Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle

by Cathy Kelly

Ingrid thought she might be sick. She shoved her chair back from the table. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said and she moved off, napkin spilling on the floor, everyone looking at her. ‘Headache.’

  ‘I’ll come with you, Mum,’ said Molly, leaping to her feet.

  Ingrid controlled herself long enough to say, ‘No, love, you stay here. Please.’

  Somehow, she managed to get out of the restaurant and into her car. It would take five minutes to drive to the store, that was all.

  The Kenny’s security man, Abel, clearly thought she was under the influence of something.

  ‘There is nobody in, Mrs Kenny,’ he kept saying gently, as though he were speaking to a small child.

  ‘I know,’ Ingrid hissed, doing her best to maintain her calm public persona. ‘There’s something I need to check.’

  ‘They’ll all be here in the morning–’ he said.

  ‘Now–I want to check it now,’ Ingrid snapped.

  ‘Of course, madam.’ Abel’s professional mask went up. He was polite, a tall, immaculately turned out man from Sierra Leone. David used to say he had the intelligence and gravitas of a judge. What might he have done with his life if circumstances hadn’t brought him and his large family to Ardagh where he had to work the shifts that nobody else wanted? She wondered whether David had come here late at night and had Abel been accustomed to letting him in with someone else clinging to his coat, laughing at their daring…No, she wasn’t going to think that way. Not until she was sure.

  Her mobile phone rang as she was inserting the key in David’s suite of offices. Probably Flora, checking she’d got home all right. Flora was unlikely to be comforted by a message that read: Not home yet, decided to go to dead husband’s office to see if my instinct that he was hiding something from me was correct.

  It would probably be padded-cell-and-soft-focus-drug-time if Flora got that message.

  She checked her phone.

  The text was from Molly, seeing if she was all right. Whatever was going on, Ingrid didn’t want Molly involved.

  Nearly home, sorry for rushing, headache bad, talk in morning. Love Mum. She sent the text.

  Lying was actually an OK thing to do when your husband had just died. If you told people the truth about how you felt, they’d have you locked up.

  Ingrid flicked on all the lights, swept through Stacey’s office, then found the correct key for David’s. The Lucite lamp on his desk lit up jewel-green when she pressed the switches on the wall. Clever. Like everything David did, it was all perfectly organised: no fiddling around with desk-lamp buttons. Just flick two switches and everything worked. Attention to detail was David’s trademark.

  Which was why the red roses on his grave and the locked drawer sounded a duff note in Ingrid’s head.

  The drawer was still locked. Ingrid pulled it again to make doubly sure. No, still firm. She looked around the office for something to pry it open, but there was nothing obvious lying around.

  She wrenched open the drawers on the other side of his desk. They contained paper, files, pencils, even, ominously enough, one of the big suction corkscrews, but nothing useful. Next, she tried Stacey’s desk and hit paydirt: a lethal-looking letter opener.

  ‘Perfect,’ Ingrid said grimly.

  It took about ten minutes, much longer than it took thieves in burglar movies. But then they always had delicate lock-picks and she was hammering away at the keyhole with the tip of a letter opener. Finally, the lock broke. She threw the blunted letter opener down. Stacey would wonder what happened to it. Not Ingrid’s problem.

  For a couple of seconds, the opened drawer looked like any other drawer in David’s desk: an innocent space with neat piles of stationery. She’d been picturing something awful. Grief did terrible things to people. Made them imagine all sorts of wrongs.

  She poked through the paper with a forensic eye.

  And there they were: a neat pile of handwritten letters. She lifted them out.

  The goddess of clichés was kind today. The letters weren’t tied up in ribbon or–she sniffed them–scented with perfume. But they were love letters just the same, written on decent stock writing paper in a looping, feminine hand:

  Darling, I dreamed about you last night. I woke up and thought you here with me. I hate it when that happens. America seems such a long way away and I want you beside me, making love to me. Love and kisses, Me.

  David’s wastepaper bin was made of metal, which was just as well because Ingrid had to throw up into something and she didn’t want to ruin the carpet. This thoughtfulness seemed odd under the circumstances. Her heart was destroyed, why not the carpet?

  Once she’d got rid of the beautiful dinner which had tasted like sawdust, she sat back against the wall holding weakly on to the bin, her legs spread out in front of her, eyes closed. She didn’t want to move because, if she moved, she might feel sick again. She had so many feelings inside her, all jostling for recognition, that she couldn’t cope with any more.

  After a while, she felt strong enough to put the bin down. She wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her grey cashmere cardigan and for a moment she thought how incongruous the scene would have appeared to an onlooker: Ingrid Fitzgerald sprawled on the ground, a wastepaper bin of vomit beside her, a smear of sick on her cardigan. She hauled herself on to the desk chair.

  She laid the pile of letters to one side. David had kept them together with big paperclips. No red ribbons. He’d never been a romantic, had he? There was a modicum of pleasure in the fact that his lack of romance stretched to both of his women. She’d look at them later, when she felt able.

  There was something else in the drawer–credit-card bills that told the story of the affair. Lunches at beautiful restaurants on the outskirts of Dublin, nights at exquisite hotels where nobody ever went for business meetings, a three-day stay at the George Cinq in Paris. That stung, despite the barrier Ingrid had created around herself. Paris, their city, where they’d gone when the children were small, and again for their first adult-only holiday after Ethan and Molly left home.

  They’d had coffee in the George Cinq but never slept there. Instead, they’d stayed in the Crillon, where they’d lain in an antique French bed made up with endless pillows and snowy sheets, enjoying room-service champagne and the hotel’s famous breakfasts.

  They’d visited Paris many times since, and Ingrid’s favourite shop was the beautiful Anne Fontaine shirt shop where elegant sales ladies had sat David in an armchair, plied him with coffee and Le Monde, and generally patted him in an understanding Gallic way, so he was happy while she tried on exquisite blouses that fitted as though made for her.

  ‘If we go bankrupt because you like that shop so much, we’ll be able to say: “We’ll always have Paris,”‘ David said once and laughed heartily at his own joke.

  ‘We won’t go bankrupt with you working such long hours,’ she’d joked back.

  Not so funny now.

  Ingrid stared at all the receipts, some with faded printing, through the small reading glasses she never wore on air because she felt they made her look old. She felt that if she tried hard enough to distance herself, it would be like reading the research compiled on a cheating politician.

  She would be at her desk with Gloria bringing in the details and everyone in the office would wonder about the ethics of using such evidence. Was the moral life of a politician open for public consumption?

  But this evidence wasn’t about a politician for whom she cared nothing. It wasn’t about a poor maligned politician’s wife, waiting patiently at home while even the dogs in the street knew her husband spent more time than was necessary with a colleague. Ingrid always felt so sorry for the women who kept the home fires burning, hauled children to and from school, answered phone calls from irritated constituents while the man himself was wined and dined in Dublin and Brussels, making it all look so easy. It was easy because of his wife, and he was cheating on her.

  Now Ingrid was in exactly the same position. It hurt so much.
/>   What really surprised her was the anger, pure and sharp, that roared through her. How could David have done this to her? She had never nagged him the moment he got home, irritated by his life, bored by her own. She was a career woman, damn it. She dealt with big issues every day, wasn’t afraid of responsibility.

  If he wasn’t happy, he could have left, but this–having someone else who wrote him adoring letters and missed him so much in a needy way–this was sheer betrayal.

  Ingrid would have fallen to pieces privately if he’d asked her for a divorce, but if David had said, ‘I’m in love with another woman,’ she’d have given him his divorce. Only a fool or a masochist would try to repair the cracks in a marriage after that.

  Except he’d never said it. He’d gone on playing happy families. He’d died letting her believe he was true. She’d stood at his grave and sobbed her heart out for a man who loved someone else.

  If David hadn’t been dead, Ingrid could have killed him with her bare hands.

  She bent and threw up again, bile this time. There was nothing else left in her stomach. She closed her eyes until the nausea passed, then got up and went to the small fridge in Stacey’s office. There were cans of fizzy lemonade and she drank one.

  Slowly, Ingrid felt her energy return, along with a little bit of herself.

  Stacey would wonder what had happened if she saw the bin, the ruined paper opener, the drawer. There would be no hiding her presence in the store–Abel, the security man, would have to report anyone who’d come into the building. Ingrid knew she had to handle this carefully. She emptied out the drawer and closed it neatly, then took the bin to the bathroom and washed it. When the place looked more or less as she’d found it, she wrote a note for Stacey:

  Stacey, David had some letters of mine and I knew they were in his desk. I came to get them last night. They were so personal, I just wanted to have them. Ingrid.

  Not a bad excuse, she thought grimly. Men may come and go but the ability to lie lasts forever.

  She roamed the fifth floor until she found an empty cardboard box. As she piled in the evidence of David’s betrayal, she had a sudden thought. The only drawers she’d tried were in his desk. What if there was more for someone else to find? She opened the elegant wooden cupboards that hid filing cabinets where he kept his personal records and tested the drawers. Among all the innocently open ones, there was one that was locked.

  ‘More shit,’ she muttered as she wielded the letter opener again. This lock broke easily. There were more credit-card statements going back further. Ingrid scanned the first sheet, then scooped the whole lot out and into her box. She closed the drawer and pulled the door across. Hopefully, the note would satisfy Stacey’s curiosity. But then, perhaps she’d been in on it with David.

  ‘Tell my wife I’m in a meeting–I’ve got another secret date with my girlfriend,’ David might say, and Stacey would wink at him in time-honoured personal assistant style, knowing it was her job to keep everything a secret.

  Or perhaps the other woman was Stacey. ‘Let’s lock the door, nobody will know…’

  Damn David! She had to know who it was or else she’d go mad suspecting every woman in his life. But she had to be subtle about it. The media would love to hear that a television star like Ingrid had been betrayed by her supposedly loving husband. It would destroy the children if they were to learn of the affair. Ingrid would do everything she could to hide this other woman’s existence from Ethan and Molly. But first, she needed to find out who she was.

  There was only one person she would trust with this pain and that was Marcella. Among her many talents, Marcella knew how to lock a secret into her mental strongbox and keep it there forever.

  Marcella sat curled up on her couch picking hard skin off her feet and watching an episode of Sex and the City. She’d seen this particular episode many times before and owned the box set, but deciding to watch a show from your own DVD collection was somehow never as enjoyable as finding it randomly on television. In the ad break, she ran out to the kitchen and made herself another cup of decaf tea. She’d drunk pints of tea every waking hour of the day, until her acupuncturist told her that caffeine late at night was fatal for sleep and, as someone with sleep issues, she needed all the help she could get.

  The doorbell buzzed loudly.

  Instinctively, Marcella looked at her watch. A quarter past eleven. Nobody called without warning at that hour. Either it was some emergency–surely they’d phone instead?–or it was a crazy person selling religion or junkies armed with syringes wanting to break into her house. They’d picked the wrong woman. She grabbed her alarm remote and her mobile phone, dialling in 999 just to be ready. Then, she peered out of the window beside the door and saw, to her utter astonishment, Ingrid standing there.

  ‘Ingrid!’ Marcella wrenched open the door and stared at her friend in alarm. Carrying a large cardboard box, and with her face a strange grey colour, Ingrid looked as if she hadn’t slept in a hundred years. ‘Come in. What’s wrong?’

  Ingrid didn’t speak as she carried the box indoors and set it on the giant glass coffee table. Marcella noticed that all the scaly bits of dry skin she’d picked off her feet were on the table beside the box, waiting to be binned. Normally, that would have horrified someone as house-proud as she, but she simply swept it all on to the floor. From the look on Ingrid’s face, it was clear that bits of skin were hardly important in the grand scheme of things.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she repeated.

  ‘This,’ said Ingrid in a monotone, gesturing to the box. ‘There were red roses on David’s grave earlier today and a locked drawer in his desk. I knew something was wrong.’

  Marcella sank bonelessly on to one of her armchairs. ‘Roses?’

  ‘Red roses; not from me, and without any card saying who’d sent them,’ Ingrid said, opening the folds of the box with great calmness. She began taking sheaves of paper out and placing them in neat piles on the table. ‘I was out at dinner tonight with my sisters and the kids,’ she went on, ‘and the memory of those red roses kept coming into my head. That and the locked drawer I discovered when I went to David’s office today.’

  Marcella reached forward to put a comforting hand on her friend’s arm, knowing how hard it must have been, and how Ingrid had been putting off the visit to Kenny’s.

  Ingrid flicked her a brief, wry smile. ‘I thought I was being brave too,’ she said. ‘I went in today because I knew Molly couldn’t come and I didn’t want her to have to be with me when I went through his things. I didn’t want to make her into a little handmaiden of death, to be with me all the time, worrying about me. Her father died, that’s enough to deal with. She shouldn’t have to deal with my feelings too. Do you understand?’

  Marcella nodded, although she didn’t understand. She had imagined that having children would help Ingrid get over David’s death, because there would always be three of them who’d lost him. But she still couldn’t quite touch what that would feel like, being a mother. She stuffed that ache away in her mind.

  ‘I’m glad Molly wasn’t with me,’ Ingrid went on, and resumed emptying the box. ‘She’d have noticed a locked drawer.’

  ‘Where was the key?’

  ‘I didn’t have the key,’ Ingrid replied. ‘Stacey hadn’t found it. The whole thing kept nagging at me through dinner. I decided I had to know for sure. I drove to Kenny’s and broke open the damn drawer with a letter opener. Every office should have one,’ she added with fake brightness. ‘This is what I found–’

  ‘In one drawer?’ Marcella looked at her coffee table, which was now obscured by papers.

  ‘There was a drawer in a locked filing cabinet too. I haven’t gone through the stuff I found in there.’ For the first time, Ingrid’s brittleness appeared to crack. ‘I read one letter from his desk drawer. He was away in America and she missed him. There’s a date on it, last June.’

  ‘They might be someone else’s letters,’ said Marcella, clutching at straws. She looked
through the piles for the handwritten stuff.

  ‘David was in the US last June,’ Ingrid said flatly. ‘And why would he hide someone else’s letters? No, they’re his.’

  She sank back into the couch and stared at the television. She liked this show, it was fun and thoughtful. Samantha, Charlotte, Carrie and Miranda were having brunch in their Sunday-morning restaurant. Whatever panic they were going through, it was over. It had been made up. Ingrid felt a bit made up herself. Her life hadn’t been real at all. What she thought was real wasn’t.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Marcella said, searching. She found the letters and held them carefully in her lap, Exhibit A, Your Honour.

  The flowers you gave me are nearly dead. I’m not going to throw them out until the very end. It was such a lovely weekend, wasn’t it? When I’m with you, I feel safe and protected.

  When I was little, I used to press flowers and I’m going to press the roses…

  ‘What’s this rubbish?’ Marcella said, furious. ‘All this little-girl stuff: “I used to press flowers.” I used to have a bloody Barbie, I don’t go on about it now.’

  ‘I told you, I only read a bit of one of them,’ Ingrid said. ‘I brought them here so you could do it for me.’

  Marcella took a deep breath. ‘Red wine?’

  ‘If I drink anything at all, I’ll cry, and I don’t want to cry, not yet.’

  ‘Good point.’

  Marcella left the room and returned five minutes later with a pot of coffee and biscuits. ‘We’re going to be up all night anyway, so we may as well imbibe.’

  She put on some music: Tina Turner, because no woman could fall to pieces with Tina singing ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It’ in the background, and began looking through the letters. It was a mammoth task: the unravelling of the myth of David and Ingrid. Like a fairy story in reverse. Like Sleeping Beauty. Except, in this case, the prince hadn’t woken Ingrid from a hundred-year-sleep–he’d made her age one hundred years in a moment.

  Ingrid poured herself a coffee, sat back on the couch and let her mind roam.