The Couple: An unputdownable psychological thriller with a breathtaking twist

by Sarah Mitchell

  I tell myself the call is about something tedious, possibly the Land Registry or the seller’s questionnaire. Nevertheless, I can feel my heart quickening in anticipation of the conversation, the fact he has chosen to call me and not Angus. The ladies’ room is empty. Absurdly, I check my hair in the mirror before I stand at the window and locate his number, the traffic a silent, metallic river below. He answers just as I am steeling myself for the disappointment of voicemail. There is a fraction of a second where he is still speaking with someone else.

  ‘Claire!’ he says, and I get a warm feeling in my stomach, as if I have swallowed a mouthful of brandy. ‘Can you come round to the house tonight? After work?’ His voice is light but has surprising urgency.

  ‘I suppose so,’ I say. ‘Why?’

  ‘Remember the mirror? The Spanish mirror by the door?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say doubtfully.

  ‘I think you should buy it.’

  ‘Buy it?’ I repeat, slightly dazed.

  ‘It looks so good where it is, it would be a shame to move it. And you liked it, didn’t you?’

  Did I? I think of the curling petals, someone crouching with a knife in front of a slab of wood, sunburned hands focused on their work, before anyone had heard of Franco or Cabanellas or Mola.

  ‘You said it was expensive,’ I say slowly. This isn’t quite true but I am thinking of Angus, his possible reaction to a spontaneous purchase of an antique mirror. The last time I splashed out on something for our soon-to-be new home he chided me for not consulting him first – ‘It’s our house, Claire, I thought we would enjoy furnishing it together…’ – although all I had bought was a forty-quid vase from Fenwicks.

  ‘Think of it as an investment,’ Mark prompts. ‘Like art.’

  ‘How much are you asking?’

  ‘We’ll see. You can make me an offer.’ He is teasing again.

  ‘Does it have to be today? I should talk to Angus first.’

  Mark sighs so heavily it seems like the air itself is oozing through the telephone wires. ‘I’m afraid it does. I fly to Poland tomorrow. Business trip.’

  ‘What about when you get back?’

  ‘Come on Claire, Carpe Diem. I might have sold it by then.’ Now he sounds slightly impatient, as if I am being more difficult than he expected. But he changes gear with the smoothness of melted chocolate. ‘Besides, there might be other things – other pieces – you might like.’ He hovers, for just a second. ‘And, of course, it would be nice to see you, Claire.’ The way he says Claire is like a touch or caress. Daniel rarely called me by my name, I was ‘babe’ or ‘sugar’ and dull with imprecision.

  I swallow. ‘All right,’ I say. ‘I’ll be there about eight.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ he says, as though it really is.

  Later that afternoon, my phone trills again. Another text from Mark.

  Claire – don’t forget to bring cash

  I stop at the bank on my way to the tube station. At first I withdraw three hundred pounds from my own account. Normally, I take out fifty pounds, sometimes seventy, occasionally a hundred, but never as much as three hundred. Even so, I wonder if it is enough. I have no idea how much the mirror is worth. I imagine Mark’s reaction if I get it wrong; see him shake his head; hear him say, ‘That’s a shame, Claire. I thought you would realise how valuable it is.’

  I hesitate only a moment before I remove another three hundred. This time I use our joint account: the one Angus and I set up to pay for the wedding, the honeymoon and, of course, the mortgage. It is substantially more joint in name than it is in nature. Although we both put in the same proportion of our wages, Angus’s income from the hotel chain consists of a different number of digits from the one I am paid by Her Majesty’s Treasury.

  Holding that much money, I find my heart is racing. The novelty of the amount makes it feel like a windfall, like it’s come from somewhere else. Since the wedge of notes is too thick to fit in my wallet I buy a cheap birthday card – a Labrador being pushed in a wheelbarrow – and use the envelope from that instead. I tell myself I can pay some of it back into the bank the following day; I don’t have to spend it. I tell myself I mustn’t let myself be talked into anything. But, of course, I do. And I am.

  * * *

  The mirror is beautiful. Mark stands close behind me, pointing out the intricate details of leaves and vines along the edges. I can feel his breath on my hair, the brush of his sleeve on my ribs. The mirror, he tells me, is worth a great deal, considerably more than the six hundred pounds I tell him, foolishly, that I have brought with me. But since we are buying the house, he could let us have it for that. And, he adds, as though it is an afterthought, something merely to clinch the deal and illustrate his generosity, he will even throw in another item – a small oak chest, banded in iron – for free. He opens champagne to celebrate, letting the cork shoot over the room and the froth spill down the side of the bottle.

  As I am about to go, my phone rings. It is Angus.

  ‘Where are you?’ he says.

  ‘I…’ – I hesitate, it’s the wrong time to try and explain – ‘I got delayed.’ Mark is watching me carefully. He catches my eye, raises his eyebrows. I have to turn my back on him to stop myself from laughing.

  ‘I’ve cooked dinner,’ Angus says, from far away. ‘You didn’t tell me you would be late back tonight.’ He sounds like a petulant child about to throw a strop in a supermarket.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say and try to mean it. I remind myself that Angus is someone who knows what he wants and expects to get it. That I am lucky to be included on his wish list and an occasional sulk is only to be expected of a person so driven, that it is a small price to pay. ‘I ran into Julia, an old friend from university, and we went for a drink. I should have called you.’ I haven’t actually laid eyes on Julia for five years and am unlikely to see her anytime soon – neither of us, I think, would want the awkwardness of that encounter. But Angus isn’t to know this and since I am sure he will never meet her, my little white lie will go unnoticed.

  ‘Well,’ he says, sounding partially mollified. ‘I suppose I’ll have to eat on my own.’ Then he adds, ‘Another time you must remember to tell me if your plans change.’

  As I shut my phone Mark is smirking. ‘It sounds as if you’d better go, Claire.’

  I feel awful, but it is a pretend kind of awfulness that is nearly excitement, as if a little bit of me has broken loose.

  At the doorway we pause, Mark dips his head and for an astonishing second I think we might kiss. Instead, he places his lips in the middle of my right cheek and they linger a moment before he draws them away. ‘Good night, lovely Claire,’ he murmurs and it sounds closer than a paper’s width to come upstairs. In that moment I am back five years earlier. I am standing outside the lightless windows of my student halls. It is three in the morning, the night I first went out with Daniel. He says, ‘Good night, beautiful Claire,’ touches my cheek and walks away into the dark, leaving my skin aflame.

  Chapter Five

  It is the transition between summer and autumn, when the weather tempts with a day of glorious sunshine before issuing a stern reminder of the months of wind and rain ahead. It is also two weeks and three days after Angus and I moved in. I am standing at the bottom of the stairs, wearing a work shirt over my underwear, but not yet a suit – instead a dressing gown is slouched over my shoulders, the collar damp from the ends of my showered hair – and carrying two mugs of tea. Already it has become hard for me to think of the house as the same place that Mark lived. The open-plan rooms are cluttered with packing cases and hastily bought, ill-judged furniture that has required mind-numbing trips to stores on the North Circular and painful hours of self-assembly, while the soft, shimmering paintwork now appears duller, almost drab. It seems that Mark must have taken something of the allure of the place with him when he left. Maybe it’s just that dreams never do actually materialise, the best you can hope for is a rough approximation.

  To my surpr
ise, my reckless purchase of the Spanish mirror didn’t appear to bother Angus at all. To the contrary, he looked quite pleased when I finally took the plunge and confessed. I bent the truth a little, invented a visit to the house to consider what extra furniture we might need after we moved in, how the seller – ‘Mr Tyler’, I managed to say – talked me into buying his mirror, how lovely it looked on the wall, how hard it was to resist. ‘Well, I hope you got it for a good price, Claire,’ was all Angus said. When I told him the amount, his face twisted, as if with the effort of a piece of mental arithmetic, and then he nodded. ‘It sounds like you did. Good.’ And he never mentioned my indulgence again.

  I glance at the mirror now, as I place my foot on the first step, not at the glass – I would rather avoid the sight of my bare complexion and morning shadows – but at the golden, walnut frame. Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder, but they don’t tell you how fickle the beholder can be; the carving is still beautiful, of course, but not as beautiful as it was when I stood beside it with Mark, drinking his champagne.

  At that second the sound of a mobile reverberates. Angus’s work phone – he tries to separate his business from his personal calls. I see the screen flash from our dining table, the casing shudder with the energy of the vibration. I hesitate but then hurry towards the noise as quickly as I am able to without spilling the tea. Inevitably, just as I arrive the sound stops, but like an echo or a footprint the identity of the missed call is displayed for all to see. It’s only a number, not a name, but it looks familiar. Not very familiar, but nevertheless a number I might, at one time, have used myself. I wonder, briefly, who would want to call Angus before seven in the morning, but a phone call is not such a remarkable occurrence that I give it any more thought.

  Upstairs at least our bedroom is tidy, the clothes unpacked, the packing crates banished to the landing. I step over Angus’s slippers – which are appropriately tartan and placed very precisely, as they always are, next to his bedside table – put down one of the mugs and touch his shoulder. ‘Wakey, wakey!’

  His eyelids flicker and then open completely; one of the things I noticed about Angus the first time we spent the night together was his ability to move from sleep to total wakefulness almost instantaneously. That and the fact he slumbers in near total silence; no snores, no grunts, unless I really listen I can barely hear him breathe.

  ‘Have I overslept?’ The sweep of Angus’s gaze is taking in my partially dressed state, my wet hair.

  ‘No, don’t worry, the alarm hasn’t gone off yet.’

  ‘But’ – he is gazing at the mugs – ‘you’ve already made the tea!’

  ‘Something woke me early. Probably the bins being collected. I thought I might as well get up.’

  ‘But that’s my job Claire. You know I always make the tea.’ Angus has a fixation for little rituals. I guess it might be to do with the fact that his parents split up when he was sixteen. The affair – his mother – the divorce and the house sale all happened while he was away at school. It must have felt like a scene change in a theatre, by the time he came back on stage all of his familiar landmarks had disappeared. I know he is still in contact with them – his parents – but neither of them made an appearance at our engagement party and they never feature in his conversation. Even so, it’s an oddly stern response to a cup of tea.

  I assume he is joking and perch on the edge of the mattress. The bedroom is cold – Angus likes to sleep with the window open at least six inches regardless of the weather – and my wet hair and bare feet are making my body temperature plummet. I think how nice it would be to slide back inside and curl myself around his sleep-warm torso.

  ‘So? This morning it’s my turn to be the tea lady.’ I put down my mug next to his, shrug off the dressing gown and begin to peel back the duvet.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘What does it look like I’m doing? I’m cold!’ I pull the duvet a little further and wriggle into the space between the bedside table and Angus. The gap is so small I have to tilt myself sideways, hooking my left leg over his, so that I’m almost lying on top of him. The heat is meltingly sudden. I touch his calf with my toe, and when he doesn’t respond I slide my hand under his T-shirt and over the smooth gleam of stomach. Lying so still, so inanimate, he reminds me of a mannequin that has been polished with a duster ready for display in a department store.

  ‘Claire…’ His voice is a brake, but I don’t want to hear it.

  ‘Come on, Angus. You surely can’t be cross I usurped your tea-making role!’ I shift position so that I am straddling him, remove my hand from his T-shirt and undo the buttons of my blouse with showy deliberateness. As the cotton falls open I lean forward, letting the rich sweep of my hair fall across his ribcage. Although his expression remains blank I am smiling into his eyes because he normally finds an offer like this irresistible. It’s not actually until I’m reaching behind my back to unclasp my bra that he finally stops me. All at once his fingers close around my wrist and he sits up.

  ‘Not now, I can’t be late for work this morning. I’ve got an early meeting.’ He pushes me away, lightly but firmly, and heads for the shower. For a moment I lie back against the pillows in stunned stillness. I am no longer cold, but hot, too hot, and my emotions are a muddy mess of every kind of colour. A second later I fling back the covers, dress rapidly and give my hair a cursory blast with the dryer. By the time I hear the water stop in the bathroom I am already downstairs with my coat on.

  I am about to leave when Angus’s mobile bleats again. This time I am quick enough across the room to answer it, but instead I simply let it ring. The number blazing on the screen is, I think, the same one as before. I have a repeated sensation of familiarity although it is only a vague, unreliable notion. For a moment I rack my brains, wondering who it might be, but since no candidates come to mind I assume I must be mistaken.

  I head for the door then at the last moment my resolve weakens, I stop and double back. As children we were always advised never to go to bed on an argument and I suppose the same principle should apply about leaving for work. Not, I tell myself, that Angus and I have had an argument.

  I pick up the phone and take it upstairs. ‘You’ve had two missed calls on your work phone this morning.’

  Angus is knotting a thick silk tie. He spins at the sound of my voice; he probably assumed I’d already left the house, but if he’s pleased to see me it doesn’t show. ‘Thanks,’ he says, ‘just leave it on the bed.’

  I turn to go.

  Then, ‘Claire?’

  ‘What is it?’

  All at once his features relax, the light returns to his eyes. ‘Have a good day!’

  I smile back, but as I leave the bedroom I see that his mug of tea is still sitting on the bedside table, untouched and stone cold.

  * * *

  That afternoon I am sitting in a meeting when I begin to feel that telltale tickle in my hands and feet. When I lost Daniel – temporarily at first, and then definitively – my body used to fragment like this, a symptom, perhaps, of post-traumatic stress. It hasn’t happened for a long while now, but sure enough within minutes the writing on the paper, the features of my colleagues, the lines and contours of the room, begin to blur and soften as if we have all been plunged underwater. I look at my watch but the numbers are jumping and popping. A discussion is swirling around me about a proposal to make a small but significant change to the immigration category known as Highly Skilled Migrants. Maggie, our new manager, is leading it and everyone is anxious to demonstrate that they have read the hefty pack of reports and statistical data.

  A colleague called Nigel – my work buddy from the immigration conference – has grabbed an opportunity to speak, ‘I agree with the reasoning,’ he says, pushing his glasses further up his nose, ‘but I wonder if the penultimate paragraph on page 5 might be better placed after the current Shortage Occupations List on page 7?’

  There is an outbreak of rustling as everyone turns to page fi
ve and I am thinking that I cannot possibly make it to the end of the meeting when Maggie’s voice cuts across the fog, ‘Claire, you’re very quiet. Is there anything you want to say?’

  I am the most junior person in the room. Maggie, kind and conscientious, is anxious to ensure I am feeling valued, but I cannot now recall my carefully prepared contribution, let alone articulate it. A silence with army-blanket weight settles on our laps, and then, from a distance, I hear Maggie’s voice again.

  ‘Goodness, Claire, you’ve gone a very funny colour! Are you feeling all right?’

  I murmur something about a migraine, an easier explanation than the more complicated real one. There’s a collective intake of breath, a scraping of chairs, someone dials reception, someone else escorts me downstairs and before I know it I am in the back of an Uber weaving through the unremitting West End traffic, courtesy of the taxpayer.

  When we pull up outside the house I notice that the downstairs curtains have not been drawn. They are long and heavy, indented with a pale fawn stripe. I try to remember if I opened them this morning when I made the tea but it feels as if a pendulum is repeatedly striking my right temple and all I can think about is climbing into bed. I thank the driver and root for my key amongst a wad of crusty tissues and supermarket receipts. When I open the door, I am confronted by semi-darkness; it seems the curtains over the French doors that lead out from the kitchen are drawn too. At the same time I can hear the light squeak of footsteps on a tiled floor. Instinctively my hand reaches for the light.

  ‘Don’t, Claire!’

  In the split second that follows I see a man at the entrance to the kitchen. I think Daniel, then realise it is Mark, but my primal instincts react more quickly than my brain can process the fact of recognition and I jump nonetheless, making a noise somewhere between a gasp and a scream. Mark raises a finger to his lips and comes quickly towards me. He is wearing the same combination of white shirt and jeans, but the shirt has worked loose and his breaths are ragged. He pushes back his hair from a damp forehead.