He looks at me, his head tilted to one side, his jaw tight and his eyes icy.
‘You know you don’t mean that, Jen,’ he says, sipping more wine. ‘This arrangement suits us both. I was thinking, we should make it longer-term. There’s no point you and Kieran rattling around in this huge place by yourselves.’
‘It’s not happening,’ I say, standing up to clear my plate. ‘I don’t even know you. You’re just some guy I met in a bar and—’
‘Oh, Jennifer,’ he says, grabbing my wrist again, this time more forcefully, dragging me back down into my chair. I hear Kieran humming to himself as he thumps back up the stairs. ‘You’re hurting my feelings. I’m not some guy. Take that back.’
I swallow drily, my mouth wanting to say something, but it can’t. I’m frozen.
‘We have a connection, you and me. You can’t deny it. And now we have a baby on the way.’ His other hand slides under the table and strokes my stomach.
I screw up my eyes, my entire body tensing. ‘It was a mistake,’ I tell him. ‘If you’re not gone by tomorrow morning before I leave for work, I’m calling the police.’
Call them now! a voice in my head screams. But I know I won’t, just as I know I probably won’t call them tomorrow either. I open my eyes to see him smiling, almost laughing at me. He leans forward and, to my disgust, kisses my neck – a slow, gentle kiss, making me hate my body for responding. I shoulder him away.
‘Were you this cold with your husband?’ he says, his breath warm against my skin. ‘Is that why he’s gone?’
For a few seconds, I’m back in the hotel room again, breathing the scent of him in, unaware of my body or my senses or if I should be fighting or protesting or saying no or simply going along with him. I hate my brain for keeping these details from me.
‘I did not consent to sex with you that night,’ I say, my words brittle and dangerous. I feel the sensation of a hand around my throat, another pinning my wrists together, the weight of him on top of me, impossible to escape. ‘You put something in my drink. You raped me.’
‘You think I roofied you?’ Scott shakes his head and cups my hands between his. ‘Jennifer, Jen… you loved every minute of it.’
‘No, no I didn’t.’ I screw up my eyes again, refusing to believe him. I was drunk, yes. And I was upset and consumed by suspicion and paranoia about Jeremy. Perhaps a part of me was flirting to begin with, maybe even a part of me wanting secret payback, something for me and me alone that would cancel out whatever it was I believed Jeremy was doing behind my back. If I went home from the conference feeling as though I’d gained some kind of control over my life, got attention from a guy in a bar that Jeremy didn’t know about, then it would have maybe made whatever he was getting up to slightly more bearable. Because I knew there was no way I’d be able to prove anything between him and Madeleine. Just as there was no way that I’d gone out that night with the intention of having sex with a stranger.
‘See?’ I hear Scott say.
When I open my eyes, he’s holding out his phone, flicking through some photos.
‘Now tell me you weren’t enjoying yourself,’ he says, shoving his phone in front of my face and scrolling through.
There are dozens of pictures of me clothed, semi-clothed, naked, posed, tied up, looking provocative, sipping from a wine glass. More of me taken from above, my head down between his legs, even a video of me moaning, begging, my words not making sense yet the tone of my voice pleading, desperate. My eyes are a dark, sunken mess from smudged make-up, but with a vacant, dead look inside, as though my soul had left my body. My lips are scarlet, almost sore, from whatever he’d done to me, my body heaving and writhing as he did things that almost convinced me this was not me in the footage – that it was someone else entirely.
Then he takes back his phone and swipes through his camera roll, showing me a completely different batch of images. I don’t understand. They’re blurry and the light isn’t good as it’s dark, but I can still make out that it’s me, that this time I’m fully clothed – and they were taken here, at my house. He’d been watching me, photographing me – and by the looks of it, it had been over many months.
‘It was you,’ I whisper, cupping my hand over my mouth as I retch and make a dash for the downstairs toilet.
Twenty-Four
Rhonda
‘But I thought you had a few days off for half-term?’ Chris says, stretching out in bed.
Rhonda doesn’t think he really minds too much if she goes into school today. It’s not like they had any particular plans, and he’ll no doubt just mooch around at home, exhausted from his run of shifts. Besides, Caitlin is home all day and they always enjoy spending time together.
‘Hopefully we can get it all sorted in one hit,’ Rhonda says, glancing away from her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She grabs a baggy sweatshirt and pulls it on over her T-shirt. She’s opted for her old leggings, knowing they’re likely to get filthy up in that loft. ‘And then we’ll have the rest of the week together.’
‘You mean you’ll have the rest of the week,’ Chris says, reaching for the coffee Rhonda had brought him up. ‘I’ve got two earlies then two lates, remember?’
‘In that case, we get to spend Sunday together,’ Rhonda reminds him as she ties up her hair in a band, securing it with a headscarf. She sits down on the bed, suddenly becoming pensive. ‘I’m really getting concerned about Jen,’ she says, biting her lip. She stares out of the window, the curtains only half pulled back. The sky is a slate grey, threatening rain. ‘That guy she had to stay over for a night, he’s still there and—’
Chris hoists himself up in bed, exposing his broad chest. Perhaps not quite as muscular as he was when they first met, and some of his hairs have turned silver, but Rhonda loves him even more for it. He frowns, waiting for her to continue.
‘He’s called Scott. Some friend of Jeremy’s, apparently, though I’ve not heard of him before. I got a funny vibe off him. Like he was getting his feet well under the table.’
‘Maybe he’s providing support, Ron.’ Chris shrugs, flopping back down onto his pillow. ‘If having a friend stay is what she needs right now, then I don’t see the problem.’
‘Jen’s pregnant,’ Rhonda says, immediately wishing she hadn’t. She fixes her stare on the wardrobe, thinking that if she doesn’t look Chris in the eye then perhaps it won’t feel quite so much like she’s betrayed her friend. And while Jen never said not to tell anyone, she didn’t say to tell anyone either.
Chris sits up again, blowing out through pursed lips. ‘That’s big news,’ he says, running his hands through his hair. ‘Did Jeremy know before he died?’
Rhonda shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so. It’s early days, from what I can make out.’ She swallows, wondering if she should test out her theory on Chris, or see if he arrives at the same conclusion. But then, he wasn’t party to the conversations about Jen’s suspicions of Jeremy having an affair and that, as a consequence, their sex life had nosedived. Though it only takes one time, and she’d not directly asked Jen about the father.
‘Is she pleased?’
‘Hard to tell,’ Rhonda says, getting up again and putting on her trainers. ‘Shocked more than anything. If we get this stuff at school sorted out in good time, I’ll drop in on her later, see how she’s doing.’
Chris nods. ‘Don’t forget your phone,’ he says. ‘You know what you’re like with it.’
‘Not true!’ she says, prodding him. ‘God knows how it ended up in the laundry basket on the landing the other night. I swear I left it on the sofa after we’d watched the film.’ And with that, Rhonda gives Chris a quick peck and heads off.
St Quentin’s hadn’t always been a private school – far from it, in fact. Up until the mid-nineties, part of it had been used as a comprehensive, with only a small section of the old early-Victorian grammar school buildings being occupied and the rest lying derelict. An ugly concrete structure had been erected in the grounds in the early eight
ies and was used as the main school building for the comprehensive, with satellite classrooms in prefab mobile units dotted around a tarmac playground. The council had conceded it was cheaper than renovating the crumbling Gothic ruins that had been largely out of bounds since the boys’ grammar school had closed previously.
Now, St Quentin’s, located on the eastern edge of Shenbury and fully restored, almost resembled a Gothic asylum with row upon row of mullioned windows, the building flanked at each end by two towers complete with stone spiral staircases. It was home to the not particularly prestigious fee-paying school that had moved there from a smaller nearby campus when the education authority sold off the property cheaply.
The concrete relics of its comprehensive years had been torn down long ago, with the ghosts of the mid-nineties events that led to its demise not quite forgotten by those still local. The murder of a local toddler by a pupil had parents pulling their children out in droves back then, until the local council had no alternative but to shut the doors on the grim reminder that had, for a while, made the area infamous.
The private school’s motto was ‘Sapere Aude’, or ‘Dare to Know’, when St Quentin’s opened its doors at the dawn of the new century. The charitable trust and board of governors had indeed done a good job of attracting local fee-paying pupils with its reasonable terms, as well as adhering to its mission statement of ‘Education for All’ by offering more scholarships than any other local private school.
And a scholarship was the only reason Caitlin was able to enrol at St Quentin’s. With Rhonda taking up the head of English position when they both moved in with Chris, it seemed natural that Rhonda put her daughter in for the exam, and she and Kieran had started at the same time. It was their friendship that had brought the two sets of parents together socially.
‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ Rhonda says as the three of them reach the top of the spiral staircase, huffing and puffing and staring into the roof void of the westernmost tower at the school. She covers her face, letting out an exasperated laugh. ‘It’s going to take all of half-term and beyond,’ she groans, with the other two staff – Ellis Greene and Miranda Wells, from the history and art departments – grumbling agreement beside her.
Miranda had arrived in dungarees and trainers, looking quite the part for a day’s hard graft in the loft, while Ellis had favoured a sports jacket and trousers, saying he was meeting his boyfriend for an early dinner straight afterwards. Rhonda didn’t fancy his chances of not looking like a scarecrow once they’d done a day’s work up here.
‘Heavens above, I’ll definitely have to go home for a shower before meeting Pete after dealing with this lot,’ Ellis says, tapping out a text to warn his partner that he’d probably be late. ‘What have we let ourselves in for?’ He slips off his jacket and rolls up his shirtsleeves, shuddering at the task ahead.
‘Well I’m grateful for the bonus they’re paying us,’ Miranda says, wading in amongst the piles of boxes and other detritus that has collected over the years.
‘Me too,’ Rhonda says, planning on tucking the extra money away in her and Chris’s holiday fund. She gazes around the large loft space with its high, pitched roof on the inside of the tower. The air is warm and fusty, despite the cold temperature outside, and dust motes float about in the light coming from a couple of bare bulbs as they assess the task. ‘I’ve always wondered what was up here,’ she says, prising the flaps of a box open. ‘And now I know. A load of crap, by the looks of it.’ Rhonda stifles a sneeze.
‘No wonder they asked me to help,’ Ellis says. ‘I bet there’s loads of stuff for the school history archives here. We shouldn’t be too cavalier about ditching it all.’
‘I think that’s why they didn’t just get a clearance company in,’ Rhonda says. ‘They figured tackling this job now rather than waiting until the end of term was wise. The builders are booked in to replace the roof in the Easter holidays.’
‘Right,’ Ellis says. ‘If you two want to have a root around through some boxes, give me an idea of what’s in them, then I can begin ferrying stuff down to ground level and either dump it straight in the skip or put it aside for further investigation.’
Rhonda smiles and gives a salute as she and Miranda tackle a side each at the rear of the loft, stooping beneath the roof timbers and stepping over all the clutter. ‘There are old textbooks from the year dot in here,’ she says, lifting a box and manhandling it over to Ellis. But before he can take it, the bottom gives way and several dozen books covered in mildew drop onto the floorboards, sending a mushroom cloud of dust up their noses.
‘We need masks,’ Miranda says, coughing.
‘And a bloody medal,’ Rhonda says on her hands and knees, gathering the books and handing them over to Ellis, who begins a tireless series of trips up and down the stone spiral staircase.
Several hours later, Rhonda calls for a tea break. ‘Let’s take a load each down with us, save wasting a trip.’ She gathers up a random box and follows the others, leaving it in the lower lobby of the tower. ‘Don’t chuck that one,’ she says. ‘Looks like old accounting records or something, but I think there are some photos in there too.’
The three of them head off to the staffroom, brushing themselves down as they cross the quad. Rhonda pulls off her headscarf and shakes out her hair, catching the same fusty smell from up in the loft in her throat, before she ties it back up again.
Over tea, they chat about various bits of school gossip, Old Hairy’s contentious new policies about away sports matches, as well as the school play, which all of them are involved in somehow, as well as general plans for the Easter holidays.
Back in the lobby, Rhonda leaves the other two to head back up to the loft while she checks the contents of the last box she brought down. She smiles when she sees a file stuffed with receipts for library book orders, shaking her head at the old-fashioned ledger. It seems anything and everything had been crammed in, with no sense of order, when the comprehensive school was essentially packed up and things either stored or disposed of.
Rhonda takes the general paperwork out to the skip and delights in chucking it all in. Rooting through the remainder of the box, she finds some photographs – a number of them in albums, the glue peeling off and the pages brittle with age. But the majority of pictures are just thrown in loose, creased and yellowing, some torn and some stuck together. At the bottom of the box are a few class and whole-school photos, roughly folded to fit in the box – the extra-wide kind where the entire school would have been made to line up and stand on chairs or precariously stacked crates, the staff racked up stiffly around the edge, with senior management sitting on chairs front and centre.
‘Blimey, look at these,’ she says to herself, glancing up the stairs to see if the others are on their way down again to show them. ‘Nineteen ninety,’ she mutters, knowing from the history displays in the school’s library that this wasn’t long before the comprehensive shut its doors. ‘Miranda,’ Rhonda says as she hears her coming down. ‘Come and have a look at these.’
Miranda appears from behind a stack of two boxes, dropping them onto the old quarry tiles in a cloud of dust. She blows out from exhaustion, brushing herself down. ‘What have you found?’ she says, peering over Rhonda’s shoulder as she kneels on the hard floor. ‘Old pics?’
‘Yup. I think they should go to the library, let Ellis and his department decide what’s fit to keep or not.’
‘Agreed,’ Miranda says. She takes an album out of the box, blowing on its cover, holding it carefully as she opens it. ‘Blimey, look. This looks like a summer fete or something. And sports day.’
‘Check out those uniforms,’ Rhonda says, pointing to a girl’s skirt, the hem of which barely came down to her thighs. ‘Mr Meads would have a fit,’ she says, joking about their strict head teacher. As Miranda flips through the pages, Rhonda does a quick double take on a couple of photos, as if something snags at the back of her mind, but then she returns to the stack of whole-school pictures
. ‘These are in some kind of order, look. We’ve got nineteen ninety, ninety-one, -two and -three here,’ she says, reading out the dates printed at the bottom. ‘There are no more after that because that’s when the comprehensive shut down.’
‘You know why, don’t you?’ Ellis says, jumping down the last couple of steps as he overhears the women’s discussion. They both look up as he dumps another box on the floor.
‘I’ve heard the rumours,’ Rhonda says.
‘Murrrder,’ he replies in a silly voice, rolling out the ‘r’.
‘No way,’ Miranda says, shocked. She’s only been teaching at the school since last September.
‘Some kid went to prison, right?’ Rhonda says, standing up and rubbing her sore knees. It’s just as she’s about to shove the pictures back in the box to take over to the library that she sees a stack of individual class photos, with names printed underneath. ‘I wonder where all these people are now?’ she says, about to put them back in the box when one name in particular jumps out. She suddenly goes cold, barely stifling a gasp at the sight of Jeremy’s young face on the back row, positioned there because he was one of the tallest boys.
‘What is it?’ Ellis says, just as he’s on his way out to the quad.
‘That’s so sad,’ Rhonda says, staring down at his eager face, the same trademark dark curls identifying a pubescent Jeremy. Despite his youth, his features are unmistakable. ‘It’s Kieran Miller’s dad,’ she says, knowing that neither Miranda nor Ellis teaches him. ‘He died recently. We were friends.’ She points to him standing proud in his blazer.
When they first met, Jen had explained that she and Jeremy went to the same school, which came as no surprise as they were both from the area and the comprehensive was where the local kids went. They’d both joked many times that they’d had nothing to do with each other in class, barely noticing each other until they were in their second year of university, having happened to end up at the same one – Jen studying medicine and Jeremy philosophy.
The Trapped Wife: An absolutely gripping psychological thriller with a mind-blowing twist Page 16