The Wake: an absolutely gripping psychological suspense

by Vikki Patis

  I pick up the bank statement, my fingers drawn to his name in the top corner. Richard Asquith. It is our joint account, my name, Eleanor Hart, nestled beneath his, and I run a forefinger over the words, grief flooding through me once again. We will never be married, now. We will never live together, never grow old together in the seafront house we dreamed of buying. Richard is gone, and I am alone.

  He wasn’t the perfect man. He had his foibles, as we all do. Leaving his damp towel on the bathroom floor, never washing up his breakfast bowl, and forever kicking off his shoes in the hall where I would trip over them when I came in. But he was kind, and generous, and loving. In the three years we were seeing one another, I discovered a Richard I had never seen before. We’d known each other for a long time through work, well over a decade, and I had always seen him as the sharp, somewhat cocky businessman, until a work function that involved too much wine and not enough food that ended with me going back to his hotel room and staying until the morning. I soon learned that he was a passionate man, romantic too, never turning up without a bouquet of flowers or a box of chocolates. He liked to have sex in any room but the bedroom; on the kitchen counter, in the shower, and once even in the garden. And he liked to cook, elaborate steak dishes or some exotic fish, an apron tied around his waist, his feet bare against the tiles.

  I loved to watch him. He was in good shape, though his stomach was starting to show signs of too many boozy lunches, and his hair had just one streak of grey running through the front. I used to run my fingers through it as he rested his head on my lap, his face warm against my thighs.

  I need to remember him like this. The man I loved, and who loved me. He was going to leave Fiona. I know, it’s what they all say, but he was. He didn’t love her, had fallen out of love with her years before our first night together, and she wasn’t interested in him either. A few months ago, we put in an offer on the house on the seafront. We’d been discussing paint colours for the living room and chosen curtains for the bedroom. I had even picked an estate agent to put my house on the market, and Richard had moved some money into our joint account for the solicitor’s fees. We’d had a plan, had discussed our future at length, and we were moving forward. Until the night he died, and everything came tumbling down.

  I don’t respond to Felix’s message. Instead, I block him, slamming my phone back onto the table and getting up for the first time in hours. The house is dark around me, the evening settling in, and I switch on the hall lamp to dispel the gloom. But nothing can remove the gloom that has settled around my shoulders, the shroud of grief I have worn since I found Richard that night, slumped over the steering wheel, blood trickling down his face.

  I go upstairs for a bath, squeezing a dollop of the citrus bubble bath Richard bought me for my birthday last year into the water. I light a few candles and go into my bedroom to collect my book. My hair hasn’t been washed in over a week, and my body suddenly feels dirty. I need to get clean. I need to get ready for the funeral. To say goodbye to Richard.

  I prop my book up on the bath shelf and pad back downstairs to pour a glass of wine. Richard used to love baths like this, luxuriating in the peace and quiet as we laid in the water together, my head on his chest, his knees resting against my thighs. This time I am alone, and I feel my heart clench as I lower myself into the water. The bubbles come up to my chin and I close my eyes, trying to remember the feeling of his arms around me.

  I drink the wine and read my book, forcing myself to focus on the words, but my mind keeps drifting. Almost three weeks ago, I lost the love of my life. When will I feel normal again? Will I ever? Or will this grief follow me around for the rest of my life? Being with Richard made me feel alive again, excited for the future, even more than I was in my twenties and thirties. He invigorated me, took me out of the routine I had found myself in, of the same meals on rotation every week, the silent house I came home to every day.

  I am pathetic, I think, sinking further down into the water. I had a life before Richard, of course I did. I had a husband once, and a son whom we loved dearly and lost at a heartbreakingly young age. I had friends, friends I’d go dancing with or share a takeaway curry and a bottle of wine with. Colleagues who took me out for lunch, and even the odd fling or two over the years. But I cannot shake the feeling that I have lost the most important thing in my life. That I am destined to remain alone. That I have nothing left.

  I watch the bubbles disappear as the water grows cold around me, and my body becomes visible once again. I look down in dismay at the saggy skin on my stomach, the wrinkles on the backs of my hands. Next year I will turn sixty, and I am reminded once again that I am alone. A sad, old, lonely woman.

  I spend the night on the sofa wrapped in a blanket, the television on mute, the images flickering across the screen the nearest thing to company. As the sky turns darker and the stars come out, I feel my resolve strengthen. I will go tomorrow. I will. Nobody can stop me from attending his funeral. Not Felix, that jumped-up little prick, and not his mother either. She knew I existed, she knew that Richard had fallen in love with someone else, and she tried to stop him from leaving. I heard her on the phone to him one day, begging him not to leave her.

  ‘Please, Richard,’ she said, her voice thick with tears. I saw anguish pass over Richard’s face and my stomach lurched. Don’t fall for it, I urged him silently. You know what she’s really like. But he remained firm. He was leaving, at some point in the near future, but she and the boys would be taken care of. She wouldn’t want for anything.

  That was his way. I have to remember that he was kind and generous, that he cared deeply about those around him. I remember the way his voice changed when he told me about his daughter, the one who went missing when she was a child, and the way he kept swallowing while he spoke, as if there was a lump in his throat. He told me about Skye, who had moved to France in her twenties and cut all contact a couple of years ago. My heart went out to him, then, at the pain in his eyes as he spoke of his lost daughters. One by force, one by choice.

  ‘What do you think happened to Saffy?’ I asked him, our hands clasped tightly together.

  He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t say, Ellie. But it was my fault. It’s all my fault.’

  It wasn’t his fault, I told him, cupping his face in my hands. Children went missing every day, it was a sad, horrible fact. Children go missing and die and leave their parents bereft. I still remember the day my son died, the cancer eating him from the inside, and my heart still aches for him. Richard had turned his back for a moment, for only a moment, and Saffy was gone, never to be seen again. He wept as I held him, and I felt my love for him grow in that moment.

  Poor Richard. Poor Saffy. And, yes, poor Fearne too. You never get over the loss of a child, I know that as much as anyone, and in a strange way I felt lucky that my son had been taken by leukaemia, an enemy we could see and fight, not a stranger on a beach, not the ghost who plucked Saffy from the shore and disappeared into thin air.

  5

  The Deceased

  Richard Asquith lies in the chapel of rest, his face serene, his hands folded over his chest. Fiona sits beside him, her right hand fiddling with the rings on her left hand. Her engagement ring flashes in the light and her hands still, one folded over the other on her lap. Her back is ramrod straight, her body held perfectly still as she stares down at the face of her husband. The room is quiet, the funeral director having left to give her a few moments with him, this man to whom she was married for so many years. Fiona needs more than a few moments to say what she wants to say. She needs to go back three weeks, to the day Richard died, to stop him from getting into that car. Death is an easy escape for him, she thinks, staring down at her husband. Too easy.

  ‘How could you?’ she hisses, her voice too loud in the silence. ‘How could you do this to me?’ But she knows the answer. Richard never loved her, not like he loved Fearne, his first wife. She knows that he only married her because of the children, because it was the honourable th
ing to do, and because Fearne had just thrown him out. She knows she was the second choice, and that, in the years since, he’d strayed more times than she could count. The latest fling was the longest, and Fiona could see the writing on the wall. He was going to leave her. He was going to walk out on the life they had built together, on his two sons and his grandchild. Tobias might have forgiven him in time; her youngest son has a kind heart, and always wants to see the best in people. But she knows Felix would never have spoken to him again, and neither would she. No, Fiona would not have let him get away with disgracing her like that, tearing her from the life she loves, selling the house from under her like he had with Fearne. Over her dead body. Or his.

  Yes, she’d known all about his plans with her. He was going to sell the house and buy that monstrosity near Porthtowan. He was going to walk out on her, leaving her penniless and unable to explain to her sons, to her friends, what had happened to bring her so low. She has no family to take her in like Fearne did, nowhere to run and nowhere to hide while he disgraced her entirely. It had been bad enough when Richard was visiting the same haunts with his new woman, her hanging off his arm and on his every word, just as Fiona had once done.

  It hurts to remember those days. The early days of bliss, when she was still secret and exciting. She had known Richard through his brother, Peter, who briefly lived with James when they were younger, but she hadn’t really taken notice of him until he moved back from Scotland and set up his business. Wealth suited Richard, that much was true. Though his parents had worked hard, Richard and his brother had grown up poor, and they had both learned very different lessons from it. Peter learned that he was better off accepting his lot; Richard learned to strive for more. And so Fiona noticed him, the shining star at a dinner party with mutual friends, Richard still young and fresh enough to be amazed at what his new lifestyle could give him.

  She’d loved him, once. He didn’t believe it by the end, but she had loved him with every fibre of her being. And though she’d known it was wrong, she had tried her best to take him from Fearne, to be the jewel in the crown of his new life. And it had worked, for a time. Despite his proclamations, and his apparent inability to use contraception, Richard was never a family man. Small children irritated him, the daily grind of cooking and cleaning and laundry bored him. He was like a puppy, always looking for the next exciting thing, and, every time, he would find it.

  Fiona watches her husband, half-wishing he would come back to life so she can kill him again.

  Richard’s son, Tobias, comes next, a tissue gripped in one hand. He’s too soft, Richard always said, he needs to toughen up. He’s not like Felix, a proper boy always running around and fighting and climbing. Toby preferred to play indoors, making up games with his stuffed animals, and one Christmas when he asked for a doll, Richard didn’t speak to him for a week.

  Toby remembers this, his fists clenching by his side. He thinks of his mother’s grief, and how he wishes he could take it away. He thinks of Felix and wonders if he will cope with the business alone, and whether he will stop trying to be so much like their father now. He thinks of his sister, travelling from France to attend their father’s funeral, and wonders what she will be like. She is ten years older than Toby, and, according to her Instagram, lives with her girlfriend in Brittany. He wonders what their father would have thought about having a gay child, and smiles.

  He thinks of Lexi, of how good she is. Too good for this family. She has been holding the fort at work since his father died, fielding all calls, quietly taking care of the business he and his brother now own. He wishes he could take her away, her and Leo, to save her from the toxicity. But she is bound to them now, and he can’t think of a way to untangle her. For all her faults, his mother loves her grandson, and besides, Toby knows that it was his father who was the problem. He wonders if they can begin to rebuild their lives, build a family they can be proud of, without Richard’s overbearing presence hanging over them. But it’s too late for that now. Too much water under the bridge.

  Toby will miss his father, he supposes. He will miss flipping him the bird as he boards a plane for Australia, his trust fund raided, the ties that bind him to this place and this family severed forever. He regrets that he will miss out on that.

  6

  The Daughter

  We step off the ferry together, rucksacks thrown over our shoulders, hair tangled and eyes watering. We find the hire car and I slide in behind the wheel, trying to remember to drive on the left-hand side of the road.

  Fleur turns to me in the passenger seat and places a hand on my arm. ‘We are going to our lodging,’ she says, and I smile at the old-fashioned word. I can almost see the checklist in her mind. This is how she keeps herself – and me – on track, with a clear plan of what will happen on any given day. ‘Where we will shower and find something to eat. Je meurs de faim!’

  I laugh. ‘You’re always bloody starving.’

  ‘Bloody,’ she repeats, shaking her head. ‘Five minutes back in England and you are already English again!’

  ‘You’d better get used to it. There will be lots of bloody hell and piss off and Scotch eggs.’

  ‘Scotch eggs?’ Fleur wrinkles her nose. ‘What is this?’

  I laugh again, turning on the engine and putting the car in gear. ‘Welcome to Angleterre, mon petit ami, land of the Scotch egg and Yorkshire puddings. You’ve got a lot to learn.’

  The satnav takes us down roads I haven’t travelled in years. I remember the last time I came to Cornwall, for the ten-year anniversary of Saffy’s disappearance. Mum decided at the last minute that she couldn’t face it, so I drove down alone. I had to go. I had to see the place where my sister had disappeared for one last time.

  It was the last time I saw my father in the flesh too, during that brief visit in June almost twelve years ago. Saffy would have turned twenty that year, and the loss hit me as I stepped onto the beach. It was warmer than the day she disappeared, the sun high and bright, the sky blue and cloudless. The beach wasn’t yet full of tourists – my father would never use the Cornish term emmets – and a small group was gathered along the shore. My dad turned towards me, one hand shielding his eyes, and his wife put up a hand to wave me over. Their two sons were kicking a ball around as if it was just a normal day at the beach for them. And maybe it was. They had never met Saffy, hadn’t loved her as I did. What was she to them anyway? Just a sister they’d never known.

  Dad seemed disappointed that I was alone; he had that look in his eyes that I had grown used to over the years. It was the same way Mum looked at me, her gaze focused on a point just over my shoulder as if waiting for Saffy to appear behind me, the question where is your sister? on the tip of her tongue. But this time, it wasn’t my sister he was searching for. He was looking for Mum, the ex-wife who could barely bring herself to utter his name.

  ‘Hello, Skye,’ Fiona said, a smile fixed to her face. She stepped forward as if to hug me, then appeared to change her mind and patted my shoulder awkwardly instead. I ignored her.

  ‘Good drive?’ Dad asked.

  I nodded. ‘It was fine. No traffic.’

  ‘What time did you leave?’

  I checked my watch. It was almost two o’clock. ‘About four I think. I stopped for coffee a few times.’

  ‘Hell of a journey,’ Dad said. ‘You still driving that little Focus?’

  That little Focus was his way of saying that fucking shitheap, but I refused to take money from him for a new one. It was his way; throw money at a problem and hope it goes away. I knew he still gave Mum money, despite me no longer living with her, and he paid my tuition fees, but that felt different somehow. I never saw the tuition money, never knew how much he’d sent to Mum and how much she’d subsequently given to me. Somehow, I could keep that separate from my desire to be independent of him. Of my mum, too. I lost my family the day I lost my sister, and I was still learning how to navigate the world alone, but I was determined to do it.

  I heard a
cry from behind us and turned to see the youngest of my half-brothers lying on the ground, his face pressed into the sand. Fiona took a step forward, but Dad held her back, his fingers tightening around her arm.

  ‘Get up, Tobias!’ he called. ‘Stop being such a pansy.’

  ‘Yeah, Tobias,’ his brother mocked. ‘Stop crying like a girl.’

  The way he said girl made my skin prickle. As if girls were somehow lesser than boys. As if being a girl was something to be ashamed of. The eldest, Felix, must have been about fourteen or fifteen, his pale skin dotted with acne, braces glinting on his teeth, and I felt a surge of hatred for him. Not for him as he was then, but for the man he would become, raised in my father’s image. In his shadow.

  I let Toby braid my hair that day, surprised by how much I enjoyed it. In a way, he reminded me of Saffy, of how we would take turns painting our nails or doing our hair, always making sure we matched. Toby looked at me, his eyes wide and bright, and in them I saw my sister. It was almost too much to bear, and I left soon after, getting back into my car and driving up to Bristol to stay with a friend.

  I shake myself as I follow the satnav’s directions across the Tamar and into Cornwall. Fleur stares at the shimmering river beneath us, one hand pressed against the window.

  ‘Welcome to Kernow,’ she reads from the sign, pronouncing it Ker-now.