Eleanor, you little bitch.
My mother’s words, echoing through the years in my head, as if I’d never escaped her. As if fire and blood and death had not been enough.
‘Oh, right. Guess he had it done then after all? I thought he was just sounding off, never thought he’d go through with it.’
‘With what?’ I was really struggling to follow her, my brain inching itself along, winded by revelations.
She frowned at me. ‘The vasectomy? After what happened with my pregnancy, Sean was so angry he said he was going to get one, make sure he never got caught out again. I assume he did it?’
Suzi
Being down in the cellar was how I imagined being dead. No one could hear me – it didn’t matter how much I screamed and shouted. The expensive soundproofing Nick had put in for his ‘music room’ was doing its work, and anyway, who was there to hear me out here?
I wondered where Nora was, why she hadn’t come to look for me in days. Had she worked out somehow I was on to her? Perhaps she would prefer me down here, safely out of the way. In my more paranoid moments, when panic clutched at my throat, I wondered if they were in it together, Nora and Nick. A revenge pact, against you and me. If they had somehow engineered your death too. I would not have believed it, but I would also not have believed that Nick, my mild-mannered husband, had been building a soundproofed prison right under my nose, and had locked me up in it. Oh, it was nice enough, this prison. There was carpet, and a bed with soft sheets, and he gave me plenty of water and food, coming down several times a day to check on me. There was even a loo, which he’d suggested putting in during the rebuild for when we had guests, and I had agreed to, listlessly, as I did with everything. I’d been trying to wash myself in the sink, but without a proper shower I already smelled.
The first time Nick came down, I raced at him. Tried to hit him, claw at his eyes. He just held my wrists until I subsided. He was stronger than I knew – all those gym visits. Another thing I had missed.
‘Stop it, it’s bad for the baby.’
‘You can’t do this!’
‘It’s for your own good. The way you’ve been acting, running all over the country in the snow, looking for some twat who didn’t give a damn about you – Suzi, it’s madness. When you have time to think, you’ll see how good you have it here. I love you. I’ll take care of you – you never need to work again.’
The next time, I just cried. Big snotty sobs. ‘Please let me out. Please, I won’t tell anyone. I admit what I did was bad. I’ll even go to therapy if you want.’
He looked sad too. ‘We’re past that now. This is the only way.’ He was solicitous. He would ask which meals I preferred, if I liked white bread or brown, consult me on how to make certain dishes.
‘Just let me out,’ was all I said at first, but gradually I gave in. If I was going to be stuck down here, I might as well eat things I liked. This was how you got used to any horror. The terrible adaptability of human minds. If it weren’t for the lack of windows and a shower, I could have been resting in a nice hotel, with books and soft furnishings. Just nothing I could use to get a message out. ‘It’ll be good for you, less phone time,’ he said, as if I was a child.
I protested about the shower. ‘You have to let me wash. I could get sick.’
I could see him pursing his lips. My plan was, if he let me upstairs to the bathroom, I would grab something – one of my kitchen knives, or maybe a heavy ornament – and I would hit or stab him, and I would run out of this house and on to the desolate road, and I’d keep running until I found someone who would help me. It might not have been a good plan, but it was the only one I had.
Eleanor
Finally, after all my investigations, I had to go home. Conway was dead. My husband, my entire existence, was not as I had thought. He had a son. He’d let me think all those years I might have a child too, even though he’d had a vasectomy. He couldn’t be the father of Suzi’s child. He was not even dead. My whole plan, to find Suzi and pull her life apart, piece by piece, had crumbled away. She might not ever know it, but Suzi was a victim too, both of his lies and Nick’s control. I was sick of the narrative I’d chosen: the vengeful wife hunting down my husband’s mistress. I was sick of men, pitting us against each other. Lying. Locking us up in our dolls’ houses. It was time to end it. I had made up my mind – I would go to Suzi, and tell her the truth, and help her to get away from her life. Burn it to the ground, if she had to. I was good at that. Then perhaps, together, we would track down my husband, and make him pay.
It took me almost half an hour to drive down the slipway lane from the motorway to my house, normally a ten-minute journey. Snow had piled up in my absence, and the tyres groaned and slipped on the icy, powdery surface. Gritters did not come down here, I knew. I might not get out again for days. I parked near Holly Cottage, its ruined hulk almost hidden by snow. Shielding my face from the driving snow, I pushed aside its rotten doorway. The roof was so full of holes, the inside may as well have been outside.
‘There, there. I’m sorry, poor boy.’
Poppet was shivering in the makeshift kennel I’d rigged up for him, his food bowl empty. I felt a stab of guilt. What had I been thinking, taking him like this? When he ran off that day in the grounds of the old house, I had quickly found him in the bushes, blazing with anger that Suzi still could not control her dog. Then the idea had come – a way to punish her, unbalance her. I had meant no harm to the dog. I could never hurt an animal, and now the poor thing was freezing because I’d left him tied up in here.
‘Come on, come on.’ I led him with me, towards the relative warmth of my cottage. I would make him a bed in front of the fire, feed him double helpings of Pedigree Chum. Another thing I would have to confess to Suzi.
A single lamp was burning in Willow Cottage, and I lifted the dog under my coat, hiding him. He was heavy, panting hard against me, and he stank of damp fur, but it was a comforting smell. It was 3 p.m., the light already leaching from the sky, and I decided I would cross the lane and tell Suzi what I knew. It was time.
After sorting out Poppet and leaving him in front of the gas fire, I crossed the lane, a treacherous journey given the slushy, unsalted surface. The black tarmac was slippery as a diamond. I trudged up their path, surprised that Nick hadn’t cleared the snow from it, and knocked. I braced myself to confront Suzi, to both blame and acknowledge blame. At the end of this conversation, we would know each other better. Who knew, perhaps we would even come out of it allies. Stranger things had happened.
The door opened and I saw – Nick.
‘Nora!’ He seemed surprised. ‘Hello.’
‘Oh, hello. I thought I’d pop by to see Suzi.’ What was he doing home? ‘Not at work today?’
‘I was a bit under the weather,’ he said, though he seemed fine. He was wearing dark jeans and a white shirt. I recognised it as an expensive brand my husband had liked, and I was surprised, because Nick hadn’t struck me as a dandy. ‘Suzi’s not here, I’m afraid. She went to her mother’s.’
‘She left when you were sick?’ A woman who was almost seven months pregnant, crossing the countryside in snowy weather? It didn’t make sense. And then I remembered – Suzi had told me her mother was going away for Christmas, on a cruise. Thank God, it means we don’t have to invite her here. At the time I had felt a strange bond with her, both of us with difficult mothers.
Why was Nick lying? Was Suzi there, but didn’t want to see me?
‘Oh, I got worse after she went. Better she’s away, to be honest. Can’t have her getting ill in her condition.’ He was already shutting the door and I panicked.
‘Wait! Nick, I do need to tell her something. Is she contactable there? On her mobile?’
‘There’s no reception,’ he said sympathetically. ‘It’s in some kind of weird rural dip, like here.’
‘How about a landline?’
He hesitated. I knew I was being rude, but I didn’t care. All the hair on the back of my n
eck was standing up. Something was wrong here. He wanted rid of me, I could tell. ‘You know, I can’t for the life of me remember the number. I never call her mother myself, obviously.’ He did a little self-deprecating shrug. ‘I can look, but you’ll have to give me a while.’
He had boxed me in. I could not now get inside the house without raising the alarm. I glanced past him into the gloom of the hallway. On the wall behind, set into the expensive wallpaper, was a door, a coded keypad beside it glowing red. Did red mean locked? I remembered another thing. Suzi showing me round the cottage. And that’s Nick’s music room down there, God knows who’s going to steal his stupid guitars, but he insisted on this lock. Had I seen it locked before, that door? ‘Alright. If she calls, tell her I’m looking for her, will you?’
‘Of course. Bye.’ The front door shut with a click, its hermetic seal locking the house up. I looked at the glowing alarm keypad, so out of place on this old cottage. Nick had turned the place into a fortress, remote-locking doors and windows all operated by codes, automatic blinds and shutters, the cable of a burglar alarm snaking around the house. Of course, a fortress also made a pretty good prison.
I squelched around the side of the cottage, counting its dimensions from the few times I’d been inside. The large kitchen – a light showed beneath the shutter but no shadows moved. Suzi’s studio, in darkness but for a faint blue glow. Her computer had been left on, maybe, but she wasn’t in there. The downstairs loo, the pantry, all the rest of the house in darkness. If Suzi wasn’t at her mother’s, and she wasn’t in any of the rooms, where was she? They had dug into the cellar to make the music room. If you were middle-class, it seemed you could create a virtual dungeon in your house and no one would even notice.
It was a crazy thought, but no more so than anything else that had happened recently. Was Suzi in there?
Suzi
‘You can’t keep me a prisoner here for ever,’ I said coldly, when Nick next came down. I felt like a zoo animal. I had food, water – the large bottles he’d bought, ostensibly as snow supplies – books, a comfortable bed. But all the same I wanted to tear a hole in the wall just to get out. To have space, light. Down here, I could barely tell what time of day it was.
Nick set down my lunch, a bowl of tepid carrot soup. Perhaps he was worried I’d throw it at him, anything piping hot.
‘Prisoner? Suzi, you’re in your own home. You’re warm and dry and well fed. I’m taking care of you! You were out of control, running all over the place in the cold. You just need to calm down a bit.’
‘I’ll be missed. I have midwife appointments, scans! Mum will notice I haven’t called.’ My mother had already left for several months of educational cruising with Nigel the bookbinder, and I tried to think if I’d told Nick the exact dates. Would she think to call me during her holiday, or just text? If we’d been closer, she might have already noticed something was up. Or, you know, actually listened when I tried to tell her.
‘If she rings I can just say you’re in the bath. You’ve told me to do that enough times, when you don’t want to talk to her.’
It was true. He was so maddeningly calm about the whole thing. Almost reasonable. I had to keep reminding myself that this wasn’t normal, this was a crime. He was keeping me locked up in a basement. I was like that girl who’d been missing for twenty years. I went cold. Surely someone would come to look for me before then? A health professional, or my mother, or Claudia even? It was a good way to take stock of your life, wondering who might come to find you if you went missing. Would Nick tell them I’d just gone off somewhere? Run away with a man? But the baby. He wouldn’t make me have the baby down here?
A jolt of fear made me change my tone. ‘Please, sweetheart. I’m afraid. What if I go into labour down here and you’re not about? If you’re at work? I could die!’
‘I’ve taken sick leave,’ he said, glancing up from wiping down the little card table he’d left me to eat at. Even imprisoned with virtually no belongings, I managed to make a mess. ‘I’m always here. I told Mum not to come for Christmas, by the way. Said you didn’t feel up to it, with the pregnancy.’
Things were pretty bad when the idea of my mother-in-law not coming made me want to cry. With the Christmas break approaching, it was possible no one would find me for weeks. They’d think Nick and I had bedded down, cosy and happy together in our rural idyll.
‘But you can’t hear me up there, if I need something.’ Perhaps I could convince him to give me my phone.
‘There’s the camera. I’ll check on you through that.’
The idea of being watched all the time made my breath stop. I twisted my hands together, trying to match his reasonable tone. ‘The thing is, I really do need to shower. I read that infections can develop otherwise, hurt the baby.’ I began to cry, not entirely faked. ‘Poor thing. He didn’t ask for any of this.’
‘He?’ Nick frowned. ‘Did you find out the gender and not tell me?’
‘No, no,’ I said quickly. ‘Just a feeling.’ In truth, I had no feeling at all, and could barely picture the baby as a person, but I had calculated that Nick would prefer a boy. I was scared to imagine him with a little girl. The way he’d treat her dates. Smothering her in a curtain of pink.
Nick was thinking about it. ‘If you promise to be good, you can have a wash. I mean it, Suzi. There’s nothing to stop me keeping you down here till the birth. If anyone asks, I can say you’re at your mother’s. You really think the cash-strapped NHS will bother to come all the way out here? Plus, we’re virtually snowed in at the minute.’ He said the last words with some relish. ‘You’d need a jeep to get down here.’
So no one was coming.
‘Nora,’ I said. ‘Where is she?’ What a hole I was in, when the only person who might rescue me was the woman who hated me.
He shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen any lights in her place. I think she’s away.’ He was lying; I saw his eyes flicker. Why would he lie about that? Because he knew Nora might help me? Did that mean she was around? A crazy surge of hope punched into my chest. But why on earth would Nora do anything for me?
‘Well, if no one’s about, you don’t need to worry about me making a scene,’ I pointed out. ‘No one would hear.’ All he’d have to do would be to hide the phones, and the house itself would become an extension of my prison.
Nick was nodding. ‘Alright. You are starting to stink a bit. Smells like a pet shop down here.’
That hurt my feelings, absurdly, but I said nothing. This was my only chance.
Eleanor
I wasn’t sure what to do. I was pacing my living room, rubbing my cold hands until they were cracked and red. What would the police say if I called them? I think my neighbour’s being held prisoner. Who by? Her husband. Head of local council IT. Where? Oh, in her own music room. It was ridiculous. Suzi could well have gone away, if not to her mother’s then a friend’s. It was possible she’d even lied to Nick, that he didn’t know about the cruise. That she’d made her escape as I’d urged her to do, just in a different way. But somehow, I felt that wasn’t true. Nick had been hiding something. He hadn’t wanted me there.
I had put it all together since stealing his phone and meeting Lisa Ragozzi. Nick wasn’t a dupe, even if Suzi treated him like one. Far from it, he knew exactly what she’d been up to. He watched her through cameras, knew when she entered and left the house, so it was quite likely he’d also been monitoring her phone. It was astonishing how many people had Find My Friends – tracking software, essentially – turned on and didn’t even know or care. He might even have cloned her phone so he could read her messages – I had read that you could do that quite easily, just by sending a link to the phone. Perhaps he’d been planning to confront her about it, her second affair, before she said she was pregnant. Patrick couldn’t father a child, so it was Nick’s, whether he knew that for sure or not, and a baby was likely what he’d wanted ever since he’d tried to persuade Lisa – a college student! – that she should have one.
>
I could see the plan clearly, as if I’d made it myself. Suzi was almost seven months pregnant now. All he had to do was keep her somewhere until she went into labour – somewhere safe and warm, no point causing distress to the baby by making it a nasty place – then when she had the child, get rid of her somehow. It didn’t even have to be murder. He’d laid the groundwork so well, taking her to the doctors, reporting her anxiety and hallucinations. Documenting her panicked racing around the country, her long walks in the cold, her weeping for hours. I imagined he would have her put away, in some nice safe hospital, the kind of place where I’d stuck my mother. Then divorce her, and who would give custody of a baby to a crazy woman? She would have antenatal scans booked, yes, and appointments, but perhaps he could tell them she’d moved practices. Or scare her enough that she’d never say a word, even if he let her out and she got her chance to tell someone. There were women who lived like that for years. Even me, I had lived in a cage I thought was perfect.
Oh, Nick was good, I had to give him that. In another world, I would have admired him. I had done similar things. I too had been the eyes watching from the shadows, a victim of the relationship between my husband and his wife. I too had conspired, and sneaked, and manipulated. But only in the hot bloodlust of grieving revenge. Not this cold-blooded calculation. I wondered how far back his plan stretched. Getting her out of London, that was surely part of it. Maybe he’d even thought it would work, the move. Make her realise what she had with him, make her love him again. Or did the possibility of this plan graze his mind even then, in case she didn’t comply?
I pulled aside my curtains and gazed across the lane at Willow Cottage. How well do any of us know our neighbours, what goes on behind those lighted windows and locked doors? I hadn’t even known the man I shared my life with. I thought I knew about Suzi, but in truth so much of her life was obscured to me. I had tried to know Nick, to ferret out his secrets, but there he was just feet away and I couldn’t reach him. More snow was falling, obscuring the cold air, fogging up the glass. Soon the lane would be impassable again, and that meant Nick might not go to work. Which meant I couldn’t get in to help Suzi. She was over there, I was sure, locked up in the dark hole of the earth, her screams soundproofed away. He needn’t have bothered with that. Aside from me, who was there to hear? Who would even miss her if she didn’t leave the cellar for months? He’d managed to make sure she had no one even looking for her.
The Other Wife Page 23