The Women: A gripping psychological thriller

by S. E. Lynes

  Yes, she is lucky, she is, only …

  She speed-walks up the hill, stops for literally two seconds at the brow. She is so lucky, she thinks, taking in the green sweep of the bank that runs down to Petersham Nurseries, to the flash of winter sun that splashes like cream on the kink in the river. She is so lucky. She feels it acutely now, in almost every part of her. Almost. She runs then, down Rosebush Road, the tiniest something that has been niggling her since she left Aisha and Jenny pushing darkly at the edges of her mind. Some peace-wrecker, some latent gremlin. The private looks exchanged between them, herself on the outside of their friendship, looking in – perhaps it is only that.

  But as she pushes open the gate, the gremlin steps out into the light and she sees it so clearly that she wonders why she didn’t before. When she mentioned the baby, Jenny said: Aw, little Emily. How old is she now?

  Samantha has not mentioned her daughter to the class. She knows this because she decided before the course started to keep her worlds separate. In the months that Emily has been alive, everyone she has told about her, or introduced her to, has reacted with an infinitesimal delay, a kind of benign surprise, and she knows this is because she is so very young to be a mother.

  But Jenny didn’t do that. There was no such moment.

  And she knew Emily’s name.

  Sixteen

  Before Samantha gets halfway up the path, Peter opens the door.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he says. ‘I’ve been waiting to go.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘It’s not yet half past three though, is it? And you don’t go till nearer four.’

  ‘That’s not the point, Sam.’

  From inside the house, Emily cries.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Without pausing to wait for a kiss that will clearly not be forthcoming, she steps into the house and heads for the living room. ‘I went for a very quick coffee with a couple of students. I sent you a text. Anyway, I’m back now.’

  Emily is in her car seat in the living room, her face a raging raspberry. Samantha picks her up, shushes her. The baby’s little head is hot against her shoulder.

  ‘I’m off then.’ Peter is at the door, his expression still stern.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘I just wanted to chat to someone.’

  No reaction. As if she hasn’t spoken.

  ‘I’ll be back late myself,’ he says. ‘Don’t wait for me to eat. I’m trying to fit some of my PhD consultations into the evenings to give me more time at home.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She is wriggling Emily’s arms out of her fleecy jacket. The poor child is boiling. ‘See you when you get home. I really am sor—’

  The front door clicks shut. A moment later comes the lupine growl of his car, the vintage Porsche that so impressed her a little over a year ago now. Only after the roar has died away does she reflect on his parting shot. Whether or not he meant to be passive-aggressive, it is hard to say, which she supposes is the whole point of passive aggression. And at that last she laughs to herself.

  Sod him, grumpy old bugger.

  As for Emily, Samantha has no idea what time she was last fed, since Peter was too busy making a petty point to have time for a handover. What is apparent is that she has not been changed all afternoon; her nappy is as heavy as a bag of potatoes. It is as if Peter will deign to look after their baby for a short time but that he regards this as a favour he is doing for her, one for which she is expected to pay by clearing up the mess he chooses to leave her. He is so much older than her, she thinks. And yet sometimes he behaves like the child.

  Too unsettled to stay indoors, despite the threat of an imminently darkening sky, once she has changed Emily, Samantha clips the car seat into the chassis of the buggy and heads out. Yes, the sky is bruising already, but the air is crisp and cool. She walks around the block, calls at the shop for some milk and a loaf of bread. On the way back, she goes to the top of the hill again and stands opposite the Roebuck pub, looking out. The river is almost in darkness now. The view reminds her of the first night she came here, when, half sick with awe, she let him drive her to his home within minutes, no, within seconds of their meeting. It seemed to her then to be a dream. Now it’s more like madness, a kind of fugue state. She can’t put herself there, can’t imagine herself behaving in that way anymore. She felt like a schoolgirl. It’s possible she behaved like one.

  She heads back. It is really quite dark now – a thunderous blue-black. Emily will need feeding the moment they get in. She’ll need a bath, a story, a top-up feed before bed. Samantha reaches the end of Rosebush Road. On the pavement near her house, a figure loiters in the gloom, begins to walk. Something about the way his head moves side to side is familiar. He is carrying something round. The dusk makes it hard to see his features, but it looks like Sean, and as he draws nearer, she sees that yes, it is him. It is Sean, his motorcycle helmet in his hand.

  ‘Sean?’ she says when there is no more than half a metre between them.

  His smile is uneasy. He is wearing headphones.

  ‘Hello, Miss.’ He raises a hand before returning his gaze to the pavement.

  She dismisses the absurdity of him, possibly fifteen years her senior, calling her ‘Miss’. He has on the same anorak as earlier today, but no woolly hat, no scarf or gloves, and even in the dull light she can see that the base of his nose is pink, his eyes glistening with cold. There is something heartbreakingly vulnerable about him, and she is filled with her mother’s advice to be kind, always.

  She stops, there on the pavement, expecting him to stop too. But he doesn’t. Instead, he passes her by, shooting her a furtive glance. Perplexed, she turns, watches him head away, up the street.

  ‘Sean?’ she calls after him, wanting to ask him if he’s all right, or at least to find out what he’s doing here, so near her home. But he either doesn’t hear her through his music or chooses to ignore her.

  Perhaps he lives nearby. But as he rounds the corner and heads away towards the town, it occurs to her that no, he doesn’t live around here. He was late for the first lesson because of roadworks. If he’d driven in from Richmond Hill, he would not have hit those roadworks, only the heavy traffic that chugs through the one-way system in the centre.

  Why, then, is he wandering around near her house?

  She calls out again, a ball of heat in her chest. ‘Sean?’

  But he is gone. She would have to run to catch him, but she has not moved. She is standing there with the buggy as if her feet are attached to the paving stones, staring and thinking that she did not check the folder before leaving college today, after her coffee with Aisha and Jenny. She did not check it when she got back just now. Sean was coming from the direction of her house. It’s possible, she knows it, that in her haste to get some fresh air, she left the back door open. It’s possible, then, that Sean was able to enter the house when no one was there.

  ‘Shit.’

  Her rubber soles fall quickly on the pavement. Another few seconds and she is shoving open the iron gate, pushing the buggy up the path, plunging the key into the front-door lock. From the living-room window, the lamp glows. Her stomach clenches before she remembers that it’s programmed to come on at five.

  The hallway is chilly and dark. Keeping her coat on, she leaves Emily in her pram, heads for the kitchen and flicks on the overhead light. The homework folder is on the kitchen table. She has no memory of getting it out of her bag, which she discovers on the floor next to a chair. She blows into the roll of her fingers and puts the heating on. Chafes her hands together. Maybe she threw her bag down after pulling out the folder to look at later.

  ‘No,’ she says, to no one. She didn’t take the folder out.

  Which leaves Peter. Or …

  She tries the back door, feels her chest heave when the handle gives, a surge of nausea when the door opens.

  A soft whine escapes her.

  On the table, the folder stares at her in challenge. She cannot open it, not now. Her nerves are too
frazzled. Pathetic, but there it is. She cannot open that—

  She picks it up, grabs the pieces of flash fiction. The names of her students barely register as she throws the sheets one by one onto the table. They slide on the smooth surface; one skids over the edge, lands a moment later with a soft shush on the terracotta floor tiles. And there it is, the blank, anonymous sheet. Handwritten this time, a short paragraph. A paragraph she reads against a terrible heat that climbs from her chest, up her neck to her face, her ears, her scalp.

  A very sociable man

  He was a very sociable man, everyone said so. And smart, liked to dress well. He made his girls laugh, made them think, made them want him. He offered them the world, his lovely house on the hill with all the pictures on the walls. He liked pretty things. Like girls. He liked girls almost as much as he liked clothes and red, red wine. Chose his girls like fruit: just as their colour changed, but still a bit green. Just like his daughter, all grown up now. And him, Peter Pan. His childhood never ends. Mine ended long ago.

  The paper shakes in her hand; her breath is hot against her palm. The piece has that same mix of vagueness and specificity, enough detail to send a chill through her veins, not enough to take it to the police. Planted secretly enough to be sinister while allowing the possibility that this was done in plain sight. Sean was right outside her house. He looked sheepish. He must have written this and put it in her folder while she was out. That means he must have been watching the house, waiting for her to leave. He could be watching it now, from a distance. God knows, he could be in it.

  She shivers, pulls her coat tight. Emily.

  In the hallway, Emily is still asleep, fists raised, lips pursed in a kiss. Samantha tears her hand away from her panting mouth, forces herself to think clearly.

  Lock the back door. Yes.

  She returns to the kitchen, turns the key, leaves it in. She doesn’t want to lock anyone in. Her breath is ragged in her chest. She calls Peter, but his phone is off, as it always is when he is teaching. She thinks about calling the police, but what would she say? She is not in mortal danger. And yet she can taste danger like stale breath on her tongue, can feel the solid lump of it in her belly. Something is not right. Even Peter, by turns so loving and tender, then so cold and disapproving … There is something, something …

  She runs upstairs. In her and Peter’s room, she looks out of the front window on to the street. There is nothing, no one. In Emily’s nursery, out of the back window, the dark shapes crouch like monsters: the shed, the neighbours’ gardens, the pale squares of light in the other houses. There is no living shadow lurking, no rustling movement in the hedges.

  She runs down the stairs. Emily sleeps on, oblivious. Samantha is pretty sure there is no one in the house. She would feel it if there were. She would sense it. Wouldn’t she?

  In the living room, she slides her hand behind the sofa cushions. The pills are gone.

  With a cry, she pulls the cushions onto the floor, digs down into the base. The bag is not there.

  She replaces the cushions, runs out of the living room, takes the stairs two at a time. In the bathroom, she rifles through his toiletries – hair wax, hair gel, hair fudge, shaving foam, Dior eau de toilette, liquid facial cleanser, a small wallet of grooming tools – scissors, tweezers, cuticle removers … Good God, he has more of this stuff than she does.

  In the bedroom, she throws herself to the floor, peers under the bed. Nothing. Peter doesn’t approve of keeping things under the bed, says they attract dust.

  At his bedside table, she hesitates. This is an infringement of privacy. And Peter has done nothing wrong. She has no right to—

  She opens the drawer. At the top, a box of condoms. She thinks about the night they ran out, how, caught up in the moment, they carried on regardless. Would she change that now? Would she grab her stolen youth and run? She shakes the thought away. She would not be without Emily, that’s all that matters. There is a pot of cufflinks, a book of Dylan Thomas poems. There is a red paper wallet of what look like photographs. Are photographs.

  She sits on the bed and spreads the glossy pictures on her lap. It is weird to have them printed out like this, to physically touch and handle, not thumb through on a screen. There is a small picture of a teenager dressed in an elegant school uniform: black blazer with a gold insignia on the breast pocket, white shirt and black tie with diagonal gold stripes. He is standing by the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He is in the foreground, holding out his hand so that the tower balances in his palm. It is Peter; she recognises his eyes, his smile. He is no more than a child, but still it strikes her as ironic that he should be posing in exactly the kind of naff tourist stance he would openly deride now. Another photograph is of him at university by the looks of things – his hair is less long than big, almost fluffy, and this, his square clothes and the fact that he is quite obviously inebriated makes her smile despite everything.

  Another photograph shows him aged twenty-five or so, with around twenty young girls, all in rather less elegant grey school uniforms and a mixed array of winter coats. He is standing in the middle, his arm around some of their shoulders. He is wearing a shirt, tie and V-neck sweater and he is grinning. The girls are laughing, a couple of them looking at Peter with the expression of goofy adoration she has seen him elicit so many times. The group stand in front of a cathedral she half recognises. On the back of the photograph, in a version of Peter’s handwriting, she reads: St Catherine’s trip, York, October 1999.

  So he must have been around eighteen, nineteen. This must have been a training post or work experience. He looks older, probably because he is dressed in a shirt and tie, and surrounded by girls of around fourteen, fifteen. Perhaps he was a sixth-former and had volunteered to help on the outing.

  She doesn’t, she realises, know much about that period of his life.

  At the next photograph, she catches her breath. Peter, older in this shot – perhaps thirty, thirty-five? – with his arm around a beautiful woman. They are clearly a couple, though Samantha cannot pinpoint exactly how she knows this – something about the way the woman leans into him, the angle of her head tipped towards his – but they are together and she … she is—

  ‘Aisha,’ she hears herself say into the silence. ‘Aisha.’

  Behind them are railings, a green city square. Gordon Square, she’s pretty sure, opposite the history of art department. The photograph is uneven at the bottom, where it has been trimmed with scissors. On the back, a pale brown scar of old glue. It was clearly in a frame. Possibly hung on a wall in this house …

  She pinches the bridge of her nose, battling, battling to keep her breathing under control, to sit still, to not throw the photographs across the room. She cannot pull her gaze from the picture, from Aisha, the amusement in her eyes, the way her head tilts both towards Peter and back a little, as if this narrowing of eyes, this white and wide smile, is about to blow up, the eyes about to close, the mouth about to open fully, Aisha’s long, soft brown neck about to lengthen as her head falls back in helpless laughter.

  Peter has always been open about having a past. Samantha has tried never to mention his ex-lovers, no matter how difficult she has found it sometimes. She has not wanted to appear younger than she is; his age, his knowledge, his status already make her feel all too often like a child. She has wanted to be an adult, like him. He has made it clear that to ask about his life before her is childish, beneath her, beneath both of them, though she cannot say how he has done this, cannot point to any actual words he has said. Somehow the topic has been off limits, almost a taboo. And he has never, ever mentioned an affair with a student.

  Although Aisha was not a student, at least not one of his. She said she’d studied English literature, not art history. Samantha casts her mind back to the conversation with Aisha and Jenny over coffee. She thinks Aisha mentioned an ex-boyfriend, but she didn’t say he was a lecturer. But she, Samantha, definitely told them that she was living with a UCL lecturer and that they had a ch
ild together. Then there was that look that passed between Aisha and Jenny. It would have been natural at that point for Aisha to chip in that she’d once been with a lecturer, or was that a leap too far? Perhaps she meant to get to it but Samantha had to rush off and the moment never came.

  A sick feeling starts in Samantha’s belly. It hardens, becomes a rock. She runs downstairs and retrieves the flash fiction from the folder, her eyes skimming across it.

  … liked to dress well, she reads … made his girls laugh, made them think, made them want him.

  Her hand flies to her forehead, runs through her hair. When she gets to his lovely house on the hill with all the pictures on the walls, she stops, presses the sheet to her chest. The house on the hill with all the pictures on the walls. It is too on the nose. Whoever wrote it knows Peter. Whoever wrote it has been in this house.

  … red, red wine, she reads in a half whisper in the dim kitchen. She thinks of the dusty bottle of Amarone, the shiny stripes as he cleaned it with a cloth that very first night.

  I’ve been waiting to open this one for a long time, he had said.

  Chose his girls like fruit, she reads on, punishing herself now, just as their colour changed, but still a bit green. That’s her; she can see that her colour has changed now, the green all but gone. Aisha would have been green still when they met.

  His childhood never ends. Mine ended long ago.

  It was Aisha who wrote this; Aisha, the friendliest of the students. Aisha who asked if Samantha wanted anything bringing from the canteen, if she wanted to come for coffee, Aisha who is always so keen to contribute in class, who lingers at the end as if she wants to chat or simply … connect. She knew Samantha was going to be the tutor and enrolled just so she could inflict some mental torture on her. She has been the sweetest but is in fact the deadliest, motivated by that particularly poisonous breed of jealousy: that of the jilted ex.