by Celia Walden
‘You went to your boss’s house, and you attacked his wife.’
Maya. Oh God.
‘Her children … ?’
‘Her children are fine. But Maya needed medical treatment.’
‘No. Maya’s my friend. I would never hurt her.’
‘But you did. You put her in hospital.’
‘No, no …’
Alex tried to pull herself up. She needed to get out of here: find out how much of this, if any, was true.
‘I need you to calm down and focus, because this next part is important.’
Exhausted, she fell back against the pillows.
‘You were lucky. Your boss’s wife is going to be OK, and I’m told she doesn’t want to press charges. But it could have been much worse.’
Maya’s blue-veined breast, exposed. Magnolia petals falling like confetti. A plaid picnic blanket and Katie on her back, tiny arms raised at right angles. Nicole was there, and Jill. No, not Jill, just Nicole, who was about to ruin everything. And throughout it all the monotonous rise and fall of sirens.
‘You’re sure …’ Alex swallowed and tried again. ‘You’re sure it was my boss’s wife that I … ?’
‘I’m sure. And my only concern is your health and treatment, but the police want to talk to you. I’m obligated to tell them that you’re now conscious. Because they have been trying to establish where it was that you went after.’
‘After?’
‘After.’
The sirens had kept getting louder. The only way she could block them out was by dipping down into the nearest Tube station. That was where she’d gone afterwards.
‘I got the Tube home. With Katie.’
‘We know that you went home first. And again, this is not my concern. But that’s not where you were found later on that night. Your daughter, Katie, she was found at the flat, alone. She was OK. She is OK, I need you to understand that, but the police found other things, Alex: printouts of your former boss’s schedules, private emails of his. And what they’re trying to work out is whether you went somewhere that night, whether you saw Mr Lawrence.’ Dr Chua leaned forward. ‘These are questions the police are going to ask you. Because Jamie Lawrence is dead, Alex. And they seem to think that you had something to do with it.’
CHAPTER 33
JILL
7 AUGUST
‘It’s a formality, as I said on the phone, Mrs Barnes. We’re just crossing our Ts. So if you could read through your statement and sign right there at the bottom, that’s us done.’
It was the same DI she’d spoken to forty-eight hours earlier, DI Silver, but a different room – brighter, airier – and a very different atmosphere.
‘Can we get you a cup of tea, water?’
He’d left her alone, then, to relive the nightmarish details of Jamie’s final hours – details Jill could hardly even remember providing, so distraught had she been on her last visit to the station. And, taking a breath, she began to read back through the curt, clumsy and often barely grammatical string of sentences on the paper before her.
‘On the evening of Wednesday 4 August I’d left Mr Lawrence outside the Crown & Sceptre pub in Shepherd’s Bush around 9.15 p.m., where he was being kicked and punched by three men in QPR shirts. The men had been annoyed by his behaviour inside the pub. He had spilled a drink on one of them.’ She took a sip of tepid tea and pushed on.
‘We had had a row about his behaviour over the past few months, and his suspension [prompted by an allegation of assault made by BWL’s special projects supervisor Nicole Harper].’ Here Jill paused. She’d said nothing to the police about Nicole and Jamie having had a consensual affair, unwilling to get into the murky details of a relationship that she would doubtless never understand. That both Nicole and Maya had enjoyed some kind of sordid game-playing was now clear to her. But with both women instantly eliminated from the police inquiry, Jill had left it up to them to decide how much of that, if any, needed to be shared.
‘Mr Lawrence was very drunk, so I’d called him a company car on account – we use Addison Lee – to take him home. I gave the driver an extra £20 to get Jamie home safely. Then I went straight home myself.’
Stripped of all the conflicting emotions she’d felt that night – rage at Jamie’s behaviour towards her, pity at what he’d been reduced to, shame at the part she’d played in a downfall that in retrospect was perhaps inevitable, and lastly the visceral pain of her discovery that Stan’s diagnosis was terminal – the statement read like someone else’s account of an evening she, Jill, could never possibly have lived through.
‘I had been going to check that Jamie had indeed been dropped off safely at home on the BWL system. I was worried enough about him to think of doing that, but once home I got distracted by my husband, who has been unwell.’ Unwell. A mental image of herself clinging to Stan, tears matting the wool of his jumper. A slam of the pain that might lessen over time, but would be part of her life for ever now.
Had she followed through with the check-up on Jamie’s journey that she’d started – even going so far as to log on to the system before abandoning her open laptop on the kitchen counter – could his death have been avoided? Would she have been concerned enough by the realisation that her partner had changed his destination to the Vale to send for help? Or would she – more likely – have snapped her laptop shut and left the man responsible for so much hurt to his chaos?
‘On the following morning, the morning of Thursday 5 August, I decided to take the day off work to look after my husband. Then at around 1 p.m. I got a call from my partner, Paul Wilkinson, who told me what had happened.’
Still woozy from the sleeping pill Stan had given her the night before, Jill had emailed Kellie to say she wouldn’t be in. Then she had sat down and drawn up a ‘to do’ list. Anything to slow the unspooling in her head, restore a semblance of order.
One last Grand Union trip was what they needed. One last wander down the flight of locks near Tring to Marsworth and back up past the reservoirs. One last steak and ale pie at the Half Moon pub – if the doctor gave them the go-ahead. Early September would be ideal. Any later and the nights would get chilly aboard Lady J. But first they were going to have to sit down and discuss Stan’s burial plans, the ideas they’d tossed about after funerals over the years being no more than moments of self-indulgence. And Jill had been thinking about how to broach this when the call had come in.
In a curiously clinical monotone Paul had managed to get across what she needed to know – that Jamie was dead, that he’d been found that morning at a building site behind the Vale, that they didn’t yet know how it had happened – and she’d felt behind her for a bar stool to sink down on.
The timeline had become sickeningly clear later that afternoon, when Nicole had described the scene in Maya’s kitchen. Obsessed, deranged Alex attacking first Jamie’s wife at home, before somehow tracking him down at the Vale, and carrying out her final act of revenge? Here’s to putting a not-so-good man down.
‘How are we getting on?’
DI Silver popped his head around the door.
‘I’m, um …’ Jill glanced down at the last words on the statement, and the dotted line beneath. So much had been left out, and yet the facts listed in black and white above were true and correct. All she needed to do now was put her name to them, sign off on Jamie’s death.
‘You say this is just a formality.’ She looked up at him. ‘Because you know? You know how he died.’
DI Silver pulled the door shut behind him and took a seat opposite her. His eyes were kind but tired, and his shirt front bore the faint satiny imprint of an iron. Perhaps there was no Mrs Silver at home to take care of him.
‘The coroner will give the official verdict.’ He paused. ‘But yes, Mrs Barnes, we’re confident we’ve now pieced together what happened.’
‘So you’ve spoken to Alex? She’s conscious?’
‘We have, and she’s still in pretty bad shape, but being looked after.’ T
he sympathy in his voice was unexpected. ‘Ms Fuller was nowhere near the Vale Theatre on the fourth: we’ve had that corroborated by neighbours who heard her shouting and saw her looking disorientated in the streets outside her home late that evening.’
‘What? But …’ The question died on her lips. ‘Jamie killed himself.’
DI Silver nodded. ‘We’ve heard a voicemail he’d left Mrs Lawrence while she was in hospital. It was –’ he pressed his lips together, perhaps anxious to spare her unnecessary pain ‘– pretty conclusive. He spoke of feeling things were “stacked against” him, and it’s not uncommon with men in these situations to feel there is no way out, to spiral out, especially when under the influence.’
Jill nodded, thanked him – and signed on the dotted line.
Of all the emotions vying to be heard within her as she made her way out of the ugly red brick building onto Salusbury Road, she was surprised to find that the loudest was anger. How fitting that Jamie would make such a selfish final gesture. That he would betray Stan, devastate her life – and then make it all about him.
CHAPTER 34
JILL
‘Jill? Come and have a look at this.’
Stooped over the low, sprawling branches of an ash in Mortlake Crematorium’s Garden of Reflection, Stan began to read out the messages inscribed on little silver leaves by the bereaved. ‘You were my world, Ted.’ ‘JJ, I will keep you in my heart.’ ‘Love you to the moon and back, dearest Anita.’
In grief, human emotion reduced itself to song lyrics. And maybe there was nothing wrong with that; maybe in the end platitudes were people at their most honest. But there was nothing honest about Jill being here today, about pretending to ‘celebrate the life and mourn the passing’ of James Edward Lawrence, when she couldn’t, in good conscience, do either.
‘I don’t think I can do this.’
The ceremony was due to start in ten minutes – and Jill felt her ribcage tightening like a vice.
‘Of course you can.’ Stan straightened. ‘You were up until silly o’clock writing it.’
‘I know. But I should never have agreed to give a eulogy. It’s not … my place.’
From her husband’s pause, she realised with mounting panic that he felt the same. And there was something else.
‘You shouldn’t have to be here today.’ Jill slipped her arms around her husband’s waist, alarmed by how easily her hands now met across his stomach, how quickly the very substance of him was dwindling away. ‘You shouldn’t have to …’
‘Stare death in the face?’ Turning to his wife, Stan tilted her chin up towards him. ‘Hey. Me and death, we’ve been on first-name terms for a while now. I know it’s too much to ask, but I wish you could make peace with it the way I have. Or somehow … go back to not knowing.’
How could she? It was the first thing Jill thought of when she woke up, patting the covers for her husband’s warm, reassuring shape before she even opened her eyes, and the last thing she thought of at night. So no, she couldn’t suspend disbelief. But if Stan wanted her to be brave, that’s what she would be.
In the days after that final police interview, the postmortem results and the coroner’s official ruling of suicide, Jill had swung from culpability to fury and back again. Unlike Jamie, her husband didn’t get to choose how or when he was going to die. He hadn’t even got to tell his wife how long he had left: by blurting out what he had that night in the pub, Jamie had robbed Stan of that. And yet … how desperate Jamie must have been to do what he did. How certain he must have felt that the world was closing in on him. A world she, Nicole and Alex had manipulated to do just that.
Beyond the rose bushes and crab-apple trees lining the Garden of Reflection, the glint of a hearse appeared.
Stan was right. She was here now, and she had to go through with it. ‘We’d better go.’
As they rounded the hedge to see a tiny figure in black stepping out of the car behind the hearse, however, Jill nearly turned back and fled. ‘Those children,’ she murmured. ‘I can’t bear it.’
‘I know, love.’ Her husband’s voice was no longer as steady as it had been. ‘Come on.’
There was Maya – straight-backed in a plain square-necked black linen dress, Elsa on her hip – nodding to the assembled mourners as she passed through the crematorium’s arched entrance. But as they approached, Jill’s eyes snagged on another figure: a woman in a wide-brimmed black hat and sunglasses, standing alone, a little way off.
‘She came.’
Nicole looked up from the Order of Service in her hand to meet Jill’s gaze, her incredulity at what she’d just read mirroring Jill’s own.
‘Maya wasn’t up to the eulogy,’ Jill pre-empted defensively. ‘She asked me and I … I couldn’t say no. Jamie’s father’s doing the main one. Mine is short. Just a … anyway. But you?’ Jill thought back to the headlines that had appeared after Jamie’s death. TOP PROPERTY BROKER PLUNGES TO DEATH AFTER ME TOO CLAIM; DISGRACED PROPERTY BROKER FOUND IMPALED ON RAILINGS. ‘Did Maya see you?’
‘She was the one who asked me to come,’ Nicole replied quietly, swaying a little on her heels. ‘And I couldn’t … not be here.’
Something in Nicole’s over-painted face released itself then, and as the two women held each other’s gaze, Jill felt her own anger and recriminations drain away along with Nicole’s. All this bitterness, all this hate, had left them both so very tired.
‘Stan?’ After a brief chat with Paul, her husband had joined them. ‘This is Nicole.’
‘We’ve met before.’ Stan: always measured and polite, even in the most testing circumstances. ‘I think I’d already taken more of a back seat when you started?’
‘That’s right.’
Theirs was the banal introductory exchange of any social gathering, with the same ‘where do we go from here?’ silence, once concluded – a silence Nicole filled by asking Stan about his health. But as the niceties went on it became evident to Jill that having any kind of conversation at all was proving an enormous strain for her colleague. Something curious had happened to Nicole’s mouth, the fuchsia lips unnaturally hard around vowels, and in that moment she understood how much it was costing Nicole to be here, despite the shades, the hat and the lipstick. It had been more than an affair. Maybe losing Jamie would be the tragedy of her life.
From the first few bars of Vaughan Williams’s ‘The Lark Ascending’, people cut their conversations short, rearranging their faces into suitably sober expressions and adjusting their jackets and ties. Stan’s hand was warm on Jill’s back, guiding her forward along the nave of the crematorium. And when she turned to give her husband one last imploring look, he responded with a small nod.
‘In an hour, all this will be done,’ he murmured as they took their seats.
That he understood without knowing what she’d done that Jill would want to distance herself from anything connected with Jamie after today was miraculous. And as a crop-haired minister with a rapturous expression assured the room that the Lord would ‘hear their cries and comfort them’, ‘light a lamp for them’ and ‘be there through the darkest valleys’, Jill watched little Christel, three pews ahead, walk a tiny plastic fairy back and forth along the polished wood of the pew.
Had Maya bought it especially? ‘Your daddy killed himself. He’s lying in that casket a few feet away now, because he couldn’t be bothered to wait around for you to lose your first tooth, become a woman and go on your first date. But here – have this.’ At that moment, the gulf between her and mothers felt larger than ever. Jill only had herself and Stan to think about; the pain of losing him and surviving life without him. How could Maya remain strong not just for herself today, but for Christel and Elsa for ever?
With heavy steps Jamie’s father made his way up to the front of the chapel and stood before his son’s raised coffin at the lectern. Jill noticed that his black suit looked relatively unworn, but not new – the kind bought by men in their sixties once they’d started to lose a few frien
ds and were conscious there would be more to come. A ‘funeral uniform’ no father ever imagined wearing to bury his son.
His hair glowed white against the russet tan of his face – a wide, honest face – and Jill remembered the pictures of the Alicante condo Jamie had once shown her on his phone, proud to have been able to give his parents the retirement they’d dreamt of. Too snobbish to visit much – ‘the weather and wine still don’t make up for the chavs’ – Jamie hadn’t mentioned his parents a great deal in conversation, but on the rare occasions he had, Jill remembered, his tone had always been suffused with love.
Ted Lawrence must have become a father in his late teens or early twenties. In stark contrast to his hair, Ted’s face was youthful and unlined, his eyes the same soft velvet brown as Jamie’s. He was probably mischievous, too, under normal circumstances. He’d been something to do with central heating. Boilers – that was it: Ted had been a boiler repair man in Sevenoaks, where he and his wife Laura had been based until their retirement. She was there beside Maya, her uncontained sobs audible to all. Jill couldn’t bear to look at her.
‘Seeing so many of you here today – hearing how much you loved our boy – is a great comfort to myself and my wife,’ Mr Lawrence began slowly, pulling a crumpled sheet of paper from his inside pocket and smoothing it with a palm as he placed it on the lectern. ‘But I’m standing here with a broken heart.’ He faltered, and Jill willed him to get through it, before remembering there was no way through this kind of grief. ‘Laura and I, we never thought we’d have to deal with the loss of a child: our only child. I dare say nobody does. But losing a child like this. Knowing he felt like he had no alternative, no one he could talk to.’ Mr Lawrence shook his head. ‘Because Jamie had all these plans, you know? For the future. And he was well on his way to making them all come true. So this …’ Nodding at his wife, Jamie’s father’s eyes filled with tears. ‘This just makes no sense. Jamie’s always been a glass-half-full man, since he was a little boy. He’d never let us sleep in at the weekends. He’d be in there at the crack of dawn, bouncing on the bed, telling us to “get up!” – wouldn’t he, Lau?’