by M. B. Shaw
‘Do you believe me?’ Billy asked, once the silence became unbearable. ‘About Mum.’
‘Yes,’ Iris said, without hesitation. ‘I do.’
It was as if the floodgates had suddenly been opened. Billy let out a terrible moan and crumpled forwards over the kitchen table, his whole upper body racked with sobs. Not sure what to do, Iris acted on instinct and walked over to him, pulling up a chair and wrapping her arms around his thin, convulsing torso. For a few seconds Billy did nothing, passively accepting her embrace as his own emotions reached a peak. Then suddenly he sat up, wrapped his arms tightly around Iris and kissed her passionately on the mouth. Horrified, Iris tried to pull back, but Billy’s grip tightened. His hands were everywhere now, down her back, in her hair, grabbing and clawing at her, mistaking her pity for attraction.
‘Iris,’ he murmured. ‘Oh, Iris.’
‘No!’ she shouted, elbowing him as hard as she could in the ribs and literally wrenching her face away from his. ‘Billy, stop! I don’t want this. Stop.’
He stopped, instantly, like a robot whose power supply has just been switched off. Iris jumped up and scrambled back away from him, to the other side of the table.
‘But you … you came to me.’ Billy looked at her, confused.
‘I felt sorry for you,’ said Iris, perhaps more truthfully than was wise under the circumstances. ‘I still feel sorry for you.’
Now it was Billy who got up and backed away. ‘You encouraged me! You led me on.’
‘No,’ Iris said firmly. ‘You misread the signs, that’s all. You made a mistake.’
‘I trusted you,’ Billy hissed, turning and bolting for the door as if the house were on fire.
‘You can trust me,’ Iris called after him. ‘I’m your friend, Billy. Where are you going?’
But it was too late. He’d already taken off into the night, swallowed by the shadows that were waiting for him.
Iris closed the door behind him and leaned back against it. Only then did she realise that she, too, was shaking. Did that just happen? This entire evening had been surreal. Terrifying and enlightening and sad and—
‘Aaaaagh!’ Iris screamed. The door at her back had been swung open forcefully from the outside, sending her flying across the room. Landing with a thud on the stone tiles, next to the Aga, she banged her head on the bottom oven door. Pulling herself up to her hands and knees, the first thing she saw was her own blood dripping onto the floor. Then she turned and saw a man’s figure looming in the doorway. Then everything went black.
* * *
‘Iris? Iris! Thank God.’
Graham Feeney’s face hovered above hers, a picture of concern. It took Iris a moment to piece things together and get her bearings. She was lying on the sofa at Mill Cottage, with a pillow under her head, a blanket over her and a packet of frozen peas resting semi-precariously on her forehead.
‘Are you all right? You’ve been out cold for more than a minute. I’m so sorry, Iris. Do you think I should call an ambulance? I’m sorry. I … I didn’t know what to do.’
‘Stop saying sorry for a start.’ Iris smiled weakly. ‘I don’t need an ambulance. Ow,’ she winced, gingerly moving the peas aside and touching the gash on her head. ‘So it was you who broke the door down?’
‘I didn’t break it down,’ Graham gabbled wretchedly. ‘At least, I didn’t mean to. I opened it suddenly because I was worried. I’d just pulled up when I saw someone running hell for leather away from the cottage. I know you’re being followed, or you think you are, and I thought … I was afraid that maybe this person had tried to hurt you. I didn’t know you were leaning on the door. Are you sure you don’t need a doctor?’
‘Quite sure.’ Iris sighed. Perhaps she was still feeling dizzy from the blow. Or perhaps the difficult, painful encounter with Billy had messed with her head. Whatever the reason, she found herself reaching up and stroking Graham’s face.
He hesitated for a moment, smiled, then took her hand and kissed it.
‘I think I might love you,’ Iris said softly.
Graham’s smile broadened. ‘You think you might?’
Iris tried to nod, but it hurt her head. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly instead, closing her eyes.
‘I think I might love you too,’ said Graham.
Iris felt his lips on hers, and felt happy and safe and other things that she hadn’t felt in a long, long time. She waited for the guilt to hit her and spoil everything, but it didn’t.
‘Will you stay?’ she whispered between kisses.
‘Try and stop me,’ Graham whispered back. ‘I think we’ve waited long enough, Iris. Don’t you?’
Later, Iris would look back and remember the date: 12 February.
The beginning of the beginning.
The night Graham Feeney brought her back to life.
Chapter Nineteen
Jenna Wetherby pulled her orange Zara wrap more tightly around her shoulders and tried to tell herself that she was shivering with cold rather than abject terror. It was certainly a possibility. The mercury in London this Valentine’s Day morning had dropped to below zero for the first time in several years. Walking down the narrow lanes towards the Thames, past newsagents’ windows full of cheesy Valentine’s cards and naff teddies clutching sateen hearts, Jenna could see her own breath form into little clouds before her. It was the perfect weather for lovers to cling to one another, curled up indoors with a glass of champagne in front of a roaring fire.
For Jenna and Marcus, however, there would be no champagne, and no roaring fire. Because today was the day when Jenna could take it no longer. Today was the day she needed to know. The day she would know, she told herself firmly, stifling the frightened voice inside telling her to stop this nonsense now, immediately, before it was too late, to go back home and pretend everything was all right and ‘drop it’, as she’d promised Marcus she would.
Another promise broken.
But then Marcus knew all about broken promises, didn’t he?
If Marcus had kept his promises, none of this would be happening.
Weaving through the Embankment traffic, Jenna crossed Waterloo Bridge, forcing her mind to go blank until she reached her destination, the nondescript grey-white tower block of Television Centre. Standing outside the traffic barrier, hopping from foot to foot against the cold, Jenna checked her watch: 11.50 a.m. It wasn’t long before the first trickle of staff came out for their lunch breaks: gaggles of giggling interns in their cheap H&M boots and coats; older, seasoned technical workers, cameramen and sound guys and computer technicians, for whom the ‘glamour’ of a job in television had long since worn off; the occasional well-dressed presenter or producer, darting off for meetings at the Oxo Tower or one of the overpriced foodie restaurants along the South Bank.
It was twelve thirty on the dot when Rachel Truebridge emerged. Elegantly dressed in a long black wool skirt and matching polo-neck sweater, she was chatting to a female colleague as she passed the barrier, oblivious to Jenna’s presence.
‘Rachel!’ Jenna called out. Her nerves were at fever pitch, but she’d come this far.
‘Yes?’ Rachel turned round and looked at her blankly. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m Jenna Wetherby. Marcus Wetherby’s wife.’
Rachel’s face darkened. ‘I’m afraid I’ve nothing to say to you.’ She started to walk away.
Jenna chased after her, grabbing her by the shoulder. ‘Well, I have something to say to you,’ she blurted angrily. ‘I want to know how long you’ve been having an affair with my husband.’
Rachel’s friend looked from Rachel to Jenna open-mouthed.
‘It’s all right, Angela. You go on,’ Rachel said calmly. ‘I’ll see you back at the studio.’
She waited for her colleague to leave before turning back to Jenna.
‘Let’s walk and talk,’ she said, her apparent confidence rather throwing Jenna off her stride. ‘There’s a park a few streets down. Come on.’
Not sure
what else to do, Jenna followed in silence as Rachel headed towards the wrought-iron park gates. The small strip of green was almost deserted, and surprisingly quiet, given that it was wedged between busy roads and office blocks.
‘I’m not having an affair with Marcus,’ Rachel opened robustly. ‘That’s the first thing you need to know.’
Jenna eyed her suspiciously. ‘Have you ever had an affair with him? A fling?’
‘No!’ Rachel laughed.
‘I don’t see what’s so funny about it,’ Jenna said, stung. ‘It was obvious at Dom’s funeral that the two of you know each other, and not just casually. And at the Christmas Eve party, the night before Dom died, when you showed up at the Mill, Marcus looked like he’d seen a ghost. Why?’
Rachel looked at Jenna’s angry, anxious face and felt a wave of pity. She was an attractive girl, but the deep shadows under her eyes and worry lines on her gaunt face bore testament to how much she’d been torturing herself. It was time to put her out of her misery.
‘I’ll tell you why,’ she said, earnestly. ‘But only on the understanding that this stays between us. I don’t want the media sniffing around my door, or the police. This is my private life. OK?’
Jenna nodded curtly. She hadn’t been prepared for liking Rachel, but there was an honesty about her, a directness that was hard to resist.
‘I had an affair with Dom,’ said Rachel, her boots crunching on the gravel path as she walked. ‘I’m not proud of it, but it happened. We’d been working on Grimshaw together for a number of years. At the time, I was in love with him.’
Jenna listened in silence. If she found it strange that this poised, beautiful, articulate young woman should fall in love with Jenna’s charismatic but much, much older father-in-law, she didn’t say so. Dom’s effect on the opposite sex was well documented, whether Jenna understood it or not.
‘In any event, I had no expectations, as they say. I knew he wasn’t about to leave his wife or anything like that. But I was shocked when it ended and Dom had me fired from the show. Shocked and, well, furious. I wasn’t going to have that.’
‘So how does Marcus come into it?’ asked Jenna, who sympathised, if what Rachel was saying was the truth. And she could imagine it might be. Dom certainly had a ruthless streak when it came to work, or to protecting his own interests generally.
‘I told Dom I would go to the press about our affair if he didn’t reinstate me as producer on Grimshaw’s Goodbye,’ said Rachel.
‘But he didn’t,’ said Jenna.
‘No.’ There was no hiding the bitterness in Rachel’s voice. ‘He didn’t. The bastard called my bluff in the end. But he must have been worried enough to confide in his son about it, because one night in early December, Marcus came to see me. He just showed up at my flat unannounced and started shouting. Calling me a whore and a gold-digger and a blackmailer and God only knows what. He was vile, actually,’ she told Jenna defiantly. ‘I told him to leave and he refused. He became very angry and violent, pushing me, accusing me of trying to destroy his mother’s life. This is in my own flat, mind you. We ended up fighting, physically. I scratched him on the face and a neighbour threatened to call the police and he left. I don’t know to this day if Dom sent him, if he even knew about it. At the party on Christmas Eve, he claimed he didn’t, but then Dom claimed a lot of things that weren’t true.’
Jenna took all this in. It made sense. The timing, the scratch to Marcus’s face, his lies about that. Jenna knew better than anyone how hard it would have been for Marcus to admit to her what she already knew: that his parents’ marriage was far from perfect, that the blissful Wetherby family idyll at the Mill might be about to collapse around their ears like a house of cards in a breeze.
‘Why was he so upset at the funeral?’ asked Jenna.
‘He thought I shouldn’t be there,’ said Rachel. ‘I suppose he was right, in a way. But the thing is, despite everything, a part of me still loved Dom. We’d shared a lot together and I … I wanted to say goodbye.’
To Jenna’s surprise, she saw that Rachel’s eyes were welling with tears.
‘I understand Marcus wanting to protect his mother, I do, but threatening me? The way he sees his mother…’ she went on. ‘I never wanted to hurt Ariadne, only to protect myself, my life, my career. The only real villain in all this was Dom. But your husband enabled him. I’m afraid I’m not a fan of your husband.’
The two women completed their circuit of the park, mostly in silence, and walked back towards Rachel’s office. At a café on the corner, Rachel stopped. ‘This is me,’ she told Jenna. ‘I still haven’t eaten.’
‘Of course,’ said Jenna. ‘Thank you for talking to me.’
They shook hands and Rachel went inside while Jenna walked back towards the river, oddly deflated. The interview had not gone at all as she’d expected. She felt a mix of emotions, chief among them relief. She believed Rachel when she said that she and Marcus had never had an affair. And that, surely, was the main thing. And yet much of the behaviour Rachel described still troubled Jenna deeply. Dom had always been a bully. Charming, but a bully nonetheless. But Jenna had always thought of Marcus as better than that. Kinder. More decent. And yet whenever his mother was concerned, all bets were off.
What had Rachel said? ‘The way he sees his mother…’
It’s not normal, thought Jenna. It’s not.
It was time to talk to Marcus. Whether he liked it or not.
* * *
As soon as the double doors closed behind her, Rachel tapped the familiar number into her phone.
‘I can’t talk now.’
His voice was the same as it had been the first time. Businesslike. Clipped. Dismissive. Yet for all his brusqueness, he was as deep in all this as she was. Deeper, in fact. And he knew it.
He’d started it.
‘Call me back when you can,’ Rachel snapped, her irritation mirroring his. ‘And don’t wait too long. It’s important.’
She hung up.
* * *
To Jenna’s surprise, Marcus took the news about her visit to Rachel Truebridge quite well.
‘I knew something was up when you booked this place,’ he said, glancing around the expensive Italian eatery Jenna had brought them to for a ‘Valentine’s Day dinner’. ‘You hate Hallmark holidays.’
‘I do,’ she admitted, relieved for the second time that day that her marriage was apparently not about to unravel after all. ‘But I thought we should talk out of the house. In case things got heated.’
‘Heaven forbid,’ said Marcus, smiling back and taking her hand. ‘So what did she say?’
Jenna recounted their conversation close to verbatim, only slightly toning down the part where Rachel cast aspersions on Marcus’s relationship with Ariadne, mostly because it sounded so much like Jenna’s own point of view she worried he wouldn’t believe the words came from an outsider.
Marcus listened patiently, frowning occasionally but not interrupting. Like Jenna, he felt battered and exhausted by their estrangement in recent weeks, especially with the added pressure of the murder investigation still hanging over everything. It was imperative he tread carefully tonight. That he pull his wife closer, not push her away.
‘OK,’ he said, once Jenna had finished. ‘So a lot of what she told you was true. I’ll admit that.’
‘I liked her,’ said Jenna. ‘I didn’t expect to, but I thought she was honest. Brave, even.’
‘Well, hold on,’ said Marcus, raising a finger in caution. ‘Before you go awarding her the Nobel Peace Prize, there was stuff she left out, Jen. Important stuff.’
Jenna raised an eyebrow. She was prepared to believe this new, calmer, kinder Marcus, or at least to hear him out. ‘Such as?’
‘Such as the small matter of her blackmailing Dad.’
‘You mean threatening to go to the press about the affair if Dom sacked her?’ said Jenna. ‘She told me about that. Although I’m not sure I’d call it blackmail. More self-defence. What y
our father was doing was outrageous, Marcus. And anyway, she never went through with it.’
‘Not that,’ said Marcus, taking a fortifying sip of wine. ‘Months before the sacking thing, before the affair was even over, she was threatening him. Touting around some cock-and-bull story about Grimshaw not being Dad’s original work. About him stealing the idea from another writer.’
Jenna frowned. ‘Come on. Really? What evidence did she have?’
‘None!’ said Marcus. ‘How could she have any evidence? It’s bollocks. Dad was writing notes for the first Grimshaw book in his teens, for God’s sake. Mum still has those notebooks at the Mill.’
‘Then why threaten him?’ asked Jenna. ‘It doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Sure it does. This is the British media we’re talking about,’ said Marcus. ‘The tabloids. You don’t need evidence. You need rumour. Insinuation. Let’s face it, ideas are ten a penny. And it’s not as if Grimshaw is an original idea. He’s a detective, solving murders. Any Tom, Dick or Harry could say, “I thought of that plot”, or, “I thought of that character. You stole it from me.” A couple of sob stories in the Daily Mail is all it would have taken to destroy Dad’s reputation. He knew it and so did she. I’m telling you, Jenna, that woman was extorting him. The only thing Rachel Truebridge ever wanted out of Dad was money. He didn’t fire her because their affair ended. He fired her because she was a lying, scheming, manipulative bitch. He stood up to her. And I supported that, but at the same time I was worried about Mum. So yes, I probably handled it badly. But I’m not the bad guy here, and Rachel Truebridge sure as hell isn’t the feminist heroine.’
Jenna sat back, thinking. Marcus seemed so plausible. But then so had Rachel, when they met today. They couldn’t both be telling the truth.
‘Why did you lie to me about the scratch on your face?’ Jenna asked him directly.
‘I don’t know.’ For the first time all evening he sounded unsure of himself. ‘I shouldn’t have. I panicked.’