Weycombe

by G. M. Malliet

  And she had never called me “love” before.

  One day weeks later, I punched in the speed dial to talk to Rashima. I hung up quickly when I realized I’d called her mobile by mistake, when what I’d wanted was her home number—I knew she’d be at her desk that time of day. I hung up and started to dial the right number, then stopped, finger poised over the keypad.

  That call from Anna.

  She had rung our house phone rather than Will’s mobile number—I was sure of it. It was Will’s voice on our answerphone, and if you weren’t paying attention you might not have heard him say “You’ve reached the Whites.” When she’d realized her mistake, she’d hung up. She’d made the same mistake I’d made with Rashima’s numbers, only in reverse: mistaking landline for mobile.

  Around the time I realized that the jewelry receipt I’d found wasn’t for a gift intended for me, I decided that keeping an eye on Will’s mobile phone couldn’t hurt. I did find an old message on there from Anna, but it was so innocuous my suspicions were allayed. “I’m having trouble reaching Jillian,” it said. “Have her call me, okay?”

  Only trouble was, that message was dated weeks earlier and Will had never passed along the message to me. He had “gone out to the pub” for an hour or so after dinner that night. He’d done the same on a few other occasions that I thought might line up with Anna messages. But I remembered that one in particular; we’d had a major fight on his return because he was so much later than he’d said he’d be.

  Coincidence? I asked myself.

  Don’t be an idiot, I answered myself. There are no coincidences.

  36

  There were signs and portents galore, harbingers of things to come.

  I didn’t leap to conclusions. Conclusions were handed to me.

  One day late that summer I was in the garage, hoisting the kayak back onto its rack—Will had a tendency to just dump it somewhere when he was through with it. It was then I spotted the mobile phone tucked behind some old rags. It wasn’t mine; it wasn’t his. Someone had dropped it in our garage somehow? The workman who’d installed the shelving, maybe. I turned it over.

  It was a plain black phone that looked like the sort of thing they sold at convenience stores—not a real phone connected to a monthly service. I’d never held a burner before but I knew what it was. A disposable phone, used by people with bad credit and by drug dealers.

  And by cheating spouses.

  Immediately, I got on my alternate theory hamster wheel. It was a habit of mind I didn’t seem able to break. Anything to dodge reality for a little while longer.

  Was Will a spy? Was he MI6, recruited at university like the Cambridge Five? Or maybe he was spying on another corporation, trying to learn insider secrets.

  Would you need a secret phone for that? Wouldn’t you just meet in a pub and exchange views?

  Maybe the phone didn’t even belong to Will. Maybe someone had broken into our garage and left his phone behind.

  I chased down every ridiculous scenario, including Will White, Drug Runner. And not one of them made an ounce of sense.

  The phone was one of those designs that folded in half like a taco, hinged from the top. Cautiously, I flipped it open. It was branded with a logo I recognized—I’m not sure what I expected, maybe something Russian or a Chinese character meaning good luck. If you are not into this sort of thing, you just don’t know, and my mind was still on the spy-go-round wheel, hoping to escape the obvious truth of what my dearly beloved husband had been up to.

  I pressed a few trial buttons. Not being familiar with the model, I didn’t want to accidentally erase something. I also didn’t want Will to know I’d found his secret phone. It might come in handy. It might help me keep tabs on him.

  The voicemail queue was empty, but there was a list of calls made and received, with their dates and times. The calls were all to one number, but it was a number I didn’t recognize.

  A number for someone I didn’t know?

  Just as likely, the calls were to another burner phone. They stretched over the past few months, those calls, all to the same number.

  In my heart I knew already, that number would connect me with Anna.

  There was only one way to find out: to call the number already, but using another phone. If anyone answered, I’d hang up. I’d have to call from a phone box, and good luck finding one of those left in England.

  I made a note of both numbers, and a list of the dates and times of calls. I planned to check against my calendar what I knew or could remember of Will’s activities. The calls were in most cases made at night. Probably he was sneaking into the garage to call. Why he didn’t just keep the thing with him at all times I couldn’t imagine, but maybe he thought I was more likely of an evening to search the briefcase he took into work each day. As if I would ever do that.

  I put the phone back where I’d found it.

  First I wiped it clean of prints.

  That weird calm stayed with me as I planned my next move. The marriage was over, of course, but I wanted Will to believe for now everything was just fine, that he could have his cake, etcetera. So I cooked his meals and did my best to be agreeable when I couldn’t avoid him entirely. And I kept busy. Busy, busy.

  Would it have made a difference if it had been anyone but Anna? I’ll never know. Apart from Rashima, Anna had been as close as I’d come to having a friend in posh, let’s-do-lunch Weycombe. Friend and confidant. At least, I’d thought we confided all in each other. Obviously, not quite all.

  I’d spent hours listening to Anna as she detailed her unhappiness with Alfie and Jason, her frustrations and yearnings, her attraction to Colin. Was all that just meant to mislead me? Worse, to play with me?

  I remembered one time, she’d started to name her current lover and then she’d caught herself, corrected herself. Had that name begun with a W ? The chances were looking good it had.

  Later, when Anna was killed, there were plenty of men who made good suspects—Colin, to name one. But Will had “Likely Suspect” written all over him. And a prize catch for any policeman working the case would be landed gentry like Will.

  Fine with me, I’d decided. I could help with their inquiries. And whatever happened to Will, happened.

  The day after Frannie died I found a letter mixed in with the ordinary mail. It was in an ordinary WHSmith-type brown envelope among all the other mail, but without a stamp. It was a warning, created in time-honored tradition with words cut out of headlines. It read, BACK OFF. Just those words, nothing more. BACK OFF.

  I called Detective Milo, a tremor in my voice. He was there in ten minutes.

  I heard him talking to someone as he stood outside the door, concluding with, “I’ll see you back at the station.” I opened after a suitable delay. I projected composure, a woman worried but totally in control, as if finding warning notes on my doorstep were an everyday occurrence.

  Whoever he’d been talking to had vanished. Probably he’d sent someone to case the back of the house.

  “You didn’t see who left the note?” Milo asked.

  “No,” I said. “It could have been anyone. The walkway up to the door is partially hidden by those bushes in front. And almost no one is home this time of day. I happen to know Rashima from across the street is out of town until this evening.”

  He looked around. “You’ve been busy, I see,” he said. “The place looks nice.” I had spent the morning cleaning; the aromas of glass cleaner and furniture polish filled the air. I’d be putting the house on the market soon; Anna would have approved of my efforts in getting it ready. As a bonus, it might get Will off my back for a while, and I needed to keep him sweet, or at least in the dark, awhile longer. What happened next had to come as a complete surprise. As big a surprise as that Intime bill and that burner phone had been to me.

  It was during this conversation Milo talked to me ab
out his son, who as it turned out had some rare cancer or other. Which explained why Milo often looked so worn away at the edges. The only treatment for the disease was an experimental gene therapy that cost a king’s ransom. It wasn’t covered by the National Health, of course. Sometimes I wonder what is. My heart went out to Milo, it really did.

  I offered him coffee and a blueberry pastry from the local shop, and as had become our wont we settled across from each other at the kitchen bar. It was homey there, with the sun sieving its way through the German lace curtains. I would miss the house but it was time, past time, to start a new life. To set down roots elsewhere. I had put on a new blue dress that morning to cheer myself up, to signal that things were changing.

  Milo finally gave the pastry a rest and looked at me expectantly, as if I’d invited him over for a chat about my plans. In a way, I had. He had already slipped the poison pen letter into an evidence bag. To his questions I could only answer, “No idea.”

  I asked after Detective Attwater. “Your boss sent you here on your own?”

  “Technically, she’s not my boss. I don’t work Murder, as a rule.”

  “I see,” I said. He might have been there in some special capacity. Or he’d gone completely rogue and was making a break from standard protocol. I half wondered if he was going to ask me out on a date or something.

  “We seem to have hit a bit of a wall,” he said. “And I’m wondering if you’ve thought of anything more about Anna, something you may have forgotten when we spoke before. Sometimes neighbors see or hear things that they don’t realize at the time are important.”

  “Sure, I get that,” I said. He’d completely sidestepped my question: Where was Attwater, anyway? I decided to play along. If he pressed me on things I couldn’t talk about yet, I’d ask him to leave—or so I told myself. Could he refuse? Not really. This was England. So I sat back in my chair and relaxed, at least as much as I was able under the circumstances. Only I could hear my heart hammering away, on high alert. I said, “Speaking of walls. Although these walls are thin, you have to understand there was nothing much to hear from next door. At least, not once Jason moved out.”

  “There were quarrels over Jason?”

  “The quarrels were more with Jason. He would turn up and, so I gathered, ask for money. But I got that knowledge more from conversations with his mother than from anything I overheard. It’s just … ”

  “Go on.” He’d been eating the pastry with one hand, ignoring the fork I’d provided. I noticed he kept his hands neat, the nails smooth and squared off. He set the remaining pastry down on the plate and, wiping a smudge of frosting from his lip, gave me his full blue-eyed attention.

  “I don’t think Jason could have done this,” I said firmly. “Killed his stepmother, I mean. I don’t think he was even visiting here at the time. He was in London, wasn’t he?”

  “We think so. Yes.”

  “So—what is it?” I asked. There was clearly something on his mind and he was having trouble finding the words. Or deciding whether to tell me at all.

  “That scarf she was wearing,” he said at last. “It was not what killed her. She was choked with a woman’s nylon stocking. The scarf obscured it.”

  Holy gods. Had the police traced it to Miss Kitty’s Long Branch? To Will’s credit card? These were questions I didn’t dare ask.

  “We’re keeping these details away from the media, you understand. We may use them to trip up a suspect during questioning. That is, when we have a suspect.”

  I wondered at this new open, sharing phase to our relationship. He was telling me things that certainly should have been kept back, in case of false confessions and what not. BM: London had taught me that much.

  “Yes,” I said. “I mean, I noticed it, the scarf, not the stocking. And from the way she looked … it had to be … that she was—you know. Anyway, she often wore that scarf while she was running. Blue background with a flowered print. A boho scarf, they call it. A single piece of cloth that goes in a continuous loop around … around the neck. Like an eternity scarf.” Just then the implications of “eternity scarf” struck me. I vowed I would never wear one again, so long as I lived. Who was that dancer who was strangled when her scarf caught on the spoke of a wheel? Isadora Duncan? “How awful for Anna.”

  “I wasn’t clear,” he said, cutting across my babble. “What actually killed her was a knife wound. A knife aimed at the heart, from under the ribs. But first they tried to strangle her from behind, using a stocking. That gave the killer the advantage.”

  I paused, smoothing the fabric of my dress, to show the gravity of the whole thing was not lost on me: someone had really wanted Anna dead, choking and stabbing her. I shook my head in confusion. “Sorry? How do you mean, advantage?”

  “The element of surprise. If you’re being strangled while you’re facing your attacker, you have at least a fighting chance. You can land a strategic kick or scratch his eyes out. This way, you can’t do much to defend yourself. Victims tend to panic, to claw instinctively at their own necks, to relieve the pressure on the windpipe. The fight for oxygen becomes their only priority. The experts think she was choked until she was unconscious or nearly so, then she was stabbed. At that point she was an easy target.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Jesus. Please, stop. It’s too awful.” And why tell me?

  “By the way, Roger is in the clear,” he said.

  It took me a full beat to remember who in fuck Roger was. The vagrant I’d told Milo I’d seen near Anna’s body that day.

  “He was locked up at the time, our Roger. Drunk in public. They let him sleep it off inside. So unless he managed to tunnel his way out, we have to cross him off the list.”

  I wondered at that “we,” and then realized that of course he meant himself and the crack team of detectives on the case.

  I was reaching for my coffee when he said, “A video has surfaced. It might give us something to go on.”

  “A video? No kidding.” Suddenly I couldn’t take my eyes off him. “A video of what?”

  “Some tourists were out early wandering about—Japanese with jet lag, internal clocks shot to hell. They were documenting every moment of their holiday with a camcorder and happened to aim it at the river. They didn’t hear about the murder until long after they got home. Their lawyer got in touch with us, thought we might be interested.”

  “What luck,” I said. “What did they record?”

  “Unfortunately, they didn’t have the lens pointed right at the spot where Anna was killed. They were more interested in the scenic river and the trees, and a kayaker on the river. We’re following up on that, anyway, putting out a call for information. He might have seen something.”

  Or done something. “So that’s how … ?” I let the sentence hang, but of course, I was going to say that must have been how the killer got away. How Will got away.

  He nodded. “The footage is grainy and taken from a distance, so it may not be a lot of help. A logo on the jacket the kayaker’s wearing can be seen, and a flash of a watch or jewelry in the early light. And the time the video was recorded, of course, which may be useful. The kayak itself has a logo and a distinctive color. Would you mind if I took a look?”

  He stood. For a second I didn’t realize he was asking if he could look in my garage. I nodded and pointed him the way. I stayed where I was, waiting for the verdict.

  He was back in less than a minute. “It looks like a match to me. Someone will have to come over and photograph it to make a comparison.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He sat back down, pushing his plate to one side, and folded his hands in front of him. Clearly this was his getting down to business pose. “I’m very sorry to have to tell you,” he began, “but we’ve heard rumors. It looks as though your husband had a relationship with the victim. An, erm, inappropriate relationship.”

  Good
old Dhir. So male solidarity had in fact gone by the boards.

  I shook my head. “That’s impossible,” I said. “Will would never … ”

  I’d already decided to pretend this was shocking news. Impossible to take in. I’d had some time to practice a look of stunned dismay.

  He proceeded, oh so gently, to give me the details. Some of it was news to me, so I didn’t have to pretend a keen interest. I had pieced together that the affair had got going about the time I’d been laid up with a sprained ankle, giving them freedom to meet pretty much whenever they chose. Once I was laid off but was walking again, it had really put a cramp in their style to have me around the village all the time.

  According to Milo, Will and Anna had worked out a strategy for meeting in which she, in the middle of preparing dinner, would pretend to have run out of goat’s milk or quail eggs or whatever and would send Alfie off to Whole Foods—a thirty-minute round trip minimum. Then Will would pop over when she rang him with the all-clear. It was the very definition of a quickie, wildly reckless. I’m sure the risk of discovery was all part of the thrill. If Alfie had returned mid-romp, they would have had a French farce on their hands. In a narrow four-level house there is really no way to sneak out the back door. If you can’t climb out a window, you’re likely to be trapped in the bedroom closet until dawn.

  I did gather, however, that the English basements in both houses came in handy in a pinch—so to speak.

  Milo told me all this, or a much more dignified version, trying to spare what sensibilities I had left.

  How could he possibly know this? I demanded of him.

  From Alfie, of course. Alfie had known all along.

  What the hell, I thought. Tell him.

  Tell him the whole story, what you know, what you suspect.

  Just do it now.

  37

  I settled back into my chair, feeling about a hundred years old. I had wanted to be surer of my ground first, but hey. There would never be a better time.