Wink Murder

by Ali Knight

  I begin the hunt through my house with the certainty of one who cannot lose. I know this place so intimately, every hiding hole, every dent, which way the floors slope and how toys roll across them, which corners gather dust, where the ants come in. If he’s hidden something he doesn’t stand a chance. An hour and a half later in the gloom of early evening I have to cross into enemy territory and start on the shed. It is meticulously tidy, a thudding contrast to the chaos he lives in across the garden with me. I pick up carefully rolled balls of garden string, open the lawnmower, cleaned and put away for the winter. He can be quite a different personality if he chooses to be. This thought does not offer me comfort. As I’m yanking at a rake I hear my name being called.

  A canal runs along the back of our garden with the towpath on the far side. Paul loved that canal when we first saw the house, it fitted neatly with his fantasies of perfect childhoods – he’d teach Josh to fish there, spot dragonflies, get a boat. I loved the house but I’m scared of water and was suspicious of the mooring rights just beyond our back fence. But Paul got his way and we bought the house. Funny how things turn out, because it’s me who loves the canal now – the craft that trawl up and down, transporting plastic barrels and trailing weeds, the bearded men in their narrowboats who stop for a few days before travelling on through the old transport arteries of England, the occasional cyclist who waves from the towpath.

  I come out of the shed, dusting grass clippings off my shoulders. ‘Hello, Marcus.’ Six months after we bought the house, we bought the mooring rights and Paul found an old narrowboat in Worcester. The Marie Rose has floated at the end of our garden ever since, serving for a while as overflow offices of Forwood and now rented to Max and Marcus, student friends of friends. Paul and I speculated for several weeks whether they were gay, but Jessie put us straight by sleeping with Max the first time she met him at a barbeque in our garden. She appeared in our kitchen the following morning looking a perfect combination of mischievous and ashamed. Sipping strong black coffee to alleviate her pounding head she christened Max and Marcus the M&Ms, ‘because they’re good enough to eat’.

  Marcus holds up a hand and waves, one foot looking like it’s sprouting from a plant pot and the other out of an old bicycle wheel. ‘Something in there you can’t find?’

  ‘My life?’ His boyish grin lights me temporarily before I sink back on to the fence, suddenly exhausted. ‘How are things with you?’

  Marcus scratches his chest through his T-shirt, which has the name of a band I don’t know on it. ‘Yeah, great, really great. We were at a party that lasted two days . . . no wait, maybe three. It was . . . you know.’ He shrugs, which makes me smile. Time, such a concern of parents – and of suspicious wives. I make a note that he wasn’t here to see Paul drown the scarf – or a weapon.

  ‘Is Max with you?’ In answer a head pops up from the cabin and a long body follows. He rubs sleep from his eyes. ‘Just got up, I take it?’ He yawns and a maternal fondness for my perfect lodgers lifts my sunken mood. Max and Marcus, everything twenty-two-year-olds should be: beautiful, carefree, attracted to the bucolic – and helpful. They’d been in the boat about two weeks when Paul needed help felling a pine and the three of them eventually brought it crashing down across our lawn as the kids and I cowered in the house. Josh fell in love then and there. Max is the only person to get Josh away from the computer; he played catch with him for hours, sitting on his deck in an old chair as Josh rushed back and forth like a terrier picking up the ball he kept dropping.

  Cassidy was horrified when I told her about the lovely young men living over the back fence. ‘Having to put on make-up to go into your own garden is a real drag,’ she said. But Cassidy didn’t understand that Max and Marcus served a much more useful function – they made me feel young again.

  ‘Is there anything you need?’ asks Marcus. He’s referring to my shed-banging.

  ‘Oh. I lost my scarf,’ I say.

  ‘I’ve got one. You can have mine if you like.’

  I protest politely. ‘It’s not like I haven’t got about ten back there.’ I gesture at my house, groaning with possessions, and feel embarrassed. Were Paul and I ever this carefree, pared down to life’s essentials? As I walk up the garden the day’s last rays of sunlight are blocked by the shadow of our tall house.

  An hour later I am picking bags out of the grey wheelie bin, sorting through a week’s supply of chicken bones and tea bags, curry boxes and yoghurt pots, my frustration leaping at every turn. I am empty-handed, the scarf nowhere to be found. I let out an incoherent roar and burst into tears.

  I wash my hands, carefully scrubbing away the smell of putrefying waste. A strong headache starts throbbing in my brain. Paul washed blood down this sink only a few days ago. I get out the Cif and scrub the enamel so hard my fingers ache. I pour bleach down the outside drain. My hands are shaking. Get a grip, Kate, get a grip.

  12

  A suspicious mind has an appalling clarity. Paul comes home from work and hugs me tightly for a long time. The afternoon was draining as the news of Melody’s death jumped from desk to desk – a forest fire in dry brush. I tell him I’m sorry and he hugs me tighter. Unexpectedly tears spring to my eyes and he releases me only when Ava interrupts us. He pours two hefty glasses of wine and I watch him pull up a chair and tuck into the dinner I’ve made.

  He chews for some moments in silence. ‘This is good. I’m starving, is there any more?’ I nod and empty out a dish as he leans forward for some water. I spot the outline of his phone in his trouser pocket. I study it as if I have X-ray vision. ‘Tell me something normal, something nice and . . . ordinary. What did you do today, honey?’

  I consider replying with ‘realised that you might have murdered your lover’ but instead I shrug, non-committal. I spent the early evening rehearsing what I was going to say to him, but when he catapulted into the house I was struck dumb, lacking the vocabulary to even know how to confront him. ‘Max and Marcus have been on a three-day bender.’

  He smiles. ‘Must mean summer’s on its way. You renewed the travel insurance?’ I listen to him scrape his plate clean, watch him wipe his mouth with a napkin, dig something out from under his nail. He’s snuggled down in safe, domestic territory. We’ll be discussing which hedge trimmer to buy or relating that the light in the fridge has gone next; the banal, unthreatening details that underpin a relationship over the years. I like life like this.

  Any next step I take will mean drama, and I need to be sure, very, very sure, so I listen and observe. I track him with my ears around the house. He reads Ava a story and I stand below them in the hallway, listening to the floorboards creak. He is sitting on her bed. He talks to Josh about gladiators, says he’ll take him to the Colosseum one day. The future. I cannot imagine anything except this moment now as I hunt mercilessly for clues and signs. Were you really feigning being drunk that night? Did you only pretend to pass out, and if so, why? I can tell he’s opening the cupboard in Josh’s room. You won’t find what you’re looking for in there, Paul.

  I go in to say goodnight to Ava, sit down on the Cinderella duvet, lean over to kiss her, am enveloped in her freshly baked biscuit scent, and something hard is jabbing me in the leg. It is Paul’s phone, spilled from his pocket while he read Angelina Ballerina. Trust. I guess that’s the opposite of suspicion. It takes years to learn to trust, Paul, and it can be destroyed in a moment, that moment when you fell on our kitchen floor, to be exact. My sweat wets the metal as I grip the phone. Do you trust me, Paul? I turn out Ava’s light and stand in the corridor, senses alert, not unlike that terrible night when this all first started. The TV is on, you are not upstairs. I scroll through forty-seven texts from work, your family, your friends, every compartment of your life. I find three texts from Melody, all sent on the same evening. ‘Please call me,’ is all they say.

  ‘Here, I found your phone. You need to be more careful with it.’ He looks up from a rerun of Grand Designs in surprise.

  ‘Where w
as it?’

  ‘On Ava’s bed.’ I throw it on to the sofa dismissively.

  He grunts and shoves it back in his pocket. We watch a glass building being erected by a lake. ‘You know, we could build our own house now. Have something exactly as we like.’ I nod carefully. ‘Maybe we should move to the country, get away from all this stuff here.’ I watch my husband from the corner of my eye.

  ‘What about your work?’

  He almost looks sad. ‘Once the full two years is up and the final part of the sale is completed, I won’t have to work any more.’

  ‘What about my work?’

  He turns to me in wide-eyed surprise, scratching the back of his head. ‘You’re really into it, aren’t you?’ I nod. He pauses for a moment and then flashes his brilliant smile. ‘Tell you what, we’ll found a new husband-and-wife company and dream up TV programmes together as the sheep bleat outside. That way, you can work and I can spend more time with you and the kids.’ Maybe there is a window open somewhere, a door that stands ajar, because at that moment a shiver passes right down my spine.

  We watch a lot of TV in our house, hours and hours of the stuff. It’s fair to say Paul and I love TV. Not for us the daily battle to stop the kids slouching down in front of CBeebies. Paul rightly scoffs at contempories whose livelihood is television but who refuse to let their own children play with the remote. Hypocrisy is so dull. TV is in his blood, it’s his passion and it has become mine too. I love that it transports me to other worlds, terrifies and excites me, and that I don’t even have to leave my own sofa to live. Today it’s doing the job of cheering me up because it’s making me feel superior, so when Paul rings around ten and tells me over the jeers on The Jeremy Kyle Show to get the news on now I just reach out contentedly for the remote control.

  ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘No. Melody was strangled.’

  I shift awkwardly in my seat. ‘We already know that, Paul.’

  ‘With a white rope with frayed ends.’ I can’t vocalise my shock and stare dumbly at the pen and sheaf of paper in the newscaster’s hands. ‘Kate, I’ve got to go.’ Paul is already talking to someone else as our connection is cut. He didn’t need to explain what this means. Gerry Bonacorsi killed his wife all those years ago by strangling her with the tools of his trade: his white magician’s rope, frayed artfully at either end.

  I sit hunched forward on the sofa, transfixed by the scenes unfolding before me. With few facts available speculation is allowed to run riot. A young reporter stands beside some bright green bushes near the spot where Melody was murdered; there’s a shot of a featureless building and talk of the Parole Board and the predictable clips from Inside-Out and police shots of Gerry. The next time I see Paul he is being interviewed on Sky News at lunchtime. Sarah phones just then to give me her support and we both listen to Paul defending Inside-Out. He stays cool under the relentless questioning in a dark jacket that he wasn’t wearing this morning. He keeps a couple of suits at the office for the times when the media outlets come calling for a quote. Words such as ‘guilt’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘copycat’ ricochet angrily between the news anchor and my husband.

  ‘I’m not sure you’re going to see much of Paul in the next few days,’ Sarah says.

  I groan. Reality TV is a volatile beast. It made Forwood into the success it is enjoys today, but like a wild animal, it can eat its young. The news anchor rams home her point: ‘Is this not one of the worst examples of the media highlighting a heinous crime which an unstable attention-seeker has decided to copy—?’

  ‘It is far too early to draw any conclusions, as the police have been saying all day,’ Paul counters.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Sarah says, ‘this story could run in all sorts of directions.’

  I shake my head, even though I know she can’t see me. ‘And none of them are good.’

  We listen as the interview continues. ‘Do you concede, Mr Forman, that the alternative is even more horrifying: that the blanket coverage of Bonacorsi by your programme may have influenced the Parole Board into taking a wrong decision that has had catastrophic consequences—?’

  ‘No. I refute that—’

  ‘You’d think Bonacorsi had already been convicted, the way they’re carrying on,’ Sarah says.

  We don’t hear Paul’s full answer as the broadcast cuts clumsily to a police van speeding past a crowd of reporters somewhere in central London. Bonacorsi is being taken in for questioning.

  ‘His taste of freedom was brief,’ I say.

  Back in the studio they bring on the head of the Parole Board, who looks dumbfounded. ‘On days like this I’m glad I don’t have an important job,’ Sarah says, but her tone is wistful. ‘We’ll probably have to research all this for questions in the House,’ she adds. ‘Victims’ rights are the hot thing at the moment.’ I say nothing and stare at the hangdog eyes of the man who makes decisions that have life-and-death consequences. ‘So,’ asks Sarah, ‘do you think Bonacorsi did it? Was that folksy charm we saw on late-night telly all an act?’

  And to that question I have no answer. Now they’ve brought Paul back and he’s calmly defending the integrity of Inside-Out. He swings slowly from side to side in the studio chair; a face made for television with teeth to match. He’s in complete control. The gap between this image and him on the kitchen floor, mired in snot and blood, a colossus could not bridge.

  ‘Pitch-perfect presentation, Kate. He’s a pro,’ Sarah says in admiration.

  Paul went on a media-training course a few years ago because the interest in Forwood TV meant he was increasingly asked to do interviews. In theory the course told you about using the right body language, how to sell your story in a soundbite, dodge tough questions and not get rattled. A producer I knew was on the course with Paul and said to me in awe that he needed none of their advice. He was the best they’d ever seen – there was nothing he didn’t seem to know. The camera simply loved him. ‘He’s the perfect liar,’ I reply and Sarah laughs, but I didn’t mean it as a joke.

  The rest of the day slides by with nothing to anchor it. Later I go to school to pick up Josh and Ava. We are beaten home by the snails, the children bicker, my head throbs. Josh can’t believe that I let him play a game on my iPhone without complaint as I slump into a kitchen chair.

  ‘Mummy, will you plait my hair?’ Ava twists this way and that, in maximum-plead position. I reach for a bottle of white and a glass, heck it’s already five, where’s the harm?

  ‘Not today, sweetheart, Mummy doesn’t feel well.’ It’s as if a builder has told me my foundations, which I thought were solid, durable and unshakeable, have been burrowed under by an unknown pest and my cherished home is about to crumble to nothing.

  I suggest Ava dresses up and off she skips. I am alone in my kitchen, the queen of an empty kingdom. The wine tastes sour but on I glug. All my life I have wanted to be a mother. I liked my jobs, I fought for and enjoyed promotions and pay rises, dug in on one side or another at the battle lines of office politics; but they were jobs, not a career, something to pass the time before my real work began. But now both my children are at school the itch to define myself some other way is becoming fiercer. I know this is partly driven by fear, the fear that I have become out of date, outmanoeuvred by changing times and attitudes. Paul is constantly butting up against exciting concepts. Maybe I haven’t kept up. I slug back more wine, maudlin self-absorption taking over.

  I hear Ava clattering down the stairs in a pair of my high heels and I wipe away my self-pitying tears with the sleeve of my sweater. She drags her feet into the kitchen to keep my stilettos on. She is wearing fairy wings over her Snow White costume and has a twinkling crown on her head. Sometimes my love for my daughter catches me unawares.

  ‘Oh, Ava, you look so lovely.’

  ‘I can’t do it up,’ her dress is dragging on the floor behind her, Velcro fastenings flapping. I reach out to pull her to me, desperate to snuggle into her youth and innocence, to try to get some of that magic to rub
off on me. ‘This is my belt, can you tie it on for me?’

  In her flawless hand with the little dimples on the knuckles she is holding Paul’s scarf, reaching up so that a big, blotchy bloodstain is visible through her tiny fingers.

  ‘Where did you find this?’ I hear my voice coming from far away.

  ‘My dressing-up box.’

  ‘I tell you what, you can use my belt.’ Ava’s eyes open wide in excitement as I pull mine out of the loops on my jeans. ‘A special treat.’ I pull gently on Paul’s scarf, watch it spooling through her palm into my clutches. She lets go and takes my belt, skipping off into the living room.

  Paul’s scarf is cashmere with a bit of something trendy and pointless thrown in, rabbit wool, alpaca or pashmina, I think I once knew. It’s furry with fibres that stick up. It has a tasteful stripe and is not very long. I bought it for him last Christmas. What do you buy the man who has everything? The same things every year, because he keeps losing them. Paul makes even present-buying easy. A beautiful gay man carefully wrapped it in tissue paper for me and said, ‘May it keep him warm,’ as he handed over the heavy card bag with the thick rope handles. I know how you tie that scarf, Paul, tight around your neck and with the ends hanging short over your chest. The rust-coloured stain flowers like a toxic rose near one end, hard and brittle to the touch. It means whatever or whoever was bleeding was leaning against your chest, but you said to me you dragged that dog, that’s what you said, Paul, dragged it out of the road. I feel the panic ballooning in my chest.

  This is what he’s been looking for the past few days, and both he and I were foiled by our own daughter, who’d packed it away in the dressing-up box, her own piece of treasure. There must have been a lot of blood, fresh and free-flowing. I’ve lived with blood, Paul, as all women have. I started my periods when I was thirteen. I have been having periods for nearly twenty-five years, I have given birth to two children. Blood on cotton, lace, rayon, silk, wadding and paper, I know what blood looks like, how it spreads on my sheets, other people’s sheets, across knickers, into pyjamas and nighties and through the thickest part of denim jeans, even on to the checked seat of a London bus. So I know that stain soaked in deep and it soaked in fast. Did that someone have their arms around you? Was their face or were their lips close to yours? What were they saying? Were they pleading, begging, screaming or dying?