The Other Woman’s House

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘The woman at 17 Pardoner Lane told me where Elise Gilpatrick works,’ Simon said. ‘The Judge Business School. I couldn’t get through to them on the phone – they’re probably closed Saturdays. If I’d got through, I’d have asked when Elise last turned up for work.’

  ‘Aren’t you leaping to rather extreme conclusions?’ said Charlie.

  ‘Who was the dead woman Connie Bowskill saw on Roundthehouses?’ Sam asked her. She inferred from the question that he shared Simon’s concern for Elise Gilpatrick’s welfare.

  ‘You could wrap a body in a pair of curtains,’ Simon said in a monotone. He seemed to be talking to a point beyond Charlie’s shoulder. ‘The prof said Jackie Napier’s car was full of them, curtains wrapped in plastic – so many she’d had to put the back seats down. Wrap a dead body in curtains, cover the whole lot in plastic, make it airtight with parcel tape so that the neighbours don’t smell anything…’ Simon was pressing buttons on his phone. The same button, three times: number 9. ‘We’ve got enough,’ he said. ‘No breaking and entering required.’ A few seconds later, Charlie and Sam heard him ask to be put through to the police.

  25

  Saturday 24 July 2010

  ‘You can still save me,’ I say to Kit, as calmly as I can. ‘Saving me doesn’t mean killing me. You must be able to see that.’

  He’s behind me, his face pressing against the back of my skull. When he shakes his head, I feel it. ‘You don’t understand anything,’ he says, his words indistinct, muffled by my hair. ‘Nothing.’

  The knife moves beneath my chin. I lift my head, try to pull my neck back.

  ‘Listen to me, Kit. You’ve always told me I’m clever. Remember?’ This is what I have to do: I have to talk. There can’t be silence, or space for him to think. Space for him to act.

  ‘You’re not as clever as Jackie,’ he says flatly.

  I want to scream at him that I’m cleverer than Jackie, that she’s lying lifeless in someone else’s congealed blood and I’m still alive.

  I’m clever enough to find a key labelled ‘No. 12’ in a mug with a red feather design, and remember about 17 Pardoner Lane, 18 Pardoner Lane. 11 Bentley Grove, 12 Bentley Grove.

  If only I’d been clever enough to stay away – to be satisfied with knowing, instead of having to prove it to myself.

  How can Jackie Napier have wanted me dead? She didn’t know me.

  ‘Please listen,’ I say evenly. ‘There’s no way out of this, you’re right, but there is a way through. If we face up to what’s happened, take responsibility…’

  Kit laughs. ‘Did you know there are no prisons in Cambridge? I Googled it yesterday. There’s one in March, one in a place called Stradishall, near Newmarket. Postcode’s CB8 – sounds like Cambridge, but it’s not.’

  I open my mouth, but no words come. It’s not what I was expecting him to say. He searched for prisons in Cambridge. On the internet. Why?

  ‘We were idiots – we shouldn’t have wasted our time on the villages,’ he mumbles. ‘Should have stuck to the city. Those tiny hick places – Horningsea, Harston – they’re not Cambridge, they’re not civilisation. Might as well stagnate in Little Holling. Reach, Burwell, Chippenham – you might as well be in Newmarket, once you’ve gone that far.’

  My teeth are chattering. Is it still hot outside? It can’t be; I’m freezing. Kit’s body feels cold too. Freezing each other to death.

  ‘We wasted so much time,’ he says sadly. He’s talking about 2003, our house search.

  Seven years ago. Gone, finished. There’s no past and no future, no point talking about either. There’s nothing but now, and scared of dying, and silence piling up around me, suffocating, spreading like blood.

  Blood that disappeared when Kit sat down to look.

  I breathe in sharply. Knowledge rushes at me, before I have time to doubt it. The blood wasn’t the only thing that disappeared.

  I try to push my fear aside and think in an ordered way, but I can’t think – all I can do is see what’s no longer in front of me, like a film playing in my head: Kit sitting at my desk, staring at the laptop. Me standing behind him, scared I’ll see the horrific picture again, even though he’s saying it isn’t there; Nulli’s certificate of incorporation lying on the floor in its smashed frame…

  ‘I know how you did it,’ I say. ‘Everyone kept asking me why you didn’t see the woman’s body, when you looked at the same virtual tour that I looked at, the one I started. I kept having to explain what I thought must have happened.’

  Kit makes a noise, a small exhalation. Somehow, I can tell that he’s smiling.

  I can feel the expression on his face without seeing him: does that mean I know him?

  ‘It was a good theory,’ he says. ‘A virtual tour with a variable that comes up only once in every hundred or thousand loops.’

  ‘I was wrong, though, wasn’t I? You were looking at a different tour. When you first went into the room, I stayed outside.’

  Shaking on the landing. Kit on the other side of the closed door, complaining. Great. I’ve always wanted to look at a stranger’s dishwasher in the middle of the night.

  ‘You closed down the lot,’ I say. ‘The tour, the internet, everything. One click and it was gone. On the desktop, you had the other tour ready to go – the original one.’ You got it from her, from Jackie. ‘Another click and it started playing. There was the lounge, with no woman’s body in it.’

  Kit says nothing. I don’t think he’s smiling any more.

  ‘When I came back into the room, there was no Roundthehouses screen behind the virtual tour box, only the desktop screen. Before I woke you up, when I was watching the tour on my own, the screen behind it was the Roundthehouses screen. The address was there – 11 Bentley Grove – and the Roundthehouses logo.’

  Why has it taken my memory so long to produce this detail?

  Because you can’t see everything at once. You can’t see your husband’s face when you’re staring at the knife in front of your own.

  ‘When you got angry with me and went back to bed, I sat there and stared for a few minutes, just stared. Watched one room after another turn in slow motion. Every time the lounge came back, it was the same – no woman’s body. Then I closed the tour down – your tour. I decided to start from scratch, in case that made a difference. All I could think about was how the dead woman could possibly have disappeared. I didn’t ask myself why I was having to reconnect to the internet – I was barely aware of doing it.’

  ‘You didn’t wake me up,’ says Kit quietly.

  Of course I didn’t. ‘No. You were awake. Doing a convincing impression of somebody asleep.’ Those long, slow breaths, the stillness…Both of you, you and Jackie, lying still, pretending. Lying.

  ‘You knew I went to Cambridge on Fridays, looking for you, looking for evidence of your other life at 11 Bentley Grove. You must have known long before I told you.’ I feel disorientated as I pull the story, piece by piece, out of the darkness. I still can’t grasp what it means, still can’t see the full picture. It’s as if I’m shining light on one fragment at a time, trying to connect each new part to the others I’ve managed to gather together.

  ‘You didn’t go every Friday,’ Kit says. ‘I could always tell. Some Thursday nights you’d be massively on edge – you’d ask me what time I was setting off to London in the morning, what time I’d be back at the end of the day. You wanted to know how long you had.’

  I close my eyes, remembering how exhausting it was – pretending to have one motive, concealing another. I needn’t have bothered.

  Needn’t bother with anything, ever again.

  No. Keep talking. Keep telling the story, before the chance slips away. Kit has spent so long and worked so hard trying to keep my reality separate from his. I need to tear down the barrier. We are going to die here, together; I want us first to live, just for a short while, in the same world.

  ‘Jackie knew exactly when 11 Bentley Grove went on the market. She works for
Lancing Damisz. Worked,’ I correct myself. ‘She’d have known all the details. You both knew that when I went to Cambridge that Friday, I’d see the “For Sale” board outside the house for the first time and be desperate to look inside. I rang them, you know.’

  ‘Who?’ Kit brings the knife closer to my throat.

  ‘Lasting Damage.’ I hear a noise, a manic laugh, and realise it’s coming from me. ‘I wanted someone to show me round there and then. The woman I spoke to told me no one was available, it was too short notice. Was it Jackie who told me that?’

  Kit says nothing, and I know I’m right. I shiver: cold feathers on my neck.

  ‘You knew I’d come home and go straight on the internet to look at the pictures. That’s why…’ I stop, sensing the presence of an obstacle without knowing what it is. Then it comes to me. ‘How did you know I wouldn’t go to an internet café? I thought about it. If I’d known where one was…’

  ‘We figured you were bound to,’ Kit says. We. Him and Jackie. ‘Didn’t matter. We knew you’d look again at home, soon as you could. You were so suspicious and paranoid by then, once wouldn’t have been enough for you – you’d have had to check, in case you’d missed something.’

  ‘You stuck to me like glue when I got home, all evening, right until we went to bed. I remember thinking it was odd that you didn’t do any of the things you normally do: watch the Channel 4 news headlines, go for a quick pint before dinner. All you seemed to want to do was talk to me. I wasn’t suspicious – I was flattered.’ After six months of not trusting you, I still loved you. ‘When we went to bed, you read your book for ages – much longer than usual. Did you agree a time with Jackie, beforehand?’

  Through my hair, against the back of my head, I feel Kit nod. I wait for him to say something. All I hear is ragged breathing.

  ‘You needed it to be late at night,’ I say, thinking out loud. ‘You needed the body and the blood to appear and disappear quickly – I was supposed to be the only one who saw them.’ My mind snags on something, but I force it out of the way. ‘Jackie hacked into the website and put the new tour up just before one. You gave her step-by-step instructions how to do it. She wouldn’t have needed to hack in, except it had to look as if an outsider had done it. At one o’clock, you pretended to fall asleep, knowing exactly what I’d do and exactly what I’d see.’ Rage flares up inside me, breaks through the fear. ‘How did it feel, to know so much when I knew nothing?’

  The knife swerves towards me, nicks the skin on my neck. I feel a trickle – thin, like a tear.

  Is that the best you can do?

  If he wants to silence me, he’ll have to kill me. ‘Did you lie in bed waiting for my scream?’ I can’t remember, now, whether I screamed or not. I hope I didn’t, if that was what Kit was waiting for. I hope I disappointed him. ‘You knew I’d wake you up as soon as I’d seen it. I wouldn’t want to be alone with…that, in the middle of the night – of course I’d wake you. Must have been a fairly safe bet for you that I wouldn’t want to go anywhere near my computer afterwards, that I’d send you in there on your own to look, so that I didn’t have to see it again.’

  ‘I knew only you…that you’d only come in once I’d told you there was nothing there,’ Kit whispers. He stumbles over the words, struggling with what must feel like a second language to him and not his mother tongue: the language of rationality.

  ‘You went in, closed down my tour, clicked on yours on the desktop screen and started it playing,’ I say, numb inside. ‘You called out to me that you were looking at the picture of the lounge and there was no dead woman in it.’

  ‘Stop,’ says Kit. There’s a hollow tiredness in his voice. ‘None of this is my fault,’ he says. ‘Or yours, or Jackie’s.’

  If I tried to struggle free, would I stand a chance? No. Not yet. Kit’s arm is still pinning me against him. Maybe later, when he’s held the position for even longer and his muscles are aching. If I try and fail now, I might not get another chance – Kit might decide to hurry things along.

  How long was he here with Jackie before he killed her?

  ‘Why have the original tour waiting on the desktop? Why not just text Jackie and tell her to change it back?’ I’m asking myself, not Kit. I’m asking the person I trust. When the answer presents itself, I feel as if I’ve cheated and it must be the wrong one. How can I know, if I didn’t know before?

  I hear Alice’s voice in my head: Usually what we’re seeking comes to us. It’s just a matter of how long it takes to reach us.

  ‘You did text Jackie,’ I say. ‘You heard me scream, or you heard the sound of glass smashing when I knocked Nulli’s certificate off the wall – either way, you knew I’d seen what I was supposed to see and you texted her then. But you couldn’t bank on her being able to change the tour back to the original quickly enough, could you? And you couldn’t risk me seeing the woman’s body more than once.’

  ‘Stop, Con.’

  I recognise begging when I hear it. But there’s no need for Kit to beg. He’s the one with the power, the one with the knife. I ignore him. ‘Any more than once and it wouldn’t have been so easy to make everyone believe that I imagined it: a split-second visual delusion, gone in the blink of an eye. That’s what you wanted them all to think – the police, my family, Alice. You wanted me to feel that the whole world was against me, that no one believed me…but…’ I stop, aware of the flaw in what I’m saying. ‘Jackie. She came forward. She said she’d seen it too. Ian Grint only took my story seriously because of her.’ It makes no sense. If Kit and Jackie wanted me not to be believed…

  ‘Stop!’ Kit shouts, finding his energy. He’s moving, dragging me with him. I try to make a big enough noise to immobilise him as he pulls me towards the stairs, but terror steals the sound, and all that’s left is a long, low moan. Did I think I could keep him at bay for ever? That if I carried on talking, I could make time stand still? I reach out, close my fingers around the top of the newel post, the white death button, but Kit pulls me away, yanking me roughly up the steps, one at a time. My arms and legs feel floppy and uncoordinated, like a rag doll’s.

  Does he have a plan for what happens next, or did his plan run out a long time ago? Is he going to do it in one of the bedrooms? A bitter liquid fills my throat. I haven’t got the strength to swallow; I can hardly breathe.

  On the landing, the bad smell gets stronger. Kit starts to panic. I can feel it, like electrical charges all over his body, pulsing through to mine. He doesn’t want to be up here. He can’t keep still. The blade of the knife keeps touching my face; each time, I jerk my head away. Kit mumbles apologies, one after another. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’m too frightened to speak, unable to tell him that no amount of sorrys will ever be enough. ‘It’s not your fault, any of this,’ he says. ‘I’ll show you whose fault it is.’

  He moves us towards the only closed door on the landing; all the others are slightly ajar.

  ‘No,’ I manage to say. ‘Please, I don’t…no, don’t…’ This is the room. He’s going to kill me in this room.

  Using the tip of the knife, Kit pushes hard near the handle and the door swings open with a click. He tightens his arm around my waist. I try to focus on the idea of breathing easily, without restriction. Kit yelps like an animal in a trap as he forces me over the threshold. He doesn’t want to do this. He hates everything he’s doing. The stench of putrefaction in the room makes me gag. I notice nothing but the black humming, the double bed in front of me, and on top of the bed…

  No. No. Nopleasenopleasepleaseno.

  Four large plastic parcels, each one several feet long, with brown parcel tape wound around them and sealing the ends. Four stinking cocoons, with a cloud of black flies buzzing around them – three lying side by side, and the fourth, the smallest, nestling in a groove made by the curved sides of the two biggest. Through the transparent plastic, I see material – a pattern of flowers and leaves, a paisley pattern…

  ‘We had to wrap them like mummies,’ says Kit
. ‘Stop them smelling, stop the flies getting in – that’s what Jackie said. See how well it worked? This is her idea of the flies not getting in.’

  Now. Now’s when I should run, but my body is boneless and limp. Kit bends down, taking me with him. There’s a roll of brown parcel tape on the floor, by the leg of the bed. ‘Pick it up,’ he says, freeing one of my arms. ‘Tape your mouth shut, then wind the tape twice round your head, so that your mouth’s properly covered.’ The knife blade slices into the air in front of my eyes. One inch more and it would cut my eyeball in half.

  I feel something pouring down my legs. I try to deny to myself what this must mean, but the knowledge is there and I can’t get away from it. I’ve wet myself. I try to turn my head so that I don’t have to watch my shame soak into the carpet. Whoever finds my body will know that I died terrified and humiliated.

  ‘Pick up the tape,’ Kit says again, as if he can’t understand why the thing he wants to happen isn’t already happening. ‘Tape your mouth shut, then wind the tape twice around your head.’

  But I can’t do anything, nothing at all. I can’t comply and I can’t resist. ‘Just kill me,’ I say, sobbing. ‘Get it over with.’

  26

  24/7/2010

  ‘Plenty of Cambridge students stay on after they finish their degrees,’ said Charlie. ‘Why didn’t Kit Bowskill, if he was so in love with the place?’ She was sitting in the back of Simon’s car, having abandoned her own outside the Granta pub. The traffic was heavy; Sam had already suggested once that they get out and walk. Charlie was starting to think he might have a point. The car had been in the full glare of the sun all the time that they’d been in the pub, and so far the air-conditioning hadn’t had much effect. The back of Charlie’s top was wet with sweat.

  ‘You’re looking at it the wrong way,’ said Simon. ‘Don’t think of Bowskill as an ordinary bloke who sets out to achieve something, succeeds, then pats himself on the back for a job well done. Think of him as a wanting machine, programmed to do nothing but enhance its wanting skills. He’s spent his whole life practising. He can want longer and harder and deeper now than he could five years ago. He’s so good at wanting that no amount of getting can ever be enough for him.’