by Ali Knight
It takes hours to complete the task. The friend is chatty and frothy as she plays the video feed for me. Melody and her played together in a drama production at school when they were fifteen. It’s not good quality or interesting enough to use and I back out of the house without the tape, by now desperate to get home.
Paul phones as I walk the unfamiliar streets of this corner of south-east London. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Terrible.’ This is an understatement. I’ve got a throbbing headache and I feel faint. The only thing I’ve eaten all day is a BLT double-decker sandwich bought on the train. It sits like cement in my stomach and I worry it’s going to come back up the way it went down – fast. ‘This whole visit is a complete red herring.’
Paul makes sympathetic noises. ‘You need to get home and rest. I’m in Woolwich at the ferry terminal.’
‘What are you doing all the way out here?’
‘I had a job to do. Marcus is babysitting. You should be in bed, you’ve had a nasty shock.’
I thank him and trudge to the ferry terminal, my bruise banging against my skull with the same rhythm that my bag bangs against my hip. Maybe my decision not to go to hospital was pig-headed and hasty after all. When I arrive Paul is leaning against a railing. He wraps me in a hug, takes my bulky bag. ‘You shouldn’t have gone to work today. You’re not well.’ I slump against his shoulder but he holds me by the arms, a smile on his face. ‘But what a job you did with Gerry! Why didn’t you tell me you were hunting him down?’
I try to shrug nonchalantly, but I’m basking in his approval. ‘I didn’t know if I’d find him.’
‘Livvy is very impressed.’
‘Oh? She didn’t sound it on the phone.’
‘Oh come on! You know Livvy, she can’t say it, but she feels it.’
‘I guess you’re right.’
Paul pauses. ‘But, Kate, I think it’s important you don’t do things like that without telling me first in future, it could be dangerous. After all, I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you.’
I frown, and my bruise throbs. I’m ready to admit defeat. ‘Yeah, you’re right. Where’s the car?’
Paul tips his head across the river. ‘Over there. We can walk.’
‘Oh. Can’t we take the ferry?’ I’m exhausted and want to sit down.
‘It stops running at eight. Come on, you can see the other bank.’ He takes my arm and threads it through his and we head for the round brick building that houses the entrance to the Woolwich Tunnel. Paul starts for the stairwell.
‘Can we go down in the lift?’ I say, pressing the button. My legs feel leaden.
‘Look, they’re out of service,’ he says, pointing to a sign taped to the wall. ‘Come on, where’s your sense of adventure?’ I trail after him, as I’m used to Paul making decisions that are good ones and I’m too tired to think anything through, although I take one look at the rusty handrail and walk down unaided. We descend, going round and round the narrow staircase. I start to feel dizzy and have to slow, Paul moves out of sight below me. It seems a long way down. It doesn’t smell good, not good at all, here.
‘Paul?’ He doesn’t answer and I can’t hear his footsteps clanging on the metal stair treads. ‘Paul?’ I start hurrying after him and as if in response to my admission that I’m feeling scared the hairs on the back on my neck rise, making me gasp and stumble. I turn round, expecting something horrible, but there’s no one there.
‘This stairwell has one hundred steps’ I read at the top. I’ve walked maybe sixty, just over halfway. I want to retreat, travel the grinding miles home by train and bus, get out in the freezing air, but the drowsy warmth of the car is only a walk away, I can sleep like a child as Paul transports me back to the comforts of home. I grab the handrail and move my feet as quickly as a boxer with a skipping rope and run down the steps. I’m in danger of falling, and it will be bad if I do, but fear has set up shop inside my head and won’t be dislodged. I fly around the last curve and come up short, panting.
Paul is standing by the lift shaft. He looks serious. He’s holding my bag in the crook of his elbow and Melody’s blue folder is peeking out of the top. I haven’t had time to do anything with it, but Paul could easily have glanced at it and understood where it came from. ‘Is there anything you want to tell me, Kate?’ I’m trying to regain my breath. ‘Because I’d hate to think that we have secrets from each other.’ His arm shifts and my bag squishes, the corner of the cardboard poking up from the leather like a sail in stormy seas. I can’t reply. His eyes are cold as we stare at each other in silence. ‘Let’s go then.’
I turn and have to swallow the saliva that’s forming too fast in my mouth. A tunnel with dim and intermittent lighting leads away and down for a long distance before rising again so that it’s impossible to see the end. Perspective is playing tricks and the path ahead looks smaller and narrower with each step. My latent claustrophobia tightens its grip on my stomach. We are alone. I’ve lived in London over half my life. My mum can’t understand it, she calls it that ‘dreadful, dirty place,’ but I love it. It’s the most private place in the world. Wherever you go there’s a crowd, the comfort and the cover of strangers. I’ve never felt afraid, a remarkable achievement in a city this big, because I’ve never been alone. But down here, down in this tomb, there’s just Paul and me. No one can hear you scream. No one in their right minds (as my mum would say) would be here at 9.30 at night. No one of sound mind.
Paul heads off and we walk stiffly side by side. ‘I guess the Thames starts about here.’ I swallow again. We’re going deeper, the tarmac pathway descending at a shallow angle. ‘I wonder what the weight of the water is above us.’
‘Can we talk about something else?’ He’s doing this on purpose, trying to make me freak. Everyone has an Achilles heel and mine is water. I can’t swim. It’s one of life’s accomplishments that I never ticked off, like playing an instrument or learning to cook. Water terrifies me, drowning is the worst death I could imagine. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve had nightmares about trying to outrun tsunamis, though they were called tidal waves when I was small; stories about whirlpools made me cry. Paul knows all this, but he’s still trying to pull at the frayed edges of my peace of mind.
‘Imagine, during the bombing raids in the war they must have had to stay down here all night. There must have been hundreds of people in here.’
I change the subject – fast. ‘Who were you seeing in this part of town?’
‘An executive from the BBC.’
‘It’s a strange place to meet.’
‘He flew in to City Airport. It’s just up the road from the other side of this tunnel.’
‘Oh.’
‘Look, water!’ Paul reaches out to touch the grimy white tiles where a small leak has formed, puddling on the tarmac.
‘Come on, come on.’ I hurry past, desperate to get to the end of this interminable underground prison, trying to block out the vast weight of the Thames flowing above us – God, what if the lights go out?
‘It would be fun down here if the lights failed,’ Paul says. He’s holding my bag, nonchalantly strolling.
‘Stop it!’
‘What, don’t you trust me, Kate?’
And then with an understanding that stops my legs from moving I realise that he’s planning to do me harm. Five years ago, maybe six, images of a picnic on Hampstead Heath flood my brain. It was summer, a run of stifling city days that are seared in my memory because they’re so rare and precious. It was early evening, Josh was toddling about and Jessie was there with a friend who was talking about her acting course with great enthusiasm. She said they’d been learning that for actors to gel as a group on stage required a large amount of trust; they had to know that they could depend utterly on each other. They’d tried to build that trust by playing a game where they had to catch each other as they fell. She said it was fun so we played on the grass of the Heath in the early-evening sun, our shoulders bare and our necks sticky.
‘Come on, Eggy, fall backwards into my arms,’ Paul said. I hesitated, standing with my arms folded across my chest and looking anxiously behind me. ‘Come on!’ He took a step away, increasing the distance between us. ‘Don’t you trust me?’ He wiggled his fingers, beckoning me to put myself entirely at his mercy. His face was tanned and his teeth glowing.
‘Of course I trust you, but you’re too far back. I’m not that tall.’
‘I’ll catch you.’ And he’d said it again. ‘Don’t you trust me?’
‘Go on, Kate,’ urged Jessie, ‘you’ve got to take the risk. What’s the worst thing that can happen?’ And so I closed my eyes, made myself rigid and toppled backwards and heard his ‘Shit!’ too late and slammed painfully, shoulders first, into the sun-baked Heath. I lay there stunned, the breath knocked out of me, faces blocking the light as they peered over me.
He hadn’t caught me. I heard nervous, scandalised laughter and broken voices all at once but tuned into only one: the pleading voice of my husband trying to say sorry, trying to explain how it had all gone so wrong. ‘I thought that the final part of the fall is the most intense, I was trying to give you a thrill—’
‘Or a scare!’ someone added.
‘– and then catch you at the last minute—’
‘She’s gonna kill you for that! Jessie had said, shaking her head and trying to give me a glass of wine.
Most of our friends thought the whole thing was hilarious, but Paul and I hadn’t. He knew how I would be more than physically hurt by his mistake, that I would read into it a greater meaning about our relationship, that I wouldn’t forget and however hard I tried would find it hard to forgive.
The tunnel is rising now, we’re at the deepest part of the river. Our footsteps echo in the narrow space. How black is your heart, Paul? I watch the tilt of his head, it juts forward and down, his straight nose, which I’ve kissed from every conceivable angle, a vertical line, the crow’s feet beginning to form around eyes that I’ve seen crinkle with delight more times than it’s possible to count. His coat flaps open as ever. He stops and turns round, looking back the way we have come. Just as he always hoped, there’s no one here with us. Did you really set up your business partner and old friend, kill Melody for money, not for love?
Are you about to complete the plan and kill the mother of your children who conveniently gave you an alibi? Right here, right now? There was no one at the ferry terminal when I met you because the ferry had stopped. Not a soul saw me, passers-by in the street barely glanced my way. You would have come through here unnoticed, a stranger in a part of town we never visit, far from home. Lex’s words ring like a mantra in my head. ‘Someone set me up.’
On my interrogation course I watched a lot of police videos of suspects accused of all sorts of crimes, from shoplifting to murder. The crimes of passion were the worst (a man who bludgeoned his mother to death with an iron bar; a woman who stabbed her twin sister thirteen times with a kitchen knife) but to me they had an honesty that was understandable; passions unleashed by our beastly sides, the explosive anger that perhaps lies within all of us. Those killers had been overtaken by a momentary madness that condemned them to suicide watch on the anniversaries of those deaths, because what they did in that split second would haunt them for the rest of their lives. But setting someone up requires the darkest of dark hearts because it’s planned.
‘It’s awful down here, isn’t it?’ Paul says, coming closer to me. I stop and back up against the curved wall, the tiles cold against my bum. ‘You could get properly scared, Kate. Don’t ever walk here alone.’ His hand goes into his coat pocket and I can’t breathe.
He takes another step towards me, one of his shoes creaking in the silence as I stare into my husband’s face and at that moment the words from part of our wedding service spring from my mind with the clarity of a bell ringing on a clear Sunday morning. ‘Loving what I know of you, and trusting what I do not yet know.’ But what do I, in fact, know? Paul, I have lain next to you for ten years, I know where the sweat runs when you orgasm, I remember the look on your face when our children were yanked from my torn body, I have seen you shit and puke and shout with pain. I know your muscle spasms when you fall asleep, where the snot runs when grief occasionally overwhelms your sunny disposition, I feel your deepest fears and laugh at your most arrogant assumptions. I know you want to be cremated not buried, and that you hope Josh and Ava, by then polished and accomplished adults, and I will stand on a suitably stunning cliff in Devon and scatter your ashes to the westerlies.
I shared a life with you, created two new lives with you, expected to end my life with you, spent untold, uncountable hours with you, but as I stand here, deep under the river that flows through the city where we lived that life, I realise that I do not know you at all.
I don’t understand what you’re capable of, I cannot fathom your intent or your motives. You may be about to kill me or hug me, I can no longer tell. We have destroyed trust. I lied for you, perjured myself in an effort to preserve that perfect life, left Lex to his fate and . . . Oh, Melody, I’m sorry. At the time I thought the choice was not mine to make.
‘You look like you’re about to faint,’ Paul says, pulling a hanky from his pocket and handing it to me. I hold it to my face like a white flag of surrender. ‘Come on, lean on me and let’s get out of here.’
We get to the other end eventually and I can’t even manage a groan at the sandwich-board sign signalling that the lift north of the river is also out of service. I drag myself up the endless staircase past the urine puddles. My palm smells like blood from the rusty handrail. ‘Wait here, let me get the car,’ Paul says at the top of the exit. ‘I don’t want you walking any more.’ I collapse on a low wall and Paul hands me my bag.
‘Can you get me some water? There’s a shop over there.’
He strides down the road and across the street to the late-night Shop ’n’ Save and disappears under the neon sign. I pull out my mobile and O’Shea’s card and dial. Our conversation is short as I tell her that I want to change my statement and I briefly explain why. I hear a note of triumph in her voice: job done, she’s thinking. I’m still sitting in the same place when Paul returns.
I take deep gulps of Volvic when I’m settled in the passenger seat and then I’m asleep before we’ve even reached the end of the street.
29
They came in the morning as Paul was swishing a tea bag round his cup. Ava ran to open the door and they were down the hall as I came out to meet them. There were a lot of them: O’Shea and White, several other plain-clothes police and some in uniform. They busied into the kitchen and O’Shea was the one who told Paul they were arresting him. When he’d asked why they’d said ‘in the light of new information we’ve received’. He’d turned to me and stared wordlessly, still balancing the dripping tea bag on a spoon.
‘Let’s get it over with.’ He chucked the tea bag and spoon in the sink and walked to get his coat from the hall and then all hell broke loose. Josh started screaming. He ran after O’Shea as she followed Paul into the hall and punched her in the stomach.
‘Leave my dad alone!’ Paul was knocked into the coat stand and upended on the floor. One of the other policemen tried to grab Josh but he found large reserves of pre-teen energy and kicked out, eliciting a yelp of surprise and pain from the man.
Ava’s howls drowned out the clamour of several voices all competing at once.
‘Get your child under control,’ White snapped as too many adults barged and knocked into walls and each other in the confined space. Josh was lying on top of a shell-shocked Paul, clinging on as I tried to prise him away.
‘Don’t go, Daddy, don’t go,’ Josh wailed into Paul’s shoulder as my husband stared up at me, white-faced and mute. The platitudes that I would normally have clucked to bring this scene to a swift finale I couldn’t summon, I had no false succour for Josh and Ava. I couldn’t comfort or reassure my own children. There in the scratchy chaos of our elegan
t hallway was the proof that Paul loved his children and they loved him and it was me that was tearing them apart. I tried to conjure Melody’s face to give me the resolve to continue, but I could hear only my own terrified and heartbroken children. The life-threatening fear I felt deep underground yesterday hasn’t travelled with me to my home, but the truth is the only thing that can give me back my peace of mind.
‘Get him out of here,’ O’Shea commanded, or that’s what I think she said, Ava was screaming so loudly in my ear the crowd became artists performing mime.
Paul tried to stand and a policeman lifted Josh away, I didn’t have the heart to do it. Paul left the house flanked by two officers, Josh’s wails of ‘Daddy!’ ringing out behind him. Paul hadn’t said a word to me. O’Shea held the door shut with her foot as I locked us all in the house because Josh was trying to run down the path after his dad. She adjusted her flying shirt tails and folded back her hair. ‘I hate you!’ Josh screamed at me and he really meant it.
‘Charming,’ O’Shea responded sourly.
‘He’s a fighter!’ a jovial man in his forties remarked but was silenced by one look from O’Shea.
‘Give Mrs Forman a minute,’ O’Shea added, giving me a nod, but it took a lot longer than a minute to calm my distressed children. I took them to school to keep things as normal as possible but it’s hard doing simple things like helping them with their bags and lunch boxes when your heart has been ripped from your chest.
Now, four hours later, I’m sat on the sofa drinking whisky with shaking hands. I’ve sold out my family, repeated to O’Shea and a middle-aged man called DS Ben Samuels details of the late hour and the blood on Paul’s hands and handed them the scarf. O’Shea’s eyes were shining when I brought her that. I’ve saved her floundering murder inquiry, wiped the egg off quite a few police faces today. I’ve probably helped her get promoted. My house is being turned upside down as they search for ‘material relevant to the investigation’. I hear them rooting through cupboards; one officer is methodically pulling books off the shelf in front of me and flicking through them; someone in a white suit is in the toilet no doubt swabbing the grouting and poking Q-tips down the plughole.