by Peter James
‘I really did think Bryce was the one,’ Red said. ‘I owe a lot to Mum for finding out the truth about him. God knows what would have happened if she hadn’t been so perceptive. I could have ended up marrying a monster.’
‘But you are moving on now, aren’t you, darling?’ her father said. ‘You’ve found this new flat that you like?’
‘I’m hoping to exchange contracts soon. I’d love you to see it.’
‘Where is it?’ her sister asked.
‘Quite close to where I am now – along Kemp Town seafront. It’s gorgeous. The top floor with a balcony overlooking the sea – a real suntrap, and I think a good investment. It needs some renovation, but I’m fine with that because it’ll be a good project for me.’
‘When can we go and see it, darling?’ her mother asked.
‘Pretty well anytime. The owners are away in Australia. Perhaps next weekend, either Saturday or Sunday, if you’re free? I’ll arrange to get the keys from the agent.’
‘Are we free, darling?’ her father asked, looking at her mother for confirmation.
‘Sunday would be best,’ her mother said. ‘We’re meant to be bringing the boat back on Thursday or Friday, if the forecast is right, and we have a lot to sort out on it at Brighton Marina on Saturday.’
‘Ah yes,’ her father said. ‘We’re bringing her back from Chichester to the marina for the winter. So Sunday would be best. Look forward to it.’
33
Sunday, 27 October
Seething as he listened to the conversation, Bryce Laurent made a note in the large lined Moleskine notebook titled Red File into which he transcribed every conversation that Red and her family had.
Her totally fucked-up family.
He could picture the dining table exactly. He’d sat there himself through several painful lunches and dinners with Red and her evil parents. And on two occasions with her equally toxic sister and her dribbling turkey of a husband.
But Red’s sister and her husband were just a sideshow. Her mother was the truly evil, poisonous one. Supported by her vacuous fool of a husband.
I could have ended up marrying a monster.
He wrote down the words.
Really, Red? I’m a monster, am I? Well, if that’s what you think, then a monster I shall be! But I don’t think you really meant that, did you? Maybe you are just upset over losing your car? It was a bit of a dodgy vehicle. I did warn you about it. You really should not have been driving something that old with none of the modern safety features in it. Good riddance, I say. But hey, I understand you’re upset. You need cheering up. A nice gift might cheer you up, perhaps? Yes?
I have good thoughts about this.
A gift would be a nice touch.
Bryce looked at his watch. He had dated Red for almost a year when they had been walking, arm in arm, down Bond Street in London, and had stopped to look in the window of Cartier. She’d told him then that she thought they were the most elegant watches in the world.
He remembered the look of total joy on her face the day, just a few weeks later, he had slipped the Cartier Tank watch on her wrist.
But that was then.
He turned his focus back to the conversation, just one of the communications sent to him regularly throughout the day and night by the SpyBubble software, then replayed it from the start, listening intently.
Especially to the parts where they were talking about him.
‘He sounds really nice. A doctor! Quite a contrast to that awful liar, Bryce.’
That was her mother’s voice. Camilla Westwood.
Camilla!
Oh, you smug cow, Camilla. Don’t you realize how much I loved your daughter? I loved her in a way I’ve never loved anyone before. She was my light, my laughter, my sunshine. She was, quite apart from being the sexiest creature I’ve ever met, my soulmate. Your daughter was the woman who told me, who whispered into my ear while we were making love, that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with me.
And I responded, ‘Right back at you!’
Three days later, she dumped me.
Poisoned by you and your husband.
I’m a monster, am I?
Okay, I’m fine with that, I can live with that. So long as you understand what monsters do. They kill people. They rip them to shreds. Happy with that?
Happy knowing you are going to die?
You really should not have said that.
‘I owe a lot to Mum for finding out the truth about him. God knows what would have happened if she hadn’t been so perceptive. I could have ended up marrying a monster.’
Do you remember the last text you sent me, Red? When you were still as crazily in love with me as I was with you? Before your toxic parents poisoned your mind?
Every part of me is thinking of you. It is totally the best feeling. I want it to stay with me for a long, long time. Am high on you and what you do to me, and I looooove the time we spend together, even if it is just staring at each other. I feel so lucky we feel like this. I’ve never felt anything so strong and I totally adore it. And I totally adore every inch of you. I go to sleep dreaming of you and I wake in the morning craving you – and counting the hours until I see you again. XXXXXX + XXXXXXXX + XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Oh shit, I adore you.
PS did I tell u I adore you? XXXXXXXXX
PPS did I tell you just how much I adore you?
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
You sent this just two days before you dumped me.
Nobody changes their mind that fast. Not unless their mind has been poisoned.
And I’m really sorry – but no one can mess with another human’s emotions in that way. There’s a Rubicon in every relationship that we cross. You and I crossed it a long while ago. We crossed it, I thought, the day we were making love and you asked me to come with my eyes open, staring into yours.
That was the night our souls intertwined.
Can you even begin to understand the anger I am feeling now?
It’s why I have to kill you. Because I cannot live in a world in which you are with some other man. My heart just won’t take it. I’m sorry, Red. Really I am. We could have had such a great life together. Instead, we’re just going to have to settle for a great death.
Single girl, 29, redhead and smouldering, love life that’s crashed and burned. Seeks new flame to rekindle her fire.
You wanted fire, Red? You’ve got it.
34
Monday, 28 October
At 8.30 a.m. on Monday, Red sat once more in the basement consulting room of the terraced house, close to Brighton station, with the crimson Buddha staring benignly down at her from the mantelpiece. The room felt chilly, the ancient two-bar electric fire in the grate giving out scant heat.
‘So how was your weekend, Red?’ Judith Biddlestone asked.
‘Let’s not go there.’
‘Oh dear, I’m sorry. Any parts of it you want to talk about?’
‘My car caught fire.’
‘Oh my God. Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine. I managed to get out, thank goodness, before it burst into flames. Afterwards I had to endure more sarcasm from my sister at Sunday lunch. It wasn’t the greatest weekend. I kept thinking how Karl and I had planned to spend it.’
‘Your older sister, Margot, who you describe as successful?’
‘And who has never stopped letting me know it, all my life.’
‘I don’t think she’s ever helped your confidence, has she?’
‘Probably not. No.’
‘Do you want to talk about your weekend or shall we revisit what we bracketed at the end of the last session?’
‘Let’s keep talking about Bryce. That’s why I came to see you in the first place.’
‘You told me that the private detective your mother had secretly hired found out that Bryce lied to you about what he did for a living, and about his past. How did he learn about what you had discovered?’
‘I confronted him with it.’
&nb
sp; ‘How did Bryce react?’
‘With total denial. He said the detective had the wrong person.’
‘What happened then?’
‘I said I needed some space to think about our relationship and our future. He didn’t want to know. He kept insisting that we were engaged, and we were going to spend the rest of our lives together.’
‘And were you engaged at this point?’
For some moments Red was hesitant in replying. ‘Well, in his mind, yes. We were having dinner in Cuba Libre – the restaurant where we’d had our first date – when he suddenly put a little box on the table. He took out a ring and slipped it on my wedding finger, and then asked me to marry him. Actually, I didn’t like the ring, it wasn’t my taste at all – it was very bling. And I was already uncertain about him at this stage. There were so many ups and downs, good times and bad. I told him I would have to think about it. That triggered another row when we got back to my flat – he went bananas. I ended up calling the police. And PC Spofford came. They arrested Bryce and took him away because I was scared to have him in the house. But they had to release him on police bail the next day because he hadn’t hit me or anything. He’d just been abusive, and I didn’t want to press charges.’
‘He was taken into custody the night he asked you to marry him, due to his rage. You told him you needed time to think, and yet he believed the two of you to be engaged. How did you make sense of that?’ the psychologist asked.
‘That’s how things were with Bryce and me. What he wanted, he got. I learned not to contradict him. I knew I hadn’t accepted his proposal but calling the police hadn’t worked – he was back the next day, being nice and acting all loved up because we were engaged. I just went along with it. It was important not to give him a reason to get angry.’
‘What the detective had uncovered, I’m sure, would have fallen squarely into the category of things that would give him a reason to get angry?’
‘Definitely! Things just went from bad to worse. The detective said Bryce had told me a pack of lies about his background, and that he had a conviction for serious assault in the US. Part of me wanted out, but whenever I tried to broach this with him, he would burst into tears, throw his whole unloved childhood baggage at me, tell me that I was the only person who had ever given him a feeling of self-worth in his life. And he swore he would change. He said he knew he wasn’t perfect but that the detective had got the wrong man and that he hadn’t lied to me about all those things. He was very convincing. I wanted to believe him.’
‘When you think about that now, why do you think you wanted to believe Bryce?’
‘I felt such a fool when I heard what the detective had found out and especially that my mum had been right not to trust Bryce. I – I guess I’d put so much of myself into the relationship it was difficult just to walk away.’
The psychologist said, ‘Of course it was difficult, Red. I liken the incongruity of hating the way you are treated in a relationship yet not wanting to leave it to the experience of newly trained troops.’
‘How so?’
‘Basic training for the British Army is tough. Recruits are treated, on the whole, pretty harshly and I’ve never met one that said they had a nice easy time of it. Usually they were hurt and in pain – physical or emotional, or both – every day, and were humiliated and broken in the process. Yet, having given so much of themselves, they tend not to take kindly to a bystander suggesting that if the Army has been so unkind, they maybe ought to leave and join the Royal Navy instead.’
‘That makes a lot of sense to me. I felt that I had invested so much of myself that I had more to lose by leaving than by staying. And he kept convincing me that if I broke up with him, I’d never find another man. And – this may sound pathetic – I believed that. He’d made me believe that. I suppose I let him stay out of some kind of desperation. You have to understand that he has immense charm and is very persuasive – very manipulative.’
‘I do understand that. Do you? Do you allow yourself to truly know how well he manipulated you?’
‘He was a prize manipulator. He even managed to be nice for a long while after I challenged him about the private detective. I actually began to think maybe he had changed. I was going to leave him, but he begged me to stay, and foolishly I gave him another chance. Then one night a few weeks later something I said seemed to pull a trigger in him and he went loopy again – totally berserk.’
‘Trigger?’
‘He was admiring himself in the mirror – naked. He’s obsessed with his body. He gets up in the middle of the night, takes steroids and does weight training. I just joked – quoted that Robbie Burns line – as he stared at himself with, like, absolute approval. I said, “Would that the world could see us the way we see ourselves.” And that was it. He smashed the mirror, then turned on me, screaming and shaking. He picked up a shard of broken glass and came at me with it. I actually thought I was going to die. Somehow I managed to get out and ran into the street, barefoot, screaming. A guy walking his dog stopped and called the police for me, and Bryce was arrested.
‘I decided then and there to throw him out, while he was in custody. I packed all his stuff in the two suitcases that he had arrived with, including the ghastly, vulgar bling ring and the Cartier watch, then I asked Constable Spofford to come to the house the morning he was released on bail because I didn’t know what would happen. Rob – Constable – Spofford put all his stuff outside the front door, and he told Bryce when he turned up that I did not want to see him, and he wasn’t to go in.’
‘And how did Bryce react?’
‘He didn’t say a word. Just took his stuff and went off quietly, like a lamb, apparently.’
‘Curious. With what you know of Bryce is that what you would have imagined he would do?’
‘At the time I remember feeling relieved that he hadn’t made a scene but after a few hours I started to feel really scared. Other people kept telling me it was over but I knew it wasn’t. I don’t think Bryce will ever let me go.’
‘Tell me why you think that.’
‘Because in his head I belong to him. I had an anonymous email with an attachment a couple of days later. I opened it. It was a cartoon drawing of a playing card – the queen of hearts. I knew it was from him. I wasn’t sure what to make of it; but it seemed, maybe, his way of saying goodbye.’
‘And then?’
‘Nothing. Total silence. I thought that perhaps he had finally got the message and moved on. Several of my friends tried to fix me up with new men, but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to meet anyone. Then my best friend, Raquel Evans – a dentist – said there was a very good-looking young doctor called Karl Murphy in the medical centre where she worked, who was a widower with two small boys. I agreed to go on a blind date with him, Raquel and her husband, Paul. Something clicked – or sparked – between us. I really liked him, and suddenly, after all the darkness of Bryce, I could see light again. We had fun together. It wasn’t the intensity of passion I had with Bryce, but I felt comfortable with him, safe, for the first time in as long as I could remember. And I really liked him. I could see a future with him. I actually liked that he had young children – he seemed to care about them so much, and that made him seem a good person to me. We were starting to make plans.’
‘And now you think he might be dead?’
Red shook her head. ‘I know for sure now, he’s dead. His body’s been identified by his dental records. He committed suicide. Doused himself in petrol – self-immolation, they call it. Can you believe a doctor would do that? Cover himself in petrol, then set fire to himself? Surely a medic would know what a painful death that would be? Why didn’t he just take pills, which he could have prescribed for himself?’
‘How are you processing this, Red? What sense are you making of it all?’
‘I still cannot believe he killed himself.’
‘You don’t think it was suicide?’
‘I’m told the post-mortem strongly i
ndicates that it was. But why? Why would he have done that?’
‘Are you asking me why?’
‘Can you explain it? I cannot make sense of it at all.’
‘I couldn’t possibly comment without having known him, Red. I am interested in how you are making sense of what has happened, given that you did know him.’
‘I thought I knew him. Do you think I should go to his funeral?’
‘What do you think about that?’
‘I don’t even know when it will be, or where – I’m hoping to find out today – but I wonder if it will seem more real if I do go. Maybe I’ll get some closure?’
‘Funerals can be helpful for closure. But it depends on how you feel.’
‘I wish I could get some closure with Bryce,’ Red said, abruptly changing the subject. ‘I still have it, you know, the guilt. That it was my fault, all the abuse. That I brought it all on.’
The psychologist looked through her notes. ‘You said that in our last session on Friday. Why do you feel that?’
Red thought for some moments. ‘I guess that’s how he made me feel – that I let him down all the time. In the kitchen. In bed. That I couldn’t live up to his expectations.’
‘You wanted to live up to his expectations?’
‘Of course.’
‘Were you clear about what they were?’
‘I’m not sure I understand,’ Red replied.
‘I apologize, I wasn’t clear. Curious, that I would become unclear as we were talking about Bryce and his expectations. What I meant to say was, did Bryce’s expectations stay the same regardless of his mood or the situation?’
Red laughed bitterly and said, ‘No, never. One day he would be pleased with me and the next I’d do exactly the same thing and he would fly into a rage.’
‘Did he do that in company? If you were with his friends, for instance?’
‘That’s something I realized was very weird about him. He had no friends. None. I thought all men have a best mate, don’t they?’
‘Normal men do, Red. Yes. He had none at all? No former work colleague? Childhood buddy?’