The Other Woman’s House

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘The kitchen came up first. The picture kept turning – it made my eyes feel tired, so I closed them, and then when I opened them I saw all this…red. I realised I was looking at the lounge, and there was a woman’s body—’

  ‘How did you know it was the lounge?’ Sam K cuts me off.

  I don’t mind the interruption. It calms me, pulls me out of the horror that’s still so vivid in my mind, and back into the present. ‘I’d seen it in one of the photographs – it was the same room.’ Haven’t I just told him I looked at the photographs first? Is he trying to catch me out?

  ‘But there was no woman’s body and no blood in the photograph, correct?’

  I nod.

  ‘Let’s leave aside the blood and the body for a second. In every other respect, the virtual tour’s lounge was the same as the lounge in the photograph, yes?’

  ‘Yes. I’m almost sure. I mean, I’m as sure as I can be.’

  ‘Describe it.’

  ‘What’s the point?’ I ask, frustrated. ‘You can log onto Roundthehouses and see it for yourself. Why don’t you ask me to describe the woman?’

  ‘I know this is hard for you, Connie, but you have to trust that anything I ask, it’s for a good reason.’

  ‘You want me to describe the lounge?’ I feel as if I’m at a kids’ party, playing a stupid game.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘White walls, beige carpet. A fireplace at the centre of one wall, tiles around it. I couldn’t see the tiles in detail, but I think they had some kind of flower pattern on them. They were too old-fashioned for the room.’ I realise this only as I hear myself say it, and feel relieved. Kit might choose tiles like that for our house, which was built in 1750, but never for a modern house like 11 Bentley Grove that can’t be more than ten years old. He believes new buildings should be wholeheartedly contemporary, inside and out.

  Therefore 11 Bentley Grove is nothing to do with him.

  ‘Go on,’ says Sam K.

  ‘Alcoves on either side of the chimney breast. A silver L-shaped sofa with red embroidery on it, a chair with funny wooden arms, a coffee table with a glass top and flowers in a sort of horizontal display case under the glass – blue and red flowers.’ To match the tiles. There was something else, something I can’t call to mind. What was it? What else did I see, while the room was slowly circling? ‘Oh, and a map above the fireplace – a framed map.’ That wasn’t it, but I might as well mention it. What else? Should I tell Sam K there was something else but I don’t know what? Is there any point?

  ‘A map of?’ he asks.

  ‘I couldn’t see – it was too small in the picture. In the top left-hand corner there were some shields – about ten maybe.’

  ‘Shields?’

  ‘Like upside-down gravestones.’

  ‘You mean crests?’ says Kit. ‘Like when a family has a crest?’

  ‘Yes.’ That’s it. I couldn’t think of the word. ‘Most of them were colourful and patterned, but one was empty – just an outline.’

  Was the empty crest the missing detail? I could pretend it was, but I’d be kidding myself. My mind took something else from that room, something it won’t put back.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘A dead woman in a pool of blood,’ I say, hating the belligerence in my voice. Why am I so angry? Because you’re powerless, Alice would say. We manufacture anger to give ourselves the illusion of power when we feel weak and helpless.

  At last, I hear the words I’ve been waiting for. ‘Describe the woman,’ Sam K says.

  Words begin to pour out of me, an uncontrollable flow. ‘When I saw her, and all that blood, when I realised what I was looking at, I looked down at myself – that was the first thing I did. I panicked. For a second I thought I was looking at a picture of myself – I looked down to check I wasn’t bleeding. I didn’t understand it afterwards – why would I do that? She was lying on her front – I couldn’t see her face. She was small, petite, my size and build. She had dark hair, same colour as mine, straight like mine. It was…messy, sort of fanned out, as if she’d fallen and…’ I shudder, hoping I don’t need to spell it out: dead women can’t make adjustments to their hair.

  ‘I couldn’t see her face, and I imagined – just for a second, until I got my bearings – that she was me, that I was the one lying there. Stop writing,’ I hear myself say. Too loud. ‘Can’t you just listen, and make notes afterwards?’

  Sam K puts down his notebook and pen.

  ‘I don’t want to build it up into more than it was,’ I say. ‘I knew she wasn’t me, of course I did, but…it was as if my perception played a trick on me. It must have been the shock. She was lying in the most blood I’ve ever seen. It was like a big red rug under her. At first I thought it couldn’t be blood because there was so much of it, it covered about a third of the room, but then I thought…Well, you must know. You must have seen dead people lying in their own blood, people who’ve bled to death.’

  ‘Jesus, Con,’ Kit mutters.

  I ignore him. ‘How much blood is there, normally?’

  Sam K clears his throat. ‘What you’re describing doesn’t sound implausible, in a bleeding-to-death scenario, though I’ve never seen it first-hand. What size is the lounge?’

  ‘Twenty foot ten by eleven foot three,’ I tell him.

  He looks surprised. ‘That’s very exact.’

  ‘It’s on the floorplan.’

  ‘On the Roundthehouses website?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know the dimensions of all the rooms?’

  ‘No. Only the lounge.’

  ‘Tell him what you did last night, once I’d gone back to bed,’ says Kit.

  ‘First I rang Simon Waterhouse, then, when I couldn’t get him, I rang you,’ I tell Sam K. ‘After talking to you, I went back to my laptop and…looked at 11 Bentley Grove again. I studied every photograph, I studied the floorplan. I watched the virtual tour over and over.’ Yes, that’s right. I hereby declare myself obsessive and insane.

  ‘For six hours she did that, until I woke up and dragged her away from the computer,’ says Kit quietly.

  ‘I kept closing down the internet, then opening it up again. A few times I turned off the laptop, unplugged it, then plugged it in again and rebooted it. I…I was exhausted and not thinking straight, and…I kind of got the idea into my head that if I persisted, I’d see it again – the woman’s body.’ Am I being too honest? So my behaviour last night was out of control – so what? Does that make me an unreliable witness? Do the police only listen to people who take mugs of Ovaltine to bed at ten o’clock and spend the rest of the night sensibly asleep in their flannel pyjamas? ‘I’ve never seen a dead body before. A murdered body, that then disappears. I was in shock. I probably still am.’

  ‘Why do you say “murdered”?’ Sam K asks.

  ‘It’s hard to imagine how she could end up like that by accident. I suppose she might have plunged a knife into her stomach, laid herself face down on the floor and waited to die, but it seems unlikely. It’s not the most obvious way to commit suicide.’

  ‘Did you see a stomach wound?’

  ‘No, but the blood looked thickest around her middle. It was almost black. I suppose I just assumed…’ A deep tarry blackness, thinning to red. A small window, rectangles of light on the dark surface…

  ‘Connie?’ Kit’s face is swimming in front of mine. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘No. No, not really. I saw the window…’

  ‘Don’t try to talk until the dizziness passes.’

  ‘…in the blood.’

  ‘What does she mean?’ Sam K asks.

  ‘No idea. Con, put your head between your knees and breathe.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ I push him away. ‘I’m fine now. If nothing else I’ve said has convinced you both, this will,’ I say. ‘I saw the lounge window reflected on the surface of the blood. As the room turned, the blood turned, and so did the little window. That proves I didn’t imagine it! No one would imag
ine such a stupid, pedantic detail. I must have seen it. It must have been real.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake.’ Kit covers his face with his hands.

  ‘And her dress – why would I have imagined a dress like that? It was pale green and lilac, and had a pattern that was like lots of hourglass shapes going down her body in vertical lines, curved lines going in and out, in and out.’ I try to demonstrate with my hands.

  Sam K nods. ‘Was she wearing shoes, or tights? Any jewellery that you noticed?’

  ‘No tights. Her legs were bare. I don’t think she was wearing shoes either. She had a wedding ring on. Her arms were up, over her head. I remember looking at her fingers and…Yes. Definitely a wedding ring.’

  And something else, something my mind’s eye refuses to bring into focus. The more I try and fail to identify it, the more aware I am of its hidden presence, like a dark shape that’s slipped off the edge and out of sight.

  ‘What happened when you saw the body on your laptop?’ Sam K asks. ‘What did you do, after you’d examined yourself to check you weren’t bleeding?’

  ‘I woke Kit and made him go and look.’

  ‘When I went in, there was a rotating kitchen on the screen,’ Kit says. ‘Then the lounge came on, and there was no woman’s body in it, and no blood. I told Connie, and she came in to look.’

  ‘The body had gone,’ I say.

  ‘I didn’t reload the tour,’ says Kit. ‘It was still running when I walked into the room, the same one Connie had started, on a repeating loop. I’m not saying changes can’t be made to a virtual tour of a house – of course they can – but they wouldn’t affect a tour already playing. It’s just not possible—’

  ‘Of course it’s possible,’ I cut him off. ‘You’re telling me someone can’t arrange a virtual tour so that once in every hundred or thousand times, a different picture of the lounge comes up?’ Come on, Kit. Aren’t you proud of your pupil? It’s thanks to you that I no longer underestimate what’s technically possible. A computer, instructed by the right person, can do almost anything.

  ‘Well?’ I demand. ‘Isn’t it possible?’

  Grudgingly, Kit concedes that it is. ‘Please tell me you’re not going to spend the rest of the day sitting through the tour a thousand times,’ he says. ‘Please.’

  ‘Can I have a look at the laptop?’ Sam K asks.

  While Kit takes him upstairs, I pace up and down, picturing 11 Bentley Grove’s lounge, trying to uncover the missing detail. The woman disappeared. The blood disappeared. And something else…

  I’m so wrapped up in my thoughts that I don’t notice Kit has returned, and I jump when he says, ‘I know everyone hates estate agents, but you’ve taken it to a whole new level. What you haven’t done is considered the why. Why would some evil genius estate agent, sitting in his office in Cambridge, want to include an elusive dead woman complete with own pool of blood on the virtual tour of a house he’s trying to sell? Is it, what, a daring new marketing technique? Maybe you should see which agent the house is on with, ring up and ask them.’

  ‘No,’ I say, feeling calmer as he loses his cool. ‘It’s the police who ought to do that.’ I won’t let him turn this into something to be laughed at.

  ‘You say she was murdered. Most murderers want to cover up what they’ve done, not broadcast it via one of the country’s most popular websites.’

  ‘I’m aware of that, Kit. I also know what I saw.’ I need to ask him something, but every question I ask is another opportunity for him to lie. ‘Why didn’t you tell him?’

  ‘Tell him?’

  ‘Sam. That I was obsessed with 11 Bentley Grove long before last night. The whole story.’

  Kit looks caught out. ‘Why didn’t you tell him? I assumed you didn’t want him to know, because…’ He stops himself, looks away.

  ‘Because?’

  ‘You know damn well why! If I’d told him what’s been going on since January, he wouldn’t have given your dead woman the time of day – he’d have assumed the vanishing body was a figment of your imagination, just like the rest of it’s a figment of your imagination!’

  ‘Would he? Mightn’t he have assumed the opposite – that something must be going on, something involving 11 Bentley Grove and you?’ I wasn’t willing to take the risk; perhaps Kit wasn’t either.

  His eyes fill with tears. ‘I can’t take much more of this, Con. I keep telling you, and you don’t listen.’ He falls into a chair, rubs his temples with his fingers. He looks so much older than he did six months ago. His face has new lines; there’s more grey in his hair; his eyes are duller. Have I done that to him? The alternatives are too horrible to contemplate: either he’s the kind, funny, loyal, honourable man I fell in love with and I’m slowly but surely destroying him, or he’s a stranger who has been wearing a disguise for months, maybe years – a stranger who will eventually destroy me.

  ‘I love you, Con,’ he says in a hollow voice. I start to cry. His love for me is his most effective weapon. ‘I always will, even if you succeed in driving me out of this house and out of your life. That’s why I didn’t tell’ – he gestures towards upstairs – ‘the whole story. If you want the police to take you seriously, if you want them to go to 11 Bentley Grove and check there’s no dead woman lying on the carpet, then, however crazy it is, that’s what I want too. I want you to feel better.’

  ‘I know,’ I say, numb inside. I don’t know what I know any more.

  ‘Do you have any idea how hard it is, living under a cloud of suspicion when you’ve done nothing wrong? You think I don’t know what you’re thinking? “Kit’s a computer geek. Maybe he can make a body appear and disappear in a matter of seconds. Maybe he killed the body himself.”’

  ‘I don’t think that!’ I sob. Because I didn’t let myself go that far. ‘I hate being suspicious of you, I hate it. If 11 Bentley Grove was anywhere but Cambridge…’

  Sam K is back, standing in the doorway. How much has he overheard? ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ he says. ‘I’m going to speak to Cambridge police myself. They’re more likely to pay attention if I make the initial contact.’

  My heart jolts. ‘Did you…?’ I point upwards, towards our office.

  ‘I didn’t see a body, no. Or any blood.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘The strong likelihood is that you were tired and had some kind of…transitory hallucination. What did you call it before? A trick of perception. But, at the same time, I don’t want to dismiss what you’ve told me, because…’ He sighs. ‘Because you rang Simon Waterhouse, not me. Simon’s the one you wanted. I can’t turn myself into him, but I can do the next best thing, do what I know he’d do: take you seriously.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t thank me – I’m only the stand-in.’ Sam K smiles. ‘You can thank Simon, the next time you see him.’

  It’s only once he’s gone that it occurs to me what those words must mean: he knows I’ve met Simon before.

  POLICE EXHIBIT REF: CB13345/432/20IG

  CAVENDISH LODGE PRIMARY SCHOOL

  BULLETIN NO. 586

  Date: Monday 30th November 2009

  Kittens at Cavendish Lodge!

  We had an assembly with a difference on Wednesday in Class 1! Marcus’s cat Bess has had five kittens, and his mum and dad brought them all into school! We had a marvellous time playing with these cute furry visitors, and a very interesting talk afterwards about pets and how to care for them, so huge thanks to Marcus and his family for allowing us to have this super treat! Below are two lovely write-ups from Class 1 children…

  yesterday afternoon Marcus kittens came into school. They looked so cute they were black with white patches. I got to hold one of them they were lovely and furry but they had very sarp pink claws. One of them runed of beind the piona. I herd one of them purring. They had little blue eyes. It was a lovely afternoon.

  by Harry Bradshaw

  yesterday Marcus and his mummy brought some kittens to our asembaly we
were talking about how to look after pets they were so lovely some were black with wight patches. The mummy cat Bess was not there. I got to hold four of them they felt soft just like fethers.

  by Tilly Gilpatrick

  4

  17/07/10

  Charlie didn’t know what to do about her surname. It hadn’t occurred to her that it was an issue until Simon had brought it up at the airport. He’d nodded at her passport and said, ‘I suppose you’ll have to get a new one now.’ She hadn’t known what he’d meant, and must have done a dismal job of concealing her shock when he’d explained. Simon had laughed at her. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I assumed you’d be changing your name to mine, but if you don’t want to, I don’t mind.’

  ‘Really?’ Charlie had asked, immediately anxious about his happiness, which she perceived as fragile and endangered at the best of times. She had assumed the opposite: that she would remain Charlie Zailer; frankly, she was amazed Simon hadn’t also. Annoyed with herself for being unprepared for such an important discussion, she’d decided on the spot that she would do whatever he wanted. There were worse names than Waterhouse.

  It seemed, though, that for once Simon’s feelings were uncomplicated. ‘Really,’ he’d assured her. ‘What does it matter what you’re called? It’s only a label, isn’t it?’

  ‘Exactly,’ she’d replied, straight-faced. ‘I mean, thinking about it, I could just be called Female Police Sergeant number 54,437, couldn’t I?’

  The matter of her surname had been preoccupying her ever since. What did other married women do? Charlie’s next-door neighbour Marion Gregory, Kate Kombothekra, Stacey Sellers, Debbie Gibbs – they had all changed their names. Olivia, Charlie’s sister, who was getting married next year, was trying to persuade Dominic, her husband-to-be, that they should become the Zailer-Lunds. ‘Or he can stay as he is, and I’ll be Zailer-Lund on my own,’ she’d told Charlie defiantly. ‘If Dom wants to wrap himself in the mouldering fetters of outmoded tradition, that’s up to him. He can’t stop me from adopting a more progressive approach.’ Knowing Olivia as she did, Charlie suspected her determination had less to do with principle and more to do with a desire to be double-barrelled.