Dead and Gone: A Gripping Thriller With a Shocking Twist

by D. L. Michaels

‘I have to ask, Sarah. How did you manage to stop both men finding out about each other?’

  ‘It wasn’t easy,’ I say with a sad smile. ‘I kept what I call Lie Boxes.’

  ‘Lie Boxes?’

  ‘Hidden physical and digital places, where I’d store information and things relating to each man and each marriage. Records of places we’d been together, people we’d met, restaurants we’d eaten in, films and shows we’d seen and what each husband had liked and disliked.’

  I see a degree of amazement, or maybe it is disgust, register in her eyes, before she asks, ‘And social media? We live in a digital age – how did you get away with your friends and family, your husbands’ friends and family not seeing or reading about you?’

  ‘I don’t have close friends, or any form of family.’ I shrug at the thought of how cold and isolated I just sounded, then I add, ‘I have no Facebook or Twitter profiles and make a point of never having my photograph taken. I put it down to being self-conscious and camera-shy.’

  ‘But really, you were just covering your tracks, taking steps to avoid your bigamy being discovered?’

  ‘I was, yes.’

  ‘What about when you married Martin? Weren’t there photographs then?’

  I smile at the memory. ‘I fixed the Italian photographer and insisted he shot on film, so there were no digital prints. Martin’s parents were our only guests and neither of them use their phones for anything other than making or receiving calls. Martin is a technophobe, so he has no online identity save his website. And Danny, well, Danny has been drunk the last ten years, so photos and online postings haven’t been high up his list of priorities.’

  ‘And finances?’ pushes the inspector. ‘Did you set up false bank accounts in your bigamist relationship?’

  I realise she has slipped the question in. Realise that my answer could result in an extra charge of fraud, to go with the count of bigamy. ‘Yes, I did,’ I reply, unhesitatingly. ‘I established false personal accounts in my bigamous marital name and false business accounts in the name of Sarah Johnson, to collect monies as a sole trading business consultant. All taxes have, however, been paid.’

  The inspector makes notes. No doubt to pass on to the Inland Revenue. I think about disclosing Martin’s secret account, his cash payments into a numbered Swiss account. The police would probably find out everything there is to know, quicker than Fin.

  ‘Is there something else?’ Parker asks me.

  ‘No, no, there isn’t. I was just thinking that we never really know people, do we? You can live with them, share their lives, their hopes and fears, loves and loathings, and still there are secrets that we all keep.’

  63

  Martin

  The police just called.

  They told me I might be in danger from a man called Danny Smith – Sarah’s other husband.

  I suppose Smith, like me, is raging against the dying light of his marriage and wanting to hit out at something. At me, to be exact.

  The female officer asked where I was, and I said I was about to leave Chipping Norton to go to my parents’. That seemed to satisfy her. And until I heard about Danny Smith it satisfied me too. My parents are who I normally run to when my life carriage hits a rut and a wheel comes off. They always comfort me nonjudgmentally and give me enough time, space and home-cooked dinners to find a way out of whatever hole I’ve sunk into.

  But not this time.

  I turn off my mobile phone, so I won’t be bothered by any more callers. Dazed and distracted, I walk upstairs and take a chair out of the spare bedroom and position it on the landing.

  I have a plan.

  A course of action.

  But suddenly it becomes blurred. Fuzzed by thoughts of Sarah – Paula – her betrayal, my gullibility, and more than anything my love for her. My passionate, undying love for her.

  My whole day has been like this, but now my brain is even more fogged. I sit and try to focus. You could cut off one of my hands right now and I wouldn’t feel anything. I am numb. Devoid of feeling.

  I had a younger sister who died of a blood disease when we were teenagers. I was at that age when I thought I knew everything but really fully understood nothing. Anyway, I had always known Sue was sick. I can’t recall a time when she hadn’t been going to hospital, was in hospital, or was coming home from hospital.

  But I didn’t expect her to die.

  I didn’t see the big picture.

  Hospital had simply become part of the rhythm of our life. Just one of the places Sue and I went that wasn’t much fun. So, when Sue died, when she didn’t come home from hospital, the rhythm stopped. And there in the silence and stillness, I tumbled into the yawning gap between what I believed would happen and what actually happened. And when I hit the floor it left me numb. Like today. Deathly numb. Like right now.

  I thought I was happily married. Settled. Part of a loving couple.

  I’m not.

  I’m alone. Shocked and shamed by my own stupidity.

  I always suspected Sarah had her secrets. I even suspected she’d strayed and had affairs. So what? I told myself. You’re an artist, a free spirit, a liberated soul. You can live with a little sexual indiscretion. Let’s face it, she is an attractive, powerful, modern woman. She’s going to have had admirers. And, on those long, stressful business trips, maybe even moments of loneliness and weakness. So what? A good marriage, a modern marriage, can survive an indiscretion. An isolated infidelity. Or two.

  And in truth, I’m no saint.

  There is the matter of my dark secret, an event from the past that I live in constant fear of being shamed and punished for. An event that I should be punished for.

  Then there is Stephanie. My all too lovely neighbour.

  I didn’t lie when I told Sarah we weren’t having an affair. That was true. But we had – in the past. And it continued, until Sarah came back to the pub that night and came home with me. We’re all human. We all make our mistakes and the most shameful of them we turn into secrets that we hope will never be discovered. So, I was capable of forgiveness.

  At least, I thought I was.

  With hindsight (what a cruelly precise science that is!) Sarah’s deceit is obvious now. In our early days, when we first got together, she mentioned a troublesome ex. Said she’d had difficulties getting him to accept that their relationship was over. I believed she’d done it. That the time she spent away from me was purely on business, not on leading a second life with him.

  But I didn’t check.

  I didn’t root in her bag, sneak looks at her phone, trawl her computer or calendars. Maybe I should have done. Maybe it’s wrong to believe totally in someone, or anything.

  And so, I continue the task I started. I get up and stand on the chair. Take one final pause, then I reach high and shove back the hatch to the attic and draw down a ladder.

  I move the chair and climb up into the dusty darkness. There’s a bulb on a cable but it blew more than a year ago and I haven’t got round to replacing it. I shine a torch into the long, narrow space.

  Precariously, I tiptoe over the jutting, rough wooden beams, over the thin snake of an aerial cable and thick wads of roof insulation, around the head-banging, angled uprights of the roof and the bulky, boxy hot-water tank.

  Up here is spider heaven. They have spun themselves myriad mobile homes in the rafters and their gardens and kitchens are now in my hair and eyes. I rub myself clean of the dusty webs and make my way to a set of large cardboard boxes in the far corner.

  There, at the very bottom, in a slim case of its own, is what I’ve been searching for.

  I squat and my knees crack. I run a hand over the cobwebbed metal. My father had been going to sell this old treasure when he and Mum moved to St Ives, but I persuaded him to let me keep it. I guess I just wanted to hold onto a piece of him. Something that tied our lives together.

  There’s a combination lock on the case, four digits. I know the numbers because it’s my birthdate. Dad used it a
s all his passcodes. I finger-push the tiny lumps of metal until the lock yields.

  And there it is.

  A Browning B125 Over and Under shotgun.

  It’s packed in its broken-down state. Twenty-eight inches of twin barrels, fourteen inches of near-black hardwood stock. At the end of the case, half a dozen cartridges, a set of cleaning brushes and a small bottle of oil.

  I sit on a cross beam and unfasten a leather strap holding things in position. I take out the stock and barrel, and slot them together. I’ve fired this gun before. Many times. Never in anger and seldom as well as my father. But out in the countryside I’ve shot wild creatures. Even dangerous ones. Ones that could have killed me.

  And I’m quite prepared to do it again.

  So, come Danny Smith. Come running to me with your brutish wildness, your jealousy and your anger.

  I am ready for you.

  64

  Annie

  Charlie drives the Mondeo pool car. A big, wallowing white whale, with close to a hundred thousand miles on its sad old clock. We’re following Sarah Johnson and her lawyer in his flashy Jaguar 4x4.

  ‘I still don’t know what to make of this woman,’ I confess.

  ‘You mean the murderous, bigamous, lying psychopath we’re following?’ he says unsympathetically. ‘I’ll tell you what to make of her. She’s either an elaborate, mentally ill fantasist, or she’s a manipulative monster who should be locked up for as long as possible.’

  ‘Really? You don’t see any in-between?’

  ‘And you do?’

  ‘Yes, to some degree. For a start, I can easily understand how a teenage girl who’s been raped wants to kill the bastard who did it.’

  ‘Sure, but going through with it is another matter.’

  ‘Granted. But would she have? I mean, we haven’t met Danny Smith yet. He actually killed Crewe and has held the murder over his wife for all their married life.’

  ‘So she says. But don’t you think someone Machiavellian enough to run two marriages is also likely to shift the blame onto someone else? Someone she wants to get out of her life?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘What if she was the one who actually invited Crewe to come to the children’s home and, when he arrived, she knifed him to death?’

  ‘Possible.’

  ‘Then sobbingly she called up her boyfriend and had him do all the dirty clean-up work?’

  ‘All right. I see your point. I guess all that is plausible. But why then stick with Danny until now? If she were capable of murder, why not kill her drunken husband?’ I nod at the F-Pace as it glides right. ‘They’re turning off.’

  Charlie steers our wallowing white whale after it. We’re on the outskirts of a small market town called Wirksworth and, according to signs, heading down a road towards Black Rocks. I know the area well enough. The towering outcrop of gritstone boulders is popular with climbers from all over the country. ‘I’ve a feeling Sarah Johnson is about to ruin some family memories for me,’ I tell Charlie. ‘I used to picnic out here with Tom.’

  ‘Just like Brady and Hindley ruined Saddleworth Moor for millions of people.’

  ‘Thanks for that,’ I say as we hit an unmarked track leading into the moorland. Thick mud splatters our windscreen. Charlie flicks on the wipers, only to discover we’re either out of water or it’s frozen. For the rest of the journey Charlie squints through smears on the windscreen.

  Finally, we stop.

  I cautiously open the door and check we’ve not halted mid-mud lagoon. The track is dry on my side. But apparently not on Charlie’s. ‘Shit!’ he shouts.

  I ignore him and look toward Sarah Johnson. She’s out of the Jaguar already and is walking on her own. Her expensive black shoes and slender ankles are already slicked in mud. But she’s not bothered. Not fussed at all, by the look of things. I guess she knows she’s sunk in something deeper than a few inches of wet, snowy clay and stagnant water.

  We pick our way across the foot of the old track. Bricks and rocks have been thrown into deep potholes, probably to prove some traction for stranded vehicles that needed to turn. Two parallel lines of rust-coloured trench water run behind us. Stepping over them is treacherously slippery. Something mean and spiteful inside me wants the lawyer to go arse over tit and get sludged up.

  Off the track, up on a small rise, Johnson raises her left arm and points.

  We’re all too far away to hear if she’s saying anything.

  I hurry straight through a muddy trench.

  She turns.

  Her face is drained. Her fine hair blown back like a scraggy scarf.

  I’m close enough now to hear her.

  ‘Down there,’ she says in a broken voice. ‘That’s where we buried Ashley Crewe.’

  My eyes slide from her pointing hand, across sodden, overgrown and snowy grass, down a gentle dip into a patch of bracken.

  ‘How can you be sure?’ I ask.

  She raises a hand and points. ‘I remember that fence. The stile for walkers. The big metal gate for lumber vehicles to go through.’

  ‘Not much changes out here,’ I concur.

  There’s a distant look on her face. As if she’s remembering it all and wishes she weren’t.

  Charlie trots down into the dip. Stops. Looks back towards us. ‘Can you say exactly where, Sarah?’

  A gust of wind blows a curtain of hair across her face. She fingers it back and turns away from the buffeting. ‘It’s very much where you are. I was sat in the car up here and, although it was dark, I remember the fence and the other markers because the headlights were on and it’s all I was staring at for about an hour.’

  ‘I’ll get a team out with ground radar,’ I tell Charlie. ‘If there’s a body out here, they’ll find it.’

  65

  Sarah/Paula

  I look across the fields to a blurry horizon where daylight is ebbing away. I’m not sure if the dull ball of white behind the curdled clouds is the moon or the sun, but one thing’s for certain: in half an hour the sky will be as black as my soul.

  I haven’t been here for almost twenty-five years, but I recognise every hill, every blade of grass, every wood and every ditch.

  It’s as if time has stood still.

  Maybe the terrible thing I did back then has stopped the clocks.

  Perhaps the crime I have kept secret for a quarter of a century has damaged more lives than just my own. Maybe this is a spot where no one goes any more. A place that animals whine and scamper away from.

  I look again.

  Down into the dip.

  Down into the snow-splattered grass, the towering weeds and the prospering ferns that grow on the spot where Danny and I buried the monster who raped me. I feel as cold as the earth over his rotted corpse. Despite my best efforts, all kinds of moral questions come wriggling to the surface.

  Did Crewe deserve to end up as plant food, left in an unmarked resting place, in the middle of nowhere?

  Should he have lost his life for raping me?

  Can I be forgiven for what the fifteen-year-old me has done?

  In truth, I am finding it hard to be genuinely contrite. I still despise Crewe. Abhor what he did to me. How he made me feel. The enduring problems he left me with. Standing over his grave, I want to applaud the maggots that moved in on his marrow.

  Yes, I am bitter.

  Yes, I have doubts and regrets.

  But even now, in the midst of confessing, I can’t get beyond the hate. I loathe all the anger and shame he made me experience. I hate that he made me weak. And I am glad that he is not alive for me to spot in the street, or fear in the shadows.

  Yes, I do regret telling Danny that I wanted Crewe dead.

  Of course, I do.

  My words triggered a chain of events that ruined so many lives. Maybe prison would have stopped him raping again. Though I doubt it.

  Perhaps some woman might have loved him enough, for him to become a good man. I don’t know.

  And if I am ho
nest, I don’t care about Ashley Crewe. Not a jot. Not even in this moment when remorse should be born.

  But I do care for Martin.

  He is the only innocent in all this.

  And, believe it or not, I still care for Danny. The teenage me threw down a challenge to him to prove his love, to avenge me, and he did.

  Darkness is closing in even faster than I thought. Rain spatters my face. A sleety shower that’s come out of nowhere.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  I look to my right and see Annie Parker looking at me. Behind her, the other detective is pacing, talking into his mobile.

  I suppose this is the start of it all.

  The real start.

  Forensic tents, men in white suits, exhumation squads, miles of fluttering tape strung across these fields saying:

  CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS

  ‘Are you all right, Sarah?’ She touches my arm as she asks again.

  ‘Yes, I think so.’ I look up at her. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Let me take you back to your car. There’s no reason for you to stand out here.’

  ‘No.’ I smile sadly. ‘It would be too ironic to sit in a car and watch Ashley Crewe be dug up, just as I had sat in a vehicle and watched him be buried.’

  Parker smiles back. ‘I understand.’

  Terry appears at my side and talks to her. ‘Perhaps I could take Sarah back to the police station? We could wait there, while you conclude whatever needs to be done here.’

  ‘Not unaccompanied, you can’t. Take her to the car and I’ll get a police escort here as fast as possible.’

  Terry scowls at her. ‘Need I point out to you, Detective Inspector, that my client is still helping you of her own accord and is free to go anywhere she chooses, any time she chooses?’

  ‘No, you needn’t.’ Her face hardens. ‘Shall I change that situation, then, and arrest her on suspicion of murder and bigamy? Because if you want me to, it’s done in a blink.’

  Terry holds both hands up in surrender. ‘We’ll wait, DI Parker. We’ll be in the car, waiting patiently.’