Chapter Twenty-Five
Now
As I approach from the tube station I see the house is dark, the empty bones of its interior visible through the undrawn curtains to anyone who happens to be passing. The rain has returned, repellent and relentless, and by the time I reach our front step the drops are sliding from my hair like glass beads tumbling from a broken abacus.
Inside, I realise the blackness is not complete after all, a faint glow is trickling from the kitchen, a thin, half-hearted kind of luminosity that might emanate from one of the small bulbs under the kitchen cabinets. A light that could easily have been left on by mistake.
‘Hello?’ I push my voice into the gloom while I stay, dripping, by the entrance. ‘Angus, are you there?’ The only reply is the zip of tyres spraying water on the tarmac behind me. Reaching for the light switch, I remember six months earlier, leaving the team meeting, coming home, my head bursting and suddenly hearing Mark’s voice: ‘Don’t Claire!’ For a second, the clarity of the memory causes my fingers to flutter indecisively in mid-air before they find the brass casing and flood the room in yellow.
To my relief the surroundings appear unchanged, untouched. The sofa, the neatly filled bookcase, the Spanish mirror, the muted tones of the cream-and-taupe colour scheme, all suggest an ordered life troubled by only ordinary complications that have been forgotten about by the following week. My cereal bowl is sitting in the middle of the table, where I must have abandoned it this morning before I took the tube to work, to my nice, respectable civil service job.
Shutting the door, I note the quiet thunk of the returning latch, the sense of being severed from the world outside. I wonder how long I will have to wait for someone to arrive and keep me company; I contemplate who that someone will be. I lay my coat, the wet, sodden weight of it, over the bannister, and after a second’s hesitation decide to check out the stray light – just in case he has arrived already but is keeping his presence quiet.
From the archway into the kitchen I see Viktoria hasn’t been in to clean today because the countertop still bears a jar of peanut butter and a plastic tub of a butter substitute that should have been put in the fridge, while the dim arc of a downlighter illuminates the chopping board and the sludgy remains of a melon. At least, however, no one is standing beside the counter; there is no sign of either Angus or Mark.
In the sitting room I pace around the furniture. I am wearing Agatha’s trainers, which are a size too small, but although they are rubbing my sore feet I don’t intend to take them off in case a pair of running shoes turns out to be exactly what I need.
I check my phone.
Nothing.
I brush a film of dust from the top of the TV. Turn it on. Catch a few unbearable seconds of a late-night chat show and immediately switch it off. I fiddle with the few possessions we’ve bothered to display on the shelves: a silver fish-shaped trophy that Angus won in some angling competition, a Bluetooth speaker – a practical, rather than aesthetic addition – and my Portuguese bowl, the one painted so beautifully with azaleas.
Finally, a key rustles in the lock. My stomach clenches like a fist preparing to land a punch as the door is flung back and Angus staggers across the threshold. With his clothes plastered to his body and his blonde hair dark with rain, he resembles a man who has been shipwrecked, who is lurching on to the sand of an unknown shore.
He gapes at me with wide, wild, astonished eyes. ‘You came back.’
‘Yes.’
For a long moment we simply stare at each other, and then he moves towards me. Although my instincts are telling me to back away, into the kitchen, the garden – a different life perhaps – I make myself hold my ground, refusing to flinch as the distance between us narrows to less than grabbing distance.
He stops about a metre away. I search his face, it should be utterly familiar, however I am struck by the same sensation I felt in the bus, that I am looking at a stranger. He stretches out a hand, not to grab me – it turns out – to touch my face, but he is too far away to reach.
‘You slept with him, didn’t you?’
The accusation, the surprise of it, rocks me onto my heels. ‘Who?’ I say lamely. Lamely and too late.
‘Mark, of course. You slept with Mark! You booked a room. I found your reservation on the system and I went to see what the hell you were up to. You were both there together. I saw you kissing in the porch.’
Although there is rage in his voice, to my astonishment I realise he also sounds distraught. I gape at him in disbelief. ‘No! It wasn’t what it looked like.’ Not that time, anyway. The sentence, my denial, flounders on the jagged rocks of guilt.
Angus steps forwards and takes hold of my forearms, squeezing the muscles made feeble by the endless hours I spend sitting at a desk. ‘I should have guessed that Mark would try to involve you in his crappy business. Such an easy way to get back at me for making him sell his precious house.’ He inhales, pauses, exhales, his breaths ragged with distress. ‘I need to tell you something. There was a gun in that chest Mark gave you. He had hidden the key under the mirror, stuck it with tape, but it fell, I found it—’
The pressure of his grip intensifies. He is hurting me but I don’t – I can’t – reply.
Angus tilts his head. Watching my face he misreads my silence. ‘It doesn’t matter. Not now. The gun has gone. It disappeared some time ago, I think Mark must have collected it.’ His pupils bore into mine like tiny drills and his expression gradually changes. ‘Jesus Christ, Claire! You knew about the gun.’
Still, I don’t react.
‘You knew because he asked you to hide it, and you did what he said, because,’ he lets go of my arms, ‘because you were already sleeping with him.’ He gazes at me; the raw and naked gaze of the dispossessed, the abandoned. The gaze that I am so familiar with myself.
Regret, sadness, all those toothless, belated emotions swell in my throat. I swallow them down; I remind myself that Angus has hardly been the devoted, faithful fiancé himself.
‘You never told me that you and Mark are friends.’
Angus curls his lip. ‘We’re not friends.’
‘Business partners, then.’
He doesn’t reply.
I raise the stakes.
‘And you slept with somebody else too.’
At this, Angus shakes his head vigorously. ‘Of course I didn’t.’ There is an empty beat, then, ‘I love you.’
‘What about the thong I found in the bathroom?’ I persist. ‘The one you said had been mixed in with the laundry in a Frankfurt hotel. It was dirty, Angus. Disgusting. The fabric stank. And not of washing powder. Besides, I found another just like it tonight in my room at The Grange’ – I shiver involuntarily, as if a ghost has walked in – ‘so I know exactly where you got it from, what you were up to.’
The expression on Angus’s face changes, not to one of culpability, exactly, more as if he is computing a difficult exam question. There is a flat second of confused silence before the impasse is interrupted by a different voice.
‘I imagine it belonged to Viktoria.’
Slowly, we both turn our heads. A figure is standing in the shadows of the landing. A man who could, in the half-light, be Daniel. Except, of course, that Daniel is dead. And the person who is starting to come down the staircase – steadily and with purpose – is Mark.
‘Viktoria probably came straight here after her night shift at The Grange. I expect she needed a shower after all that hard work.’ Mark’s tone is conversational, as if he is discussing any old diary schedule. However, all at once it tightens. ‘I would move away from Angus, if I were you, Claire. He’s a very dangerous man. You’ve seen for yourself the kind of business he runs, what goes on in those shitty little rooms. And you nearly married him, how fucking careless is that?’
Angus turns to him, ashen and snarling, ‘You lying bastard! That’s your filthy set-up, not mine. I didn’t want any part of it. I told you to stop. I was making enough from the paperwork but
you always need more money, you always go too far!’
Descending into the sitting room Mark halts beside the Spanish mirror. The crummy T-shirt with the ketchup stain is gone; he is back in one of his blindingly white shirts and a pair of jeans. ‘You need to step away, Claire. This is a man who blackmails vulnerable women, who has no conscience. My only crime is giving a few hopeless sods a ticket to ride, the chance to make something of their lives in the land of milk and honey when they have no hope of getting here any other way. A few fake jobs, a few false visas, where’s the harm in that? They drew the short straw in the great postcode lottery of life. I’m just adjusting the balance a bit.’
My gaze switches between Mark and Angus. Only one of them is telling the truth. Without making any conscious decision, I have already edged slightly further from Angus. We are like three points of a triangle, although Mark is closer to the front door than I am, Angus is closer to the arch into the kitchen and the route to the garden. Bet on the wrong horse and my exit is blocked.
‘You were the one who wanted the lists of names and addresses,’ I say to Mark.
‘To give to Angus—’
‘That’s a fucking lie!’
Mark pays no attention to Angus. His focus is entirely on me. ‘I needed some money quickly. I was desperate – you saw the letter from the bank. And Angus was willing to pay a lot for that information. Not surprising, I suppose. You’ve seen what he does with it. How enterprising he is.’
I don’t say anything. I know there are clues I’m not quite piecing together. I will myself to concentrate, to factor, to rationalise, but there is too much adrenaline coursing through my veins to think straight or quickly. It’s like a light being shone directly into my eyes – similar, in fact to the blinding effect of low winter sun.
‘Come here, Claire. Come to me.’
The way Mark is positioned with his back to the staircase I can just about see the reflection of his profile in the polished glass. If I half-close my eyes, squint through the dusk of lowered lids, he could be Daniel. Daniel, when he loved me. When I thought he loved me. When I wanted to believe he loved me more than anything else in the world.
‘Come here, Claire.’
I take one pace, two paces towards the Spanish mirror.
Something glimmers; something flickers in the reflection; an unexplained needle of light that appears and is gone before I can work out where it came from. I pause, but Mark doesn’t notice my hesitation. His attention has already swivelled to Angus, his features dressed in a sneer of triumph. ‘You might have taken my house, my one fucking chance to get my head above water, but I took your girlfriend. Right here, in fact,’ he gestures upstairs, ‘and again in my car. She was very keen. Up for it any—’
The crack of bone on bone splits the air. Blood spurts in a bright, crimson arc. Mark clutches his face, howling. As Angus lowers his fist he throws himself at Mark’s chest. Arms locked around Mark’s waist, he drives Mark backwards, until they fall on the coffee table and crash to the ground with Angus pressing his fingers into the base of Mark’s throat.
Mark gags. He is choking from lack of air and the red liquid smeared over his face and hands, running into his mouth and drenching the pristine cotton of his shirt. Grabbing Angus’s hair in both of his fists, he hauls on Angus’s skull until Angus is forced to raise his head, and then in one slick movement Mark releases the hair and jams his bloody thumbs into Angus’s eye sockets. For a second or two Angus maintains the pressure on Mark’s neck, but the gouging fingers force him backwards and all at once his grip slackens.
Mark begins to sit up and his arms drop from Angus’s face, I assume he is going to push Angus away, I think he will stand up, they will both get up, that the fighting, the violence, will be over. That perhaps it is all a dream, a nightmare: Mark, The Grange, the woman in the baby-doll nightdress, even Daniel, the brilliance of the sun and the too-fast car. For an infinitesimal moment I am back in my childhood bedroom, safe amongst my A-level textbooks and my Take That duvet cover.
Then I see Mark reach his right hand towards the back pocket of his jeans. There is a spark, a flash of metal jabbing upwards so quickly I am not certain anything has happened until Angus gasps, a surprised, outraged groan, and I see the handle of our kitchen knife protruding from his ribs like the arm of a slot machine in a tacky seaside arcade.
Mark shoves Angus sideways into a crumpled heap on the floor and staggers to his feet. It is suddenly very quiet. I hadn’t noticed the grunting and the heaving until the screaming absence of it now. I can’t even hear any traffic. It seems as though everything has stopped.
‘What have you done?’ I whisper. I am on my knees beside Angus; blood is pooling on his chest around the hilt, amassing in a dark disc the shape of a saucepan lid. The flow is smooth and steady, like an underground spring seeping unstoppably to the surface. Angus is staring at me. His gaze is rigid with shock but the intensity is fading, his complexion bleaching from white to grey.
I gape up at Mark. ‘What have you done?’ I repeat. Now I am shouting.
He wipes his face with his forearm, smearing a crimson stain across his sleeve and doesn’t reply.
Something brushes my left hand. Angus’s fingers are flickering against my own in small, jerky, uncontrolled strokes. A thin trickle of plasma runs from the corner of his mouth over his chin and down his neck. His hand flutters again and his lips move. He is trying to speak, although his lungs are filling with blood, his body is drowning. I bend low over his chest.
‘Claire…’ His voice is transparent, a ghost. ‘Be…’ – he tries to breathe and exhales red bubbles – ‘careful.’ His lips are turning blue. A horrible brackish shade of blue. I lean closer and the ends of my hair drag through the bloody pond of his chest. ‘It was meant for Mark.’ The words are an almighty effort, tossed to me beyond the suction of gravity. ‘The message… meant for Mark.’ His eyes hang on to mine, but their grip is sliding, slipping away from me.
‘Angus!’ I shake his shoulder. ‘Angus!’ I realise that I am crying but my tears are useless and too late.
For a moment he looks at me, suspended over the abyss, holding me within his gaze. And then the connection breaks, his pupils freeze and I know he has plummeted, that he is seeing nothing at all.
I haul myself upright to face Mark, who is watching, his expression impassive.
‘You killed him,’ I yell. ‘Why did you kill him?’ I am shaking, and my head is swimming in confusion. I don’t know whether to be very afraid or if the danger has passed and my biggest threat is lying dead on the beige carpet.
Mark’s expression doesn’t alter. ‘He was an animal, Claire. You saw for yourself the kind of things that went on in that hotel.’
‘What did Angus mean about a message? That it was meant for you?’
Mark shrugs. Stretching his right hand up towards his head, he runs his fingers through his hair in the standard gesture of mystification and on his little finger I glimpse his signet ring. The chunky silver band embossed with black lettering.
Watching him, I suddenly understand why Agatha’s image of Nigel caught my attention; I decipher the clue that it held as the blindingly obvious giveaway clunks into place. The hand holding the tray of drinks also wears a ring, a signet ring. The extended forearm protruding into the frame, the white sleeve, didn’t belong to a waiter at all. It was Mark. Of course it was Mark.
‘You told me that you didn’t know Nigel,’ I say slowly.
‘Did I?’ Mark drops his arm to his side.
‘You said, “Who the hell is Nigel?” when we were outside The Grange.’
‘So?’
‘I’ve seen a photograph of you and Nigel, together with Viktoria.’
His glance is sharp and surprised, but he recovers quickly. ‘Come on, Claire. What does that matter? I was protecting Nigel. I didn’t want you to find out he was involved in any of this.’
‘You lied.’
‘Yeah. So what? I told you, I had my reasons.’
‘No—’
My brain is buzzing as the final dots now join up. As soon as you can prove one simple deceit, all the rest of someone’s story crumbles like sand. Every lawyer knows that. A lie could be a single, solitary mistake, a one-off, an aberration, but believe me that’s never the case. A liar never tells one lie, if he is lying about one thing then he’s lying about everything else: like the identity, for example, of the person who is really responsible for turning vulnerable immigrants into drugged-up hookers.
‘Although Angus was part of the fake visa set-up he had nothing to do with the blackmail, did he? And when he found out you were using his hotels he told you to stop.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Mark’s tone is dismissive, but I see a muscle twitch in his neck, his gaze travel briefly towards me and then to the door. I wonder if he is about to make a run for it. However, to my surprise he walks over to Angus instead, to his body, squats down and picks up the wrist as if checking for a pulse.
‘I saw his WhatsApp message,’ I continue, ‘Playing about again? You’ve gone too far this time. Stop right now if you want past mistakes to stay in the past.’ I have recounted those sentences so many times I can recite them word for word. ‘You’ve been involved in the same thing before, or something like it, and the message from Angus made you think that this time he would go to the police. Only he sent the message to me first, from his business mobile, before he sent it to you, probably because we’d just exchanged texts on his personal phone.’ I remember the packed train to Ipswich, full of sleeping commuters, the sudden disorientating fear that someone had found out about Daniel, but it was nothing to do with Daniel at all. ‘Angus must have realised his mistake as soon as I replied.’
Mark drops his head. As though he has stopped listening, almost as if he is bored. His grasp moves suddenly from Angus’s arm to the handle of the knife, which he hauls from Angus’s ribcage in one swift movement. A rush of liquid wells from the wound but it’s not the bloody mess of Angus’s chest that has my attention; Mark is on his feet and brandishing our chef’s knife like a dagger, red raindrops dripping from the blade and onto the carpet.
The Couple: An unputdownable psychological thriller with a breathtaking twist Page 28