The Other Woman’s House

by Sophie Hannah

  16

  23/7/2010

  Ian Grint was early. Simon had guessed he might be; he’d sensed the detective’s anger within seconds of meeting him, the impatience of a man who needs to prove people wrong, and quickly. Grint headed for the bar, making a pint-lifting gesture at Simon, who nodded. Actually, he hadn’t needed as much time as both he and Grint had thought he would. He’d finished reading everything half an hour ago, and had gone for a stroll. The pub Grint had chosen, the Live and Let Live, was in a residential area, so Simon hadn’t seen any of the historical college buildings that Charlie had told him he had to see because they were so beautiful, only houses and another small pub: the Six Bells.

  Walking around, Simon had drawn the conclusion that Cambridge was a more imaginative place than Spilling. More tolerant too. The front door colours had surprised him: yellow, orange, lilac, pink, bright turquoise. Evidently the inhabitants of Cambridge believed that all shades were eligible for consideration; in Spilling most people opted for something sombre and dignified: black, dark red, dark green. Simon doubted there was a single orange door in the whole of the Culver Valley.

  The names of the pubs in Spilling were stodgily traditional: the Brown Cow, the Star, the Wheatsheaf, the Crown. Never in a million years would a Culver Valley landlord choose to call his establishment the Live and Let Live. Live and Carp About Anyone Who Doesn’t Live the Way You Live, perhaps – the Live and Carp for short. The Liv and Chris Gibbs, Simon thought surreally – that was one pub Charlie wouldn’t be setting foot in.

  He moved the papers off the table, put them down on the chair next to him as Grint approached with their pints. ‘I hope none of my esteemed colleagues has been in here and spied those over your shoulder,’ he said. ‘Much as I’d love to get sacked at the moment, I probably ought to try not to. Don’t think my wife would appreciate it.’ The word ‘esteemed’ was loaded with sarcasm.

  ‘I’m going to disappoint you,’ Simon told him. ‘I haven’t found much. Nothing you could put in front of your DI and say, “This is a new angle, a way of taking things forward.”’

  ‘You’ve found something, though?’

  ‘Something and nothing. The statements Kit and Connie Bowskill signed – did you take them separately or were they—’

  ‘Separately.’ Grint took a swig of his beer, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘The official statements, they were both alone with me. Later I put them in a room together and took them over it all again, brought Sam Kombo in as well. I wanted to see how they changed in each other’s company, if at all.’

  ‘Did they?’

  ‘Not in any way you couldn’t predict. He looked more uncomfortable when she was there, but so would I have done, in his shoes – she was spitting accusations at him left, right and centre. She was a bit more high-octane in front of him than on her own, but only marginally.’

  Simon sorted through the pile of papers, looking for Connie and Kit Bowskill’s official police statements. ‘When you interviewed them separately, did you spot anything odd?’

  Grint laughed. ‘You mean, apart from everything about them?’

  ‘Factual contradictions.’

  ‘Where do you want me to start? He’s convinced she must have programmed the address into his SatNav, she says he did it. He reckons she might be a psycho killer, she thinks he’s the psycho. They’re each ready to suspect the other one of murder on the basis of a picture and not much else – a picture he didn’t even see.’ Grint shakes his head. ‘Bizarre doesn’t begin to cover it.’

  ‘There’s a smaller point of disagreement between them that might be significant.’ Simon passed the two statements to Grint. ‘The house they nearly bought in Cambridge in 2003. In Connie Bowskill’s statement, she gave the address as 17 Pardoner Lane. In Kit’s, it’s 18 Pardoner Lane.’

  Grint frowned. Stared as Simon pointed out the relevant paragraphs. ‘Can’t believe I missed it,’ he said eventually. ‘Still, at a distance of seven years, it’s an easy mistake for one of them to have made. I doubt it means anything.’

  Simon disagreed. ‘They both mention that the house was next to a school called the Beth Dutton Centre. Both go into detail about why this particular house appealed to them: original Victorian fireplaces, original iron railings outside…’ Simon shrugged. ‘Whichever one got it wrong, I can’t see why they’d remember all that and not the number of the house.’

  ‘I forget trivial stuff all the time,’ said Grint. ‘Don’t you?’

  Simon never forgot anything. He dodged the question. ‘Connie Bowskill’s phone’s going straight to voicemail – I must have tried her fifty times since I got back from Spain. I never spoke to the husband, so I didn’t have his number. Your files did, though, so I made use of it.’ He waited for Grint to remonstrate with him. When it didn’t happen, he volunteered more information. ‘He’s agreed to meet me this evening at eight.’

  ‘Where?’ Grint asked.

  Not your business. Simon told himself to stop being a tosser. Grint had a right to know.

  ‘In a pub – the Maypole. I was going to ask you for directions.’

  Grint made a dismissive noise. ‘The Maypole,’ he muttered, as if even the name offended him. ‘I won’t be coming with you, in that case.’

  I didn’t ask you to. Simon was better at talking to one person alone than he was in a group, even a small one.

  ‘You can ring me later, tell me if you get anything worthwhile out of him,’ said Grint. ‘If not, I’m going to have to stop pretending I’m a superhero. I’ll make the guv happy by following orders and pretending nothing ever happened – not much else I can do, is there?’

  He was disappointed, Simon realised. Sam had talked up Simon’s talents, and Grint had expected him to come up with a plan of action, to see something in the files he’d given him that wasn’t there to be seen. Simon was the one who had turned out not to be a superhero.

  ‘According to Kit Bowskill, Connie’s phone’s broken,’ he said. ‘She threw it into a main road.’

  ‘Yeah, I can see her doing that.’ Grint looked at his watch. ‘You’ve got just over an hour to kill. Fancy grabbing a curry? You can tell me your unlikely theories and I’ll tell you mine. I’ve always found it’s the shit ideas that lead to the good ones.’

  Simon felt uncomfortable eating with people he didn’t know well. He and Grint weren’t friends. Why did they need to have a meal together? What was the point? ‘I wasn’t thinking about food,’ he said. He was thinking about Pardoner Lane, that it couldn’t be too far from where he was now. He had time to find it, see whether the Beth Dutton Centre was next to number 17 or number 18. A small discrepancy, true, but there was no reason to think it wasn’t important all the same.

  No reason to mention his plans or his thoughts to Ian Grint, either.

  ‘Do you remember that night in the Brown Cow a couple of years ago, when you nearly got into a fight?’ Olivia asked Gibbs. They were in bed together at the Malmaison hotel in London. They’d tried a few hotels this week, but this one was Olivia’s favourite. The walls and floors were dark – reds, browns, purples, black in places; it was like walking into the inside of a human heart. Liv had told Gibbs her theory several times: the hotel must have been decorated with secret passion in mind.

  ‘I’ve nearly got into lots of fights.’

  ‘This one was with a man who said you’d nicked his mate’s chair after he’d said it was taken. You said he’d told you it wasn’t taken.’

  Gibbs shook his head. ‘Don’t remember.’

  ‘But you remember seeing me at the Brown Cow?’

  He gave her an odd look. ‘All the time.’

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘Think?’

  ‘When you saw me.’

  ‘I don’t know. “There’s Charlie’s sister with the posh voice and the massive tits.” What did you think when you saw me?’

  ‘I didn’t think this would happen, not in a million years. Did you?’
/>   ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you think that’s odd?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That neither of us had a clue we’d end up…where we are.’

  ‘Not really,’ said Gibbs. ‘How could we know what was going to happen before it happened?’

  ‘But I mean, we didn’t even think we wanted it to happen.’

  ‘So? It was still going to happen.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Olivia pushed him off her. ‘Do you think that’s true? That it was going to happen, even then, before we had a clue?’

  Gibbs thought about it. ‘It happened,’ he said. ‘Before it happened, it was going to happen.’

  ‘You think us ending up here together was inevitable?’

  ‘It is now,’ said Gibbs.

  ‘Yes, but I mean…’ Olivia wondered how best to put the question. ‘Before Charlie and Simon’s wedding, might we either have got together or not got together, or did the possibility that we wouldn’t get together never exist at all?’

  ‘Second one,’ said Gibbs.

  ‘Really?’ Liv tried to keep the excitement out of her voice. ‘There was never any possibility that we wouldn’t have an affair – that’s what you really think? So you believe in destiny? You think free will’s an illusion?’

  ‘You’re doing it again.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Whatever I say, you change it into something I don’t understand, then tell me that’s what I said. There’s no point me saying anything. You write my lines, I don’t care.’

  ‘I’m the one who doesn’t understand,’ Liv groaned. ‘Explain!’

  Gibbs stared up at the ceiling. ‘When something happens, you can look back and say it was always going to happen – because it did. There’s no other choice, once it’s happened.’

  ‘I can’t work out if you’re saying something romantic or not.’

  He shrugged. ‘Not deliberately. Just stating a fact.’

  ‘Okay, then – what do you think about the future?’

  ‘Full of sex.’

  ‘With me?’ Olivia asked.

  ‘No, with Ant and fucking Dec. Obviously with you.’

  ‘I don’t think Debbie’d see it as obvious.’

  ‘Don’t talk about Debbie.’

  ‘Dom wouldn’t either.’

  ‘Or him.’

  ‘What’s in their future? Dom’s and Debbie’s?’

  ‘Not us,’ said Gibbs.

  ‘I used to come here all the time as a student,’ Kit Bowskill told Simon. ‘Loved the place. Ever since, I’ve had a thing about tucked-away pubs down side streets. Never on main roads. A pub on a main road’s all wrong.’ He smiled, took a swig of his Guinness. ‘Sorry. I’m rambling.’

  ‘I’d have come to Silsford,’ Simon told him, sensing his nervousness. ‘Or London. Did you have a reason for wanting to meet here?’

  ‘Like I said: I love the Maypole.’

  Simon kept his eyes on him. Eventually Bowskill flushed and looked away, loosening the knot of his tie. ‘I’m a hopeless liar, as you can see. I was coming to Cambridge tonight anyway. To meet Connie.’

  ‘She’s here?’

  ‘I don’t know if she’s here now, but she told me to meet her at nine thirty.’

  ‘Where?’

  Bowskill looked apologetic. ‘I told her I was meeting you, that you’ve been trying to get in touch with her. She doesn’t want to speak to you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She’s angry with you for going away without telling her. She went to you for help and you didn’t help her.’

  Evidently Simon failed to conceal his annoyance, because Bowskill said, ‘I wouldn’t take it personally. Con’s angry with everyone at the moment – feels the whole world’s let her down.’

  At the table next to them, three middle-aged men with loud voices were talking about a scholarship – someone had been awarded one who didn’t deserve it; someone who had deserved it hadn’t got it. One of the men was angry about this; Simon tried to block out his words, concentrate on Bowskill’s.

  ‘The house you and Connie nearly bought in 2003,’ he said.

  ‘18 Pardoner Lane?’

  ‘That was the address?’

  Bowskill nodded.

  ‘Connie doesn’t think so.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She told Sam and Ian Grint that it was number 17. 17 Pardoner Lane.’

  ‘She’s misremembered, in that case,’ said Bowskill. ‘It was number 18.’

  ‘Why would she get it wrong?’

  ‘Why does anyone get anything wrong? If I sat here and listed everything Connie’s been wrong about in the last six months, we’d still be here next Tuesday.’

  Simon nodded. ‘You must be pretty angry with her.’

  ‘I’m not allowed to be, am I? I wish I could believe she’d deliberately set out to ruin both our lives – then at least I’d be able to hate her. As it is, I’m living in an anonymous box in London, surrounded by lots of other suits in their anonymous boxes, banished from the home I’ve spent years creating – from scratch, almost. Melrose Cottage was a wreck when we bought it. It wasn’t Connie who sanded the floors, tiled the fireplaces, landscaped the garden – it was me. And now she’s booted me out. Yeah, I’d love to be angry with her, but it’s not her that’s doing all this, it’s…I don’t know, something that’s got into her, some madness. She hasn’t got a clue what she’s doing from one minute to the next. She’s not Connie any more – that’s the worst thing about all this.’ Bowskill blinked away tears, no doubt hoping Simon hadn’t noticed them.

  ‘I’ve just come from Pardoner Lane. The house you didn’t buy in 2003 was number 18.’

  ‘So you believe me?’

  A question Simon was keen to avoid answering, especially now that Bowskill was looking more confident. Believing had nothing to do with it; Simon had checked the facts for himself. His confidence was in his own findings, not in Kit Bowskill. Still, he had other more personal questions he wanted to ask, and it wouldn’t do any harm to go as far as he could down the feel-good route. ‘18 Pardoner Lane’s next door to the Beth Dutton Centre, so there’s no argument,’ he said. ‘You’re right and Connie’s wrong. About the house number, anyway. She got everything else right: the iron railings, the Victorian architecture, the sash windows. Number 17’s on the other side of the road.’

  Its owners, a friendly middle-aged couple, had invited Simon in for a coffee and looked disappointed when he’d said there was no need, he only had one quick question for them. They had bought the house brand new in 2001, since which time it had never been on the market. Yes, they remembered number 18 going up for sale in 2003. It was snapped up within weeks, they told Simon, and the same thing happened when it came up for sale again last year. ‘We considered buying it, actually – both times. It’s got more kerb-appeal than ours and bigger rooms. Unfortunately, that was reflected in the price. And when we thought about it, it seemed crazy to move across the road – though it doesn’t make sense really, that, does it? It’s like when you go out for a meal and someone orders the thing you want and you think, “Oh, well, I can’t have that now that she’s having it”, and you end up ordering something you don’t like half as much!’

  Simon had nodded, bemused. He tended to avoid restaurants, but still, he felt he ought to have known what 17 Pardoner Lane’s owner was talking about, and he didn’t. He spent too much of his time nodding at things that made no sense to him, for politeness’ sake.

  ‘I need to ask you a personal question,’ he told Bowskill.

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘Your parents.’

  The reaction was unmistakeable: instant resentment. Of Simon, for having asked, or of Mr and Mrs Bowskill senior? Simon couldn’t tell. He knew a little bit about them, thanks to Connie. Their names were Nigel and Barbara and they lived in Bracknell, Berkshire. They ran their own business: something to do with making lasers which were used for fingerprinting.

  Bowskill
had regained his composure. ‘Let me guess,’ he said. ‘Connie told you I’m no longer in contact with them. I take it she told you why?’

  ‘She told me she’d never really understood why.’

  ‘That’s bu—’ Bowskill caught hold of his anger. A strained smile replaced his scowl. ‘That’s simply not true. Connie knows perfectly well what happened.’

  ‘Do you mind telling me?’ Simon asked.

  ‘I can’t see why you’d care. What’s it got to do with anything?’

  ‘Just interested.’ Simon tried to make it sound incidental. No reason to tell Bowskill it was the main reason he’d wanted to meet him. ‘As someone whose own parents are on the trying side…’

  ‘But if you hit rock-bottom, they’d be there for you, wouldn’t they?’ said Bowskill. ‘In an emergency, they’d do whatever it took – they’d look after you.’

  Simon had never thought about it. In her younger days, throughout his childhood, his mother had stifled him with her nurturing, treated him as if he was made of glass and might break if he did anything rash like go round to a friend’s house. Now, it was hard to imagine Kathleen looking after anybody. She’d lost her air of authority a long time ago. Although she was only sixty-one and had no health problems, she moved and spoke like a frail old relic shuffling ever closer to annihilation. Simon had often imagined meeting her as a stranger, what he’d think of her. Asked to guess her age and story, he’d have said eighty for sure, and at some stage she must have been mugged at knife-point by teenage thugs and lost the will to live.

  He opened his mouth to say that in the direst of emergencies he would go to a whole range of people – including complete strangers – before he would involve his mother, but Bowskill was on a roll. ‘What parents wouldn’t help their child? I haven’t got siblings, so it’s not as if there’s any competition for their attention. I wasn’t asking them to donate their kidneys.’

  ‘What happened?’ Simon asked.

  ‘Connie was disintegrating. Physically and mentally – shouting in her sleep, nightmares, her hair was falling out. I was properly worried about her. I thought…well, she didn’t, so it’s not tempting fate to say it: I thought she might do something stupid.’