Lasting Damage

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘Oh, shut up!’

  ‘A lifetime of guilt for your sister.’

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ Charlie’s voice was brittle. ‘Why did you marry me if you think I’m such a bitch?’

  Simon looked surprised. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘You’re human, that’s all. We all have shitty thoughts, we all do shitty things.’

  Charlie wanted him to say that there was a clear distinction between her shittiness and Liv’s, that Liv’s was a hundred times worse. From many years of experience, she knew that the thing you wanted Simon Waterhouse to say was never the thing he said.

  His eyes narrowed. He squinted at Charlie, as if he was concentrating on memorising her face. ‘Categories of people – that’s where we start. You post the image of a dead body on a website, you’re either the killer . . .’

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ Charlie muttered. She walked down the steps of the pool into the water and started to swim. Her dress clung to her; her sandals were like bricks tied to her feet.

  Simon stood up and walked along the side, keeping pace with her. ‘If you’re not the killer or an accomplice, who are you? The person whose house it is? Course, the owner might be the killer. The estate agent selling the house? I can’t see how that would work, can you? Or maybe someone interested in buying. Nothing better for lowering the price than blood and guts all over the living room floor.’

  ‘Fuck off, Simon, fuck off, and thrice fuck off.’

  ‘If you’re the killer and you post a picture of the body online, you’re advertising your work. If you’re not the killer—’

  ‘There’s no dead body apart from in Connie Bowskill’s mind,’ Charlie shouted over him.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ said Simon. ‘Someone else saw it too, and contacted Cambridge police.’

  ‘What?’ Charlie stopped swimming. ‘Who? Connie Bowskill’s best friend? Her mum?’ It had to be a lie.

  ‘If you’re not the killer, were you there when it happened? Were you watching? Hiding? Did you know it was going to happen? Were you waiting with a camera? Or did you only come along afterwards and find the body?’

  Charlie hauled herself out of the pool. Now she was weighed down by the water trapped in her clothes; moving quickly in the heat was even harder.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Simon asked her.

  ‘Where am I going?’ she echoed his question. ‘Where could Charlie be going?’ Let the speculator speculate, she thought, hurrying towards Domingo’s wooden house. She was going to ring the airline, find out how soon they could fly home.

  Sam understood, finally, something Grint had said in passing earlier: that he’d asked Lorraine Turner for the names, addresses and phone numbers of everyone she’d shown round 11 Bentley Grove so far, as well as anyone who’d enquired about it, even if they hadn’t followed up with a viewing. Sam had put it down to thoroughness, a desire to cover all bases, but he saw now that it had been more than that. The woman who had assumed Selina Gane’s identity and put her house on the market without her permission might have decided to pose as a prospective buyer. The psychology was consistent. This was someone with form for gaining entry under false pretences, someone who was known to have lied about who she was. Sam could see that it might amuse her to deceive yet another member of Lancing Damisz staff.

  And then? What would the woman who wasn’t Selina Gane do next? Make an offer? Buy the house? Was that the aim, all along? It was pointless speculating, Sam decided, with so few solid facts available.

  ‘Couldn’t make it up, could you?’ Jackie was chatting to him now as if they were old friends. ‘There was me standing there like a lemon, and the poor Frenches, who’d have bought that house, guaranteed, except I had to tell them it wasn’t for sale after all, it was a mistake. Embarrassed doesn’t even begin to cover it! The Frenches were gutted. It’s the worst part of my job, having to deal with the emotional fallout when things go wrong. It must be the same with your job.’

  It was a pity Jackie Napier wasn’t more intelligent; a cleverer person would have known which parts of the story were important and which weren’t. Sam had an awful feeling he would shortly be hearing all about Jackie’s saving of the day – the even better house she found for the Frenches, with its sunnier garden and superior garaging facilities – if he didn’t take active steps to avoid it.

  ‘I need to clarify this,’ he said. ‘You’re saying the woman you met at 11 Bentley Grove the first time you went there wasn’t Selina Gane? The woman who told you she wanted to sell the house, the one who proofread the brochure and gave you a key?’

  ‘She was nothing like Dr Gane,’ Jackie said angrily.

  ‘So the real Selina Gane was the one you met when you turned up with the Frenches a few days later?’

  ‘Exactly a week later,’ said Grint. ‘Wednesday 7 July.’

  ‘I should have known as soon as I saw that bloody passport photo,’ said Jackie, tight-lipped. ‘Selina Gane’s blonde and pretty. The other woman was dark and . . . sort of severe-looking, but you don’t think, do you? Someone shows you a passport photo and says, ‘‘I used to dye my hair blonde,’’ you believe them, don’t you? You don’t think, ‘‘I wonder if they’re pretending to be someone else.’’ I had no reason to be suspicious of her. She had a key to the house, for God’s sake – she was in the house when I went to meet her there. Of course I assumed it was her passport and her house – who wouldn’t? Who puts someone else’s house up for sale? I mean, why would anyone do that?’

  Why would anyone put a photograph of a murder victim on a property website?

  ‘How did you come to see the passport?’ Sam opted to ask an easier question.

  ‘We have to see ID for anyone whose house we’re selling. So we know they’re who they say they are.’ If Jackie was aware of the irony, she was hiding it well.

  ‘You say she was dark, the woman who wasn’t Selina Gane. What was her body shape – small, tall, fat, thin?’

  ‘Small and thin. Petite.’

  Sam felt something click into place in his mind before he realised why. Then it came to him: petite. Connie Bowskill had used the same word. A dark-haired petite woman . . .

  Some bloody woman had only gone and put her house on the market without telling her. That’s what Jackie had said.

  Some bloody woman . . .

  ‘Jackie, the woman you saw on the virtual tour, lying face down – could she have been the woman who met you at 11 Bentley Grove and pretended to be Selina Gane?’

  Jackie frowned. ‘No. I don’t think so, no. The dead woman – you could see the backs of her legs. She had darker skin. The woman I met was pale. And she had a wedding ring on, but a really thin one – not much thicker than a ring-pull from a can. The dead woman was wearing a thick wedding ring.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ Sam asked.

  Jackie tapped her finger against one of her earrings – the same one she’d used to pick her nails. ‘I always notice jewellery,’ she said proudly.

  Even when there’s a butchered woman in the same photograph, competing for your attention? Sam noticed that Jackie wasn’t wearing a wedding ring herself, and felt sorry for the unfortunate man who might one day put one on her finger.

  ‘The real Selina Gane doesn’t wear a wedding ring,’ Jackie added. ‘She’s not married. I think she might be the other way – it was just a feeling I got.’

  Pale skin. Thin wedding ring. Sam turned to look at Grint, saw that he was hunched and frowning. Connie Bowskill was petite, with pale skin and a very thin wedding ring. Sam shivered involuntarily. Why would Connie Bowskill pretend to be Selina Gane and put 11 Bentley Grove up for sale? Because she thought Selina was living there with Kit? Sam didn’t like that as an explanation – the logic of it was too hazy. It was hardly the first thing you’d think to do in that situation. If Connie was the dark woman Jackie met at 11 Bentley Grove, how did she get hold of a key?

  Grint had stood up, and was making his way across the room, hobbling. ‘Foot’s gone t
o sleep,’ he said. ‘Jackie, do you reckon you’d know her face if you saw her again, the woman who impersonated Selina Gane?’

  ‘Definitely. I’m good with faces.’

  Sam thought that was debatable, given that she’d fallen for the passport photo. When he looked up, he found her staring at him, her face frozen in a mask of dislike. It gave him a shock; what had he done wrong?

  ‘You think I should have known it wasn’t her, from the passport. Don’t you? How stupid must I be, that I didn’t clock it was a picture of someone else? She’d thought of that. “I used to dye my hair blonde,” she said. “It suited me too. Admit it, I look better there than in real life. Most people’s passport photos make them look like serial killers – mine makes me look like a film star. Sadly, the reality falls way short.” ’

  ‘That was what she said?’

  ‘Not exactly that,’ said Jackie. ‘I don’t remember her exact words. It was over a month ago. But she gave me some flannel about not looking like her photo. She definitely said the serial-killer-film-star bit. Oh, she was clever. She knew all she had to do was talk about people not looking like they do in their passports. If she made me think about all those other people, she wouldn’t have to convince me – I’d do all the work myself. It’s one of those things everyone says, isn’t it? ‘‘He looks nothing like his passport photo, I’m surprised he’s ever allowed back into the country.” ’

  Sam had to concede she had a point.

  ‘What if we were to introduce you – here, today – to the woman who passed herself off as Selina Gane?’ Grint asked Jackie.

  ‘I’d ask her what the hell she was playing at.’

  Grint nodded. ‘I’ll ask her the very same. Between us, we might get an explanation out of her.’

  Sam didn’t like what he was hearing. Jackie hadn’t yet identified Connie as the woman she’d met; why was Grint acting as if she had, offering her his support? Was it a tactic? If he seriously planned to put Jackie and Connie in a room together, Sam didn’t want to be there too. Plus, there was something else worrying him, something that wasn’t any of the things he knew he was worried about. He’d suddenly become aware of a dragging anxiety beneath the surface of his thoughts. What was it? It hadn’t been there a moment ago.

  ‘I’d like to hear the end of Jackie’s story,’ he said. ‘There you were at 11 Bentley Grove, with the Frenches and a frightened, confused Dr Gane – what happened?’

  ‘The Frenches scurried off home to ring my boss and complain.’ Jackie rolled her eyes. ‘Ungrateful sods – nothing like giving someone the benefit of the doubt, is there? They assumed I’d cocked up. I haven’t spoken to them since. I wouldn’t.’

  So, no superior garaging and sunnier gardens for the Frenches, Sam thought, not if Jackie could help it. Hadn’t she described herself as loyal, at the beginning of the interview? In Sam’s experience, people who extolled their own loyalty often sought to impose reciprocity, by coercion if necessary. Almost always, there was an unspoken caveat: but if you cross me, or let me down . . .

  ‘I was left standing there like a spare part, with Selina Gane threatening to ring the police. I managed to calm her down, at least enough to explain what had happened. She was in a state – who wouldn’t be? So was I, to be honest. I mean, it wasn’t like anything bad had happened to me, but it freaks you out a bit, thinking you’ve been tricked by some weirdo and you don’t even know why. What I don’t get is, what was the point of it all, from the dark-haired woman’s point of view? She must have known what’d happen: I’d turn up to show people round the house, and I’d meet the real Dr Gane. Eventually that was bound to happen, wasn’t it?’

  Sam wondered if the point had been to scare Selina Gane out of her senses. To make her think, ‘If my lover’s wife is capable of this, what else might she be capable of?’

  ‘I don’t suppose Selina Gane said anything about who the dark woman might be?’

  ‘She wasn’t making much sense. At first when I asked her who’d do a thing like that, she said, “I know who did it.” I waited for her to say more, but she started yapping on about changing the locks. She grabbed the Yellow Pages and started looking up locksmiths, and then she threw the book on the floor, burst into tears and said how could she stay in the house after this? “If she can get a copy of my front door key once, she can do it again,” she said. I told her she ought to contact the police.’

  ‘She took your advice,’ said Grint. He aimed his next comment at Sam. ‘She made a statement on Thursday 8 July. In it, she said that she was aware of a dark-haired woman who’d been following her – she had no idea who she was, but this woman had been hanging around, behaving oddly. From her statement, there was no way of us working out who this person was, but then . . .’ Grint turned back to Jackie. ‘There have been some developments, recently.’

  Grint couldn’t have known about this statement yesterday morning, Sam thought, or else he would have sounded far more interested than he had the first time Sam had spoken to him about 11 Bentley Grove and Connie Bowskill’s disappearing dead woman.

  ‘I had to ask her,’ said Jackie. ‘I wanted to know who she thought had done it. She said, ‘‘I don’t know who she is.’’ But a few minutes before, she’d said she did know who it was. She mustn’t have wanted to talk about it.’

  Grint and Sam exchanged a look. Grint said, ‘I think what she meant was that she suspected the woman who’d been following her was responsible – she knew she had a stalker, but didn’t know the stalker’s identity.’

  ‘Right,’ said Jackie. ‘Yeah, I suppose so. I didn’t think of that.’

  ‘So you threw the brochures in the bin, took 11 Bentley Grove off the website . . .’ said Sam.

  ‘Deleted the photos I’d taken, explained to my boss what had happened.’ Jackie sounded bitter. ‘I got a right bollocking for not checking the passport properly.’ She gave Sam a look that said, I know whose side you’re on. ‘Then, just before I went to New Zealand, I got a call from Dr Gane – the real Dr Gane. I checked.’

  Sam wondered how rigorous the checking process had been, over the telephone. Are you really Selina Gane this time? Yes. Oh, okay, great.

  ‘I recognised her voice,’ Jackie snapped at him.

  ‘Fair enough,’ Sam said evenly.

  ‘She rang me because she said I’d been kind and understanding, that day with the Frenches.’ There was an unmistakeable ‘So there’ on Jackie’s face, as if Sam had called her essential goodness into question. ‘She wanted to sell her house, wanted me to take care of it. Said the house didn’t feel like hers any more. I could see where she was coming from – I’d have felt the same way in her shoes, to be honest. She said, ‘‘If that woman got in once, she might have got in a hundred times. I can’t live here knowing she’s violated my space. She might have slept in my bed, spent nights here while I’ve been away.” I told her I couldn’t deal with it, I was off on holiday, and I’d ask Lorraine to ring her. She was okay with that – she knew Lorraine, from when she bought the house – it was Lorraine that sold it to her. Lorraine went round, took new photos . . .’

  ‘Hold on,’ Sam stopped her. ‘When I spoke to Lorraine Turner, she said nothing about anyone impersonating Selina Gane and putting her house up for sale without her knowledge.’

  ‘I didn’t tell her,’ said Jackie. ‘Dr Gane asked me not to.’

  ‘She didn’t want anyone to know what had happened who didn’t need to,’ Grint told Sam. ‘She found it distressing and embarrassing, didn’t want people asking her about it.’

  Sam was still thinking about Lorraine Turner, whose relationship with 11 Bentley Grove went further back than Selina’s, Jackie’s, Connie’s. Lorraine had sold 11 Bentley Grove to Selina on behalf of the Christmas tree couple, Mr and Mrs Beater. Did she also sell the house to the Beaters, when it was first built, or had the developers done that themselves?

  ‘I told Lorraine she’d have to meet Dr Gane at Addenbrooke’s or at her hotel to collect the key,’
Jackie went on. ‘I was thinking, “Don’t bother asking her to meet you at Bentley Grove – she won’t go near the place.” She said to me she wasn’t going back to that house ever again.’

  Grint was moving towards the door of the interview room. ‘Let’s go and meet Selina Gane’s stalker, shall we?’ he said. Jackie rose to her feet. A more sensitive person might have been nervous, Sam thought; he certainly was. He tried to imagine Connie Bowskill admitting it, and couldn’t. Couldn’t imagine her denying it either – how could she, if Jackie pointed the finger in no uncertain terms? As Connie had said herself, it was difficult to maintain a state of denial when what you were trying to deny was laid out before you and you were forced to confront it head-on.

  If it was denial. It occurred to Sam that Connie might be cannier than she seemed. How good an actress was she? Her painful-to-watch attack on her husband had been inconsistent, lurching from one accusation to another; Sam had put this down to confusion and panic at the time, but now he wasn’t so sure. At first Connie had seemed convinced that Kit thought she was a killer, and terrified that he might be right. She’d wanted Grint to say that for her to have killed a woman and then repressed the memory was impossible – she’d virtually put the words in his mouth. Then she’d changed tack: Kit didn’t really think she’d killed anybody, but he wanted her to think that was what he believed – wanted to plant in her mind the fear that she might have committed a murder of which she now had no memory.

  Listening, Sam had wondered how she could harbour these two suspicions simultaneously. He’d concluded that she was most afraid of not being in control of her own behaviour; she preferred to think that her husband was a monster.

  After talking to Jackie Napier, Sam had a different theory. It was no accident that he’d been left wondering which of the two it was: Kit the liar, Kit the killer, messing with his wife’s head in the hope that he could make her collude in his framing of her for a crime she didn’t commit – or Connie the unfortunate victim of a mental breakdown whose psychological disintegration was so severe that she couldn’t be held responsible for her actions. It was no accident that a choice had been set up between these two possibilities and no other. Sam’s attention, and Grint’s, had been skilfully diverted away from a third possibility: that Connie had knowingly and deliberately killed a woman. That the anguished on-the-edge persona she presented to the world was a carefully constructed lie.