The Dead Ex

by Jane Corry

I make to turn round, although I’m not sure why. The man behind me – the so-called Good Samaritan – puts a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘There’s no point,’ he says softly. ‘Just come quietly.’

  The family is staring as he grips my arm. The mother draws the small boy with the snub nose close to her, as if I might hurt him. My legs feel as though they are going to melt.

  I almost fall as we go down the step.

  ‘Victoria Goudman,’ says one of the yellow jackets. ‘I am placing you under arrest for the murder of Tanya Goudman …’

  Part Two

  * * *

  24

  Helen

  10 November 2017

  I’ve never been to a big ‘do’ like this before. And I’ve got to get it right. Everything depends on tonight.

  Shall I wear my hair up or down? I experiment both ways. ‘Up’ looks more sophisticated. Not like me at all, but then that’s the whole point.

  Now what about clothes? I stand in front of my cracked mirror, trying to see myself from a different perspective. The lace creamy top which I’ve had for some time looks good with the black leather trousers – a brilliant charity shop buy along with a purple velvet jacket. But is it enough to catch a man like David Goudman?

  ‘The best way to get a job nowadays is through work experience,’ our tutor had said at the beginning of term. ‘Be prepared to do it for nothing. The most important thing is to build up a portfolio.’ He’d looked directly at me. ‘I suggest you approach some property companies, Miss Evans.’

  So I emailed the Goudman Corporation, enclosing some of my photographs. And I didn’t get a reply.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s pretty common nowadays,’ my tutor reassured me. ‘Just keep sending out your CV. Make sure you network too. Google individual companies and find out what they’re up to.’

  I heard back from two others. Each one offered me a week’s work. But I turned them down. There was only one employer I really wanted. So I kept tabs on him.

  Then I had a breakthrough. On Twitter, I discovered that David Goudman had won an award for building some big glass office block in Bow. There was going to be a grand opening on site. Swiftly, I contacted the press office (another of my tutor’s ideas) and asked if I could come along because it would be ‘useful’ for my portfolio. To my amazement, they sent me an invitation.

  It was so simple that I could hardly believe it. And now here I am. Getting ready to meet the man at last.

  I’m not the boastful type – at least, I don’t think so – but heads turn when I walk in. Then they go back to the people they were talking to. No one comes up to chat to me. I stand there, feeling like a lemon and clutching the stem of my glass until I almost drop it because my hands are sweating with nerves. Look around, I tell myself fiercely. Find him.

  The place is so packed that it’s hard to see my quarry in the crowd. But then someone shouts out for silence and introduces ‘David Goudman, one of the leading property developers of our time’.

  His face mesmerizes me. It isn’t that he has traditional good looks. Far from it. But there’s something about that strong jawline, the slightly crooked nose and the tall build which makes him stand out.

  Intuitively, I sense that this is a man who knows what he wants. I just have to make sure he wants me.

  As he delivers his speech – all about ‘responsibility’ and ‘caring for the public’s needs’ – I wonder if everyone else knows what kind of man he is. Mind you, blokes like this can get away with murder.

  After he finishes, everyone clusters round him like bees, each vying for his attention. I try to get near, but it’s difficult. A waiter takes pity on me and offers to top up my champagne. I choose sparkling water instead, along with some kind of fish pastry thing, and try to make my way a bit nearer.

  Eventually, I get to a spot where I am almost within touching distance. A man with ‘Press’ on his badge is interviewing him, but there’s a short gap in the conversation. If I don’t say something now, I might never get another opportunity.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, Mr Goudman, but I’m a photographic student and I emailed you recently about work experience. You didn’t reply.’

  ‘Really?’ says the journalist sharply. ‘But David, you’ve just been telling me how important it is to help young people get onto the career track.’

  David Goudman swivels round to me. A weird shiver goes down my spine. Now I am close, I can see that he looks different from the man on the podium. In fact, he appears almost ugly with those chiselled cheekbones and black eyebrows. Then he smiles at me. Suddenly he is the most attractive man I have ever met! His eyes – which don’t appear to blink – suggest I am the only person in the room. That deep voice, with the hint of a south London accent, speaks just to me. This man oozes charm. I need to be careful. Not to mention clever.

  Then he stops smiling. Just like that. As though someone has flicked a switch. ‘It is important,’ he says briskly, taking in my velvet jacket. ‘But I prefer to give a hand to those from challenging backgrounds.’

  ‘I know all about that,’ I retort. ‘My mum and dad believe in working your own way up. I live in a council flat and am doing a government-funded photographic course. Is that challenging enough for you?’

  The journalist is scribbling furiously.

  ‘Email me again.’ David thrusts his right hand into his suit pocket. Nice cloth. Expensive-looking. Grey striped. Then he brings out a card, which he presses into my hand for a touch longer than necessary. ‘This is my personal address. I’ll be in touch. Promise.’

  The journalist looks up from his pad. ‘You know what? This could make a good feature. A week in the life of a work-experience student at the Goudman Corporation.’ He turns to me. ‘Would you be up for that?’

  ‘Sure,’ I say excitedly. That means he’s got to give me a break now. And I can tell from David’s expression that he’s thinking the same.

  ‘Let me think about it,’ he says.

  Bastard.

  He makes me sweat for ten long days. Then, just as I’ve almost given up hope, the email falls into my inbox.

  Yes! He’s granted me a week’s work experience, starting on Monday.

  I am finally in.

  25

  Vicki

  Tanya’s dead? It seems impossible. Yet here I am. In a prison cell, waiting for my solicitor to arrive, under arrest for murder. I was surprised she’d picked up my call. After all, it is a Sunday. Then again, she’d rung me before over a weekend. Clearly she’s a bit of a workaholic.

  Goodness knows how long I’ve been here for. There’s no clock. The room is cramped – barely space for the blue plastic-covered mattress down one side. In the corner is a loo minus a seat. The previous occupants have left brown stains in the bowl. It’s airless. Overheating can sometimes bring on seizures. I feel sick. Disorientated. Dizzy. None of these are good signs.

  ‘My tablets,’ I blurt out when the door finally opens and Penny comes in. ‘They’re in my bag. I keep telling them, and they say they’ll bring them down but they haven’t.’

  Her face tightens. ‘Leave it to me.’

  She bangs loudly on the door. I sink to the floor, head in hands, but I can hear the odd word. Human rights … nurse …

  Finally, I find a plastic bottle of water in my hands. ‘How many?’ she asks.

  My solicitor’s voice is gentle. Almost motherly, even though she can’t be that much older than me. Ten years maybe?

  ‘Three,’ I say.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I’m not trying to overdose myself,’ I snap.

  She seems convinced, although she shouldn’t be. Three will make me extra drowsy, and that’s what I need right now. I want to crawl into a hole and not be here.

  ‘I’m going to get straight to the point. They’re telling me your DNA was found on Tanya’s body.’ She sits down next to me on the lumpy mattress. ‘And you were seen by a neighbour, coming out of the house.’

  ‘I
didn’t kill her,’ I whisper.

  There’s a sigh. ‘I wish I could be certain you’re telling the truth. You’ve been holding things back from me, haven’t you, Vicki? Like your career before you became an aromatherapist. Why didn’t you tell me you were once a prison officer?’

  Finally, my secret is beginning to leak out.

  It started with the Prasads. I was in my first year at uni when I spotted a notice, asking for volunteer students to help teach English to local immigrants. Dad had always taught me to look out for others, and I was matched with Mrs Prasad, who had recently come here with her family to make a new life.

  ‘My wife has found job in lampshade factory,’ her husband told me when I first visited their small terraced house with the baby in the pram, the little girl wandering in and out with a dummy, and a quiet adolescent boy who was their nephew. ‘But she does not understand the difference between round and square, or pink and blue. I am working away on building sites. I do not have time to help her.’

  After that, I would cycle down to the other end of town every Wednesday to help Mrs Prasad master the complex and sometimes inexplicable mechanics of the English language. ‘The boss he promote me,’ my pupil told me a few months later. ‘It is thanks to you.’

  She’d grasped my hand and insisted that I join them for dinner. I left with a warm feeling in my heart that I hadn’t had for a very long time.

  Then, towards the end of my third year, shortly before finals, I arrived to give the usual Wednesday lesson only to find the nephew being dragged out of the front door in handcuffs by a pair of policemen.

  Mrs Prasad was in floods of tears. ‘He is good boy. They have made mistake.’

  It transpired that the nephew had been accused of stealing money from work. He was refused bail because he ‘might abscond’ and put behind bars until his case was tried. I knew very little about the prison system in those days, but it seemed most unfair to me that someone could be sent to jail until he or she was proved guilty.

  ‘Please,’ Mrs Prasad pleaded, a few days later. ‘Come with me to visit him. My husband is away. I am too scared to get train on my own.’

  I had no idea what a prison would look like, but the red and grey Victorian building which rose forbiddingly before us gave me a feeling of unease and also – for some reason – excitement in my chest.

  Mrs Prasad was shaking with fear as we followed the signs to the visitor centre. Naively, I’d presumed I could go in with her but was curtly told by an officer on the other side of the glass screen that I wasn’t ‘on the list’.

  I promised to wait on a chair opposite while Mrs Prasad’s ID was checked and she was taken through a door, throwing a terrified ‘help me’ look over her shoulder.

  Poor thing. If only I could go with her! But at the same time, I was riveted by the goings-on around me.

  The other prison visitors, queuing up to get their IDs checked, weren’t what I’d expected. One had a really posh southern accent like the mother of one of my uni friends. The staff weren’t what I’d imagined either. That woman in prison uniform with the stylish layered haircut who’d gone past just now had been talking in a very articulate way about ‘inmate psychology’ to her colleague. Somehow I’d expected jail staff to be less educated.

  Standing up to stretch my legs, I wandered over to the noticeboard.

  ‘LOOKING FOR AN EXCITING CAREER? WANT TO HELP OTHERS? NO TWO DAYS ARE THE SAME IN PRISON. YOU WILL NEVER BE BORED.’

  A career in prison? How crazy was that? I was a history graduate – or shortly to be one. My tutors had predicted a 2:1, or maybe even a first. But at the same time, I had no idea what I was going to do with it. ‘How about teaching?’ Dad had suggested. Yet it just didn’t appeal.

  I found myself walking over to the glass screen. ‘I’ve already told you,’ said the woman. ‘You can’t visit. You don’t have permission.’

  ‘Actually,’ I said, almost without meaning to, ‘I’d like a job application form.’

  ‘Is there anything else you want to tell me, Vicki?’ says my solicitor, standing up.

  I gulp back a sob.

  ‘It can’t be easy,’ she says. ‘I’d be upset too in your situation.’

  I know what she’s doing. Personalize. Identify. Make vulnerable. Then swoop. Who does this woman think she is? No doubt she’s led a charmed life.

  ‘How would you feel if the man you were married to suddenly disappeared?’ I demand. ‘What if you suspected that someone knew where he was?’

  There’s a flicker of interest in my solicitor’s eyes. I’m getting somewhere.

  ‘And what if you then began to wonder if your ex-husband – whom you still care for even though he hurt you – might actually be dead and that you were responsible?’

  She looks stunned, as though I’ve just slapped her.

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I hope not. But my meds and the seizures. Sometimes I don’t remember stuff.’

  Her eyes harden. ‘Or is that an excuse for lying like you did about the photograph showing you and David arguing?’

  ‘No. Like I said before, I was scared and embarrassed. However, there is one other thing I should have mentioned.’

  She stays silent. I sense she’s losing confidence in me.

  ‘I told the police about David being a bit of a wheeler-dealer.’

  ‘So I gather.’

  ‘But I didn’t tell them I have proof that he might have been money laundering.’

  Penny looks at me sharply. ‘What kind of proof?’

  ‘Several deeds, showing he bought houses for cash. Some were worth millions. As you know, it’s a recognized way of getting rid of money gained from illegal activity.’

  ‘Are you an expert on this?’

  ‘I know a bit.’

  ‘And would you like to tell me why you haven’t revealed this before?’

  It’s a question I have been asking myself; desperately trying to find another answer, even though there is only one.

  ‘Because I still love him,’ I blurt out. ‘Crazy, isn’t it? He’s hurt me more than anyone has ever done, but I still care for him.’

  To my surprise, there’s a flash of sympathy in her eyes.

  ‘Where are these deeds?’

  ‘Hidden. I went round to the house to show one of them to Tanya because it implicated her too. I just had this feeling that she knew more about David’s disappearance than she was letting on. I thought that if she admitted she knew where he was, it would get me off the hook with the police. But she claimed ignorance. Then she attacked me. It’s how I hurt my wrist. I defended myself and she fell onto the floor.’

  Then another thought comes to me. She’d crashed against the table on the way down. She was conscious when I left. But what if she’d passed out afterwards? Supposing she’d had a bleed to the brain. Oh God.

  ‘But you didn’t strangle her?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Forensics suggest that a heavy dog-tooth metal chain was used. Rather like the key chains that prison staff wear, attached to their belts.’

  Sweat breaks out down my back. ‘But you can’t mean …’

  Her eyes are cool. ‘I have to ask, Vicki. Did you ever take one home and keep it?’

  ‘No. Of course not.’ I am loud in my indignation. ‘They won’t find my fingerprints on this chain. I can assure you of that.’

  ‘There’s the thing. They can’t find it.’

  ‘So they think I’ve got rid of it?’ I bluster.

  Penny nods. Then her mouth tightens. ‘There’s something you haven’t asked me, Vicki. I have to say I’m quite surprised.’

  So she’s found out. It was only a matter of time. I brace myself.

  ‘Don’t you want to know who found Tanya?’

  It’s not the question I am expecting.

  ‘Yes,’ I splutter. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Your ex-husband’s daughter.’

  ‘Nicole?’

  ‘She’d come over for lunch at her
stepmother’s apparently.’

  Poor kid. Even though I don’t care for her, it’s not nice to find a body. I know that.

  ‘Can you describe the relationship between the two of you?’

  ‘There’s no love lost, if that’s what you mean. She always disliked me, but I put that down to jealousy. David had her when he was very young. He didn’t take his obligations seriously but later, he’d decided to remember he was a father again.’

  ‘You sound jealous yourself.’

  ‘I suppose I was. He began spending more time with her than me after we got married. I know he was trying to make up for lost time, but she didn’t want me around. So I was left on my own.’

  ‘And then he went off with someone else.’ Penny is looking at me carefully. ‘You must feel upset about that too.’

  ‘Not enough to kill Tanya, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Or your ex-husband?’

  ‘No! Whose side are you on?’

  She tilts her head quizzically. It’s as though my solicitor is asking herself the same. ‘I’m just asking the kind of questions the prosecution will ask you in court.’

  In court? I might have been arrested but I haven’t been charged yet. This doesn’t sound good at all. ‘The thing is,’ I say wearily, ‘that I can’t remember everything. I’ve told you. The drugs. The seizures. They all affect my memory.’

  ‘Even if I do believe you – and I want to – a jury might not buy that.’

  Then she stares at me hard. ‘There’s one more piece to this puzzle, isn’t there, Vicki?’

  A huge lump comes up in my throat.

  ‘You told me earlier that you used to work in a prison. But that’s not the full story, is it?’

  I go cold. Then hot. Cold again.

  ‘Come on, Vicki. Did you honestly think the police wouldn’t find out? Mind you, I’m surprised they’ve taken this long. I have to say,’ continues my solicitor, ‘that it didn’t look good when they told me earlier on today, and I had to explain that my own client hadn’t revealed this rather crucial piece of information. It’s going to make everything very difficult.’