‘What are we going to do?’ I asked timidly. ‘It’s such a mess, Nicky.’ An old nickname for him, back from when we’d loved each other. A time I knew had existed, but which I could hardly remember now.
He sighed, his elbows on the table. ‘I don’t know. We could go away, maybe. Abroad, somewhere warm. Wait till the baby comes.’
‘And then?’
‘I don’t know. Suzi, do you . . . ?’ I knew what he was going to ask, and was ready with my lie.
‘Of course I love you. I just – I’m messed up. I was so lonely out here, and I felt like you hated me.’ He nodded, as if seeing my point. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m no good – I don’t know why I do these things. But it’s not just about us now, is it?’ I placed my hands on my belly.
His face was open and vulnerable. ‘Suze, please just tell me – is he mine, the baby?’
This time I was faster. ‘Of course. With him I always . . . I never . . . It has to be yours.’ It was a lie, but Nick seemed to swallow it. In fact, I had always felt it was your baby, based on my ovulation apps and how hard I’d tried to avoid going near Nick in the fertile time, but it seemed he had been one step ahead of me there. Maybe the baby was his after all.
He stood up, taking away the dirty stew bowls. I’d eaten all mine, like a good girl. And it might have been alright, I might have rescued the situation, and we might have found a way to muddle through before I could safely divorce him, if the erratic mobile phone reception around our cottage hadn’t chosen that precise moment to kick in. My phone, which I saw now was on the counter, charging, vibrated, shuddering across the marble worktop. A text. Nick frowned.
‘What’s that?’
Stop, no, please. I knew with certainty it was a message that would ruin everything. But I could hardly tell him not to read it, and he did, picking up the phone, and his face changed. Gone was the tenderness, the sadness. In its place, cold, glittering rage.
‘So you told me the whole truth, did you?’
Oh my God. Who was it from? Dr Holt would know not to text me, wouldn’t he, so it had to be—
‘Fucking Damian.’
He flung the phone on the table, where it landed with a heavy thunk. I read the message in a flash. It was a reply to the angry email I’d sent him, the one I’d known was a mistake. Er dunno what you mean. I’m not the one who came to see you babe am I.
Oh God oh God. I hadn’t changed my number since we worked together. Texts still popped up on a locked screen – Nick would have found it suspicious otherwise. Why hadn’t it occurred to me Damian might text back instead of emailing? Oh Christ.
‘You went to see him? You used my money for that?’
‘I – weird stuff was happening. I thought maybe it was him. I couldn’t think who else – I didn’t know it was you.’
If I’d hoped to guilt-trip him, that was a pipe dream. ‘You lied. I asked you to tell me everything and you lied. You are a liar, Suzi. I can’t trust a word you say.’
I got up, edging away from him. I couldn’t go back in that cellar, breathing in the smell of dust and plastic. I couldn’t. Left out on the counter was a knife Nick had used to slice the vegetables. I could see shreds of carrot clinging to it. I seized it with an unsteady hand, feeling how much I was shaking.
‘Stop it, Nick. You’re scaring me. The baby . . .’
He sneered. ‘The baby, the baby! Poor bloody kid, with a slutty mother like you! Sometimes I think it’d be better off not being born.’
Oh shit. The murder-suicide, favourite method of angry, vengeful fathers. He wouldn’t. This was Nick. All the same, panic was clawing at my arms. I steadied the knife with my other hand.
‘Come on, be reasonable,’ I tried. ‘This doesn’t change anything we talked about.’
‘It changes everything.’
He lunged at me, and I dropped the knife. The noise of it clattering on the floor tiles was the worst thing I had ever heard. His face was very close to mine.
‘You bitch, you bitch, you slut, you whore.’ He said it so quietly, almost a whisper, it made it even more terrifying.
What could I do? Girl, you better save yourself.
My eyes darted round the kitchen in a nanosecond. There on the draining rack was the lid of my Le Creuset pot, a heavy orange thing we’d got as a wedding present. I had used it the night we had Nora over for dinner, when I still thought there was a way out of all this. I lifted it, my wrist complaining at the weight, and hit Nick hard in the face with it. It was so easy that I shocked myself, feeling the reverb all the way up my wrist.
I dropped it but Nick was staggering, turning white.
‘Fucking . . . bitch . . . you fucking . . .’
My phone was on the table, the landline right nearby. I could have called an ambulance. But he was already pulling himself to his feet, and so, taking my chance this time, in a thin jumper and bare feet, I ran out into the snow.
Eleanor
‘Oh – it’s you.’
After Bill, my elderly chauffeur, had dropped me at the hospital, I followed the same route as before to the obs and gynae wing. I hadn’t even thought what I’d do if Dr Holt wasn’t working tonight. Or how I would explain myself, given that he didn’t officially know I was Suzi’s neighbour. In the end, there was no need to worry. He was there, sleeves rolled up, hair sticking on end, buying a Coke from a vending machine draped in tinsel. I approached. ‘Dr Holt? It’s—’
‘Eleanor. Patrick’s wife.’
‘Yes.’
He looked wary at seeing me, his can rolling forgotten in the drawer of the machine. In the end, I decided just to be honest. After all, I wasn’t sure how much time we had. ‘Dr Holt – I need your help. It’s Suzi. Suzanne Matthews – I think she’s in trouble.’
Unsurprisingly, he didn’t believe me at first. ‘Eleanor – I know about you. You moved next door to her. You know that she . . . knew your husband.’
There wasn’t time for this. ‘Yes, they had an affair, but that’s not important now—’
He stepped forward, laying a hand on my arm. ‘Mrs Sullivan, please. I can help you. We have people here—’
‘You don’t understand. Suzi’s in danger. Her husband, Nick, I think he has her locked up! He said she’s at her mother’s, but she isn’t, and the music room’s locked and it’s never locked.’ It sounded crazy. How could I make him believe me?
He was frowning. ‘What?’
‘You’ve been in touch with her, haven’t you? I saw her emails on your computer. At first I didn’t know why you’d be involved with her – I even wondered if you were caught up in it.’
‘Caught up in what?’
‘The blackmail.’ I waved a hand; that didn’t matter now either. ‘But you weren’t, were you? You just cared for her. I didn’t understand why for ages – but then I looked you up.’
He went still.
‘Edward Holt, Jane Holt – they were your parents, weren’t they?’
‘Mrs Sullivan . . .’
‘Please! Please don’t send me away or call security or whatever you’re about to do. Suzi needs us. Yes, I meant her harm to begin with, I hated her, but it’s different now. You see? It’s changed. I’ve changed.’ Oh God, I wasn’t making sense. ‘Your mother – I know what she did. I understand why, OK? It was the same in my home.’ Jane Holt, a mild-mannered housewife who loved gardening, had stabbed her husband, Edward, to death one day in the middle of Sunday lunch. Her lawyers claimed she was the victim of decades of coercive control, but she’d gone to prison all the same, and died there a few years later.
He was shaking now. ‘How do you – you can’t—’
‘You get it, don’t you? How these things work, how someone can make you lose yourself, lose any faith you ever had in your own mind, your strength. We have to stop him, Dr Holt. Please come with me.’
I didn’t think it had worked – I thought he might insist we called the police, or just refuse to believe me – but after a moment I saw him nod.
&
nbsp; ‘Are you sure we’ll make it?’
Dr Holt scrubbed at the clouded-up windscreen with his sleeve. ‘This is a four-wheel drive. I bought it after those few bad winters a while back, when I couldn’t get to work.’
We were crawling down the frozen M25, hardly any other vehicles braving the trip. I could see almost nothing, just gusts of wind that from time to time cleared the freezing fog. I had explained all I knew – my original plan, the revisions I’d made to it when I learned about the baby, my growing doubts about Nick, why I thought Suzi was imprisoned inside the house.
It turned out he and Suzi had seen each other a few times, and I detected a tenderness towards her. She was the type of woman men wanted to take care of. He admitted, ‘I was worried about Suzi. The things she said about Nick, how possessive he was, it sounded like coercion.’
‘You don’t know the half of it.’ I told him what I’d learned, that Nick watched Suzi through their alarm system, that he reset the heating and door codes to wrong-foot her, that he played music remotely to make her think she was going mad. Dr Holt’s hands clenched on the steering wheel.
‘Yet just because he doesn’t hit her, no one would think it’s abuse,’ he muttered. I deduced from this he was not just thinking of Suzi.
‘I think he might have moved on to more physical threats now,’ I said, thinking of the cellar.
‘Pregnancy is when most instances of domestic abuse get worse,’ he said, glancing anxiously at me. ‘Eleanor – one of the other doctors died a few days ago. James Conway – he knew your husband, I think. He knew about Patrick and Suzi.’
‘He was going to blackmail her,’ I said. I didn’t explain how I knew this.
‘Do you think that maybe Nick . . .’
I didn’t answer. Now was not the time to open that particular can of worms. After a moment of silence, he said, ‘I don’t want to miss the turn-off – tell me when we’re close.’
We almost did miss it in the gloom of the whirling snow, then had to take the turn too fast. I held on to the side handle, white-knuckled. Then we were bumping down the narrow, dark lane, the dazzle of the motorway suddenly gone, the car rocking over potholes left from earlier freezes. Ivy Cottage appeared, forlorn and snow-covered. And someone was at my door, hammering on it, desperate. Suzi! I saw she wore only thin clothes, and had no shoes on. Her feet were bare and red in the lights from the car.
‘Stop!’ I shouted, grabbing for the wheel without thinking. ‘It’s her!’
For one confused moment, Dr Holt pulled the wheel one way, and me another. That was all the time it took for a dark shape to loom up in front of us on the road, and then Dr Holt was swearing and braking, but the road was too icy to stop, and I saw a white startled face in the headlights of the jeep, and I knew what was going to happen, and there was nothing we could do about it.
Suzi
I didn’t understand what was happening. I had run across the lane – icy cold on my bare feet, like tiny needles stabbing me – and gone straight to Nora’s, even though the house was cold and dark. Even though I was likely in danger from her too. There was simply nowhere else to run, so I had to hope maybe she was hiding inside with the lights off. I was screaming, my voice whipped away by the wind.
‘Nora! Please help – help me!’ Was it mad to think she’d been helping me all along – advising me to leave Nick, telling me my rights? That she hadn’t wished me ill at all?
Nothing. She wasn’t there, and I could hear Nick blundering across the road to me, cursing and screaming. Terrible words, things I’d never heard come from his mouth before.
I knew it was no good. He would drag me back, put me in the cellar, keep me there until I had the baby. Maybe he’d tell the hospital we’d moved away, force me to give birth down there alone. I wondered how long it would be before anyone came to look for me. Months? Years, if he was smart. And I knew he was smart. He’d had me fooled for so long. All this went through my head in seconds, and then I saw the lights of the car.
It was swerving, going too fast for the narrow icy lane. The thing Nick had always warned me about, to look both ways before crossing. It was driving straight at him. I’d like to think I shouted to him to look out, but I couldn’t say if I did. Instead, I watched the car – a large jeep – plough right into him, tossing him off the road into the ditch like a child’s toy.
The jeep stopped, jackknifed across the road, and someone got out. Nora. But this wasn’t her car. I didn’t know whose it was, but it looked familiar. Then I saw the driver get down, run to where Nick was, throwing off a thick winter coat to free his arms. I knew that stocky, capable build. It was Dr Holt. He bent over Nick, pummelling on his chest, while Nora and I stood frozen, watching.
‘He’s gone.’
Dr Holt sat back after a moment, wiping his mouth with a shaking hand. Snowflakes whirled around us, settling on our cheeks and eyelashes, and on to Nick’s white, still face, a spread of blood flowering on his temple.
‘Oh God. I’ve killed him. I’ll lose my licence. I’ll be struck off.’
I don’t know what would have happened if it was just Dr Holt and me there. I was half-delirious with shock and cold, and all his instincts were to tell the truth, call the police. We might have got off, given that Nick had come out of nowhere on a dark road. But there was the dent I’d made in his forehead, and the pot lid still with his blood on it, and the car had swerved towards him, and the police could check for things like that. Maybe Dr Holt would, as he’d said, have been charged with dangerous driving. Lost his job. Lost everything. And me – I didn’t know what would have happened to me.
Either way, it didn’t happen like that. What happened was Nora – Eleanor – stepped forward, took Dr Holt by the arm.
‘Let’s go into the warmth,’ she said, nodding towards the house I’d just run out of. ‘Let’s go inside and talk about what to do.’
Alison
FEBRUARY – TWO MONTHS LATER
‘That was the wife on the phone. Suzi Matthews.’ Later that day, Tom leaned against Alison’s cubicle wall, causing it to buckle alarmingly. ‘She’s fine.’
Alison had been vaguely worried for the woman, who seemed to have disappeared, and who she knew had been heavily pregnant. ‘You tell her she’s a widow now?’
‘Nah. Said to come in. We’ll need her to formally identify him.’
When they’d gone to see their boss, DCI Claire Fisher, and tried to explain Alison’s hunch about the case, she had told them it was pretty much a certainty their corpse was Nick Thomas. His body had barely degraded at all under the snow, and he even conveniently had his wallet in his jeans pocket. Hit and run, body hidden in the ditch all this time. The story was clear to read.
All the same, there was still something about it that Alison didn’t like.
‘Where’s she been all this time?’
‘At her mum’s, she said, and then with a friend. They had some big row and Thomas stormed off. Texted to say he was leaving her, told his own mum the same. She’s got the messages to show us, says she hasn’t seen him since December.’
It was very neat. Little chance of finding the car that had hit Nick Thomas, so long afterwards, and an explanation for why no one had seen him all this time.
Alison thought for a moment. ‘And the link to the other two cases?’
Tom shrugged. ‘Dunno if there is one. The first crash, Patrick Sullivan, that was most probably an accident. James Conway – could be an accident too, with the gas fire.’
Alison looked at him sceptically. Coincidences like that didn’t really happen.
‘There was a lot dodgy about that crash,’ she said. ‘And why was Matthews’ name in Conway’s flat – how do you explain that?’
‘Well, how about this? He’s a blackmailer, Conway. Drives the first fella – Sullivan – to top himself, steering into that tree. The hospital are being well cagey, but looks like Sullivan was nicking money from them. They have some kind of internal investigation going on. Then Co
nway, he moves on to Thomas – he has the wife’s details so he can go to her with whatever it is he knows.’ So far they had found nothing to suggest Conway and Thomas had known each other, and nothing untoward about Nick Thomas, an apparently blameless member of the public, but experience had taught Alison there would be something blackmailable. There always was. Everyone had at least one secret they’d kill for, if they were the right kind of person. Thankfully, most people weren’t.
She sighed. ‘You’re saying Thomas kills Conway to stop the blackmail. Then who kills him?’
Tom shrugged again. ‘That I dunno. Genuine hit and run? Some accomplice? How would we ever find out?’
That was the problem. They were so stretched at the moment, with all the cuts, that it would be hard to make a case for digging deeper into it. Fisher was keen to have it all wrapped up. Three apparent accidents, where at least two of the victims had known each other? Was it that rare thing, a real coincidence? Alison sighed again, eyeing the emails ticking into her inbox like the dripping of a water clock.
‘Suppose you’re right. Let’s kick it upstairs, see what they say.’
Tom stretched. ‘Who’s doing the death ID, me or you?’
Alison couldn’t face the thought of it, taking Suzi Matthews in to look at her husband’s dead, frozen body.
She pleaded with him. ‘Ah please, mate. I can’t. It’s been such a freezing, awful day.’
‘No worries. I’ll sort it. Doubt she’ll be too upset anyway, if he left her.’
‘I owe you one,’ she said gratefully.
‘One pint?’
‘If you like.’
‘After work, The Feathers?’ Suddenly, he wasn’t meeting her eyes, fiddling with a thumb tack on her wall. They’d had drinks together dozens of times. This was no different. But all the same, Alison suddenly found it hard to meet his eyes too.
The Other Wife Page 25