round,’ he said, ‘just so she can refuse. Power games.’ She didn’t sound like a woman playing power games to me, but I didn’t press the point. The workings of other people’s families are always so impenetrable. He’ll have his reasons for keeping them at arm’s length, I know he will, and they’ll be centred on protecting me and Evie.
So why am I wondering now whether that was true? It’s this house, this situation, all the things that have been going on here – they’re making me doubt myself, doubt us. If I’m not careful they’ll drive me crazy, and I’ll end up like her. Like Rachel.
I’m just sitting here, waiting to take the sheets out of the tumble dryer. I think about turning on the television and seeing if there’s an episode of Friends on that I haven’t watched three hundred times, I think about doing my yoga stretches, and I think about the novel on my bedside table, which I’ve read twelve pages of in the past two weeks. I think about Tom’s laptop, which is on the coffee table in the living room.
And then I do the things I never thought I would. I grab the bottle of red which we opened last night with dinner and I pour myself a glass. Then I fetch his laptop, power it up and start trying to guess the password.
I’m doing the things she did: drinking alone and snooping on him. The things she did and he hated. But recently – as recently as this morning – things have shifted. If he’s going to lie, then I’m going to check up on him. That’s a fair deal, isn’t it? I feel I’m owed a bit of fairness. So I try to crack the password. I try names in different combinations: mine and his, his and Evie’s, mine and Evie’s, all three of us together, forwards and backwards. Our birthdays, in various combinations. Anniversaries: the first time we saw each other, the first time we had sex. Number thirty-four, for Cranham Street; number twenty-three – this house. I try to think outside the box – most men use football teams as passwords, I think, but Tom isn’t into football; he quite likes cricket, so I try Boycott and Botham and Ashes. I don’t know the names of any of the recent ones. I drain my glass and pour another half. I’m actually rather enjoying myself, trying to solve the puzzle. I think of bands he likes, films he enjoys, actresses he fancies. I type ‘password’; I type ‘1234’.
There’s an awful screeching outside as the London train stops at the signal, like nails on a chalkboard. I clench my teeth and take another long swig of wine, and as I do, I notice the time – Jesus, it’s almost seven and Evie’s still sleeping and he’ll be home in a minute, and I’m literally thinking that he’ll be home in a minute when I hear the rattle of the key in the door and my heart stops.
I snap the laptop shut and jump to my feet, knocking my chair over with a clatter. Evie wakes and starts to cry. I put the computer back on the table before he gets into the room, but he knows something’s up and he just stares at me and says, ‘What’s going on?’ I tell him, ‘Nothing, nothing, I knocked over a chair by mistake.’ He picks Evie up out of her pram to give her a cuddle and I catch sight of myself in the hallway mirror, my face pale and my lips stained dark red with wine.
RACHEL
Thursday, 15 August 2013
Morning
CATHY HAS GOT me a job interview. A friend of hers has set up her own public relations firm and she needs an assistant. It’s basically a glorified secretarial job and it pays next to nothing, but I don’t care. This woman is prepared to see me without references – Cathy’s told her some story about me having a breakdown but being fully recovered now. The interview’s tomorrow afternoon at this woman’s home – she runs her business from one of those office sheds in the back garden – which just happens to be in Witney. So I was supposed to be spending the day polishing up my CV and my interviewing skills. I was – only Scott phoned me.
‘I was hoping we could talk,’ he said.
‘We don’t need … I mean, you don’t need to say anything. It was … we both know it was a mistake.’
‘I know,’ he said, and he sounded so sad, not like the angry Scott of my nightmares, more the broken one that sat on my bed and told me about his dead child. ‘But I really want to talk to you.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Of course we can talk.’
‘In person?’
‘Oh,’ I said. The last thing I wanted was to have to go back to that house. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t today.’
‘Please, Rachel? It’s important.’ He sounded desperate and, despite myself, I felt bad for him. I was trying to think of an excuse when he said it again. ‘Please?’ So I said yes, and I regretted it the second the word came out of my mouth.
There’s a story about Megan’s child – her first dead child – in the newspapers. Well, it’s about the child’s father, actually. They tracked him down. His name’s Craig McKenzie, and he died of a heroin overdose in Spain four years ago. So that rules him out. It never sounded to me like a likely motive in any case – if someone wanted to punish her for what she’d done back then, they’d have done it years ago.
So who does that leave? It leaves the usual suspects: the husband, the lover. Scott, Kamal. Or some random man who snatched her from the street – a serial killer just starting out? Will she be the first of a series, a Wilma McCann, a Pauline Reade? And who said, after all, that the killer had to be a man? She was a small woman, Megan Hipwell. Tiny, birdlike. It wouldn’t take much force to take her down.
Afternoon
The first thing I notice when he opens the door is the smell. Sweat and beer, rank and sour, and under that something else, something worse. Something rotting. He’s wearing tracksuit bottoms and a stained grey T-shirt, his hair is greasy, his skin slick, as though with fever.
‘Are you all right?’ I ask him, and he grins at me. He’s been drinking.
‘I’m fine, come in, come in.’ I don’t want to, but I do.
The curtains on the street side of the house are closed, and the living room is cast in a reddish hue which seems to suit the heat and the smell.
Scott wanders into the kitchen, opens the fridge and takes a beer out.
‘Come and sit down,’ he says. ‘Have a drink.’ The grin on his face is fixed, joyless, grim. There’s something unkind about the set of his face. The contempt that I saw on Saturday morning, after we slept together, it’s still there.
‘I can’t stay long,’ I tell him. ‘I have a job interview tomorrow, I need to prepare.’
‘Really?’ He raises his eyebrows. He sits down and kicks a chair out towards me. ‘Sit down and have a drink,’ he says, an order not an invitation. I sit down opposite him and he pushes the beer bottle towards me. I pick it up and take a sip. Outside, I can hear shrieking – children playing in a back garden somewhere – and beyond that, the faint and familiar rumble of the train.
‘They got the DNA results yesterday,’ Scott says to me. ‘Detective Sergeant Riley came to see me last night.’ He waits for me to say something, but I’m frightened of saying the wrong thing, so I stay silent. ‘It’s not mine. It wasn’t mine. The funny thing is, it wasn’t Kamal’s either.’ He laughs. ‘So she had someone else on the go. Can you believe it?’ He’s smiling that horrible smile. ‘You didn’t know anything about that, did you? About another bloke? She didn’t confide in you about another man, did she?’ The smile is slipping from his face and I’m getting a bad feeling about this, a very bad feeling. I get to my feet and take a step towards the door, but he’s there in front of me, his hands gripping my arms, and he pushes me back into the chair.
‘Sit the fuck down.’ He grabs my handbag from my shoulder and throws it into the corner of the room.
‘Scott, I don’t know what’s going on—’
‘Come on!’ he shouts, leaning over me. ‘You and Megan were such good friends! You must have known about all her lovers!’
He knows. And as the thought comes to me, he must see it in my face because he leans in closer, his breath rancid in my face, and says, ‘Come on, Rachel. Tell me.’
I shake my head and he swings a hand out, catching the beer bottle in front of me. It rolls off the table and smashes on the tiled floor.
‘You never even fucking met her!’ he yells. ‘Everything you said to me – everything was a lie.’
Ducking my head, I get to my feet, mumbling, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ I’m trying to get round the table, to retrieve my handbag, my phone, but he grabs my arm again.
‘Why did you do this?’ he asks. ‘What made you do this? What is wrong with you?’
He’s looking at me, his eyes locked on mine, and I’m terrified of him, but at the same time I know that his question isn’t unreasonable. I owe him an explanation. So I don’t pull my arm away, I let his fingers dig into my flesh, and I try to speak clearly and calmly. I try not to cry. I try not to panic.
‘I wanted you to know about Kamal,’ I tell him. ‘I saw them together, like I told you, but you wouldn’t have taken me seriously if I’d just been some girl on the train. I needed—’
‘You needed!’ He lets go of me, turning away. ‘You’re telling me what you needed …’ His voice is softer, he’s calming down. I breathe deeply, trying to slow my heart.
‘I wanted to help you,’ I say. ‘I knew that the police always suspect the husband, and I wanted you to know – to know there was someone else …’
‘So you made up a story about knowing my wife? Do you have any idea how insane you sound?’
‘I do.’
I walk over to the kitchen counter to pick up a dishcloth, then get down on my hands and knees and clean up the spilled beer. Scott sits, elbows on knees, head hanging down. ‘She wasn’t who I thought she was,’ he says. ‘I have no idea who she was.’
I wring the cloth out over the sink and run cold water over my hands. My handbag is a couple of feet away, in the corner of the room. I make a move towards it, but Scott looks up at me, so I stop. I stand there, my back to the counter, my hands gripping the edge for stability. For comfort.
‘Detective Sergeant Riley told me,’ he says. ‘She was asking me about you. Whether I was in a relationship with you.’ He laughs. ‘A relationship with you! Jesus. I asked her, have you seen what my wife looked like? Standards haven’t fallen that fast.’ My face is hot, there is cold sweat under my armpits and at the base of my spine. ‘Apparently Anna’s been complaining about you. She’s seen you hanging around. So that’s how it all came out. I said, we’re not in a relationship, she’s just an old friend of Megan’s, she’s helping me out …’ He laughs again, low and mirthless. ‘She said, she doesn’t know Megan. She’s just a sad little liar with no life.’ The smile faded from his face. ‘You’re all liars. Every last one of you.’
My phone beeps. I take a step towards the bag, but Scott gets there before me.
‘Hang on a minute,’ he says, picking it up. ‘We’re not finished yet.’ He tips the contents of my handbag on to the table: phone, purse, keys, lipstick, Tampax, credit-card receipts. ‘I want to know exactly how much of what you told me was total bullshit.’ Idly, he picks up the phone and looks at the screen. He raises his eyes to mine and they are suddenly cold. He reads aloud: ‘This is to confirm your appointment with Dr Abdic at 4.30pm on Monday 19 August. If you are unable to make this appointment, please be advised that we require 24 hours’ notice.’
‘Scott …’
‘What the hell is going on?’ he asks, his voice little more than a rasp. ‘What have you been doing? What have you been saying to him?’
‘I haven’t been saying anything …’ He’s dropped the phone on the table and is coming towards me, his hands balled into fists. I’m backing away into the corner of the room, pressing myself between the wall and the glass door. ‘I was trying to find out … I was trying to help.’ He raises his hand and I cringe, ducking my head, waiting for the pain, and in that moment I know that I’ve done this before, felt this before, but I can’t remember when and I don’t have time to think about it now, because although he hasn’t hit me, he’s placed his hands on my shoulders and he’s gripping them tightly, his thumbs digging into my clavicles, and it hurts so much I cry out.
‘All this time,’ he says through gritted teeth, ‘all this time I thought you were on my side, but you were working against me. You were giving him information, weren’t you? Telling him things about me, about Megs. It was you, trying to make the police come after me. It was you—’
‘No. Please don’t. It wasn’t like that. I wanted to help you.’ His right hand slides up, he grabs hold of my hair at the nape of my neck and he twists. ‘Scott, please don’t. Please. You’re hurting me. Please.’ He’s dragging me now, towards the front door. I’m flooded with relief. He’s going to throw me out into the street. Thank God.
Only he doesn’t throw me out, he keeps dragging me, spitting and cursing. He’s taking me upstairs and I’m trying to resist, but he’s so strong, I can’t. I’m crying, ‘Please don’t. Please,’ and I know that something terrible is about to happen. I try to scream, but I can’t, the noise won’t come.
I’m blind with tears and terror. He shoves me into a room and slams the door behind me. The key twists in the lock. Hot bile rises to my throat and I throw up on to the carpet. I wait, I listen. Nothing happens, and no one comes.
I’m in the spare room. In my house, this room used to be Tom’s study. Now it’s their baby’s nursery, the room with the soft pink blind. Here, it’s a box room, filled with papers and files, a fold-up treadmill and an ancient Apple Mac. There is a box of papers lined with figures – accounts, perhaps from Scott’s business – and another filled with old postcards – blank ones, with bits of Blu-tack on the back, as though they were once stuck on to a wall: the roofs of Paris, children skateboarding in an alley, old railway sleepers covered in moss, a view of the sea from inside a cave. I delve through the postcards – I don’t know why or what I’m looking for, I’m just trying to keep panic at bay. I’m trying not to think about that news report, Megan’s body being dragged out of the mud. I’m trying not to think of her injuries, of how frightened she must have been when she saw it coming.
I’m scrabbling around in the postcards and then something bites me and I rock back on my heels with a yelp. The tip of my forefinger is sliced neatly across the top, and blood is dripping on to my jeans. I stop the blood with the hem of my T-shirt and sort more carefully through the cards. I spot the culprit immediately: a framed picture, smashed, with a piece of glass missing from the top, the exposed edge smeared with my blood.
It’s not a photo I’ve seen before. It’s a picture of Megan and Scott together, their faces close to the camera. She’s laughing and he’s looking at her adoringly. Jealously? The glass is shattered in a star radiating from the corner of Scott’s eye, so it’s difficult to read his expression. I sit there on the floor with the picture in front of me and think about how things get broken all the time by accident, and how sometimes you just don’t get round to getting them fixed. I think about all the plates that were smashed when I fought with Tom, about that hole in the plaster in the corridor upstairs.
Somewhere on the other side of the locked door, I can hear Scott laughing and my entire body goes cold. I scrabble to my feet and go to the window, open it and lean right out, then with just the very tips of my toes on the floor, I cry out for help. I call out for Tom. It’s hopeless. Pathetic. Even if he was, by some chance, out in the garden a few doors down, he wouldn’t hear me, it’s too far away. I look down and lose my balance, then pull myself back inside, bowels loosening, sobs catching in my throat.
‘Please, Scott!’ I call out. ‘Please …’ I hate the sound of my voice, the wheedling note, the desperation. I look down at my bloodstained T-shirt and I’m reminded that I am not without options. I pick up the photo frame and tip it over on to the carpet. I select the longest of the glass shards and slip it carefully into my back pocket.
I can hear footsteps coming up the stairs. I back myself up against the wall opposite the door. The key turns in the lock.
Scott has my handbag in one hand and tosses it at my feet. In the other hand he is holding a scrap of paper. ‘Well, if it isn’t Nancy Drew!’ he says with a smile. He puts on a girly voice and reads aloud: ‘Megan has run off with her boyfriend, who from here on in, I shall refer to as B.’ He snickers. ‘B has harmed her … Scott has harmed her …’ He crumples up the paper and throws it at my feet. ‘Jesus Christ. You really are pathetic, aren’t you?’ He looks around, taking in the puke on the floor, the blood on my T-shirt. ‘Fucking hell, what have you been doing? Trying to top yourself? Going to do my job for me?’ He laughs again. ‘I should break your fucking neck, but you know what, you’re just not worth the hassle.’ He stands to one side. ‘Get out of my house.’
I grab my bag and make for the door, but just as I do, he steps out in front of me with a boxer’s feint, and for a moment I think he’s going to stop me, put his hands on me again. There must be terror in my eyes because he starts to laugh, he roars with laughter. I can still hear him when I slam the front door behind me.