‘No Tinder date tonight then?’
Tom cleared his throat. ‘Nah. Thinking I might knock all that on the head. You in?’
‘Alright then,’ she said casually, letting him walk away before she allowed herself to smile.
Eleanor
FEBRUARY
I shut the door on the police with relief, and went to pick up Isobel. She was red-faced, howling in her crib. I watched her every day for signs of who she looked like, but so far all I could see was Suzi, her fuzz of hair, her clear blue eyes.
‘Shh, shh.’ I jiggled her in my arms, and gradually she went limp and contented against me. ‘You’re hungry, aren’t you? Don’t worry, angel, Mummy will feed you soon.’
Suzi had looked stunned on that winter night two months back, when I’d herded her and Dr Holt into the warmth and light of her cottage. The cellar door stood open, a dark yawning mouth, and I could see that I’d been right about where Nick was keeping Suzi. It haunted me still, the little bed, the card table, the warm prison he’d made for her. Both of them were semi-hysterical, and Dr Holt kept saying we had to call the police. But I talked him round. All we had to do was move the body, drag it a bit further into the deep ditch at the side of the road, then leave it there until the snow thawed. That could have been a week or, as it turned out, several months.
In that time, I would text Suzi from Nick’s phone, which he had conveniently left in the house, suggesting he had ditched her after learning of her infidelity. He hadn’t disconnected it from every app since I took his other one, so it was easy to get in and reset the passcode, as I had done with Patrick’s. The police might be able to tie these three suspicious deaths together – Conway, Nick, and Patrick of course – but there was enough material there to write themselves a different story. Conway had been blackmailing Nick, perhaps, or Nick had killed him to shut him up about Suzi. Or Patrick and Conway had been killed by the same person, someone else who was being squeezed for money.
Suzi didn’t believe it would work. Nick’s mother would notice he hadn’t called. His office would wonder why he didn’t come back after Christmas. But I knew it would. In the modern world, people don’t need to hear your voice to believe it’s you they’re speaking to. A few evasions here and there, and he’d resigned by email and told his mother over text (because he’d been sick, as he’d already helpfully told her himself, he’d lost his voice) that he was leaving Suzi, going away for a while to get his head straight.
And so we’d settled down to wait. Unwilling to go back into her own house, that beautiful prison she’d thought she might never escape, Suzi had moved in with me, and then, when little Isobel arrived earlier than expected in January (hardly surprising with everything that had happened), to the hospital. It wasn’t suspicious if you thought Nick had left Suzi. At least, we hoped so. Now would be the real test. The police had found his body.
I was debating whether or not to text Suzi to tell her, when I heard the sound of a car pulling up. I watched as she took her customary five minutes to extract herself from the car, tangled in headphones, scarves, cardigans, shopping bags. She couldn’t seem to stop buying things for Isobel, as if making up for not feeling excitement before the birth.
As soon as she came in I said, ‘It’s time. They found him.’
Suzi’s face, flushed from the heat of the car, went pale. ‘Oh.’
‘It’s a good thing. Get it over with.’
‘What should we do?’
‘You need to call them – say you were at your mother’s, or a friend’s. Stick to the story. Nick left you. He’s been texting, you haven’t seen him.’
She took Isobel from me, soothing her in a gesture that made my heart ache. Issy wasn’t mine, she never would be. She wasn’t Patrick’s either, and as it turned out, there could have been no child for me with him. But I hoped she would think of me as at least a kindly aunt, and I hadn’t come away with nothing – I was going to take Poppet, since Suzi hadn’t the first clue about dogs, and hopefully train him up to be well behaved. We could never explain the true relationship between us, Suzi and I. All the same I hoped there was one, and one that would endure, no matter what happened next. She said, ‘But they’ll be able to tell, won’t they? How long he’s been . . . there. In the snow.’
‘I don’t know. Even if they do, you don’t know anything about it. If someone else texted you from his phone – well, how were you to realise that?’
I knew nothing as the innocent neighbour, and they’d never think to involve Dr Holt. There was no trail linking him to us, no reason they would think to test his jeep for damage, or discover that it had been sold just before Christmas. I had thought it through many times over the past two months, placing weight on each part of the story in turn. I was confident it would hold. After all, I’d done it before.
Suzi had asked me about that, as we sat in her house on that terrible night, shell-shocked. Did I do it, what the whispers claimed? The fire that ruined my home, killed my father and my sweet little brother, sent my mother further into her madness? That saw me locked up in Uplands, a psychiatric hospital for teenage girls, until I managed to talk my way out, convince them I was an unfortunate victim of circumstances? I said accidents were sometimes just that: accidents. That was all she needed to know. Not about that night, when it should have been only myself and my parents in the house, when Sebby should have been sleeping over at a friend’s. A friend who, it turned out, had chickenpox, and so Sebby was at home as usual. I, locked in my own room for some new transgression, for complaining about being banned from piano lessons, the boarding school they were about to send me to, had not known he was there. And Suzi didn’t need to know how I had sneaked out, passing my mother’s room, seeing her wiped out on her bed with a cigarette burning down between her slim fingers. Or about me moving her hand ever so slightly closer to the curtains. Nor about getting out, taking the dogs with me so they’d be safe. Considering my father, absent even if present in body, never less than two glasses of whisky in, and dismissing him. Not about realising, too late, that Sebby was also there. Seeing his white face at the window as I raced up the lawn of the house, the grass cold and wet beneath me, the dogs yelping. Ellie! Ellie! Trying to get in, beaten back by smoke, my precious hands burned.
Of course I didn’t know he was there. He was a child, an innocent. I would never have hurt him. Anyway, I was a different person now. Not Eleanor Treadway, or Elena Vetriano, or Elle-belle, or Nora Halscombe. I didn’t quite know who I was, not yet. But I would find out.
‘Eleanor,’ said Suzi now, hesitantly. ‘I’m afraid.’
‘Don’t worry.’ I stroked the baby’s hand, and she clutched my finger in her tiny fist. ‘It’s all going to be fine. The investigation will be wrapped up soon, and then I’ll leave.’
She went even paler. ‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Will you tell him about me? About Issy? The truth?’
‘I don’t think he deserves it.’
She nodded. Soon, she was going to sell the gleaming prison Nick had built for her, and move into a flat in town. When I asked her what it was like, the one she’d viewed today, I knew she’d rave about the mullioned windows or cornices, and not a word about stairs or transport links or boilers. Bless her, she wasn’t very practical, Suzi. Not ideal for a single mother. But I thought that, in her usual style, she wouldn’t be single for long. The places she’d been viewing were all quite near to Dr Holt’s little bachelor pad. And once Nick was declared dead, she’d have his life insurance, his pension, all their savings. It had turned out pretty well for Suzi, whether she deserved it or not. As for me, I had gained nothing. I couldn’t have, really. Revenge was a zero-sum game, I knew that now. At least I had some stake in Issy’s future, and hopefully, a friend for ever.
But I had one more thing to do before I settled back into my life, and tried to move forward. I was only forty-two – there was still time, and now I knew that the reason for my childlessness was not
me. It could happen. I had hope, if nothing else, but that small spark was enough to hold back a world of darkness. First, though, I would book a ticket to a small town in Spain, one with an English pub that served Newcastle Brown Ale.
Maddy
APRIL
With the coming of spring, life had returned to La Tornada. Tourists once again wandered into the bar, eating battered fish with obvious relief that it didn’t have its head still on, standing in front of the big screen gaping at football matches back home. Maddy worked hard, scraped ketchup-spattered plates, pulled pints, smiled. But she couldn’t stop thinking about Sean. They’d kept each other company all through the dead winter months, her sneaking off to his flat in the harbour every time she had a spare moment. They’d watched films, played board games, gone for walks on the beach, and of course more. Maddy blushed when she thought about the more. But then he’d gone. The messages suddenly stopping, no answer at his door when she went to knock, ashamed at being so needy.
She honestly thought he’d come back, and every day for a week she’d made an effort with her appearance, ready to be aloof but forgiving when he came into the pub, but there was no sign of him. Ghosted, by someone too old to even know what that meant. At least she hadn’t told anyone about the relationship.
One day, not long after she’d last seen him, a woman had come into the pub. Much older than Maddy, like twice her age maybe, but there was something about her that made you look. She was stick-thin, lucky cow, and had long dark hair, dyed probably, but shiny and rich. She wore an ankle-length printed green dress and a floppy hat and sunglasses, and in a posh sort of voice, like an actress or something, she had asked after Patrick.
Maddy had been on red alert right away. Wife, her senses were telling her, even though she couldn’t have said where she’d learned this. This was his wife. But the name was wrong. ‘Patrick who?’
The woman had placed her sunglasses on the bar, so Maddy could see her grey eyes. ‘Patrick Sullivan.’
‘Oh?’ Maddy’s neck was prickling. ‘I don’t know any Patrick.’
‘He could be calling himself something else. I need to get in touch with him about an inheritance. He could be rather a rich man, if I can just find him.’
Maddy had remembered what he’d told her, that he was strapped for cash, and if he wasn’t he’d take her away from all this, to live in Paris or New York or even London. Just somewhere . . . better. But he was Sean, not Patrick. He wouldn’t have lied about that, would he? ‘Sorry.’ She shrugged.
The woman’s gaze was like a laser. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Yeah.’
Ever since then she’d been kicking herself. What if it really was an inheritance? Had she lost her chance to help him, and had he somehow found out, and that was why he’d ditched her? That was stupid. No, it was far more likely the woman had found him through someone else – La Tornada was a small place, after all – and then he’d done what he’d said and buggered off to somewhere better, only not with her.
There was a rustle of the fly curtain and her dad came in, huffing and puffing in his old-man shorts, his belly rounded under his England top. That was what years working in a pub, sampling the wares, did to you. Maddy resolved once again to get out, move back to England, find a proper job. Start her life.
‘Seen the commotion, love?’
‘What commotion?’ said Maddy, bored stiff. It was probably a sale on grappa or a donkey stuck in an alley again. God, she hated this place.
‘They found a body down in them harbour flats! Some accident with the gas stove, carbon monoxide got ’im. He’s been there weeks!’ Her dad seemed excited at this news. Immediately, Maddy’s heart began to race. It couldn’t be. No. But it would explain . . .
‘Who was it?’ she said, trying to sound casual. Her parents didn’t know she’d been seeing Sean. They wouldn’t have approved, seeing as he was so much older. She thought he was maybe even older than he’d told her, which was thirty-six. Sometimes his references just didn’t add up.
‘Some British fella,’ said her dad, already forgetting, getting engrossed in the football scores on telly. ‘Apparently his name was Patrick.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2017 Jamie Drew
Claire McGowan was born in 1981 in a small Irish village where the most exciting thing that ever happened was some cows getting loose on the road. She is the author of The Fall, What You Did and the acclaimed Paula Maguire crime series. She also writes women’s fiction under the name Eva Woods.
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