The Second Wife

by Rebecca Fleet

  “It’s not stupid,” I say automatically. Internally, I can feel fury welling up, and I obviously don’t do as good a job of hiding it as I think, because Jade looks startled, her fingers plucking at the bedsheets uncertainly. “Sorry,” I say with an effort. “It’s just, well, it’s not fair, is it? It’s not right.”

  “Not fair?” Jade echoes.

  “Not right,” I repeat. I realize that I’m not sure how much Alex has told her, if anything. For all I know, she may have no idea that the man she’s talking about has any connection to my own past. In fact, the more I think about it the more I’m convinced he hasn’t said anything. If he had, then she, too, would be thinking this wasn’t fair. She’d be asking herself the same question that I’m sure must be going through Alex’s head: Why her? If this man has some kind of grudge against me, why is it Jade he’s targeting? I have an answer, of course. Because she’s an easy target. A naïve young girl who could be a convenient weapon of choice, given the right circumstances. I could say this to Alex, maybe, but not to her. I don’t want her wandering around in a permanent state of fear, on red alert.

  “Anyway,” Jade says, her voice distant now. I can tell she’s regretting this sudden show of vulnerability; it doesn’t fit with our relationship. We get on, but she keeps me at arm’s length. “It’ll get sorted now, won’t it. If there’s some weirdo been hanging round trying to torch my house and kill me, the police will be on to it now.” She speaks with what might be false bravado, but I suspect that there’s a core of belief in her own words. Now that the drama of the past few days has passed, she can’t conceive of a world in which justice might not be done, and in which the police wouldn’t be there waiting in the wings like avenging angels if danger ever came her way again. She has no idea.

  Impulsively, I lean across the bed and take her hand in mine. I feel her muscles stiffen for an instant, but she doesn’t pull it away.

  “I understand how you’re feeling,” I say. “I was luckier than you, but I was there, too, at the fire. We’ve been through it together, and we’re the only two people who know what it was like. It was horrible, but in a way it brings us closer, doesn’t it? It’s . . . bonding. Something like that. Don’t you think?” I squeeze her hand, maybe a little too hard. And I find that I am holding my breath, really wanting her to say yes.

  “Uh-huh,” she says, but her eyes are blank.

  * * *

  • • •

  THAT EVENING Alex and I order room service at the hotel. The trays arrive topped by silver-domed servers, flanked by ostentatiously folded napkins, though the food underneath is likely to be pretty basic. The porter places our trays ceremoniously on the little table and retreats gravely without a word. I pull a chair up and sit down, smiling tentatively at Alex as I whip the servers off with a flourish.

  “And tonight,” I say in a bad French accent, “we have fillet of plaice with pommes frites. You are in for a treat, monsieur . . .”

  Alex laughs, but there’s no real warmth to it. He sits down opposite me and starts eating; fast, rhythmically, pushing forkful after forkful into his mouth in a way that suggests he’s barely tasting it. After a couple of minutes he catches me watching him and shrugs. “Sorry. Just hungry. I didn’t get much lunch.”

  I make a vague noise of acquiescence but anxiety is building within me. This wasn’t how I had envisaged this evening. I’d hoped that we might be able to shake off everything that’s been weighing us down, just for an hour or two, and that I could remind him what it was really like between us. The odds are against me, though, in this setting. I glance round at the sterile white walls, the basic furnishings. Staying in hotels is all right, when you’ve got a home to go back to.

  “So you went to the office this afternoon?” I ask after a while, when Alex has demolished his fish and chips and is staring at the plate with a look of prickly dissatisfaction. “How was everything?”

  Slowly, he nods. “All fine,” he says. “Gav had a proposal he needed to get out the door and . . .” He trails off. Silence settles between us and he takes an audible breath, pushing a hand back through his hair and rubbing the back of his neck. “No,” he says eventually. “I didn’t go to the office.”

  I taste something sour at the back of my throat. “You didn’t? Where did you go, then?” Normally I’d make an effort to keep these words light and nonthreatening, but right now I can’t think about niceties. For a stupid moment, I think he’s going to tell me he’s been with another woman. But this is Alex. He’d never do that. So why lie?

  He’s looking me full in the face now, with something like remorse in his expression, and yet when he speaks again his tone is defiant. “You didn’t want to talk to me,” he says. “You dump all this on me, this stuff about you having changed your name and started a new life, about you having a sister I didn’t even know about, and you make references to something bad that’s happened in the past, but you didn’t really tell me anything. How do you think that makes me feel, when my daughter’s in the hospital and my house has been all but burned to the ground and it sounds like it might be because of you?”

  I gasp, feeling winded. There’s a vicious emphasis on that “you,” and I’ve never heard him speak like this before. “I’m sorry,” I begin. “I would have talked to you—I will talk to you. It’s just not easy, after all this time . . .”

  “I know,” he interrupts, and his voice is softer now, the anger gone from his eyes as fast as it came. “Look, I’m trying to explain why I did what I did today. I felt I needed to take things into my own hands. I did some research on the internet, and I found out about the man you told me about—Kaspar. I found out where he was, and I went to visit him.”

  He says it so quietly, with unvarnished simplicity, that at first it doesn’t compute. My body gets there faster than my mind does, my heartbeat quickening, my fingers curling into fists. “You went to visit him?” I repeat. And saying it out loud brings it home. I look at Alex—my husband—and it’s as if that other face is imprinted on his, just for an instant. My husband has been in the same room as Kas, today. Nausea swells inside me. “What the hell were you thinking?” I ask. If I’d been asked beforehand how I’d feel if this happened, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine it, but now that it has, it seems my overriding feeling is that it’s my turn to be angry. I don’t even know exactly why, can’t stop to unpick it—there’s only this white-hot sense of incredulity and rage rising inside me. “How could you do something like that?” I spit. “How could you be so stupid?”

  Alex pushes back his chair and glares at me. “I’m trying to protect my family, Natalie. You and Jade. How can I do that if I don’t have a bloody clue what’s going on? I needed answers that you weren’t giving me.”

  “And did you get them?” I fire back. “What did he say to you?” Trying to imagine this conversation is making my brain feel like it’s about to explode. I don’t want to know what they talked about. I don’t want my husband anywhere near Kas, and yet another part of me is desperate to hear every detail. “Did you get your answers?” I push him again.

  He looks diffident for a moment, drops his gaze. “Not entirely,” he admits.

  “Well, there’s a fucking surprise.” Abruptly, I stand up and go over to the window. This room feels hot and airless. I push the window open, savagely drawing in breath in the hope that the sea breeze will clear my head. “Kas isn’t the sort of man you just—just drop in on,” I say. “If anything, you’ve probably put us in more danger. He’s a maniac—he’s a murderer.”

  “I know that now,” Alex says. “But I wouldn’t have, would I, if I’d hung around doing nothing?”

  I’m silent, thinking, looking out across the rolling darkness of the sea. I can see Alex’s reflection behind me, the shadowy outline of his body standing just behind me, so close that I can smell the aftershave he wears. “I know what you’re saying, but I still don’t think you did the ri
ght thing.” My throat feels choked up and I realize I might be close to tears.

  “You knew he was in prison, didn’t you?” he asks.

  I think about denying it, then shrug. It doesn’t matter now. “Of course I did.” I turn round to face him, leaning my head back against the wall. Memories are dragging me back. The polished, gleaming wood of the courtroom, with its strange orange-tinted light. The faces of the jury, neutral and expressionless, bored almost. And the sight of Kas in the witness box, the contained fury that shone out of him; the overt restraint with which he spat out every word. “I helped to put him there.”

  PART FOUR

  RACHEL

  JANUARY 2000

  She’s only a few yards away, standing under the station’s archway at the entrance to the platform, but it feels as if she’s watching from behind reinforced glass, or through some remote TV linkup—as if this scene has nothing to do with her beyond the fact that it happens to be in her line of vision. She sees Sadie striding up to the woman in the shiny red plastic coat, sees the defiant tilt of her head as she begins to speak. She can even hear the words, or most of them. She listens and she watches, witnesses the brittle interchange of tensions, and still she is strangely detached. If she’s conscious of feeling anything, it’s the discomfort of the night air, the thinness of her tights an ineffectual barrier against the cold. She wishes she weren’t standing here.

  And then everything changes.

  Rachel sees her sister lunge forward, her fingernails clawing indiscriminately at the other woman’s face. The savage instinct with which the woman fights back despite the precarious high heels she’s wearing, her hands tearing at Sadie’s hair. She sees that the woman is veering close to the edge of the platform, her feet slipping. It’s the speed of it all that paralyzes her, at first; the way in which the situation has abruptly kicked up a gear. And then she is momentarily distracted—seeing a gleam of light in the distance down the track, her eyes flicking to pinpoint its source. The train is coming.

  This is the moment. This is the time at which she could, at which she should, step forward and issue a warning. She knows in that instant that if she were to do so, it would be enough. Enough to make both women turn, to catch them off guard; enough to break their scuffle and draw them away from the platform’s edge. The course of action is obvious. Imperative.

  But along with this realization comes another. In these few split seconds, she knows that what could happen here has the power to change everything. And isn’t that what she’s been waiting for, hoping for? For something to stop her sister in her tracks and reach the end of the collision course she’s been hurtling on for years, no matter how violent a landing it might be? She finds herself flashing back over the past few years—the sickening lurching up and down of the roller coaster that Sadie lives on, the one she’s dragged Rachel unwillingly onto as well. The desire for something to make this stop is so powerful that it takes her over entirely.

  And so she does nothing. Nothing at all. She continues to watch.

  When she looks back in the days to come, she will start to piece together exactly what it is that she sees. Whether her sister’s arm is raising itself in defense or attack, whether the way in which it swings sharply to the left across the other woman’s body is calculated or involuntary. But right now, there is no judgment. She simply sees that movement, and its impact; sees the woman stumble and fall to her knees, skidding forward, and then the slow-motion moment in which she tumbles onto the track. The perfect coalescence of this moment with the headlights’ approach, impossibly fast, a blare of violent light and speed. And then the brutal, ugly jolt that the train gives, the slamming of brakes that comes too late, and the screaming. She isn’t sure who the noise is coming from, will never be sure. But it’s shrill and loud and almost animal, and it drags her hard into reality—as if she’s being pulled by her hair from her bed, from the deepest sleep she’s ever had. She moves forward, toward Sadie, away from the archway.

  It’s almost midnight but the train is half full and the passengers are gathering at the doors, their faces etched with shock and concern, stabbing at the door-release buttons without success, mouthing at each other, trying to determine what has happened. The driver is running down the platform toward them. He is several cars away, and Rachel realizes that he must have driven straight over the woman as he braked, that a single human body is nowhere near enough to stop a train in its tracks. It probably takes only ten seconds for him to reach them, but it feels like a lifetime, and in those seconds she looks at her sister for the first time. Sadie’s face is white, unearthly. Her eyes are wide, blinking in staccato rhythm. Shock has made her expression unreadable. But she’s looking straight at Rachel, her focus unbroken, as if she’s waiting for something.

  Before she can think what this might be, the driver is there, his feet pounding to where they are standing. He’s gray-haired, in his fifties; a small man with a paunch, dressed in a navy blue uniform. Despite the cold, he’s sweating. She can see it rolling down his forehead, soaking the collar of his shirt.

  “Oh my God,” he says hoarsely. “What the fuck happened?”

  Sadie wheels round and stares at him, and now she’s crying, gasping for breath. “It was an accident,” she shouts. “It was an accident.” Her thin arms are wrapped around herself, as if she’s trying to hold her body together. She moves toward Rachel and leans in, and Rachel finds that she is putting her arms around her, holding her in what must look like comfort—what is comfort, maybe. Even from the inside, it’s hard to tell.

  “I’m calling the police,” the driver says. His hands are shaking. He pulls a phone from his pocket and jabs at it, veering away up the platform, his voice hushed and broken as he begins to speak.

  Sadie pulls back, her fingers plucking insistently at Rachel’s arm. “We should go,” she whispers jerkily. “We need to go.”

  Jolted, Rachel almost laughs. “We can’t do that,” she says. “We have to stay here. We’ll need to talk to the police, give them a statement. You can’t just run off.”

  “But it was an accident!” Sadie interrupts plaintively. “I didn’t mean—I don’t . . .” Suddenly she slumps, looking around her vaguely. “I need to sit down.”

  At least this is better than running, Rachel thinks, and she sits down beside her sister on the platform and puts an arm tentatively around her shoulders. The concrete is smooth and cold, faintly sheened with ice. As she sits, she sees the blood. Spattering up the side of the track and onto the platform less than a yard away. She isn’t sure if Sadie has seen it, and she angles her body to block it from her view. She’s surprised by how cool her head is, how well she can deal with this.

  Her sister is muttering something, her head dipped to her knees, her shoulders shaking. Rachel makes some small noise of interrogation, and Sadie raises her head and speaks more clearly. “He’ll kill me,” she says clearly.

  There is a small strange moment of silence. Rachel turns the words over in her head. They should sound melodramatic, but somehow they don’t. “Who will?” she says.

  “Kas,” Sadie says. “You don’t understand. You don’t know him. He’ll kill me.” Her tears have dried up and her tone is soaked through with dread—fatalistic, certain.

  “But it was an accident,” Rachel says. “You just said.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Sadie shoots back. “You don’t know him,” she says again. “You don’t know what he’s done.” The words are pouring out of her now, as if a dam has been released. “He’s killed two people before, just the ones I know of—two men, George and Felix, people who used to work with him or for him, I don’t know, and I don’t even know why he did it, I think it was just to make an example of them, to show people that they couldn’t fuck with him and he wasn’t afraid of anyone. I saw it, I saw it with my own eyes!”

  “You saw it,” Rachel repeats. It’s difficult to take in, this onslaught of informa
tion, and she feels briefly dizzy. She has always known that there was more going on in her sister’s life than she was aware of, but she hadn’t gone this far in her imaginings. Even now, she can’t visualize what Sadie is telling her. The images that come to her are slapstick, almost comedic: Kas brandishing a gun with the sneer of a movie villain, her sister lurking in the background wringing her hands—or perhaps looking coolly and approvingly on. It makes no sense.

  Sadie is wiping her tears uselessly from her face, her fingertips streaking her cheeks with mascara. “I love him, I really do,” she says, “but he’s a . . .” She pauses, as if she’s testing the word inside her head. “He’s a murderer.”

  She is quiet then, her breath coming more slowly, and Rachel finds herself matching the rhythm of that breathing, wondering what she can say. But then she glimpses a movement out of the corner of her eye and when she turns round she sees the policemen—two of them, in uniform, striding toward the train driver who is now sitting hunched by the edge of the platform with his head between his knees. She thinks he might have been sick. One of the policemen crouches down beside him, speaks to him as he puts a hand on his shoulder. And the other is walking in their direction; a tall man who looks barely older than they are, with strawberry blond hair and pale, barely there eyebrows. His expression hovers uncomfortably somewhere between suspicion and sympathy.

  “Good evening, ladies,” he says. “I need to talk to you about what’s happened here.”