The Third Wife

by Lisa Jewell

  “So strange,” she said, “so incredibly strange. All that personal stuff. All that stuff that someone would only know if they were . . . family.” She shook her head as though trying to dislodge a drop of water. “Weird.”

  “Horrible,” he said.

  “Yes. Completely. Anyway. I’ll give you a ring later, OK, see if you’ve heard anything. Update you on Mr. Sitting-on-a-bench. We can have a proper chat then.”

  “Yes, thank you. That would be great.” He smiled and let her go, his own hand on the back of his chair, readying himself to leave. “Oh,” he said, a small concern from earlier leaping to the front of his mind, “your appointment, the one you were at this morning? Everything OK?”

  She looked at him with surprise, one hand grasping the strap of her handbag, the other in the pocket of her jacket. “Yes,” she said, “it is actually. Everything is OK.” And then she smiled, a rare, beautiful thing, put her hand up to him as a farewell gesture, turned and left.

  19

  “Where’s, er . . .” Luke stopped. “Adrian?”

  He hadn’t seen his dad since breakfast. Adrian had been working from home this morning because of that appointment at the police station. Freya on reception said that he’d come in at about 11:30 a.m. and then gone straight out again.

  The woman who worked outside Adrian’s office talked to Luke without looking at him as she hurriedly pulled together various pieces of paperwork. “No idea,” she said. “He told me he was popping out for an hour, but as far as I’m aware he didn’t come back. Have you tried calling him?”

  Luke shook his head and said thank you. It was strange being here without his dad. Made him wonder why he was here at all. He walked across the open-plan area in the center of the office and through the doors to the stairs that took him to the ground floor, where the archives were. He took his phone from the pocket of his jacket hanging off the back of his chair and called his dad.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at home.”

  “How come?”

  He heard his father sigh heavily. “Caroline called. Otis went missing.”

  “What!”

  “Yes, I know. It’s all fine now. She found him; he’s gone into school. Everything’s cool.”

  “God, where was he? What was he doing?”

  “Sitting on a bench, apparently, outside Angel. Thinking.”

  “I told you!” said Luke. “Didn’t I tell you? That boy’s not right. Seriously, Dad, I knew something like this was going to happen. I tried to tell you.”

  “Nothing’s happened.”

  “No. Not yet. But it could have. Who knows what’s going on with him? It could be drugs for all we know.”

  Adrian pooh-poohed his theory and Luke groaned. “You’re doing it again, Dad. You’re assuming just because you live in the best of all possible worlds that bad things don’t happen to people you love. But, Dad, Maya, your wife, she was hounded to her death by somebody. She jumped under a bus because someone was hurting her. These things do happen. You should be talking to Otis, following him, searching his browsing history. Not just sending him back to school and saying la la la, everything’s fine.”

  He heard Adrian exhale. “Yes, yes, you’re right. Of course you are. But he’s not going to open up to me. He thinks I’m a moron.” He paused. “Maybe you could try talking to him?”

  Luke sat down, feeling struck by an unexpected wave of warmth. “I can try.”

  “He’s sleeping over later this week,” said Adrian. “I could work late? You could collect him from school?”

  “School?” Luke felt vaguely horrified by the idea.

  “Yeah. He’d like that. Showing off his big brother.”

  “But I’ll be at work.”

  Adrian laughed. “I’ll talk to the boss about letting you leave early.”

  “Right,” said Luke, warming to the idea now that he knew it involved an afternoon off work. “Yeah. OK. I can do that. Maybe take him somewhere. Where do you normally take him?”

  “He likes the Italian round the corner. You know, the greasy-spoon one. He likes their carbonara.”

  “Great. Carbonara. Yeah. OK. I can do that, but . . .”

  “I’ll give you cash.”

  “Right,” said Luke. “Thank you.”

  He hung up feeling strangely substantial.

  There was a beautiful blonde sitting on the wall outside his father’s office when Luke left work at five o’clock. He could see one-quarter of her in profile and was struck by the strong line of her jaw, the kick of her peroxide hair across her cheek, nice legs, the soft print of a summer dress, pink ballet pumps and a tan satchel. He peered curiously at her, wondering if he’d inadvertently placed an order at myperfectwoman.com during his lunch hour. Then she turned to face him and his heart fell. Instinctively he spun round and attempted to exit the building invisibly and in the wrong direction. But it was too late. She’d seen him.

  “Luke!”

  “Charlotte!” He tried to sound and look surprised. “Wow!” He kissed her on each cheek. “Wow, what are you doing here?”

  “I was in town for the day,” she said, “thought I’d come and see how you were doing.”

  Luke tried for a smile. “Right,” he said, “cool. You look great.” He gestured at her pretty dress, her suntan, her glowing skin, her amazing breasts. “Really great.” He stopped, looked at his father’s office and then back at Charlotte. “How did you know where . . . ?”

  She beamed. “Google.”

  Luke felt something lurch uncomfortably within him. Hadn’t he got rid of this girl? Wasn’t she consigned to “my romantic history?” To the short but high-quality list of women he would one day remember having slept with before he met the woman of his dreams and settled into monogamy?

  “Ah,” he said, “right.”

  “So,” said Charlotte, pulling at the strap of her satchel, “lovely day. Do you fancy a pint? Just a quick one. Before I catch my train?”

  Luke relaxed. A train home. Good. That sounded nice and finite. Good-bye, Charlotte! Jolly nice to see you! Have a safe trip! And it was a beautiful afternoon, the sort of rare London summer’s afternoon when it felt almost criminal not to stand outside a pub with a pint in your hand.

  “Yeah,” he said, casually, not wanting to sow any seeds of hope, “why not?”

  They walked around the corner to a pub on Cowcross Street with a courtyard set back from the road. It was heaving with the solid backs of men in crumpled shirts, and the gentle roar of coiled male tension released by beer boomed across the courtyard. He put a protective hand on Charlotte’s back as they passed through the knot of men towards the doors and then snatched it back as he felt her body respond to his touch, her back arching slightly as she turned her neck to smile feelingly at him. No, he thought, absolutely not.

  “So,” he said, once they’d found somewhere to balance their drinks. “What brings you to London?”

  “Nothing really. A couple of appointments, shopping for bridesmaid dresses . . .”

  “Oh!” Luke brightened, imagining that Charlotte was about to share a happy, I’m-totally-over-you announcement. “So, you’re . . . ?”

  “No!” She laughed. “Not me! My cousin Nicky—remember her, with the black hair? Really pretty?”

  Luke shook his head. Charlotte had a large family, he remembered that much, an unfeasibly large family whom she talked about all the time, expecting him to remember not only names and relationships but also physical nuances and personality traits.

  “Well, anyway, she’s getting married in August and ­always-a-bridesmaid muggins here is going to be chief bridesmaid, which makes me feel about a hundred years old, and she keeps showing me all these elegant column dresses in, like, oyster satin. And I am not built for satin column dresses; I mean, you need to basically be a stick for that to work. An
d I am not a stick. I have bumps. And you know, when you get to my age, you know what suits you, don’t you? So I thought before she goes out and spends all her money on something that’ll basically make me look like, like . . . fruit in a condom, I’d better find something I like and try and talk her into it.”

  Good, thought Luke, this was good. Neutral. Clothes. He liked talking about clothes. “So,” he said, “did you find anything?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “but it’s designer. Mui Mui? Something like that. I took some photos in the changing rooms. Want to see?” She pulled her phone out of her bag and started searching through it with her thumb. “I thought maybe I could get someone to make it up for me, you know, on the cheap. Here.” She passed the phone to Luke, watching him eagerly for his response.

  His brow raised and he nodded, passed the phone back to her.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think,” he said, “that if you wear that dress you will be in danger of upstaging the bride.”

  She laughed. “I knew you’d say that. I did worry. Maybe I could get it made up with a sheer panel across here”—she passed her hand across her décolletage—“to avert the eye. You know?” She peered at him, all china-blue eyes and soft skin and simmering, deep-seated love.

  Luke swallowed some beer and nodded tersely. No, he told himself again. No no no no no. “Good idea,” he said.

  She tucked her phone back into her bag and picked up her pint glass. “So,” she said, “what’s the deal with the ‘intervention?’”

  The conversational dogleg took him by surprise. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah. That. I don’t know. I think Mum was getting sick of me. Thought I could be doing more with my life. And my dad probably thinks he should be getting more for all the money he spent on my education.”

  She nodded, as though there was something she wanted to say but didn’t feel she could.

  “Not quite sure that sitting in the bowels of my dad’s office folding up paper all day is really much of an improvement on working in a clothes shop, but there you go. And maybe . . .” He paused, forming his next thought, wondering if he should share it with Charlotte, if it would unblock sealed-up conversational vaults, and then feeling an uncontrollable sensation of opening up and saying it anyway. “It was almost predestined, I think.”

  She arched an eyebrow.

  “I found something, on my dad’s computer. Some old e-mails. To Maya.”

  “Right.”

  “Yes. Abusive e-mails. Telling her that everyone hated her. That she was ugly.”

  Charlotte’s eyes widened and she clapped her hand over her mouth. “What! No way! Oh my God. Who are they from?”

  “Nobody knows. They’re anonymous. But there’s this girl . . .”

  She dropped her hand from her mouth and stared at him, gripped.

  “She was kind of stalking my dad for a while, and Pearl. Nothing sinister. Well, we didn’t think so at the time. But now we’re not so sure.”

  “Oh Jesus, Luke! That is just awful. I mean, why would someone do that to Maya? She was such a nice person.”

  “I know. It doesn’t make any sense. Although, in a way, it does help make sense of her death. That it wasn’t just this random act of madness. That there was something behind it.”

  “So you think the two things are connected then?”

  “Well, yeah, definitely. The last e-mail was sent the day before she died. So yeah, I think it’s pretty certain that the e-mails drove her to it.”

  “So, God, is that, like, murder?”

  “I don’t know. It should be. But I don’t suppose it is. I mean, anyone could drive anyone to killing themselves, couldn’t they, if they were brutal enough? Bullies do it all the time, don’t they? School bullies. Cyberbullies. And you know, Maya, she was so . . .”

  “Immature?”

  Luke threw her a look. “No,” he said, “I was going to say: soft. Decent. I can totally imagine how badly this would have affected her.”

  Charlotte nodded and Luke lowered his face towards hers when he realized that she was crying. “Hey,” he said, “what’s going on? Are you OK?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “it’s just, I still feel so sad whenever I think about her. She was always so lovely to me. Had such a sweet way about her. And the thought of her . . . and that bus.” She sniffed and rubbed away the tears from under her eyes. “What’s going to happen?” she said. “About the e-mails? And the stalker?”

  “No idea,” said Luke. “My dad’s taken his laptop in to the police; they’re going to have a look at it. But if that doesn’t help, I guess we need to track down this stalker woman. See if she’s got anything to do with it.”

  “Weird,” said Charlotte after a short break.

  “I know,” said Luke.

  “Who would want to hurt Maya?”

  “Exactly,” said Luke, “exactly.”

  20

  August 2010

  Dear Bitch

  So you and Big Daddy are trying for a baby. Aw. That’s so sweet. Except, Bitch, for the fact that Big Daddy already has some babies. Lots of babies. Had you noticed? He’s got a really nice little baby called Beau. He’s fucking adorable. And the others, OK, they’re not quite so adorable, but they’re still his babies. Do you know what it does to a family, every time a new baby comes along? Everyone has to shuffle along a bit; everyone has to change. Don’t you think Big Daddy’s family have done enough shuffling and changing? Don’t you think Beau would like to stay the baby? Don’t you think you’ve caused enough problems? Don’t you think you should just back off? Actually, don’t back off, fuck off. Seriously, Bitch. You’re nothing. You’re just a silly little girl. You’ve bitten off more than you can chew. How did you think you could ever be a real part of this family? Seriously? Look at your predecessors, real women, proper women. You look like a sickly child in comparison.

  So, keep taking that pill, Bitch, because nobody wants your sad excuse for a baby coming into their world. NOBODY.

  Maya selected and copied the foul text, pressed shift and delete to take the e-mail permanently off the server. Then she opened the little document she kept buried deep in the entrails of the computer system and pasted it onto the end. The secret document felt a bit like one of those sanitary disposal units they had in public toilets. Something you tried not to look at, or inspect or linger over, a dark receptacle of unthinkable grimness. She wasn’t sure why she was keeping these words. Her overwhelming instinct was to banish them from the cosmos. But it seemed prudent to have something to prove that these e-mails really had been sent to her. Just in case she lost her mind. Or did something stupid. Because that was clearly the intent behind the e-mails. To drive her nuts. So far this person had made no suggestion that they wanted to harm her. The language used seemed very deliberately chosen to encourage her to harm herself. Or disappear. Or both.

  Maya still hadn’t told Adrian. He’d won a massive bid for a huge new housing and retail complex in St. Albans and was growing the practice again. He’d taken on three new architects and another floor of the new building in Farringdon. He was stressed and distracted.

  To save herself from the unpalatable truth that these e-mails came from someone she knew, Maya had invented an imaginary poison e-mail scribe. She’d made her almost comical: a middle-aged woman, wearing a harlequin-patterned satin blouse, wonky orange lipstick and a fascinator. With a parrot or some other kind of crazy bird on her shoulder. Both of them cackling, maniacally, as she typed.

  It helped.

  A bit.

  But this now, today, this was a sinister development. Mrs. Crazy Parrot Woman knew that she and Adrian were trying for a baby. How could that be possible? She got to her feet and went to make herself a cup of tea. Whom had they told? She made a mental list as she opened and closed cupboard doors, switched on the kettle, pulled two tea bags apart down a perforation.
She’d told Cat. When they’d spent the night down at Susie’s in Hove last weekend. Cat had squealed and jumped up and down and said: “Have a girl! Have a girl! Balance it out! Please!”

  She’d told Holly at work. Holly and her husband had just started trying for a baby, too. She hadn’t told her best friend, Sara, yet, because, well, because she knew she’d be funny about it. Sara was funny about anything Maya did that didn’t involve her. Well, actually, Sara was just funny, full stop, one of those “best friends” that had gone kind of past their sell-by date, but you can’t quite bring yourself to throw away. And she’d told Caroline, in a girly sharing of confidences over white wine last week, when Maya had been in town looking for a birthday present for Adrian. She’d looked entirely unsurprised and rubbed at the nibs of her elbows in that calm, unflappable way of hers. “Lovely,” she’d said, “another baby. That will be lovely.”

  And that was it. She hadn’t told another soul.

  She dropped her tea bag into the bin and took her tea into the garden. Ten more days, she thought to herself, ten more days of summer holidays, then it was back to school. It had been a long, dull summer. Adrian at work all the time, the sun barely coming out, these stupid e-mails all the time. She missed the schoolgirls and the camaraderie of her colleagues. She missed having somewhere to go every morning. She missed coming home tired and drinking wine she felt she’d earned. She missed the gossip and the cookies and the sense of living for the weekends.

  Her phone rang and she looked at it to see who was calling. It was him. She smiled, pressed answer, her mood lifting at the sound of his voice.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, you.”

  “I’m in London.”

  Maya felt a rush of happiness flood her senses. “Oh, thank God. I’m dying here. Can you come? Can you come now?”