I had only myself to blame for allowing this to happen.
I remembered what Charles said to me when I went down to see them shortly after receiving the email. Charles was always a straight talker and never one to tell you what you wanted to hear for a quiet life.
‘Moping around feeling sorry for yourself is not going to get you anywhere. You’re an attractive, intelligent woman and you need to sort yourself out. Start by getting up and getting ready each morning as if it’s a Saturday night out. You can’t let what’s happened with Daniel define you, or it will destroy you. Shit happens, Grace! I’ve had enough of it in my lifetime. You need to deal with it, then move on and enjoy the rest of your life. As for all the financial stuff, it’s not rocket science. My advice is to start digging around, be methodical and think hard about what you do actually know. I’m guessing you know a lot more than you think you do. Hire a Private Investigator if necessary. You need to show what you’re really made of and stand up to him. You know I’ll help you in any way I can.’
He paused and hugged me before continuing.
‘Just one more thing…I don’t want to frighten you, Grace, but I know what Daniel’s like. He won’t be taking any prisoners in this. Whatever was between you in the past, believe me, he doesn’t give a shit about you now. He’ll be playing hardball. Don’t be on your own with him. People become unpredictable when they’re backed into a corner. Remember that and be careful.’
Back in my own kitchen, I thought hard about what Charles had said and knew for certain that I did not like this weak, whinging version of myself and I especially hated the pitying looks of people who had already branded me as a victim. I had no intention of being a victim.
I made up my mind there and then to fight and to win, but I needed to be clever and I had a feeling Charles was right when he said that I needed to be careful.
Buoyed up once again, I put on my standard, country, dog-walking gear of jeans, Barbour jacket and wellies and headed out across the fields with Lola to clear my thoughts. I would miss this house, miss being able to walk straight out of the back door and into a scene from James Herriot country. There was not an electricity pylon to be seen here, just rolling hills covered in heather, fields segregated by traditional dry stone walls and beautiful stone farmhouses, like ours, dotted around the place. I clambered over the wooden fence that marked the edge of our land and headed straight up the hill. There were no sheep in the fields, so Lola could have a free run. She never bothered with the sheep to be fair, but the farmers had learned from bitter experience to be angry about dogs running free amongst livestock and a few of them were trigger happy with their shotguns. I couldn’t really blame them, so I was always careful to keep Lola on a lead when the sheep were in there. I was out of breath when I got to the top and turned to look back, loving the bird’s eye view over the roof of our house and across the valley. It was a harsh place to farm in the winter, but I found the rugged beauty of the landscape uplifting in any season. Lola suddenly lifted her nose in the air and set off at high speed across the field. She had the selective hearing of a Labrador following a scent and totally ignored the whistle, forcing me to chase after her. We had never quite mastered the recall part of dog training and a walk with Lola always ended up being a full workout. I could not help laughing at her face when I finally caught up with her. She had perfected the cute look of innocence, which she knew would get her out of a serious telling off. I ruffled her ears and headed home, ready to face what I had to do.
The fight starts now - I told myself.
An hour later I sat down at the kitchen table with a coffee and spread out all the information I had managed to gather about Daniel. It was true that he had pretty much emptied the house of all paperwork, but he had missed some stuff in cupboards that he had either not seen or thought was of no importance. ‘Be methodical,’ Charles had said. My task was to sift through every single scrap of paper and begin piecing together the complex jigsaw that was the picture of my husband’s life.
The first lead I came up with was a simple address: 12b Channing Street, Stainsford. The registered office of Daniel’s company. It just didn’t sit right with me.
- Why would he have a registered office in Stainsford in the Midlands, when his business was in Derbyshire?
- Why would he need another office at all, when he already had a perfectly good one at home?
Thoughts raced through my head and I struggled to make sense of them. I searched the land registry and also one of letting agents in the area. The address was a bedsit.
- Why? Why? Why?
- Why would you have a bedsit, miles away from your business, as its registered office?
I had to get myself to Stainsford. I had to see for myself. It was a very small lead, but it was the only one I had and somehow I felt sure I would find answers there, probably not ones I wanted. I remembered Charles’ words about people being unpredictable when backed into a corner and felt a little tingle of fear. If Daniel really was hiding something there, there was no telling how he would react to me poking around the place.
I decided to wait until I knew he was miles away somewhere on ‘business’, preferably out of the country, but monitoring his movements was going to be very tricky indeed now that he had moved in with The Whale. I would need to look into that and figure out how best to do it. It would possibly involve a stakeout of her house. In the meantime, I was psyching myself up for two other extremely important visits I intended to make. Just over three weeks had slipped by since the email and it was time for me to get moving.
The first visit was to Kieran, Daniel’s brother. I had not seen him since our wedding, which seemed a lifetime ago, but I now felt it was time I heard what he had to say.
The second was to Lorraine, the woman who had sent the email.
The Brother
Don’t play with fire if you’re not prepared to get your fingers burned.
Kieran was naturally suspicious and more than a little hostile when I approached him to see if he would meet me. I couldn’t really blame him. He and his family lived just a few miles away from us in a neighbouring village, but Daniel and I had cut him off completely after our wedding all those years ago. I had slagged him off to anyone who would listen about his impromptu speech at the reception. In the end, his desire to gloat and say, ‘I told you so’ must have got the better of him, because he agreed to meet me in town on neutral ground, outside Costa so he could smoke.
‘So, now you want to talk to me,’ he drawled, clearly enjoying my discomfort at having to eat humble pie. The unmistakeable Northern Irish accent reminded me instantly of Daniel.
‘I heard what happened,’ he continued, unable to resist a half-smile.
Fellside was a small town where everybody knew your business. I knew the jungle drums had been working overtime with the news of our dramatic split. To be honest, I couldn’t blame them for gossiping. I would have done the same.
‘You could have saved yourself a whole load of heartache and pain if you’d just listened to me all those years ago,’ he continued. ‘I was trying to help you, not hurt you.’
‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing Kieran. I can see that now, but at the time I was obviously going to side with the man I was about to marry and believe what he said. Perhaps if you’d tried a more subtle approach? Anyway, that’s all water under the bridge now as far as I’m concerned. I asked you to meet me because it would really help me if I could understand a bit more about the past. Things that happened before I knew Daniel.’
I took a deep breath.
‘Like his first wife. Like the fire. And of course your mother.’
Kieran’s eyes narrowed and he did not speak immediately.
‘Please. I really want to hear your side of things. I promise not to judge,’ I continued.
‘There’s nothing for you to judge because I didn’t do anything wrong,’ he snapped.
‘But Daniel told me you started the fire….’
‘Course he
did, lying bastard. Everyone believed him, the respectable local businessman, over me. I had form. I had already been in trouble with the police for minor drugs offences, nicking cars, disturbing the peace and stuff like that. It was easy for him to pin it on me. I fucking hate the police....’
‘So tell me what really happened then,’ I interrupted, keen to stop him going off on a tangent with a rant about the police.
‘When Dad pissed off to go and live with his girlfriend, Mam went a bit doolally, though God only knows why she was so surprised…they always had what you might call an ‘open relationship’. Daniel and our mother fought like cat and dog and he was vile to her most of the time, calling her every name under the sun and threatening her with all sorts if she dared to stand up to him. She was shit scared of him, I know that for sure. When she left, the house was already pretty run down. Daniel stayed there with me until he got married to Julia. I’m not gonna lie, we had some pretty wild parties in that house and always had a load of mates sleeping over. It was an amazing time and the parties were legendary, mostly alcohol and weed, but occasionally a bit of the harder stuff. Daniel bought a house on the new estate in the town with Julia, but he always wanted to get his hands on the big family house and hated the fact that Dad let me stay there pretty much rent-free. He suddenly seemed to be making quite a lot of money, although the word on the street was that it was not coming from his packaging business.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look, this was all a very long time ago. All I know for sure is that he liked to live life on the edge and a lot of what he got up to was at best borderline legal. You wouldn’t want to mess with some of the guys he was dealing with, believe me. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if that helicopter crash wasn’t engineered by someone he’d got on the wrong side of.’
He paused to let that sink in. I mentally stored the information but did not comment.
‘Anyway, as I said, Daniel tried to buy the house from Dad for next to nothing and kick me out, but Dad refused to sell it to him. Daniel came to the house the night of the fire, angry about the state the place was getting into. It was a Friday night and a few of my mates were there. I told him it was none of his fucking business and laughed in his face. He was pretty mad when he left, shouting that I would be sorry I had crossed him. I don’t remember how I got to bed that night, but I woke up to smoke and flames all around in the bedroom and my mate Josh screaming at me. If it hadn’t been for him waking me up and dragging me out of the house, I’d have died in my bed.’
‘Are you saying you think Daniel could have started the fire?’
‘I’m not saying anything. How should I know? You work it out. The fire investigation team blamed me for falling asleep with a cigarette, but that would’ve been tricky, as I ran out of fags that night. All I know is the house wasn’t fit for anyone to live in after the fire, so Daniel got what he wanted in the end. He bought it from the insurance company for a song, I was given my marching orders and he rebuilt it.’
‘Wow. I had no idea.’
‘Yeah well, it’s all true. No one would listen to a word against him and I got the blame.’
I looked at the man opposite me and wondered whether I could believe his version of events. I was beginning to realise that there were always two sides to a story, but that didn’t necessarily mean that one of them was the truth.
‘Why doesn’t Daniel get on with your father? I never met him in all the time we were married.’
‘Don’t know really. We were never a particularly close family. My parents were part of the local swingers’ crowd around here for a while.’
He sniggered at the memory before continuing.
‘Daniel hated the way everyone took the piss about them at school. He always took it personally, especially after one of his mates was staying here and came down in the morning to be confronted by Mam doing the laundry, stark bollock naked. Daniel went ballistic.’
Kieran laughed and lit a cigarette before carrying on with his story.
‘First Dad went, which was no great surprise, and then Mam presumably got fed up with us and left as well. Walked out of the house one morning to get milk and never came back. Just literally disappeared. As far as I know, no one has heard anything from her to this day. Weird, eh? I did warn you.’
He laughed again.
‘I suppose our upbringing wasn’t entirely conventional and there were always a lot of rumours going around about us. Not much fun at school, as you can imagine. It didn’t really fit in with Daniel’s image and, to be honest, he always acted like he was better than the rest of us, as if he was ashamed of us. He used to make up names for himself when we were younger and lie about being an orphan. I always thought he had a bit of a screw loose, to be honest, but he had a hell of a temper and a way of storing things up until he could make you pay when you least expected it. Put it this way, I tended to make sure I didn’t cross him.’
‘What about his first wife, Julia?’
‘Julia was lovely, but she should never have been with him; she was far too sensitive. Things seemed okay for a couple of years when they were first married, but he was a bastard to her in the end. She went right off the rails after she lost the baby, but my charming brother just seemed to want to stick the boot in and punish her for getting pregnant in the first place. She was scared of him, just like Mam was. The word on the street was he used to knock Julia about. And I know for a fact he was screwing around behind her back, pretty much all the time they were married. Sound familiar?’
He laughed ironically and took a long drag on his cigarette.
‘How do you know all that?’ I asked.
‘She was friends with Becky, my girlfriend at the time. After their marriage broke up, Becks was pleased, thinking that Julia would be able to move on and get her life together, but it was obvious he wasn’t going to let her do that. He had to keep control. He didn’t want her, but he wasn’t going to let anyone else have her either. Just kept her dangling, like a spider with a fly trapped in its web. In the end, she just couldn’t cope anymore. He’s got a lot to answer for if you ask me. I’m warning you, you need to watch your back with him. He’s dangerous. Toxic.’
With that, he abruptly stubbed out his cigarette and stood up to leave.
‘Nice chatting to you, but I think we’re done here.’
As I later reflected on all Kieran had told me about Daniel and the past, I realised again that I had never really known the man I had been married to. It was as if he were talking about a complete stranger, not the man I had shared my life and my bed with.
It seemed to me that Daniel created chaos, then simply walked away from it and started all over again. His life’s motto of leaving the past in the past and never looking back was simply a way for him to do exactly what he wanted and avoid the consequences.
Well, not this time. This time he would be made to take responsibility for what he had done. He did not get to walk away from me scot-free.
The Other Woman
You cannot defeat your enemies if you do not know who they are. Know your enemy and know yourself. Then you need not fear the battle.
Grace
My first visit to the ‘dream house’ in Hazeldene to confront the face behind the email did not entirely go to plan. My friend Sylvie refused point-blank to let me go to visit the mystery woman alone, so we set off together in her Land Rover with Lola on a blanket in the back for moral support. Sylvie was originally from South Africa but had been in Yorkshire for years. She and her husband, Andrew, together with their son, Adam, and his gorgeous wife, Melissa, ran the hotel and bar just up the road from our house in Fellside. The hotel had become my refuge and second home since the nightmare began and I headed over there pretty much every morning for a coffee and a chat.
I had still not replied to the email from Lorraine, but I had done some extensive searching of the electoral roll, the land registry and Linkedin. I was becoming quite the amateur detective. I knew where Lorraine lived a
nd where she worked, but, despite my best efforts, not much beyond that. At least I had retained the element of surprise for my visit.
The house was tucked away on the edge of the village of Hazeldene, near Oxford, and we had to do quite a bit of driving around and asking for directions before we eventually found it, despite having put the postcode into the satnav. The pretty stone cottage was at the end of a farm lane and we drove past it several times before parking up on the verge a little way away from the house. It was getting dusk, which suited me fine as I got out of the car and crept down to the house in stealth mode with my phone, keen to gather important photographic evidence. As I stood in the ditch and parted the hedge, trying to get a better view, I recoiled in horror. Daniel’s car was there. I could see him clearly on the other side of the yard, arguing with a tall blonde woman who was shouting at him from inside the house. I took a quick picture, just as a large black Labrador ran towards me from around the back somewhere, barking excitedly. I almost fell over in my panic and legged it as fast as possible back up the lane towards the car, feeling more like I was in a Carry On film than a spy thriller.
‘What happened? What could you see?’ Sylvie asked excitedly.
‘Just drive, quick. Daniel’s there and I think they might have seen me. We need to get out of here. There’s no way I’m confronting the pair of them together.’
‘I need a pee first, I’m desperate,’ she announced.
‘Can’t you wait?’ I asked, looking at her incredulously as she opened the car door.
‘No, honestly, I’ll be quick.’
Lola immediately struck up a frantic whining to show her support for the idea, so two minutes later all three of us were squatting behind the Land Rover to relieve ourselves and silently praying that there was no CCTV anywhere near.
Twenty Years a Stranger (The Stranger Series Book 1) Page 16