The Other Woman’s House

by Sophie Hannah

  Fortunately, I have no such reservations. ‘You’d do it if you knew someone had been murdered in your house. Or if you’d murdered that person yourself.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sam agrees. ‘You would. But, Connie, you must see that—’

  ‘I know: it doesn’t prove anything. Do Cambridge police know?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Probably not. Lorraine Turner happened to mention it to me when we were talking about the map – she was worried about something so valuable being left in an empty house – a house empty of people, I mean. Most of Dr Gane’s belongings are still there, Lorraine says. Her furniture, books, CDs…’

  ‘Did she tell Lorraine why she was moving out?’

  ‘No. And Lorraine didn’t ask. She didn’t feel it was her place.’

  I gulp my water down in one mouthful. ‘You’ve got to tell Cambridge police,’ I say.

  ‘It won’t make a difference.’

  ‘If they analyse the carpet, they might find traces of blood, or DNA.’

  ‘They won’t do anything, Connie. There’s no proof. Selina Gane moving out of her house is odd, I agree, but people behave strangely all the time. The guy I’ve been dealing with, DC Grint – he was satisfied with what Lorraine told him.’

  ‘Then he’s a crap detective! Lorraine’s the person who took the pictures for the virtual tour, isn’t she? She’s the last person whose word he ought to rely on. Has he checked with the Beaters, or Selina Gane? What if the Christmas tree story’s a lie?’

  ‘Listen to what you’re saying and think what it means,’ says Sam. ‘Lorraine Turner would have to be a psychotic killer who murders her victims in houses she’s trying to sell, then posts photographs of their dead bodies on the internet. Does that sound likely to you?’

  ‘Why victims, plural? Maybe there’s only one victim: the woman I saw. And you could say that about any crime, in that disbelieving tone, make it sound implausible. “What, so he dissolved all his victims in a bath full of acid?” “What, so he hacked up young men’s bodies and stored them in his freezer?”’

  ‘Do you read a lot of true crime stuff?’ Sam asks.

  I can’t help laughing. ‘None,’ I tell him. ‘Everyone knows those stories. They’re common knowledge. What are you suggesting, that I’m some kind of morbid blood-thirsty freak? What if Lorraine Turner’s the freak, or Selina Gane, or both of them? Why does it have to be me?’

  Because you’re the one yelling at the top of your voice in a crowded canteen, idiot.

  ‘I’ve answered your question,’ Sam says calmly. ‘Are you going to answer mine?’

  How does he know I’m keeping something back? Because Kit and I had a fight? He can’t have heard the details; he was too far away.

  ‘I spoke to Alice Bean,’ he says.

  I try not to let my anger show. Alice is mine; sometimes I feel as if she’s all I’ve got, the only person I can rely on to have my best interests at heart. How dare Sam poke around in my life? Why didn’t Alice tell me she’d spoken to him?

  ‘You told me Alice advised you to contact Simon Waterhouse, but you didn’t speak to her in the early hours of Saturday morning, did you? You didn’t tell her about seeing the woman’s body.’

  ‘I saw her later on Saturday and told her then.’

  Sam waits.

  ‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘I hadn’t told her on Saturday morning, when I spoke to you.’

  ‘So she must have suggested you contact Simon about something else.’

  I say nothing.

  ‘I’d be very interested to hear what that something else was.’

  ‘It’s not really something else. I mean, it is, but…it’s connected. 11 Bentley Grove is the connection.’ I take a deep breath. ‘Do you remember the snow we had in January?’

  Sam nods. ‘I was worried it was never going to end,’ he says. ‘I thought it was the beginning of the new ice age that the climate change scientists keep predicting.’

  ‘On 6 January, I went to Combingham to buy ten big sacks of coal. Kit loves real fires and we’d run out, and he couldn’t go – he was in London. If you’re about to ask why I didn’t go to the nearest garage, Kit won’t let us buy coal from anyone but Gummy in Combingham. That’s not his name, but it’s what everyone calls him. I’m a bit scared of him, and having teeth isn’t his strong point, but Kit insists his coal is the best. I don’t know or care enough about coal to argue with him.’

  Sam is smiling, and he shouldn’t be. This isn’t a happy story.

  ‘I took Kit’s car because it’s better in snow than mine – it’s a four-wheel drive. I’d never been to Gummy’s before, not on my own, and my sense of direction’s hopeless, so I used the SatNav in Kit’s car.’

  ‘He didn’t drive to London, then?’ says Sam.

  ‘He never does. Usually he parks at Rawndesley station, but it was too icy first thing that morning to drive anywhere apart from on the main roads. The gritters hadn’t been out yet. Kit walked all the way down to the Rawndesley Road and caught the bus to the station.’

  I wish he’d driven. I wish his car had been in the station car park that day instead of sitting outside our house, looking so much safer and more appealing than mine.

  ‘I bought the coal. I probably could have found my way home, but I didn’t want to go wrong, so I decided I’d play it safe and use the SatNav again. I pressed “Home”.’ I take a deep breath. ‘The first thing I noticed was the driving time: two hours and seventeen minutes. Then I noticed the address.’

  Sam knows. I can see from his face that he knows.

  ‘As far as Kit’s SatNav was concerned, “Home” was 11 Bentley Grove in Cambridge. Not Melrose Cottage in Little Holling, Silsford.’ I start crying; I can’t help it. ‘I’m sorry. I just can’t…I can’t believe that six months later I’m still telling this story without knowing what it means.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this on Saturday morning?’ Sam asks.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d believe me about the woman’s body if I told you everything. If you knew I was obsessed with 11 Bentley Grove already…’

  ‘Were you?’

  Is there any point in my denying it? ‘Yes. Totally.’

  ‘Because Kit had put it in his SatNav as his home address?’

  I nod.

  ‘And you wanted to know why. Did you ask him?’

  ‘The second he walked through the door. He claimed not to know what I was talking about. He denied it, completely denied it. He said he’d never programmed in any home address – not ours, and not an address in Cambridge that he’d never heard of. We had a huge row – it went on for hours. I didn’t believe him.’

  ‘That’s understandable,’ says Sam.

  ‘He’d bought the SatNav new – who else could have programmed in the address apart from him? I said that, and he said, “It’s obvious, isn’t it? You must have done it.” I couldn’t believe it. Why would I do something like that? And if I had, why would I accuse him of doing it?’

  ‘Try to calm down, Connie.’ Sam reaches over, pats my arm. ‘Would you like another drink?’

  I’d like another life – any life but this one, anyone’s problems as long as they aren’t mine.

  ‘Water, please,’ I say, wiping my eyes. ‘Can you ask them to fill it to the top this time?’

  He returns a few minutes later with a tall, full glass. I take a gulp that makes my chest ache.

  ‘Did you suspect Kit had another family in Cambridge?’ Sam asks.

  ‘That was the first thing that sprang to mind, yes. Bigamy.’ It’s the first time I’ve said the word out loud. Even with Alice, I skirt around it. ‘It sounds melodramatic, but it happens, doesn’t it? Men really do commit bigamy.’

  ‘They do,’ says Sam. ‘Some women do too, I guess. Did you talk to Kit about your suspicions?’

  ‘He denied it – flat out denied it, everything. He’s been denying it for six months. I didn’t believe him, and that became another thing to fight about – the inequality. I did
n’t trust him as much as he trusted me.’

  ‘So he believed you when you said you didn’t do it?’

  ‘He moved on to accusing my family – my mum, Fran, Anton. Reminded me of all the times one or other of them had been round when his SatNav was lying around in the house.’

  ‘Who are Fran and Anton?’ Sam asks.

  ‘My sister and her partner.’

  ‘Was Kit right? Could a member of your family have programmed in the address?’

  ‘They could have, but they didn’t. I know my family inside out. My dad’s terrified of anything modern and gadgety – he refuses to acknowledge the existence of iPods and E-readers – even DVD players are too much for him. There’s no way he’d go anywhere near a SatNav. Fran and Anton aren’t imaginative enough or devious enough. My mother can be both, but…trust me, she wouldn’t have put that address into Kit’s SatNav.’

  She’d rather swallow fire. I’ve seen her stiffen and change the subject when anything with a Cambridge connection comes up in conversation: the boat race, Stephen Hawking and his black hole theory. She doesn’t even like me to hear Oxford mentioned, or any university, in case it makes me think of Cambridge. At first I thought she was worried about upsetting me, but then I realised her motivation was more selfish than that: she wants me to forget that Cambridge exists, that Kit and I were ever thinking of moving there. Her greatest fear is that I will one day leave Little Holling.

  Mine is that I won’t.

  ‘Kit programmed in the address,’ I tell Sam. ‘He must have. That’s what I think at the moment, anyway. That’s what I’ve thought a thousand times, and then I accuse him again and he persuades me again that he’s not lying about anything, and he’s so…convincing. I want to believe him so much, I end up wondering if maybe I did it, then wiped the memory from my mind. Maybe I did. How do I know? Maybe I programmed 11 Bentley Grove into Kit’s SatNav, and hallucinated a body that wasn’t there. Maybe I’m some kind of deranged lunatic.’ I shrug, embarrassed suddenly by how strange and pathetic my story must sound. ‘This is what my life’s been like since January,’ I say. ‘Round and round: believing, not believing, questioning my sanity, getting nowhere. Not much fun.’

  ‘For you or for Kit,’ says Sam. Does that mean he believes Kit’s telling the truth?

  ‘He even tried to say once that maybe someone in the shop he bought it from had programmed in the address.’ I thought I’d finished, but I can’t leave it alone. ‘He wanted us to go down there together, ask all the staff.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’ Sam asks.

  ‘Because it was bullshit,’ I say angrily. ‘I wasn’t prepared to let him play games with me. I nearly agreed, but then I had a flash of clarity. I have those, sometimes, where it dawns on me that I don’t need to torment myself speculating, wondering. I know the truth: it wasn’t anyone in the shop, or me, or a member of my family. It was Kit. I know he did it.’ As soon as I’m out of here, I’m going to ring London Allied Capital and ask to speak to Stephen Gilligan’s secretary. Maybe he had a meeting with Kit at 3 p.m. on 13 May; maybe he didn’t. I need to know.

  ‘For six months, Kit’s been telling you that he didn’t programme in that address,’ says Sam. ‘What makes you so sure he did?’

  Sure? I wonder who he’s talking about. Will I ever again be sure of anything?

  ‘Three things,’ I say. Exhaustion sweeps over me; it’s hard to summon the energy to speak. ‘One: it’s his SatNav. He had no reason to think I’d be using it, no reason to think I’d find out.’ I shrug. ‘The simplest explanation is usually the right one. Two: when I first asked him about it, before he had a chance to arrange his face into a puzzled expression, I saw something in his eyes, something…I don’t know how to describe it. It was only there for a split second: guilt, shame, embarrassment, fear. He looked like someone who’d been caught. If you’re about to ask me could I have imagined it, sometimes I think yes, I must have. Other times I’m certain I didn’t.’ I want to tell Sam how frightening it is to have the narrative of your life shift and lurch and change its contours every time you look closely at it, but I’m not sure any words can accurately describe it. Could Sam even begin to understand what it’s like to inhabit such an unstable reality? He strikes me as a man firmly embedded in a consistent world, one that retains its shape and meaning from one day to the next.

  I feel as if I have two lives: one created by hope and one by fear. And if both are creations, why should I believe in either? I have no idea what the facts of my life would look like if I stripped away the emotions.

  Better not to say any of this to Sam. I’ve caused him enough bother already without drawing him into a debate on the nature of reality.

  You think too much, Con. Fran’s been telling me that since we were teenagers.

  ‘What’s the third thing?’ Sam asks.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘The third reason you’re sure Kit programmed in the address.’

  I’m going to have to tell him – peel away another layer, go back even further. I have to, if I want him to understand. It’s all linked. What happened in the early hours of Saturday morning can’t be separated from what happened in January; what happened in January is connected to what happened in 2003. If I want Sam to help me, I have to be willing to tell him all of it, just as I told Simon Waterhouse.

  ‘Cambridge,’ I say. ‘I’m sure because 11 Bentley Grove is in Cambridge.’

  8

  17/07/2010

  Olivia Zailer flicked through her diary, sighing loudly at the sight of each new page. She’d made too many appointments for the next few weeks, most of which she knew she would at some point cancel. Lunch with Etta from MUST magazine to discuss a column about famous books and which meals they would be, in the unlikely event of their being turned into food – Wuthering Heights equals Yorkshire Pudding was the example Etta had given; aerobic walking on Hampstead Heath with Sabina, Olivia’s personal trainer; tea at the British Library with Kurt Vogel, who wanted her to judge an Anglo-German journalism prize in which all the entrants would be between the ages of eleven and thirteen.

  Olivia wondered if she was the only person in the world who, with great gusto in the moment, made plans with almost everyone she came into contact with, knowing full well that she would email to cancel in due course. Why was it so hard to say straight out, ‘I’m sorry, Kurt, but no, I can’t be a judge’? Why did it feel so right to say, ‘Oh, God, I’d love to,’ and then sneak in the ‘can’t’ bit later on? Olivia would have liked to ask Charlie; she knew no one else who’d be willing to discuss it with her. Dom certainly wouldn’t. She suspected it had something to do with being eager to please others, but even more eager to please herself.

  Her mobile phone rang, and she picked it up, determined not to make an arrangement with whoever it was, even an arrangement she wanted to make and would not cancel. She needed to purge her diary of all the fake appointments before she made any more real ones.

  ‘It’s me. Chris Gibbs.’

  ‘Hello, Chris Gibbs. Oh, my God, that proves it! A watched pot really does never boil. You’re only you because I was expecting you to be Kurt Vogel from the Dortmund British–German Society. All the times I was expecting it to be you, it wasn’t – and now here you are.’

  ‘Have you still got a spare key for Charlie’s place?’

  ‘Why, has something happened?’ Olivia was immediately anxious.

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘Then why do you need a key?’

  ‘I thought it’d be a good place to meet,’ said Gibbs.

  ‘You and me?’

  ‘No, you, me, Waterhouse and Charlie, when they get back. For their wedding reunion evening.’

  What the hell was she supposed to say to that? ‘Wouldn’t that be…a bit awkward?’

  She heard a snort. ‘Joking,’ said Gibbs. ‘Yeah, you and me. I haven’t seen you for…’ There was silence as he worked it out. ‘…about forty-four hours. I’m thinking of making it my n
ew mobilising grievance.’

  ‘You usually don’t see me for forty-four hours,’ Olivia reminded him. ‘You’ve spent most of your life not seeing me, and you’ve been fine.’

  He made a joke, a whole joke. And he’s quoting me. Again.

  ‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ said Gibbs.

  She couldn’t meet him at Charlie’s house. Have sex in the bed Charlie shared with Simon? It didn’t bear thinking about. She reached for a pen and wrote ‘Olivia Gibbs’ next to where it said ‘Name’ in her diary, on the personal details page. It looked good, well balanced: the roundness of the two capitals, O and G…

  Should she scribble over it? She’d wanted to know how it would feel to write it, that was all. She ought to cross it out now. On the other hand, Dom would never look, not even if someone held the diary in front of his nose. The great thing about Dom, from a deceiving him point of view, was that he was interested in almost nothing.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ said Gibbs.

  ‘No. Absolutely not.’ If only she could be so forceful with Etta from MUST magazine.

  Olivia had no willpower, and thought people who had it and used it on themselves were weird. Luckily, she had fear and anxiety in abundance. She couldn’t have agreed to what Gibbs was proposing without feeling as if she’d crossed a line she was terrified of crossing, even with the safety net of possible future cancellation in place.

  ‘All right then, a hotel,’ he said.

  ‘What about your work? What about Debbie?’ She turned to the ‘Notes’ section at the back of her diary and wrote ‘Olivia Gibbs’ again, in neater handwriting. She wrote it underneath in capital letters.

  ‘My problem, not yours,’ said Gibbs. ‘If you don’t want to come to Spilling, I’ll come to London.’

  ‘If you want a…a girlfriend, you should find one closer to home,’ Olivia told him, praying he wouldn’t take her advice. Why give it, then?

  ‘Why should I?’ said Gibbs. ‘There are only two people I’ve ever met who don’t bore me: Simon Waterhouse and you. I don’t want to shag Waterhouse – that leaves you.’