“Well, we had a reported sighting of your husband and someone who resembles Naomi Chandler there on the night he disappeared.”
I make a show of having a bad taste in my mouth, although in reality I’m licking my lips with satisfaction. The anonymous tip-off had served me well.
“They must have CCTV,” I say, assuming they’ve already seen Naomi and Michael walking in together.
“Well, unfortunately the hotel manager informed us that there was a slight technical glitch for a while that evening.”
Really?
“So there’s no record of either Mrs. Chandler or your husband entering or leaving the hotel.”
“Well, check the surrounding area,” I say, my frustration at their incompetence growing. “There must be other CCTV that would have captured them.”
“We could do, except we’ve spoken to Shelley Jenkins, a friend of Mrs. Chandler’s, and she has confirmed that she was with her at that time.”
It takes all my willpower to stop my eyes from narrowing and my nostrils from flaring. That’s impossible. I saw Naomi go in with my own two eyes—closely followed by her suspicious husband, but there’s no need to bring him into it and complicate matters.
“So where does that leave us?” I ask, conscious that my voice is wavering for the first time.
“Well, we obviously have your statement alleging that Naomi Chandler was keeping your husband captive on the Tattenhall estate, and that when you came across them she assaulted you, causing you to lose consciousness.”
I nod.
“In which time you presume that she also attacked your husband, inflicting a fatal blow to his chest and leaving him for dead in the swimming pool.”
I allow my shoulders to convulse and squeeze out a tear for extra effect. “I’ll just never understand why she had to kill him,” I sob. “She didn’t need to kill him.”
I look up quickly to make sure my amateur dramatics aren’t going to waste.
They both study me as if waiting for a crack to appear, but they’ll be waiting a long time because I’ve plastered over everything.
Robson closes the folder in front of her to signal that we’re getting close to the end of the interview and I slip my arms into my jacket.
“Mmm,” she says. “It doesn’t seem to make sense.”
If she were me, it would make perfect sense. It was always going to end this way once there was a chance Michael was going to find out what really happened on the night Ben died.
I was waiting for Naomi to take him back, to trawl through his memories, daring to spark a recollection that would be my undoing. But as I watched the videos of their sessions, she only ever got close once; when she asked him when he’d been at his happiest and he’d talked about the last day we spent with Ben. I’d held my breath as she pressed him, watching his eyes as they searched for the truth, all the time knowing what I’d have to do if he found it. Because I haven’t spent the past ten years blocking the reality out and expending all my energy into convincing both Michael and myself that he hadn’t locked the door—the door that Ben had so innocently walked out of—just for someone like Naomi to come along and unlock the proof that he did.
Though ironically, in the end, it wasn’t Naomi who had threatened to release him from his guilt, and damn me to perdition.
It was Kyle.
He was the only one who could really destroy the glass house I’d put myself in. Because only he knew I’d left the cottage to meet him that night.
I couldn’t let him tell Michael that while he’d been torturing himself for all these years, unable to understand how his youngest child had managed to slip out of a door that he was so sure he’d secured, his wife had unlocked it to spend an illicit hour with another man. He couldn’t ever know that all the time our little boy was wandering aimlessly in the dark, his mother was wondering how long she could be out for. Or that when the water was lapping above him, she was fantasizing that without children, she’d be able to live the life she wanted.
I paid the ultimate price for my wicked thoughts and actions—but if Kyle told Michael the truth, I’d have to take the blame as well, and I’ve spent far too long apportioning that to someone else.
So the game’s up, and Michael lost. Naomi too, unluckily for her. She was, quite literally, in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, luckily for me, she played right into my hands—even though the police still seem to be questioning her motive.
“Maybe she really did mean, ‘If I can’t have you, no one will,’” I offer, trying to steer them in the right direction.
Robson looks at me questioningly and my pores prickle.
“I thought she’d written something like that in a letter to him?” I say, my throat drying up as I scramble to remember whether they’d told me that, or if I’ve once again allowed my growing sense of unease to trip me up.
I have to keep my nerve. I’m so close to walking out of here as a free woman. Free of the constraints Michael has made me feel bound by. Free of the fear that one day he would find out what I did. Now, there’s only Kyle standing between me and the lie that I’ll take to my grave—but by this time tomorrow he will no longer be a liability either.
“I didn’t know you were aware of the contents of Mrs. Chandler’s emails to your husband,” says Robson, eyeing me intently.
I picture the unsightly blotches that must surely be spreading up from my neck, their red tentacles creeping onto my face. “He showed them to me,” I say, as my right leg trembles uncontrollably. “Because he was so scared of what she might do.”
“So he really thought she was capable of something like this?”
“Oh, absolutely,” I say, far too enthusiastically. “She’d threaten him on the phone as well.” I look between the two officers, hoping that direct eye contact will distract from the other parts of my body that are letting me down. “I tried to reassure him that she’d never follow through, but…” I choke, allowing a tear to fall.
“It certainly all seems to point to Mrs. Chandler being culpable,” says Robson. “But there’s just one thing that doesn’t quite add up.”
“What’s that?” I ask, forcing my face to look as if I care.
“It’s the shoe print,” says Robson, her annoying face begging to be punched.
“What about it?” I say. “I thought you said it matched a pair of sneakers you found at Naomi’s house.”
“Yes, but they’re the same size as all the shoes we found at your house, Mrs. Talbot.”
“So?” I ask, finding it incredibly difficult to disguise my irritability. “Thirty-eight is the average shoe size for British women.”
“Yes … it is,” she muses, frustratingly slowly.
“But…?”
“But Naomi Chandler is a forty-one, so she couldn’t possibly have been wearing them.”
What? I think frantically of the lengths I’ve gone to, to pull this off, leaving no stone unturned or a single detail to chance. She’s calling my bluff. Of course they’re Naomi’s shoes; they were in her wardrobe in the spare bedroom.
“Wh-what do you mean?” I ask, willing the involuntary spasm in my jaw to stop.
“They’re her mother’s,” says Robson, her eyes boring into mine. “You took the only pair that weren’t hers.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is my fifth book … my fifth book! If you’d have told me five years ago that I’d publish just one novel, I would have talked you out of it. My ideas weren’t good enough. I didn’t have the imagination. I certainly didn’t have the time. And anyway, what was the point? There was a million-to-one chance that it would be picked up—that kind of thing only ever happened to other people, younger people, cleverer people, better connected people …