‘I really need to talk to you,’ I say, my face flushing. ‘About David and Adele Martin. I think you knew them?’ The cafe isn’t busy, only a well turned-out older couple enjoying a full breakfast and the newspapers in one corner, and a businessman sipping a coffee and working on his laptop in another. She can’t use being too busy as an excuse.
She stiffens. ‘I have nothing to say about them,’ she says. The kindness has gone from her eyes. Now I see hurt and defensiveness and anger at someone forcing a memory of something wanted forgotten.
‘Please,’ I say. ‘I wouldn’t have come all this way to find you if it wasn’t important.’ I hope she can see the utter desperation in my own gaze. Woman to woman. Perhaps victim to victim.
She does. After a moment’s hesitation, she lets out a long sigh and says, ‘Take a seat. Tea or coffee?’
I choose a table by the window and she joins me with two mugs of tea. I start to try to explain myself, to tell her something of what’s brought me here, why I need to hear her story, but she cuts in, stopping me.
‘I’ll tell you what happened, but I don’t want to know anything more about them. About her. Okay?’
I nod. Her. Adele. Oh God, oh God, oh God.
‘There was never anything in it, David and me. He was too young for a start, and he was a nice, quiet man. He’d come in early, have a coffee and sit and stare out of the window. I always thought he looked sad, and I hate to see people sad, so I started chatting to him. Not much at first, just in the way I try to, but then slowly we started to talk more, and he was charming and funny. I was newly divorced and feeling raw and it was like having free therapy.’ She smiles, almost wistful. ‘We’d joke about that. How I was paying him in coffee. Anyway, that’s how it was. She came in once or twice too, before I knew who she was. Right at the beginning. I was struck by her beauty. She was the kind of woman you remember.’
‘Like a movie star,’ I mutter, and she nods.
‘Yes, that’s it. Almost too beautiful. I didn’t know she was his wife. She didn’t say. She just drank her peppermint tea and sat and studied the place. It made me feel slightly uncomfortable, as if I was being inspected by the health board. But that was in the early days, and she didn’t come back after that. Not here, anyway.’
It all sounds so innocent, I can’t imagine what went wrong. My heart, despite everything else, thumps in relief that there was no affair. David has not done what he did with me, before. Adele was wrong, about this woman at any rate. I trust Marianne. She has no reason to lie to me.
‘So what happened?’
‘He started to open up to me a little. He might have been the psychiatrist, but when you’ve worked in the service industry as long as I have you develop your own way with people. I say he opened up, but actually it was more that he talked around things, if you know what I mean. I told him I thought that under his witty exterior he always seemed slightly unhappy, and we talked about love. He asked me once if it was possible to love someone so much that it makes you completely blind to them for a while. I told him that’s what love is at its heart. Only seeing the good in someone. I said love was a kind of madness in itself, because I must have been mad to stay with my John as long as I did.’
‘I think you should be a psychiatrist,’ I say. We’re warming to each other. A support group of two.
‘After that he started turning up half an hour or so before I opened, and I’d make us both breakfast. I’d probe him a bit more, and eventually, one day he said that he did a thing a long time ago that was wrong. He thought at the time that he was protecting the woman he loved, but it was always there between them and then, after a while, he began to worry that there was something very wrong with her. She wasn’t who he thought she was. He wanted to leave, but she was holding this thing he’d done against him as a threat. To keep him. She said she’d ruin him.’
She’s looking out of the window rather than at me, and I know she’s back in that time, those moments I’m making her relive. ‘I told him that the truth was always better out than in, and he should face this wrong thing he’d done, whatever it was. He said he’d thought about that a lot. It was all he thought about. But he was worried that if he did, and he had to go to prison, then there would be no one to stop her hurting someone else.’
My heart races and I barely feel my hands burning as they grip the hot mug. ‘Did he ever tell you what this wrong thing was?’ Rob. It’s something to do with Rob. I know it.
She shakes her head. ‘No, but I got the feeling it was something bad. Maybe he would have told me eventually, but then she turned up at my door.’
‘Adele?’