‘So what happened?’ Rob. The notebook boy. Finally, I’m going to find out his fate.
‘I only met him once. Well, I went up for a weekend so I guess it’s more accurate to say I knew him for a couple of days. He was a spotty, skinny kid with braces. Nothing special. I don’t know what I was expecting. More charisma, I guess. He seemed young to me, for eighteen. He didn’t speak a lot, at any rate not for most of the weekend. Just stared at me and muttered answers to my questions, and then would have these over-the-top moments of trying too hard. He did this terrible chef routine one morning that I went along with, but to be honest, it made me uncomfortable. Adele said he was shy. Not good with people, but I found him strange, not that I told her that. We ended up staying up chatting for a couple of hours on the Saturday night after Adele went to bed, but I couldn’t click with him at all. He kept asking me stuff about our relationship. I was pretty sure he was jealous. When I left on the Sunday I was quietly wishing their friendship would come to a natural end soon.’ He pauses and swallows. ‘My wish came true, but there wasn’t anything natural about it.’
‘Rob died,’ I say.
Eventually, he nods. ‘I wasn’t there when it happened. That was ten days later.’
For the first time he looks up, right into my eyes. ‘I know where Rob is, but I didn’t put him there.’
Rob is dead. There it is. Plain fact. It comes as no surprise, and I realise I’ve believed that to be the case for a while.
‘I know,’ I say, and it’s true. I absolutely believe him. Too late, perhaps, but I do. ‘I know you didn’t.’
‘She called me in a panic one morning,’ he continues, the story pouring out of him now. ‘She said that they’d been taking drugs, and she thought Rob had overdosed because when she straightened out, he was dead. I told her to call the police and an ambulance. She was crying. She said she couldn’t. When I asked her why, she said she’d panicked and pushed his body into the old dry well in the woods on the estate grounds. She was almost hysterical. I couldn’t believe it. It was just … just crazy I guess. I drove up there straight away thinking I could talk her into telling the truth to the police. But she wouldn’t. She said she was scared that after what happened to her parents and then this, they would lock her up. They’d think she had something to do with it all. She said she’d panicked, but she couldn’t undo it now. She said no one apart from us knew that Rob had even been there. No one else had seen him. His family didn’t even know. She begged me not to tell. She said we could move away from the house and no one would ever know what had happened.’
‘But you knew,’ I say.
He nods. ‘At first I thought I could do it – keep this secret for her. Protect her. And I tried. I tried so hard. We got married quickly, but the signs were already there that things were going wrong. I hated what we’d done, but I think I could have learned to live with it if I’d thought it haunted her too, but she seemed absolutely fine, as if she’d forgotten about it already. This boy’s whole life. Gone. His death hidden. I thought maybe her reaction was a coping mechanism – trying to blank it out – but it wasn’t. She really had breezed over it. She was joyful on our wedding day. As if we didn’t have a care in the world. Then she found out she was pregnant and I thought she’d be even happier, but she totally freaked out about it and insisted on getting an abortion – to get this alien thing out of her.’ He pauses, and his breathing is ragged. This is hard for him. Facing all this. Sharing it. ‘Love dies hard, you know?’ He looks at me, and I grip his hand tightly.
‘It took a lot of time for my love to die,’ he says. ‘I made excuses for her, and I had to finish my training and specialism, so I didn’t always see how much she’d changed. But she had. She was spending ridiculous amounts of money – even with her wealth—’
‘And that’s why you’ve now got control of it?’