I don’t answer this direct question of his. I say, ‘I put the other names and details there to help search – for connections to him, maybe, or to narrow down any results. He’s American.’
George’s voice is gentle, verging on teasing, but what he says is not. ‘To do something like this I need to know more. You’re going to have to tell me why he matters.’
‘I’ve never met him. I won’t understand why I need to know about him until I know it. Does that make sense?’
‘It actually does, yes.’
I have estimated Frederick Veliko’s age, guessing that he’d be a few years younger than Jane. ‘He’s probably in his early to mid-thirties, but he’s nowhere on social media. I’m not an expert at Internet searches, but I’ve tried everything a non-specialist can think of.’
‘Let’s see.’ He takes the paper and studies the family tree. ‘Frederick Veliko.’ He looks hard at me. ‘Unusual surname.’
‘I suppose it is. I hadn’t thought until you said.’
‘So his sister’s dead, according to your chart and dates. Very recently dead. Sad.’ He doesn’t sound surprised.
‘Yes.’
‘She must have been young.’
‘Yes.’ I watch him carefully.
‘Different surname.’ His face is again a blank.
‘Yes. Jane Miller. Her legal surname was her mother’s.’ I’m betting you already know all this, George. I glance at Zac’s name, which I also wrote on the family tree. A few days ago it would have seemed unthinkable to speak or write it. But the sky has since fallen. Zac has found me. He has found Jane. ‘Jane was married to this man.’ I touch Zac’s name and George looks sharply up at me. His guardedness disintegrates. His eyes do not leave my face. ‘Jane may have had an affair. If so, I haven’t been able to figure out who her lover was.’
‘I see.’
‘Here’s the thing that’s bothering me. The first time I searched for Frederick Veliko was a couple years ago. All I got then was an obituary, and that only came up because I plugged his father’s name in. I tried again last night. Now, the obituary is gone.’
‘Things come and go from the Internet.’
‘Yes.’ I nod in agreement. ‘But there was another weird thing. I tried some birth and death websites, all government records databases in the US. Each time I plugged Frederick Veliko’s name in, I got an error message with this long string of numbers, saying there were too many requests. I tried other names and that didn’t happen.’
He hesitates, as if he is considering something. ‘Leave it with me. No promises, but I’ll see if I can find anything.’
‘Do you think I’m crazy to think it’s as if he never existed? As if someone tried to clean him away but missed the obituary at the first pass. Then they went back and got rid of the crumb they’d overlooked.’
‘I’d never think you were crazy.’
‘Thank you.’ I imitate his mixture of seriousness and teasing.
‘It’s nice to see you, Helen.’ He adds, ‘I mean, nice for me. Obviously not nice for you. I was a bastard, blocking in your car. I’m truly sorry. Maybe we can meet for a drink sometime …’
It’s not a marriage proposal. It’s a drink. With a man who is probably spying on me. But if he is, why? ‘Maybe,’ I say. And whose side is he on?
I arrive at the park ten minutes early. From the car, I can see that the children’s play area is still deserted. While I wait for Eliza and Alice, I take out my phone and find the review blog that Milly and I created. I haven’t let myself look at it since last June, when I posted my illicit reply to Abandoned Friend’s comment.
She answered me a month later. The heroine should have trusted more in those she was closest to. It is dangerous not to do that. Love can all too easily turn to hate when you think you’ve been abandoned.
Quickly, I type, Not if it’s real love.
To my astonishment, Abandoned Friend likes my comment almost instantly. She must have set up some kind of alert for whenever I make a reply, since discovering my first. She is out there, in real time, talking to me. It must be her.
My heart is beating so fast. Half a minute later, she replies again to my comment. There is no doubt that it was, she says.
I look up, and see Eliza and Alice entering the park from the other side of the children’s play area.
I type another reply. One word is all I have time for. One word is all I need. Was?
She answers my single word with her own. Is.
Then, before my eyes, the review vanishes, and the comments along with it. Is Milly erasing any evidence that could possibly hurt me? Whatever the answer to this question, the contact with her has given me a much-needed boost of strength and heart, but also a reminder of how deeply I miss her.
I drop my phone in my bag and jump out of the car. Eliza waves madly as I walk towards her and Alice. We stand in front of the swings. She punches a juice box with a straw, then hands it to Alice before reaching into a bag she has hung on the handles of the pushchair and producing two flasks of coffee.
She takes a sip, closes her eyes, and sighs. ‘Oh, do I ever need this.’
‘Me too. Thank you. It’s delicious.’
‘Good.’ She smooths a stray hair from Alice’s eyes. ‘Madam’s had a bad couple of nights. We don’t seem to be able to do bedtime without a temper tantrum lately, do we, poppet?’ She touches a red mark on her cheek that she must have noticed I’d been staring at.
It makes my stomach drop in worry. ‘Alice did that?’ Is this a version of the I-walked-into-a-door excuse? Alice herself is holding a little pink pig, which she squeezes so it lets out a squeak and makes her giggle. It doesn’t seem the right moment to ask Eliza if her husband has been extra busy stalking his ex-girlfriends and murdering his ex-wives while beating his latest partner in between.
Eliza looks down at the grass as she says, ‘Never underestimate the strength of a squirming toddler.’
‘Swings,’ Alice says, and Eliza bends to release her from the pushchair, kissing the top of her head before plonking her into a toddler swing with safety bars.
While she pushes, I tell Eliza about a make-your-own-pizza restaurant that a patient’s father mentioned. ‘I thought you and Alice might enjoy it. Sounds fun.’
‘Meet us there tomorrow for an early dinner,’ she says. ‘I could so use the break.’
‘Will your husband come along?’ How can I get her to talk about Zac?
Eliza doesn’t colour or hesitate. ‘I wish. I’d love you to meet him, but he’s flying to Edinburgh tomorrow afternoon.’
So I say yes to the make-your-own-pizza dinner, promising to meet them there after I finish work. ‘What a shame your husband will miss it.’
Her response is a vague and regretful nod, and I see that yet another of my attempts to introduce Zac into the conversation has led nowhere.
I cannot make up my mind if this is natural or deliberate. Is it normal never to say her husband’s name? Probably, I decide, at least at this early stage of friendship. When I glance at my watch and realise I need to be at the hospital in fifteen minutes, I am no closer to working out if Eliza is Zac’s co-conspirator, his victim, or oblivious to it all.
Then Concealment
Two years and one month earlier
* * *
Cornwall, Early March 2017
The conversation between Milly and Scarlett was running on a loop in my head. Invisible hands seemed to haul me from the bed where I was curled, in a practically catatonic state, hair wet from my bath and in my nightdress. Those hands pushed me into the baby’s room, where I had a hiding place, a box stowed under a floorboard that I’d prised up. They pulled me down the stairs and into Zac’s ground-floor study. This was another camera-free zone, presumably because he didn’t want whatever he did in there to be filmed. They pressed me into his desk chair, where I sat and stared at the rusting latches of his old steamer trunk.
It was a heavy blue rectangle of aluminium, covered in dents
. Zac claimed that the key was lost, but it didn’t matter, it only contained old notes from medical school, he’d break into it someday when he could be bothered. Like Bluebeard’s wife, I had tried every key I could find. Unlike her, I hadn’t found one that worked.
In my hands were the objects that I’d removed from my hidden box. An old book on locks and locksmithing that I’d ordered using the local library’s computer, and several sizes of flat-edged screwdrivers. I was also holding the burner phone I’d used to record Milly and Scarlett earlier that day, in case I needed its camera.
What I was about to do was an absolute betrayal of trust. It didn’t matter what Maxine called it. It didn’t matter whether the person was highly placed in British intelligence, or a handler, or a jealous husband, or a lowly human asset on the ground, or a suspicious girlfriend. I was the last two, but spying is spying, and it’s a shitty thing to do. I was certainly feeling shitty that Zac had been doing it to me.
Which betrayal was the worst? Zac lying to me? Zac trying to control everything I did? Zac’s flirtations with other women, which undoubtedly went further than I yet knew? Zac bullying anyone who he thought was obstructing him – or maybe bullying merely because he enjoyed it and could get away with it? Zac secretly filming me? My breaking into his private things would be a tiny infraction compared to the other options in that ugly game of multiple choice.
The hidden cameras, more than anything, made me see for the first time that I needed to get away from a man I’d thought I loved. They made me recognise that I barely knew him. I took stock of what he had told me.
That his birthday was November fourteenth, and he was forty-one, so sixteen years older than me. That he was an only child, and hated his parents for sending him to boarding school. That his parents lived in Vancouver, where they’d settled at the end of his father’s career in the diplomatic service, and he barely spoke to them, rarely saw them.
That he owned a house in Yorkshire which his grandparents had left him, but he wouldn’t take me there, despite my asking to go and saying how nice it would be for red squirrels to be part of what the baby knew. That he was evasive when I asked exactly where the house was, because he said he had painful memories associated with it, and asked me not to press him again on the subject.
That he basked in attention from women as if it were his birthright. That he was controlling, and sexually dangerous, two related things that I had not faced properly, telling myself that the night we conceived our baby and he held me down was an anomaly, a misunderstanding.
And that he had a missing first wife. Jane. I said her name in my head again and again. Jane. A missing woman. How could I let that go? How could I not try to help to find her, if I could, knowing what I’d learned about Zac? A man who secretly filmed me in bed with him, and probably did that to Jane too.
My head was crowding with practical questions. Was it realistic that I could simply walk out? Or smart to try? If I did, could I ever truly be rid of him? No judge would terminate his rights as a father without powerful reasons. Would he try to get custody? Maybe he would say I was unfit and unable to support a child, and that I’d been incompetent and anxious and even mentally ill since I became pregnant.
‘No,’ I said aloud.
The word made me feel stronger. I would not do anything to make myself and my baby vulnerable. I would not put us at risk. I would not let him steal her from me. There was another good reason not to leave him quite yet. If I did, how could I help Jane? Maxine knew what she was doing when she appealed to my solidarity with a woman in trouble. And she knew of my Pandora-like curiosity.
My baby fluttered like a butterfly, as if to encourage me. Her movements were a gift. ‘I’m so in love with you, little baby,’ I said. She fluttered again, as if to tell me that she loved me back, and I laughed.
I got up from the chair and carefully lowered myself onto the rug in front of the steamer chest. I was cross-legged, to give my growing belly extra space, and to keep myself steady and grounded. At that moment, I couldn’t let myself think about the recording of Milly and Scarlett. And I especially couldn’t think about Zac’s home-made films. I pushed away my memories of what we did in that bed, what I wore, positions, the sounds I made, the things we said.
I turned my full attention to the steamer chest, and got to work on picking the lock. I inserted the largest of the screwdrivers into the vertical keyhole, but it was way too big. I inserted the middle-sized screwdriver, but it was slightly too big. I inserted the smallest screwdriver, and it was just right and perfectly tight.
I checked what I was doing against the illustration in the open book, but my hand was wet with nervous sweat, and it was hard to concentrate when I was jerking my eyes between the book and the lock. I lost the angle and the screwdriver slipped.
When a spy was bad in a novel, it didn’t mean they were incompetent. It meant they’d gone rogue. It pissed me off, the way the heroes in those thrillers were portrayed as so hard, so impervious. The way they seemed to do everything right.
I wiped my hands on the Persian rug that Zac put in that room to fight the country house florals the owners had stuck everywhere. I lost count of how many attempts I’d made when, to my amazement, I felt the two pins push in together, and the little locking wedge tabs along with them. I took a deep breath and lifted the lid of the trunk.
Inside were stacks of faded green and pink file pockets. I picked up the nearest few, flicking through the papers inside. Zac had told the truth about his medical school notes. They were organised by topic, and labelled in his ultra-controlled writing. I looked quickly through each of them, arranging them in a careful sequence so that I would be able to put them back exactly as I’d found them.
Radiology was towards the bottom of the last pile. Beneath several pages of anatomical diagrams was a cream envelope, greeting-card sized and made of thick, expensive stationery. The sender was a country hotel in County Cork, whose details were printed in the upper left corner in ornate script. It was addressed to Dr and Mrs Zachary Hunter, and was posted to Thorpe Hall in Yorkshire. Finally, I knew where the Yorkshire house was. I wouldn’t forget the address.
The glue on the flap had dried out. Inside was a receipt for a three-night stay from 5–8 April, including a room service dinner with a bottle of champagne. The receipt was dated 10 April 2013, which was shortly before Jane vanished. There was a cover letter, also dated 10 April, on cream stationery that matched the envelope.
Dear Dr and Mrs Hunter,
Thank you for contacting me by telephone to make payment by credit card. Please find enclosed your receipt for €1982.45. We regret the unfortunate circumstances that necessitated your early departure. We are grateful to you for paying in full, and for your understanding of our policy, requiring forty-eight hours’ notice of cancellation.
Kind regards,
Mr Patrick Murphy, Manager
I snapped a photo of the letter. What could the ‘unfortunate circumstances’ have been? A range of possibilities crowded in. Illness? A medical emergency for Zac? It couldn’t have been a work crisis for Jane, because Maxine had said that Jane quit her job a couple of years before she disappeared.
Why did Zac leave this there? Did he forget it existed? Doubtful, given that he wasn’t a man who forgot much. Maybe he didn’t know the letter was in the trunk, and unwittingly brought it along as a stowaway, like he did Jane’s beautiful suitcase? Jane herself could have slipped the letter into his medical school notes before she ran away. Then again, why did he keep the trunk locked? I recalled his assertion that the key was lost. Maybe he was telling the truth. Not everything he said could be a lie.
I was so immersed in thinking about this visit to Ireland that I didn’t notice the extra light bathing the curtains, or the sound of the car engine, which was barely audible on the other side of the triple-glazed windows. Then I heard the car door close.
‘What the fuck?’ I said aloud.
I saw him at work. I knew with absolute certain
ty he was on nights tonight. So how could he be home before his shift finished?
His key turned in the front door as I moved the files into the steamer chest at speed. There was swearing when he realised I’d double-locked the door and he had to fumble for his second key. I’d bought myself extra time with that move, but he would still be in the entry hall in a few seconds. Had he noticed the Internet outage, and that his cameras had gone blank for a few minutes? Was that what brought him home? What excuse did he give at the hospital to get away?
I shut the lid as softly as I could, then reinserted the screwdriver into the keyhole. To my surprise and relief, it rotated and the lock reengaged with a click.
I was halfway to the over-stuffed armchair in the corner when Zac’s footsteps drew near. When he continued on, up the stairs, I let out my breath. Tiptoeing the rest of the way, wincing at a creaking floorboard, I slid the book and the tools and phone under the chair’s fat seat cushion, thankful that the owners of the house chose such heavily upholstered furniture. All I could do was hope that I would get a chance to retrieve them soon, without Zac discovering them first.
Already he was calling my name, sounding puzzled not to find me in bed, going through the upstairs rooms to search for me, coming down the stairs again.
When the door to the study opened I was posed in the chair as if I had been waiting for him to come home but couldn’t help falling asleep. I’d pulled up the hem of the silky maternity nightdress Zac bought me, so one of my thighs was exposed. I’d slipped a spaghetti strap off my shoulder, though at twenty-weeks pregnant I worried that I looked too lumpy to play that trick. Still, the nightdress had a sheer lace panel at the top of the empire waist, and it didn’t take much to seduce Zac. That was one of the things I loved about him.
Used to, I reminded myself. Used to love about him.
I felt him standing in front of the chair, felt him bend, felt his lips against mine, then his fingers brushing my shoulder, slipping beneath the blush-pink fabric he chose when we found out last week that he was right and we were having a girl. Since then, he’d called the baby his mini mermaid, which I loved. I pretended he’d just woken me, when he told me how glad he was to find me, that he couldn’t bear to lose me, that he was scared I had left him.
I Spy Page 13