Can You See Her?: An absolutely compelling psychological thriller

by S. E. Lynes

  No one saw me there. I was a shadow, less than a shadow, against the cold wall.

  37

  Rachel

  The woman who takes me to the loo and stands outside the lockless cubicle has come in with a tray. There are two cups of tea and some Nice biscuits. The sugar granules glitter as they pass through a shaft of sunlight. They brought me some orange squash yesterday. It’s amazing how nice squash tastes when someone else makes it and when you’ve not had it since you were about ten. It’s all oddly civilised. Here’s some light refreshments while you give us all we need to lock you away for a very long time. There’s something a bit Titanic about it, the string quartet playing on the deck while the ship sinks. If it was a string quartet. Might have been a full orchestra. I forget, forget if I ever even knew.

  ‘You refer to Lisa in the past tense,’ Blue Eyes says, readjusting her bottom on the chair and pulling her long black wrap skirt over her crossed leg. Her shoes today are soft black leather ankle boots with studs going up one side and a wedge heel. ‘You’re no longer friends?’

  ‘I’ve not told her we’re not. But we’re not.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Why not indeed. Because minutes after I’d spoken to her on the phone, she drove past me. I was on the corner of our road and it was definitely her. She has a silver-grey Ford Focus and the passenger side had been keyed a year or two before and still had the scratch. She was driving quite fast, it seemed to me, and if she saw me, she didn’t let on. I only noticed her at the last moment, but her face was stern, her shoulders high, the whole position of her body at the wheel tense. She can’t have been on her way from anywhere other than my house. We live on a cul-de-sac; the only people she knows on our road are us. To come out any other way she’d have to fly.

  A hard pain, like a punch, landed in my gut. My face was burning. She’d said on the phone that she’d seen Mark on Church Street. She hadn’t mentioned that she was at my house, but here she was in our road. I’d sensed that she hadn’t been telling me the truth but I had no idea why not. I knew for certain then that she hadn’t seen Mark on Church Street at all. She hadn’t seen him in passing. You don’t see someone in passing in their own home.

  I hadn’t got as far as why she might have been at my house while I wasn’t there, why she hadn’t said that was where she’d been. Across the road, Ingrid’s blinds were closed on the upper floor. Her car was parked nearby on the close. Mark’s car was on our driveway. Funny, both their cars here in the afternoon. My stomach churned. I felt like you do when you’ve eaten a dodgy meal but you’re still trying to figure out whether it’s just indigestion or full-blown food poisoning.

  I opened the front door as quietly as I could and hung up my jacket. I didn’t want any questions from Mark. I didn’t want any questions from anyone. I didn’t want anyone to ask me if I was OK or if I was sure I was OK, because I no longer knew what that meant.

  I didn’t want to ask Mark if he was OK, or ask him what he’d been up to and hear the lie.

  I’d been wondering how I was going to get through the next thirty-six hours, and now I wasn’t sure I could get through the next few minutes.

  The clock in the kitchen said just after six. It was hours later than I’d thought. That was why Mark’s car was there. And Ingrid’s, although hers was usually there anyway due to her travelling in with Mark. Mark was home from work. As he would be, would’ve been since half past five or so. I couldn’t fathom how I could have lost so much time, having left my dad at four, but then I remembered that I’d gone up to the town hall pond and sat quietly, tried to gather up the frayed strands of myself and somehow knit them back together. I had no memory of actually sitting there, only a vague sensation of the cold of the bench against my backside. I didn’t remember leaving.

  The kitchen smelled of cigarettes. Not stale, as such. Recently smoked.

  The back door clattered against the frame.

  ‘Mark?’ I called out and headed to the lip of the back door.

  He was standing on the lawn, his back to me. His hands were on his hips and he was looking down at the grass as if he’d spotted a pound coin and was building up to picking it up. He was so still, like cats are still, or pigeons, and you watch them wondering if they’re a very realistic ornament until they twitch and, with a little shock, you realise they’re alive after all.

  I turned away. On the table were two cigarette butts on a saucer. I’d thought it was Ingrid here smoking when my back was turned, possibly making a play for my husband. I think I admitted that to myself fully only then. Wasn’t that why I’d kept those cigarette butts and hidden them in the garage? To not face it or to put off facing it until I felt strong enough, lucid enough? Saying something out loud had felt too much like opening a gate to a field of stampeding cattle.

  But now I knew even less. It wasn’t Ingrid who had told me she was in the supermarket. It wasn’t Ingrid who had just driven past me on her way out of our road. And it wasn’t Ingrid who was sharing illicit cigarettes with my husband.

  It was Lisa. Lisa, who liked the odd puff, more so since Patrick had left, more again since the girls went to uni. I’d even thought that Mark had taken up having the odd crafty fag at the pub, but actually, come to think of it, Roy didn’t smoke. So where had Mark been? Mark the saint. Mark the good man. Unremarkable when he was younger, of no interest to the girls who lusted after the likes of Nick whatsisname with the eyeliner or any of the other boys who passed for heart-throbs back in the day. Mark never went in for fashion, preening, posing or pretension of any kind. He never saw the point in being anything other than himself. And this ordinary bloke had, without my realising it, suddenly come into his own now that certain women were ready to move on from the slick big spenders who had impressed them in their twenties, ready for someone who might not know how to be flash with the cash and the compliments but knew how to be truly kind.

  I saw it. I saw it clearly in a way I hadn’t before. Ingrid’s husband had shot it all up his nose and left her penniless. Lisa’s had smooth-talked her into bed, into marriage, into kids, only to leave her when he fancied falling in love all over again with the one thing she couldn’t be: a woman he didn’t yet know, whose faults were yet to be revealed. I saw how my unremarkable husband might appeal in a way he always had to me. I had never wanted the flash treatment. I had never wanted moonlight and roses. I had only ever wanted to be seen for who I was, not just for my looks. These days I wanted to be seen despite them.

  But these are all thoughts that have come to me since. Then – and I think, though I’m not sure, it was only last week – in those last moments of trust, I didn’t have an idea as formulated or as clichéd as him cheating on me with my best friend, not in a million years. The thought that came to me was: he hasn’t even fetched the ashtray.

  I stepped out onto the greening paving stones that pass for a patio. ‘Mark?’

  He turned around, his eyes creasing at the edges. ‘Where’ve you been? It’s gone six.’

  ‘I’ve been to see my dad. I told you this morning I was going today.’

  His eyebrows went almost high enough to be interest before pushing together into a frown, as if it all made sense now. ‘Are we getting a Chinese?’

  ‘It’s Friday. So no.’

  He looked towards next door’s back garden before looking back to me – as far as my chin, anyway. Ingrid. She was why he’d been in the garden. A lift home hadn’t been enough – he’d needed another chat in the garden. Or she had.

  ‘Have you been smoking?’ I said.

  He spread his hands and made a funny rectangle with his mouth, the same one he did when Liverpool missed a goal opportunity. A look that said yes, you caught me, but don’t say anything.

  So I didn’t.

  ‘Ingrid wanted me to sign her passport form,’ he said, apropos of bugger all.

  I looked towards the fence, to where he’d just slid his shifty eyes. ‘Is that who you were talking to just now? Ingrid?’

&nb
sp; Now he was looking there too. Both of us staring at the dividing fence like we were waiting for a close encounter of the third kind. And as I’m remembering all this, I can’t stop thinking that by this time, Anne-Marie was dead and I didn’t even know it in any conscious way.

  ‘I don’t know where Ingrid went,’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten to put the date on the form. I filled in the photos on the back but I forgot to sign the form.’

  ‘Which was it?’

  ‘Eh?’ Raisin eyes, screwed up at me.

  ‘Which was it, the date or the signature? Which did you forget?’

  ‘Eh? What? Both. She was feeding next door’s cat. She passed it over the fence.’

  ‘The cat?’

  ‘No, the form.’ He put his hands back on his hips and surveyed the garden like it was about to give up the secrets of the earth. ‘I was thinking of getting the lawnmower out.’

  Look at me, I wanted to say to him. Please look at me. I’m your wife and I’ve loved you for twenty-five years and I still do and I’m still here.

  But I didn’t. Obviously.

  What I said was, ‘I’ve got mince in. I’ll do a spag bol.’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  He was already walking up to the shed; I was already back indoors. I picked up the saucer as I passed the kitchen table – no woman with kids ever walks through her own house without accumulating assorted random items, most often arriving at the top of the stairs loaded up like a kid on Crackerjack.

  I glance up, and sure enough Blue Eyes looks perplexed.

  ‘You’re too young to remember Crackerjack,’ I say. ‘It was a kids’ show in the seventies. They used to give two kids stuff to hold, pile it on until one of them dropped the lot or it all slid off. You couldn’t see the kids for stuff. Whoever kept hold of it all the longest won.’

  She smiles. It’s not a smile of satisfaction, it’s indulgence. Get on with it, woman.

  I tell her how I put the cigarette ends into a piece of cling film. How I went into the garage and hid them in the drawer beside the others. Why I did this, I don’t really know, and I’m quite surprised Amanda doesn’t pick me up on it, but she doesn’t – she just lets me carry on. If I had to answer my own question, I’d say I wanted a confrontation at some point, but not then. The world was bearing down on me. The world was a great big globe made of glass. It was heavy and I couldn’t remember anyone giving it me to carry, but I could feel it and it was taking all my strength not to let it drop from my shoulders and fall in splinters at my feet. I was bent double with it. I was breaking in two. It was only a matter of time now.

  The lawnmower sputtered, roared.

  I got the chopping board out, the big knife, an onion, a carrot. When Kieron was a baby, I would throw that knife at him as he lay in his crib, over and over again, in my sleep, too. That knife sailing through the air. Me throwing it, screaming at my own violence. Love on steroids.

  Katie was at the kitchen door, frowning through a full face of make-up, hair done in tiny plaits all over her head like cornrows. She looked like a Premier League footballer in drag. Three A levels: art, English literature and psychology. All As. For this.

  ‘You’re back,’ she said.

  ‘No, I’m still out,’ I replied to the back of her head as she rummaged in the cupboard. Not a twitch. Hardly comedy gold, I know, but when had she stopped finding me amusing? What was the exact date?

  ‘What’s for tea?’ A hard stare, a dead-eye special.

  ‘Spag bol.’ I nodded at the packet of crisps in her hand. ‘Don’t spoil your appetite.’

  ‘Oh my God.’ She waltzed out in her cloud of fury, stopped at the kitchen door and turned around, appearing to see me for the first time. And maybe I saw her then for the first time in a while because I remember thinking how beautiful she looked, how young, how fresh – as I had once been.

  Her brow knitted. ‘Mum, are you crying?’

  I sniffed, tried to smile. ‘No, love. It’s these ruddy onions.’

  And when I think back to it now, later that evening actually counted for as good as it got in the life I was living then. I know that sounds strange, but when I remember myself, it’s as if there’d been a knife sawing away at whatever cord had tethered me to the ground, and now that cord was holding me by one thin, final filament.

  We sat down together and ate the spaghetti bolognese. I was looking down at the three of us, from the ceiling or something, that’s how it felt. Like I was at the table and at the same time I was floating above. Katie was telling us about a stage-make-up shoot that she’d done in Sefton Park, how she’d learned to do the plaits this afternoon and that she’d done some on Thea as well. She seemed less angry, less ready to roll her eyes or say something cutting. Mark was quiet but he did smile a couple of times, he did ask Katie about her YouTube channel. Did I speak? I don’t know. Katie was up to 3,000 subscribers and had over 2,000 followers on Instagram, a separate account she’d set up under @KatieMakeUp. I didn’t really get it but I supposed the point was that she did.

  And I watched us: my husband and my daughter and myself, eating the meal that I’d made, wearing the clothes that I’d washed in the kitchen that I’d cleaned more times than I can bear to calculate. I wasn’t part of them anymore. But at the same time, I was still attached, if that makes sense, by a long cord or something. Floating away. But tethered – just, only just.

  ‘And afterwards?’ Blue Eyes looks up from her notepad.

  ‘Afterwards, nothing. I tidied up. I filled the dishwasher. I hung up the laundry load that I’d put on to wash before I’d gone to my dad’s. The glass world I was carrying was heavy but I was still carrying it, yes, I was still carrying it then. Until the next morning. The next morning I dropped everything, of course.’

  38

  Mark

  Transcript of recorded interview with Mark Edwards (excerpt)

  Also present: DI Heather Scott, PC Marilyn Button

  HS: Can you tell us where you were on Thursday the twenty-sixth of September, the night of Anne-Marie Golightly’s murder?

  ME: I went to the pub for a couple then I came home. That’s it. You can ask Roy Briars. He was with me.

  HS: And can you tell me what time you returned?

  ME: It would have been about half past nine.

  HS: Can anyone corroborate that?

  ME: Don’t know. I’m not sure if Katie was in or out. She’s usually in her room.

  HS: And your wife returned later that evening?

  ME: Later, yes. She said the aerobics class or whatever it was finished at nine, but she didn’t get back till after ten. I was surprised she wasn’t back, to be honest. I was watching telly but I heard the front door, heard her feet on the stairs. Then the boiler fired up so she must have had a shower, then she must have got into bed because I didn’t hear her come down.

  HS: So you didn’t see her that evening?

  ME: No.

  HS: And what about the next morning? Did you notice anything unusual?

  ME: She seemed happier. I suppose that was unusual. She was a bit more like her old self. Chatty, like. She said she’d met this woman and that they’d got on like a house on fire and she was looking forward to the next week. It seemed to have given her a lift, like. I didn’t know who she meant, obviously, but I suppose that was that Golightly woman, wasn’t it? The one she…

  HS: (Pause) Mr Edwards, I know this is hard, but can you tell us what happened on the Friday evening, how she seemed?

  ME: She went to see her dad. She got back later than she said she would. She looked tired. But we ate with Katie and she seemed… OK. A bit spaced out, but OK.

  HS: And you had spent the afternoon with Lisa Baxter, is that correct?

  ME: Not the afternoon, no. She’d called round to see me for half an hour after work.

  HS: And why was that?

  ME: We were worried about Rach. Lisa thought we should call the emergency services but I said I’d talk to her. I was planning to talk to her that we
ekend about getting help.

  HS: And the next day? Saturday?

  ME: On the Saturday, I could hear her getting ready to go to work but I stayed in bed. I suppose we were avoiding each other.

  HS: And did you have any contact with your wife that day?

  ME: I spoke to her briefly that morning when she was on her way out. I called her later but she didn’t pick up. She often left her mobile at home. I called her work phone but no one answered. I should have kept calling. She said she was doing the double shift – she was set on it. I should have stopped her. I was giving up, I know that. On her, on both of us, like. I should’ve fought for her. For us. I didn’t know how to talk to her. We couldn’t talk to each other. It was like a bomb had gone off and we both had this ringing in our ears that blocked everything out. That’s what it was like for me, anyway. Like I was blind, deaf and dumb. And even though when Kieron went to uni she told me she was struggling, that she felt unsettled, like it was all coming to an end, I didn’t listen, not really. They were a pair together, heads in books, always laughing at some joke only they got. I used to feel a bit on the outside, to be honest, so when he left – and I feel terrible about this – I thought, good, I’ll have more time with Rach. I had that thought.