She thought about it. I could see her eyes flicker, not really wanting to get involved – she preferred people to pay her to unpick family messes – but seeing I was upset, that she couldn’t just leave it. ‘I’m sure Nick is just taking care of you. It’s taken so long to get here, hasn’t it? Is there anything that really worries you? Anything he’s done?’
She meant had he hit me, and of course he hadn’t. He just questioned my every move. He just said I was crazy when I was sure the house had got hotter, or music had begun to play, or I couldn’t open the door to get out. He just didn’t like me leaving the house. And why should he? He knew I had lied to him, most likely, about Damian. And I was still lying. I was spending his money chasing down another man, the one I’d cheated on him with, and now that I’d found out the truth, and learned who Nora was, I was still dashing about the country figuring out what to do. From Nick’s point of view, maybe he was very much in the right. And suddenly I was so afraid that if I told my mother the truth of what I’d done, she would side with him. And I couldn’t bear it. I had come here looking for an ally ahead of the coming storm, if I decided to leave Nick, if I confronted Nora and got outed as the cheater I was. I could see now my mother wasn’t going to help, any more than Claudia would. I said, ‘No, nothing like that. I guess I’m just finding the move hard.’
She looked so relieved. ‘That’ll be it, darling. And the adjustment to the country. Maybe once the baby’s here you could join some mother and toddler groups, that sort of thing. Or take a class – Nigel speaks very highly of his bookbinding course.’
Clearly, she hadn’t taken in the fact I had no access to a car. I hesitated. ‘Mum. If I need to, can I stay with you for a bit? Me and the baby?’
She paused a fraction too long. ‘Well, darling, of course you can, though your room’s really full of junk now, all my sewing things and the leaflets for the campaign to save the village green. It would be a lot to move – but of course! Whatever you need!’
In other words, no.
‘Thanks,’ I mumbled. ‘Let’s go with the Scandi drama, shall we?’ A bit of gloomily lit murder would suit my mood quite well.
The next day, I trailed back home. I felt thoroughly beaten. Mum had made it clear – this was my life now. Behind sealed glass and code-protected doors, raising my baby, making Nick happy. If that was even possible. The trains were slow, and it was after five when I got back. Nora’s cottage was in darkness again, and it unsettled me. Before, she had always been there, and now she kept going out. Did she know I’d found out who she was? And once again, the question that had rarely left my mind since I’d learned the truth – what the hell does she want?
Nick was there, of course, ready to find fault. He was at the kitchen table, surrounded by pictures of Poppet, and I saw that he was printing up a new poster. Another thing that was my fault.
‘Sorry,’ I said, too weary to even make excuses. ‘I just . . . it took a while. I got groceries.’
Nick got up, taking the bag of shopping I’d returned with. As I trailed round the aisles of the supermarket, I’d found myself wondering would I even be there to finish the sugar-free granola, the jar of peanut butter. If I would have escaped by then. But where to? Not to my mother’s, clearly. Nick slammed the door of the cupboard. ‘I mean, it’s not much to ask, is it? I work all day, and when I come back I want to find the house warm and welcoming, the dinner on.’
I gaped at him. ‘You came back before five o’clock! You’re telling me you wanted to eat dinner then?’
Another slam. ‘I want a wife who’s here waiting for me.’
‘I’m here every day! Where else would I go? I was at my mum’s.’
He stood with his hands on the counter, his back to me. I could feel him reconfiguring his argument, as if he knew he was being unreasonable, even within the template of unreasonability we lived by these days. ‘I just worry about you. You’re pregnant, and it’s such a long journey.’
‘You were the one who brought me here.’ I snatched up the rest of the groceries, a packet of noodles, a jar of chia seeds, which were supposed to be good for me, and shoved them into a cupboard. I knew that Nick would rearrange them later on, into an order he preferred.
He frowned. ‘Please don’t speak to me like that, Suzi.’ A warning. I’d gone too far. ‘And are we going to have any dinner, do you think? I’m starving, and I’m sure the baby is too.’
I waited a few seconds until I knew I could speak without screaming. Now was not the time to kick my life to pieces, not before I knew exactly what Nora was up to. ‘Of course. I was going to make bolognaise, but if you can’t wait there’s stuff for a stir-fry.’
‘Bolognaise would be good.’ He was mollified. Crisis averted again.
‘Coming right up. Why don’t you sit down with a beer?’ He’d switched to that from wine since I got pregnant, presumably to underline the point that I wasn’t allowed to so much as sniff alcohol, let alone taste a smidge from an open bottle.
‘Alright.’ In passing, he patted my stomach, the only part of me he ever touched now. ‘How’s Mum, by the way?’ I hated how he called her that. She was my mother, not his.
‘The usual. Up to her neck in village committees, looking forward to lots of improving lectures on her cruise.’
He pursed his lips. ‘I hope you told her we’re expecting some support when the bub comes. Granny needs to pitch in, along with Nana!’ I could just picture my mother’s face when I told her she was ‘Granny’. No grandfather in sight, of course, on either side. I wondered what it was about our mothers that sent men into early graves.
As I sliced veg and wrestled mince into the pan, mildly nauseated by the pink curls of it – like a brain – I looked across the lane and saw Nora’s cottage was still in darkness, the curtains open. She had gone. But where?
Nick padded into the kitchen behind me, rinsing his beer bottle to put in the recycling. Easily, as if it was no big deal at all, he said, ‘I meant to tell you, the police called again today. They still want to talk to you.’
Eleanor
In the days after my husband died, I had looked through the items in his car like a historian pouring over the grave goods of some long-dead pharaoh. What did they mean? How had he been able to lie for so long about his job? It certainly explained why there were never any parties, or dinners with work colleagues. He had always said he didn’t want to socialise with them, that he preferred to spend time with me when he wasn’t working. I’d been pleased. Then the entire sham of my life was laid open to me and I had to find out more.
Suzi had gone away again a few days before, taking an overnight bag and another expensive taxi. Watching from the window, I’d heard Nick call, ‘Say hello to Mum for me,’ and I deduced she was visiting her mother. She’d told me ‘Mum’ was away for Christmas on a cruise, so that made sense. I felt a coldness between us – she hadn’t told me she was leaving; indeed, we hadn’t spoken since she heard me playing the piano. I wondered what was going on. I had even felt a brief stab of fear, but surely there was no way she could know who I was. Suzi was so wrapped up in her own grief and fear that she probably never gave me a second thought.
I kept coming back to what Conway had said. You don’t know the half of it, love. Did he mean what I thought he meant? It sounded so ridiculous even to think it. I ran through the steps in my head. They’d said Patrick was still conscious when the ambulance came. What had happened after he arrived at hospital? Someone would have had to treat him – multiple someones. Nurses, doctors, receptionists. It would have left a trail. If he was well enough then, wouldn’t they have been surprised when he later died? Would it not have raised alarm bells? Had someone hurt him, while he lay in hospital, recovering from the crash?
I drove to Surrey General, marvelling that I had never been there before. I had suggested a few times that we could meet for lunch, but Patrick always said he was too busy. Saving lives, bringing babies into the world. The more I thought about it, the easier I s
aw it would have been to fool me. I never came to his work – and he did work there in any case, just not as a doctor. I’d never met anyone he worked with. I never questioned what he told me. He had shelves full of medical texts, and I’d even seen a picture of him at medical school.
I parked in the car park, which was exorbitantly priced – for the first time in my life I was experiencing the unsettling feeling of worry about my bank account. The moment I entered the hospital, the noise of the place assaulted me. Lights, running feet, TVs blaring, patients everywhere. The snow had caused a rise in both accidents and flu. I saw several people with legs propped up on chairs, looking cross and tired.
I knew from Eddie that Patrick had worked as a finance clerk in the obstetrics and fertility department – that bit at least was true. The irony of it wasn’t lost on me. But instead of delivering babies and performing life-saving surgeries, he had charged people for private room hire and calculated the doctors’ expenses. A cashier, essentially. I walked up there, bracing myself for the soft, cow-like bodies of the pregnant women. Suzi had joined their ranks, thanks to him, but I likely never would. I told myself it wasn’t a big loss. The world was full as it was, and at least by having no child I had ended my family’s terrible legacy, their twisted genes. But my body didn’t understand that, and wanted to cry as a toddler ran up to me, seizing my leg to hold himself up.
‘Tyler!’ His mother, pregnant and lumbering, came up. ‘Sorry. He’ll grab on to anything these days.’
‘It’s alright.’ I had to turn away from his bright laughing eyes and starfish hands. Try to find the anger again, the thing that had sustained me for so long, living side by side with the woman carrying Patrick’s baby. All I felt now was a sort of bone-deep loss. So many lies. Even more than the ones I thought I knew about. Would I ever get to the end of them?
‘Can I help you?’
My aimless wandering of the department had drawn the attention of a receptionist, swinging a lanyard like a weapon.
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I just – my husband used to work here. Patrick Sullivan?’ Not Dr Sullivan, as I had long imagined. No wonder he wouldn’t let me phone the ward. I remembered, dimly, ringing up once when I couldn’t get him on his mobile. Who? There’s no Dr Sullivan here. And his anger. Some silly temp. They have enough to do without taking domestic calls, Elle. Don’t do it again. And I hadn’t.
Her face softened. ‘Oh yes. We were very sorry to lose him, Mrs Sullivan.’ She had liked him, I could see. Women usually did.
‘I was hoping I might be able to see his office. You know, so I can picture where he worked. Collect whatever things he had.’
She hesitated. Tears sprang to my eyes – unfeigned, as it happened. ‘Of course, Mrs Sullivan,’ she said. ‘Just follow me.’
His office was little more than a cupboard. A cheap desk and chair, a bookshelf with boring publications on it, health service regulations and copies of Sage operating manuals. There were no pictures, no sign he had been married or had any kind of life. The receptionist left me, and I sat down in the chair, imagining Patrick in this place, sitting for years at this desk. Not saving lives as I had thought, but filing expense claims and inputting data to spreadsheets.
I opened the drawers of the desk, apprehensive. In the top one were some paperclips, two used-up biros, and a coiled-up blue silk tie, left there as if for meetings. I remembered buying it two Christmases ago – it had cost £100, and here it lay in this dusty drawer in a dingy NHS back office. I took it out, running the silky material through my fingers. A tiny piece of him, left behind.
The second drawer had a bottle of whisky, almost drunk, and another of aftershave. An expensive custom-blended one. A toothbrush in an opened packet, shower gel. I didn’t want to think about why he had all these grooming items in his office. I remembered how he would shower every night when he came in, almost compulsively. Washing off the smell of Suzi, perhaps. But she’d told me they only met in May. This behaviour of Patrick’s, the lateness, the sneaking around, had been going on as long as I’d known him.
I put that thought aside and tried the third drawer. It was locked. For a moment I thought about going down the legitimate route, asking if anyone from maintenance had a spare key. But I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, and from my experience of hospitals, it would likely take hours. Luckily, I had retained a few skills from my time in Uplands, where picking a flimsy desk lock would have been child’s play to the semi-feral girls I lived with for six months. I straightened out one of the paper clips from the top drawer, and within two minutes I had the lock open.
All that was inside was a notebook, a cheap lined thing. In it were names, in my husband’s neat print writing. I recognised Conway’s. Beside them were numbers, dates, scrawled facts. Things like With girl in conference bar. Three-hour lunch break for two. Expensed for extra hotel night. What did it mean?
As I turned the pages, something fluttered out. A piece of green paper – a prescription from this hospital, with no doctor’s name specified. It was signed in an indecipherable scribble, and the medicine name was also blank. I thought of the pills he had brought home for me, my ‘doctor’ husband, urging me to take them. Saying I needed them for my anxiety, my mental health problems, just like my mother. And I had taken them, of course I had, because I believed he’d been to medical school. Had someone given him a blank prescription, to be filled as he chose?
The ramifications of that were just sinking in when I heard a noise, and the door into the room opened. ‘Can I help you?’
Suzi
The police came back the next day. Of course they did, because I had stupidly never called them to say I knew nothing, to take myself off their list.
They were very polite, wiping their shoes on the mat and thanking me for the tea I made, in a china pot, chocolate ginger biscuits out on a plate. I apologised for them not being home-made, then kicked myself for trying too hard. As far as they knew I was just an innocent neighbour, who had nothing to do with this accident. I was obsessively running over the story, looking for holes. Was there a way to connect us? There must have been, if Nora had found me. I still didn’t know how she’d done it.
There was a man and a woman, both in the same dark uniforms, radios on their belts. I knew from TV this meant they hadn’t sent the detectives, that this was probably a routine inquiry. We sat down in the living room, which I noticed had an icy chill.
‘Sorry it’s so cold. We’re meant to have that kind of holistic heating, what do you call it’ – I’d lost the word. Baby brain. ‘Maybe it’s not working.’
‘It’s a struggle with the snow,’ said the woman politely. ‘We get a lot of call-outs this time of year, elderly people freezing. They keep the heating off so they can eat.’
I arranged my cardigan around me, ashamed of all my wealth and privilege. ‘My husband said it was something about an accident?’ I used the word ‘husband’ consciously, like a shield. I’m married. I have nothing to do with this man, whoever he was.
‘That’s right. About three months ago there was a crash on the motorway slip road, the one that runs parallel to here a few miles over. A man drove into a tree.’
I put on a frown. ‘Oh, how awful. I don’t remember hearing about it.’ But would they know that wasn’t true? Would they check the searches I’d done online, see that I’d viewed news articles about the accident? ‘Was it ice? The roads don’t get gritted out here.’
‘No, it was before the cold snap. Still sunny and clear, nothing on the road that we know of.’
‘How strange. You’re still looking into it?’ Why had it taken them so long to get out here?
They exchanged a brief glance. ‘It wasn’t high priority. Cuts, you see.’
I wanted to offer an explanation – like maybe a sudden stroke or aneurysm, or something worse, shock at the news I’d just delivered you, the veiled threat I had made – but an innocent bystander wouldn’t do that, so I kept quiet.
‘You didn’t hear any
thing?’ the woman said.
‘Not that I can remember. When was it?’
She told me the date, as if I would ever forget it, and I made a pretence of getting my phone and going through my calendar. Would they be able to tell I’d been out of the house that day? Did the alarm system keep records of when I came and went? No, it was ages ago, no one would remember, plus Nora hadn’t moved in at that point. Of course she hadn’t. It must have been your death that drove her here, to find me. To destroy me.
I hedged my bets. ‘I can’t see anything in the diary, but I can’t remember that far back. I sometimes pop out for a walk, but I just don’t know, I’m sorry.’
They began to stir as if leaving, and my heart eased, thinking maybe this was just a routine call after all. They didn’t know anything.
‘Thank you, Mrs Thomas.’
I didn’t correct them about my name. Then, just as I was breathing again, poised to get up and see them to the door, they said something else.
‘Actually, Mrs Thomas, we noticed there was a call to the police a few weeks back, from this address.’
‘Oh?’ What the hell? A quick flash of panic ran through me. Had Nick told them something – did he know?
‘About a missing pet?’
I exhaled hard. ‘Oh, right, right, of course. Poor Poppet. I told Nick not to waste your time with that.’
‘Normally there’s not much we can do for missing dogs, but he’s right, there are gangs operating in this area, trying to steal pedigree animals. Have you noticed anything strange, anyone watching the house?’ I hadn’t even thought of that. It would be ridiculous if, after all this, Poppet’s disappearance was the only real crime going on here. If the strange happenings that had so spooked me had nothing to do with you and me at all.
I pretended to think. ‘We did have a few dropped calls, that sort of thing. I thought someone was casing the place – but we have such a good alarm system, I wasn’t overly worried.’
The Other Wife Page 18