by Archer, Sam
Tom was right, she knew. She’d meddled, without his asking her to. She had promised to be a good friend to him, and her actions had harmed him. That wasn’t the sort of thing a friend did. He’d trusted her, and she’d betrayed his trust.
Chloe thought about her own problems with trusting people. Doctors, in particular. Well, trust worked both ways. She could hardly complain about not being able to trust others when she wasn’t worthy of it herself.
Tom had asked her to back off. The respectful thing to do would be to grant his request and retreat, keeping her nose out of his business. Chloe knew this. And yet… what she’d learned just that morning from the email she’d received changed everything. She couldn’t ignore it. To do so would be far more of a betrayal of Tom than would ignoring his wish for her to stay away.
In for a penny, in for a pound, she thought, and picked up the phone once more, her hand steady again.
The number was easy enough to find through Directory Enquiries. Chloe had in fact wondered if the woman would have a land line, considering how many people used only mobile phones these days, so she was gratified when a number came up for Sabrina Jones. Chloe would probably have been able to track down her mobile number sooner or later, but this saved time.
She suspected Ms Jones would be at home, given how early it was and the fact that she was off sick form work. Sure enough, a voice bleary with sleep answered after four rings.
‘Yeah? Who is it?’
‘Chloe Edwards.’
There came a sharp cough, then almost a shout. ‘I’m not talking to you. You tricked me.’
‘I need to meet you in person again.’
‘What? No way.’
Chloe said, ‘I think you might change your mind when you hear me out, Ms Jones. Or should I say, Christina Hutchinson?’
The silence hung thickly.
Then the woman said, a tremor in her voice: ‘What do you want?’
Chloe told her.
Chapter Twelve
Chloe’s first instinct, when she saw the red Mercedes parked outside Tom’s house, was to turn back and try again later. Rebecca was there, and Rebecca the last person Chloe wanted to see, especially considering what she had to tell Tom.
But then she thought: no, this is actually perfect.
It was a little after two in the afternoon. Chloe knew this was a day Tom worked mornings and evenings, and she was gambling on his having come straight home after picking Kelly up from nursery. She knew her assumption had been correct when she saw his Ford in the driveway, a moment before she spotted Rebecca’s car. Chloe had deposited Jake with the same mum who’d looked after him a few times already. She really did need to organise a regular babysitter, Chloe knew, if she continued to need to deal with business outside the house as she’d been doing lately.
She hadn’t tried ringing Tom again. There’d been no point; he’d see who was calling and ignore it. Plus, he was at work that morning and wouldn’t be able to receive calls anyway. He’d no doubt be furious with her for turning up unannounced and uninvited at his front door, but she was confident that he’d give her an audience if she could just get a word in edgeways at the outset and explain why she was there.
Chloe turned into a side street so that her Astra wouldn’t be visible from Tom’s house. She made her way towards his front door. As she drew nearer she felt apprehension constrict her chest.
Through the closed door she could hear raised voices. Tom’s and Rebecca’s, and they were overlapping as they argued.
Poor Kelly, thought Chloe. For a moment she considered withdrawing. Her presence was only going to inflame an already tense situation. But she was determined to end this nonsense as soon as she could, so she set her jaw and pressed the doorbell.
The voices inside dropped to an angry mutter. In a few seconds Chloe heard footsteps approaching. The door cracked ajar and Tom’s face appeared. He looked haggard, dark shadows weighing heavily beneath his eyes. Nonetheless Chloe felt a surge deep within her chest.
He sighed sharply. In a low voice he said, ‘Chloe, please. It’s not a good time.’
‘I know Rebecca’s here,’ Chloe said quickly. ‘This concerns her, too. I’ve got something you both need to see, right now.’
‘I’ve told you not to interfere. Please, just go away and leave us alone.’ There wasn’t anger in his eyes, but something far more distressing to Chloe: a profound, wrenching despair.
Urgently, insistently, she said, ‘Is Kelly out of the way?’
‘What?’ He seemed fazed by the question. ‘Oh. Yes, she’s at a play date with one of her friends from nursery.’
‘Good.’ Chloe put a confident foot in the door. In her pushiest reporter’s voice she said, ‘I need to come in.’
‘Chloe, no.’ He started to close the door but it caught on Chloe’s boot.
‘Just hear me out for five minutes. Two minutes. Then I’ll go, and I won’t bother you again. I swear to you.’
‘You don’t get it,’ he hissed. ‘If Rebecca sees you –’
‘What’s going on?’ Rebecca’s strident tone came from behind Tom. He glared frantically at Chloe, waving his fingers in a get away gesture, but she stood her ground. Over his shoulder Rebecca’s immaculate face appeared.
‘What? You! My God, you’ve got a nerve –’ she began.
‘Let me in, Tom,’ Chloe urged.
‘Mind your own business,’ snapped Rebecca. ‘Tom, get rid of her.’
Chloe reached into her shoulder bag and took out a folded piece of paper. She opened it up and held it in front of Tom’s face. His incredulous glance flicked from her to the paper and back, then settled on the paper.
Where it lingered.
After a moment he half-turned towards Rebecca, who was standing, arms folded, just behind him.
‘Rebecca,’ he said in an odd voice, ‘I’m going to open the door for Chloe now. You need to have a look at this.’
He stepped aside, opening the door. Chloe went in and walked straight past Rebecca, who stared from her to Tom, open-mouthed. In the living room Chloe waited. Tom came in, followed by Rebecca. On one of the tables Chloe spotted a folder with some sort of legal-looking documents spilling out. She supposed Rebecca had come round to discuss some aspect of the court case she was bringing against Tom.
Chloe held up her unfolded piece of paper. ‘Would you like to know what this is, Rebecca?’
Rebecca put her hands on her hips and titled her head back, glowering at Chloe. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’
‘It’s a signed statement from Christina Hutchinson. Do you happen to know who she is, Rebecca?’
The other woman said nothing, but her eyes widened fractionally. Some of the colour faded from her cheekbones.
‘Christina Hutchinson,’ Chloe went on, ‘is a convicted fraudster and conwoman. She’s served a total of seven years in prison on three proven counts of fraud and embezzlement. At present, she’s on two years’ probation following her last offence. Oh,’ Chloe said, as if just remembering, ‘and she currently goes by the name of Sabrina Jones.’
Tom had been listening intently to Chloe, but now he transferred his stare to Rebecca. She’d lowered her head but was still gazing at Chloe. Her features were by now completely pale.
Chloe continued: ‘I obtained Ms Hutchinson’s criminal record from a fellow journalist in London who has contacts in the Metropolitan Police. They had her photograph on file, so it was relatively easy for them to match a name to the photo of “Sabrina Jones” I forwarded. Naturally, when I told Ms Hutchinson I knew about her background, she became very co-operative. If she’s caught committing fraud while on probation, she’ll be back in prison in no time.
‘So I gave her a choice. Either I forward her criminal record to the papers, which would both immediately destroy the credibility of her allegations and make her the subject of a police investigation on the assumption that she’s engaging in deception while on probation. Or, she writes and signs a statement admitting that sh
e was hired to lie about Tom. It was no contest, really. She agreed at once.’
Rebecca’s face was quivering, but she was hanging on to what remained of her composure. The atmosphere in the room was taut as a stretched bowstring.
Chloe tapped the letter in her hand. ‘It’s all here. How you first approached her, the money you offered and then paid her, the details of what you instructed her to make up about Tom. How she went and told you after I’d been to visit her the first time yesterday, and you ordered her not to speak to me any more. Now that she’s written this, she’s off the hook. Well, almost. All Ms Hutchinson has yet to do is contact both the papers she approached, the News and the Gazette, and retract her story entirely, with no explanation. Then leave Pemberham and never come back.’
Rebecca’s hands were clenched into fists at her sides, her entire body quivering. This is it, thought Chloe, still flushed with the importance of what she’d been saying but with a growing, sick sensation in the pit of her stomach. This is where it gets really, really ugly. Where the snarling, spitting violence kicks in.
She braced herself, sensing Tom doing the same.
They remained still for six agonising seconds, three points of a triangle that felt ready to fly apart at any moment.
And Rebecca broke. She sank to the floor, crouching, her hands clasped over her face, her body racked by sobs. A horrible wailing sounded from beneath her fingers. Her poise, her arrogant elegance, were gone.
Chloe didn’t, couldn’t, look at Tom. Instead she took a step or two closer to Rebecca, and when there was a pause in the keening noise the other woman was making, Chloe said, firmly but gently: ‘It doesn’t need to come to light that you were behind this. Obviously, it’s up to Tom what happens now.’ This time she glanced across at him but he was staring at Rebecca, his brow deeply furrowed.
Chloe went on, ‘But I’d imagine that if you backed off, completely, if you gave up forever all notions you might have of taking custody of Kelly away from Tom, of persecuting and hounding him and destroying his life – if you did that, then this could all quietly come to an end. No police involvement, no scandal, no rancorous court battles. Just… peace, once more. As there used to be.’
Rebecca’s wails had diminished to a muffled whimpering. Chloe and Tom stood watching her for a few more seconds. Despite her antipathy towards the woman, despite her revulsion at what she’d done to Tom, Chloe couldn’t help feeling a deep, abiding pity for Rebecca. So proud, and so troubled, and brought so low by her own folly.
Slowly, shakily, Rebecca rose to her feet again, not making eye contact with either of them. She fumbled her way along the wall to the door, and Chloe heard her footsteps tottering in the hallway before the front door slammed. She took a step towards the living room door but Tom held up his hand.
‘Just let her go.’
Chloe turned to him, awkward. He couldn’t quite meet her eye.
‘Chloe,’ he said. ‘I’m so –’
The scream of rubber on tarmac was followed a split-second later by a higher-pitched human shriek and the awful dull sound of metal hitting something soft and living. Tom froze, his mouth open. Then he barged past Chloe, almost knocking her over on his way to the window.
Chloe joined him an instant later and stared out.
‘Oh, my God,’ she breathed.
On the road, alongside Rebecca’s red Mercedes, another car had stopped, the driver halfway out of his door and with his hands in his hair. And in the road in front of the new car, like a cast-off rag, Rebecca’s body sprawled, her hair fanned out on the tarmac.
Even as Chloe gaped, unable to comprehend what she was seeing, she glimpsed from the corner of her eye Tom bolting out through the front door and sprinting up the driveway.
No… no…
Chloe came to her senses and raced to the front door, following Tom. The driver of the other car was stooped over Rebecca, shouting himself but not touching her, as though she were contaminated. By the time Chloe reached them Tom was crouched at his ex-wife’s side. People were starting to emerge from the doors of houses along the street, alerted by the sound of the impact.
Tom looked round at Chloe.
‘Call 999.’
She thumbed the emergency number in and reached a dispatcher immediately. Beside her, the driver of the car that had hit Rebecca was moaning: ‘She just came running out… I didn’t see her… I’m so sorry.’ Chloe frowned at him and held a finger to her lips.
She recited a few details to the operator, then folded her phone away. ‘It’s on its way,’ she said. To the drover she said, ‘Please. Keep back.’ When he didn’t move she took him gently by the arm and drew him on to the pavement, then returned to Tom.
Rebecca was crumpled with one leg at an awkward angle. There was blood on her dress, not a lot of it but enough to stain the expensive silk grotesquely. She was breathing, Chloe noticed, but it wasn’t a normal sort of breathing. Her chest was jerking in gasps, and as Chloe watched, Rebecca’s lips seemed to be turning an ominous blue.
Tom’s hands roved over Rebecca, probing, feeling for injuries, Chloe assumed. His fingers moved to her throat and he felt for her pulse, then laid his middle finger on the centre of her throat where a man’s Adam’s apple would be. Then he pressed his ear to her chest, beneath each breast in turn, raised his head once more and laid a hand on her chest, moving it about and tapping on one of his knuckles with a finger on his other hand. The tapping produced a hollow sound on the left side, but on the right, Chloe thought it sounded like rapping on a solid concrete wall.
Tom muttered something grimly to himself which Chloe didn’t catch. He glanced up at her. ‘Have you got something sharp? Scissors, a nail file?’
She fumbled in her bag, which she still had slung over her shoulder as she hadn’t taken it off inside the house, and brought out a small pair of scissors which she handed to Tom.
‘And I need a pen’
‘What?’ She wasn’t sure she’d heard right.
‘A ballpoint pen. Quickly.’
There was a cheap plastic pen at the very bottom of the bag. This too Chloe passed it to Tom. He removed the cap and pulled the nib out, then snapped about one third of the length of the plastic off.
Chloe stared in appalled fascination as Tom tore open the front of Rebecca’s dress, then probed with his fingertips below the right cup of her bra near her armpit. He seemed to find the spot he was looking for and, keeping it marked with one finger, he pressed the closed points of the scissors against the bared skin. Chloe cringed as the metal points penetrated the flesh. Rebecca didn’t flinch, but her mouth and cheeks were turning a deeper tint of blue.
Tom worked with his fingers, widening the slit he’d made. Then he grasped the broken casing of the ballpoint pen and pushed the jagged plastic end into the hole. He twisted it slightly, grimacing.
And Chloe heard a hiss of air, as if a balloon were suddenly being deflated. Rebecca began to gasp, but it was much freer breathing now. Rapidly her face started to lose its ghastly blue-grey tinge.
In the distance, a siren was approaching rapidly.
Tom slumped forward, a hand across his mouth, sweat matting his hair to his forehead. Below him Rebecca was groaning, shifting lightly, rolling her head from side to side. But breathing.
The ambulance came screaming up, and events began to move even more quickly after that. All Chloe remembered clearly from that time was Tom’s face. Exhausted, bewildered, it was the face of a man who’d suffered more in the way of conflicting emotion in a short time than anyone deserved to experience.
It was the face of a man who had just, Chloe understood, saved another human being’s life.
And it was the face of the man she loved.
***
The cottage was in darkness except for a dim light coming though the drawn living room curtains. Tom stumbled up to the door and knocked hesitantly.
After a minute he was about to knock again when the door opened. Chloe peered out, fully dressed
though her feet were bare, the befuddlement of the newly wakened in her eyes.
‘Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you,’ he whispered. ‘I knocked because I thought the doorbell might wake the kids up.’
She stood aside for him, her smile full of concern. ‘They’ve both been asleep for hours,’ she said. ‘I think I must’ve nodded off for a few minutes myself.’
In the living room he glanced at the clock on the wall. Three fifteen. ‘Look, I’m sorry. I should have gone back home.’
‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Cup of tea?’
‘Yes,’ he said, thankfully. ‘That would be wonderful.’ He’d had his fill of hospital coffee in plastic cups from vending machines over the last few hours, but a good home-brewed mug of tea would really hit the spot.
In the kitchen, over their beverages, Tom brought Chloe up to date.
Rebecca was out of danger. She had a mild concussion but had avoided serious head injury, and although her tibia, the shinbone, was broken, it was a clean fracture and should heal completely given enough time. The potentially most serious injury had been the one to her chest. One of her ribs on the right-hand side had been broken and punctured the pleura, the sac encasing the lung. Air had been sucked into the cavity around the lung and had been building up, compressing the lung and forcing her windpipe over to one side. In a few more minutes, perhaps seconds, she would have gone into respiratory arrest, and her heart function might have been compromised.
Tom explained as simply as he could what he’ done. He had used the scissors to gain entry to the pleural cavity, then used the shell of the ballpoint pen to open a makeshift channel so that air couldn’t build up around the lung any longer. The hiss Chloe had heard was the compressed air escaping from around the lung.
‘She’s got a proper drain in her chest now to get rid of any remaining air,’ he said. ‘They’ll take it out in a day or two. But she’ll need surgery on that leg.’
‘How is she?’ said Chloe. Tom glanced across the table at her. She must be as exhausted as he was; she’d been awake about as long, going to pick up Kelly after Tom had departed for the hospital and looking after the girl at the cottage with Jake, feeding and bathing them both and putting them both to bed.