Surrogate – a psychological thriller

by Tim Adler

  "I didn't lie. I just didn't tell you–"

  "Same thing."

  "I've seen how this works on television. Only guilty people need lawyers. I've got nothing to hide."

  "If you say so. I'm sorry, Hugo, you really are on your own now."

  I watched Mole pushing the pram back along the path towards our flat and dug my hands into my pocket for warmth. The words of the song that Mole had played that first night when I stayed over floated back to me: "When the train left the station/It had two lights on behind/The red light was my baby and the green light was my mind." Now my daughter was leaving me again, and I had the sense neither of them was ever coming back.

  That was almost the last time I saw my wife.

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Mole once said that if the worst ever happened, the place she wanted to hide in was the linen department of Peter Jones. You had the sense that nothing bad could ever take place there, she told me. At the time I hadn't understood what she meant. Today I understood. Everything in my life was flying apart, the ground beneath my feet becoming gluey and unstable. Mole had taken our daughter away last night and, moving from room to room in our now-empty flat, I had a growing sense of disquiet that this was the last I would see of them. Every song that came on the radio seemed to be about me and my situation: I can't make you love me; Money, it's a crime; Baby, please don't go. Oh stop being so bloody morbid, I thought. Of course she's coming back; they've gone away for only a week until things have cooled down with the press. Still, I felt a grain of anxiety because, once again, Mole was not answering my calls, and I had no idea where my wife and daughter had gone.

  Being at a loose end that Sunday, I decided to buy Nancy some baby clothes, and I used the underground car park to avoid the handful of reporters hanging around our main entrance. At least there weren't any television trucks. Yet.

  The baby department was on the far side of Peter Jones, through the electrical department, and I remembered that encounter with Mole's work colleague, what, less than a year ago? Back then I had been draped in comforting veils of illusion: today I saw things as they really were – I had betrayed my little family and lost all my money, and I was still the prime suspect in a murder investigation. The only other lead the police had was the black Range Rover, and Syal had telephoned to say that, without a licence plate, it could take weeks to find it. There were thousands of the bloody things all over Britain.

  I was standing on the very spot in Peter Jones where Mole had said goodbye to her friend, gazing idly across the flat-screen TVs and laptops, when I first noticed the changing digital picture frame. For some reason I couldn't understand, a feeling of uneasiness took hold: a luxuriantly sleepy puppy replaced a smiling kid with gappy teeth as the snaps revolved and then a photograph of a handsome middle-aged couple. The photo swapped again. For a moment I did a double-take and then I realised what the problem was.

  It was the photograph Mole kept on her mantelpiece.

  The one of her dead parents.

  What were Mole's dead parents doing on display in a department store? I walked over and inspected the frame more closely. The slide show went round again. Puppy. Smiling kid. Middle-aged couple.

  I collared a sales assistant. "That picture frame. Where do the photos inside it come from?"

  The sales assistant stopped smiling and looked perplexed. "I'm sorry? That's what they come with. We just switch it on. Is there a model you'd like to look at?" he said, gesturing towards the display.

  I pushed past him, anxious to get out. Something that had been there right from the start was growing inside me, spreading like cancer. Things that never made sense; questions that Mole seemed to duck about her childhood. If Mole's prized photo of her mum and dad was a stock image, then what else hadn't she told me? Why pretend that both parents were dead? Was it because of something they had done to her, something she couldn't tell me about?

  Lurid images of Mole's childhood revolved in my head as I braved reporters hanging around outside our block. Thankfully there were only a handful of them, poor sods who must have pulled the short straw to get this bit of doorstepping. The story had not escalated yet, as it would do once word got out that I'd had an affair with the murder victim. For now I was the grateful father of a baby thankfully returned after a kidnap ordeal. Recognising me, the reporters started coming forward, vying with each other to see who could ask the rudest question: "Mr Cox, do you have any idea who killed Helen Noades?" "Mr Cox, where has your wife gone to? Have you rowed? When's she coming back?" I snapped a terse "No comment" as my sweaty fingers fumbled with the door keys. I couldn't seem to get them in the lock. To my right somebody shouted, "Did you murder Helen Noades?"

  That one brought me up short.

  Finally I got the front door open and slammed it shut, leaving reporters shouting questions. I was panting.

  Mole kept her childhood photograph album in a cupboard next to the utility bills. Once, shortly after we had gotten to know each other, we had gone through this album, sitting up in bed after having made love. It was one of my fondest memories. Mole gave a running commentary as she turned the pages. This had been her childhood home; there she was hugging another girl at her fourth birthday party and as an awkward teenager on a French exchange trip. "Look at me trying to be so sophisticated," she snorted. The way she snorted when she laughed was one of the things I loved most about her.

  I was about to pull the album down when I heard the telephone. I let it ring, too afraid to pick it up. What if the police were coming for me? The moment the phone stopped ringing, the carpet, the furniture and everything else in the room went quite dead. The telephone started up again.

  "Hello," I said cautiously.

  "Is that Mr Cox? My name is Claire Hall, and I'm a reporter with the Daily Mail."

  "I'm sorry, I can't speak to you right now."

  "Mr Cox, I only need a few minutes–"

  "The police have told me not to speak to the press," I lied.

  "Did you have an affair with Helen Noades?" she said.

  I slammed our phone down in its cradle and felt sweat pop on my forehead. My heart contracted. Jesus Christ, they really were zeroing in on the truth. Were the police feeding them lines, hoping to pressure me into a confession? If the Daily Mail got hold of it, the public were going to convict me before I had even been arrested.

  The telephone burst into life again. Lying in its cradle, it looked as black and deadly as a scorpion. I approached it as if it might hurt me.

  "Oh, he picks up the phone at long last," said Dad. "What the fucking hell have you gotten us into?"

  "I'm sorry, Dad, I was meaning to phone you back."

  "I've been ringing since yesterday. You haven't returned a single call. I've had Bob Grauerholtz on the phone telling me he doesn't think the merger's going to happen. His board is getting twitchy."

  "But why? What's happened has nothing to do with the deal."

  "The Americans have got their panties all bunched up. In any case, why the hell didn't you talk to me first? Jesus H Christ, were you ever going to tell me? Or were you just going to let me read about it while I ate my fish-and-chips?"

  "Dad, I can explain. I- I- I-," I stammered. My childhood stutter had come back as if my hard drive was stuck.

  "No, let me explain, you fucking clanger. First thing tomorrow morning you come out here. We have a crisis meeting with the board to decide what we're going to do to contain this. I want this kept tighter than a nun's arse."

  I held the receiver away from me as Dad ranted down the phone. He sounded unhinged, foaming at the mouth. "Dad, please–" I started, and I waited until he had shouted himself out before trying again. "Dad, there's something you need to know ... something that isn't in the papers yet. I went to bed with Alice before she died. Just the once. A one-night stand. It gives the police a motive for murder."

  Pause. "You've got some gorgeous pussy like Emily waiting for you at home and you go and dip your wick somewhere else? You nee
d your head examined."

  "I know, I know, I–"

  "Does she know about this?"

  "Yes. Alice filmed us in bed together and tipped off the police about the video. Mole has taken the baby away for a few days until this dies down. It's all my fault."

  "Oh for fuck's sake, don't start crying. Listen. You come and see me tomorrow with Rosenthal, and we'll see if we can salvage anything out of this mess. What a fucking monkey's wedding."

  I wandered around the house in a daze, not quite knowing what to do. My thoughts turned back to the fake photograph. I was starting to suspect that my wife had lied to me right from the beginning. We had both been lying to each other. But why hadn’t Mole told me the truth about her childhood? Had her parents abused her as a child, which was why she had to fabricate these perfect impostors? Inconsistencies built up, things that never made sense but I had been too in love to question.

  My heart was racing as I pulled out Mole’s photograph album and turned the heavy leaves. There was her childhood home, a big suburban house photographed in the snow. It struck me only now how modern the photo looked, at least compared with the others. Slowly I worked my fingernail under the glue and eased the photo away. There on the back, in tiny diagonal letters, was the name of an estate agent, Barnaby & Freer, with a website address. My scalp crawled.

  So Mole's childhood home had been a fiction as well. It took only moments to find it, still on the estate agent's website. The house had been on the market in a suburb of Derby – not Nottingham, where Mole said she had grown up – at around the time we met. And I started to wonder: if this memory was invented, how many others were lies? Pages turned faster and faster. Mole riding a pony. Mole in a school play, on a school trip, at the swimming pool. I began tearing the pages out and ripping them in two, not caring which ones were real and which were false. A kind of red mist descended as I sat there, wanting to destroy them all. Tearing the last one in two, I stopped for a moment to contemplate what I had done. Then my shoulders heaved. Everything I had put my faith in, everything I believed to be true, had turned out to be a lie.

  Chapter Twenty Six

  "So Mole said she needed some time to think while she decided what to do," I said. "And she's taken the baby with her. I'm frightened, Dad. I'm scared I'm never going to see her again."

  Like many other self-made men, Dad had become infatuated with the country. I found him that morning on the front lawn practising his clay-pigeon shooting, looking faintly absurd in his tweed jacket and his shooting socks. At least he was up and about. Eliska had told me this was the first time he had been out of his bedroom in days. And for once the unseasonable fog had lifted to reveal sagging grey clouds. It was going to rain.

  "Then yesterday afternoon I go to Peter Jones to buy Nancy some baby clothes and I see this digital photo frame, you know, one of those ones with different photographs in it. And one of the photos is of her parents, the ones she told me had died in a car crash, except it was a stock photo, so why did she lie to me?"

  "What does Emily say about it?"

  "The point is, Dad, that the photograph of Mole's house, the one she told me she grew up in, well, that's fake, too. I found it on an estate agent's website. Some of the photographs are real, though, that's what I don't understand. It's all mixed up."

  "Maybe the house just came up for sale," Dad said.

  "No, she must have gone in and got details. The estate agent's name is on the back of the photograph. The house was on the market about the time we met. Which means Mole had thought about deceiving me for a long time. The question is, why? What had happened to make her do something as drastic as this? And if she could lie about something as basic as her childhood, she could lie about anything. Do you have any idea how it feels to realise that your whole marriage is based on a lie?"

  "You shouldn't have dipped your wick where you shouldn't have, that's your real problem."

  Mr Jackson, the gardener, loaded another clay. "Eyes and ears on," he said. We adjusted our ear defenders. Everything sounded muffled, as if I was underwater. The launcher flung another clay into the air; it seemed to stop and hang suspended until the crack of the shotgun made me jump and the clay exploded into fragments. Dad broke open his twelve bore, dumping spent cartridges on the lawn. There was a strong smell of gunpowder.

  "You were a bit ahead of it," I said.

  "Explain it to me again. So, just because the picture of the house was used in some estate agent's details, you think the whole album is a fake," said Dad, loading fresh cartridges.

  "Not all of it. The photographs of Emily when she was a girl are real, I know that. That's what I don't understand." There was one childhood drawing of Emily in the album, a pencil sketch showing her wearing a scarf. Yes, I thought, I would have loved you then. "There are other things, too. Stuff that Emily said about her past that didn’t make sense, I mean, both parents dying in a car crash. No brothers or sisters. Come to think of it, no real friends at all, just people she knew through work. It's like she appeared out of nowhere, and that's where she's disappeared to as well. At the time I didn't want to make an issue of it. What was the point of having a row? Didn't want to pop the bubble, I guess."

  Dad finished loading more red plastic shells into the shotgun. This time its sharp phod only clipped the clay, which landed mostly intact on the cricket pitch.

  "So I reckon I've got two unknowns," I said. "Why did my wife invent all this stuff about her childhood? And why did Alice plan to blackmail me right from the start?"

  "Not forgetting who killed her," Dad said.

  "The police are still trying to find the Range Rover."

  Dad was about to reply when we spotted Nigel Rosenthal coming towards us. In addition to being company secretary, he dealt with the press, although privately Ronnie referred to him as our "suppress agent". Nigel's job was to keep Berkshire RE out of the papers, not get us into them.

  "Morning, Sir Ronald; morning, Hugo," said Rosenthal.

  "Morning, Nigel. So, have you sat on the newspapers? I want my son nowhere near this."

  Rosenthal nodded. As I said before, he was another person who wished there'd been a proper succession rather than my just being handed the job.

  "Well, go on ... are we scuppered, or can we keep a lid on things?" said Dad.

  "I spoke to our financial PR. They say that unless anything else comes out, we can keep running with the line of 'City tycoon shocked by murder of surrogate'. It might help if you posted a reward, Hugo." Rosenthal had the hangdog look of a bloodhound. "I need you to tell me that you haven't got any more skeletons in the cupboard. I can contain things only if I know everything."

  Dad gave me a look that meant, go on, tell him, and I told Rosenthal about my one-night stand and the YouTube video. From the way he dug his hands into his pockets and rocked on his heels, I could tell he was none too impressed.

  "I swear, that's it," I said. "I had a phone call from one of the tabloids last night, asking me if I'd had an affair with Alice. All I can think is that the police must have tipped them off."

  "And what did you say?"

  "I just put the phone down."

  "Good. Keep it that way. You don't speak to anybody without going through me first. Kingsway wants us to bring in a specialist crisis PR consultant."

  "So, do we think that Continual will come back to the table?" Dad said.

  "Providing there aren't any more bombshells, then yes. They got spooked. In the meantime, I suggest you go away, Hugo. Take a leaf out of your wife's book and disappear. Go and stay somewhere with your wife and baby. Everybody would understand."

  If I knew where they were, I thought. "The police don't want me going anywhere. They want me to stay at home in case they need to question me again."

  "In case they want to arrest you, you mean. Leave, Hugo. They don't have any rights over where you travel. Just for a few days until things have quieted down."

  "What if the police do arrest me?"

  "Let's not paint t
he devil on the wall. They would have held you by now if they had anything."

  Dad kicked a spent brass-tipped cartridge with his foot. "If they do arrest you, we can say goodbye to Continual."

  Driving back to London, watching rivulets of rainwater chase each other down the glass, I thought about how to find Mole. If I went up to Derby and visited the house, that might be a starting point. There must be some other clue in the photograph album. For all I knew, my wife might even be out of the country. I imagined her mobile uselessly vibrating on a table where she had left it. God damn you, Emily Givings, who are you really?

  I was so wrapped up in my thoughts that I was startled when the phone trilled. The dashboard told me it was DI Syal calling. Dread gnawed at me as I pressed accept.

  "We've identified who Alice Adams really was," she said. "She did have a criminal record."

  "Yes, I read the name in the paper. Helen Noades. Go on, so who was she really?"

  "It turns out she had a conviction for fraud. Went to prison for it. She was caught stealing money from a previous employer, siphoning it off into her bank account."

  "How long did she go to prison for?"

  "About six months."

  So that was why she hadn’t wanted to use her real name. Any conviction would have shown up on her CRB check.

  "Have you contacted her family? Do they know what happened to their daughter, that she was murdered?"

  "They hadn't seen her for about a year. As far as I could tell, they weren't on good terms. There's a father who's in hospital and a younger sister, too. The mother died some years ago."

  "Why are you telling me this?" Police usually kept information to themselves.

  "It's not for me to say that what you did was right or wrong. I thought you ought to tell your wife, though. The victim had a history of fraud. You weren't the first people she had done this to."

  Perhaps the murderer was somebody else she'd stung for money, and who'd then caught up with her. "Can you give me their telephone number?" I said. "How do I contact them? Perhaps they could tell me why Alice – I mean Helen – blackmailed me." At the back of my mind was the faintest thought that there had to be a deeper connection between Mole and Alice, something they kept secret from me. It was there, just beyond my reach, my fingers scrabbling for it before it wriggled away.