The Strangers We Know

by Pip Drysdale

  ‘So can you run us through what happened on the night in question?’

  I nodded. ‘I’d kicked him out, dumped his clothes in his car, but when I got home he was there. All his things were back in their spots. I wanted to talk to him about it but he was on the phone and he was trying to get his computer unlocked, ignoring me. And I was so angry, you know. I just lost it. I told him I was going to tell his mother about it, about the cheating, and then we were fighting and I was screaming. His hand was over my mouth and …’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I just wanted to get away from him. I scratched him. And then I felt bad and so I ran out of the house. I wasn’t planning to be out all night but I just wanted to get away. It’d all gone so badly, so quickly. I’d always thought we were so happy, you know?’

  Holland nodded.

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, looking down at my hands. I was picking at my nail polish. That looked guilty and so I stopped. ‘I thought he’d call me or come after me. Try to fix it. But he didn’t. And I was upset. So I went to my friend’s house.’

  ‘So you’re saying Oliver was alive when you left the house?’ Her eyes were boring into me and I could feel my face flush.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. But I suddenly felt ill because I understood on a very deep level that I was being questioned over my husband’s murder. My husband who was alive this time three days ago.

  ‘And this friend, is this Tess Simmons?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘What time would you say you got to Tess?’

  Why was she asking me this? She must have already asked Tess the exact same question. Was she performing her own little polygraph test? Assessing my ability to tell the truth?

  ‘Around 8,’ I said. ‘Maybe 8:15.’

  ‘And what time did you leave your home?’ she asked.

  ‘Around seven-ish I guess. I’m not sure.’

  ‘That’s interesting. There wasn’t any roadwork in the area that night, and it wasn’t rush hour. That journey should have taken you thirty-five minutes. Forty-five, tops. So why did it take you so long to get there?’

  ‘I went for a walk. I needed to think. I thought we might make up.’ Something twisted inside me because it was all true. I could feel my yearning for him as I stood on that bridge, the cold wind whipping my hair. How different things might have been if he had come after me. If I had gone back.

  ‘Did you call Oliver that night? Try to make up?’ she asked. And I knew from her expression she’d already checked his call log and knew that, no, I had not.

  ‘No. He was the one who cheated on me. Not vice versa. I expected him to call. And when he didn’t I was hurt but I didn’t think for a moment he was in any danger.’

  ‘And then what happened, Charlie?’ she asked, lips pursed as if to say: Go on, tell us another lie.

  ‘And then the next morning I got a message from our neighbour saying the police were looking for me. So that’s why I went home. To talk to you.’ I let out a deep breath, the memory of that morning – police cars, blue and white do-not-cross tape, an ambulance siren, me sobbing on that park bench – played in my mind.

  ‘But when I got there, I just froze. I knew something big had happened because I could see the police in the window of our flat and I didn’t know what to do. I panicked. And then I saw a body coming out of our flat and I knew. So I … I just left.’

  ‘You knew it was Oliver?’ she asked.

  I nodded. ‘I could see his hand and his wedding ring, and the sleeve of the navy jumper he’d had on the night before.’

  She made a note.

  ‘You could see all this from where you were standing?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘So you were quite close?’

  ‘Yes, I told you, I was planning on talking to you. Until I saw that. Then I got scared.’

  ‘And when you left, where did you go?’ she asked.

  ‘First I went to my ex’s house – I still had a key – because I could see from his Instagram that he was away. Then later I saw he was coming home from the airport so I went to a friend’s house.’ I paused for a moment. I needed her to remember the next bit. For it to stand out in her memory. ‘Her name is Brooke Shaw.’

  Oh, the relief to see her scribble that name down. To hear the sound of her pen pulling across paper.

  ‘Charlie, would you say you have a temper?’

  ‘No,’ I said, frowning. ‘I’d say like anyone I fight back when I’m terrified, but I don’t have a temper.’

  Her eyes narrowed. I wasn’t sure if she was talking about the thing that happened when I was sixteen – whether it was on record somewhere – or whether it was just a general question.

  ‘I’m not stupid. I know how it looks. We fought. I am the beneficiary of his will. Then he turns up dead. Of course you think maybe it was me, but it wasn’t. I know what happened: somebody set me up.’

  She looked at Kowalski and he looked back at her. They didn’t believe me.

  Charlie, just hold tight. They just need to read those emails.

  ‘I think it was about something to do with his business,’ I said, pausing to take a breath. This might seem counter-intuitive, leading them down a path that wasn’t Brooke, but when those emails came in I needed them to immediately discount me as a potential source. This – having them recall me suggest an entirely different scenario – was the only way I could see to do that.

  ‘Oliver had admitted that he worked with dangerous people sometimes. They even broke into our old flat and stole his computer. It was after that he wanted life insurance so, I don’t know, I just made the assumption it might have something to do with that. Do you think I’m in danger?’

  I waited for that new information to sink in. But she was looking closely at me now. Frowning. What was she thinking? Then her eyes were back on her notepad. She was making a note and saying: ‘Okay, well, we’re in the process of gaining access to Oliver’s work computer, so we’ll make sure to look through for anything like that.’ But her voice came out a little too molasses for me to believe she was taking me seriously.

  ‘You said whoever broke in took Oliver’s laptop?’ Her words came out slowly, like she was thinking it through as she spoke.

  ‘Yes. That was all they took. It was weird. But the police said it was probably just some junkies looking for things that were easy to sell. I’m not so sure though. Oliver was so jumpy after that and insisted we move.’

  DCI Holland opened the folder sitting on the table in front of her and pulled out an image. It was of Oliver’s bronze Ganesha. There was blood on it.

  ‘Do you recognise this?’

  The walls closed in on me as my mind recreated the scene.

  Brooke holding that statue and hitting him with it. Blood. I clenched my eyes shut to stop the images but that just made them more vivid. And then a realisation: my prints were on that.

  She’d made sure of it.

  She’d had me pick it up.

  My underarms grew damp with sweat. The police were going to find my fingerprints on that weapon. And Brooke? Well, she’d have used gloves, wouldn’t she?

  All these thoughts zinged through my mind on the inside but on the outside all I did was nod and say: ‘It’s Oliver’s.’ My voice came out broken.

  Then came another picture.

  It was a t-shirt. It was white, with the Rolling Stones’ signature red lips on the front. And there was a dark stain at the bottom.

  Blood.

  My breath caught in my throat. Because that t-shirt was mine.

  ‘Do you recognise this t-shirt?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. A bit confused. Stay calm, Charlie. But it was hard to stay calm when the other thoughts racing around my head were things like: Brooke must have taken that when she was in the house planting that garter belt, when she decided Ganesha was a good weapon and she needed me to hold it … What else was coming?

  I needed them to see those emails.r />
  And I needed that to be enough.

  ‘Do you know where we found this?’ She was talking about the t-shirt now.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘We found it in a neighbour’s rubbish bin, Charlie.’

  ‘I don’t know why it was there.’

  DCI Holland smiled, a dark smile.

  I glanced at Kowalski, watching me. He knew where this was going and my throat grew tight.

  ‘Charlie, let me tell you what I think. I think we’re going to find your fingerprints on that statue.’

  ‘Well it was in my house. I have held it. So yes, you might.’

  ‘And Oliver’s blood was found on this t-shirt. And there was no forced entry. Yet the house was messed up to make it look like a burglary.’

  ‘Maybe someone had keys,’ I snapped.

  ‘Well, did anyone else have keys to your home, Charlie?’

  ‘I don’t know. I lost my keys last week but then they turned up. Someone could have copied them.’ I knew it sounded like I was grasping.

  ‘Why would anyone do that?’

  ‘Well, if they wanted to kill Oliver they would.’

  She frowned. Then came a meaningful exhale.

  ‘Charlie, let me tell you what I think happened. Perhaps you and Oliver had a turbulent relationship. You might have been a bit scared of him. Might have bought a taser to protect yourself.’

  Dizziness overcame me as I wondered if she had already seen my search history at work: How to know if your husband is cheating and Where to buy a taser in London.

  ‘And then one day you found out Oliver was cheating. You had an argument. It got out of hand. He hurt you, you scratched him and reached for your taser so he couldn’t hurt you anymore. You used it, but badly, and he was still coming at you. And so you reached for the closest thing you could. That statue. You hit him and maybe you didn’t intend to kill him. But when you realised he was dead you panicked. You knew you had to get out of there. And so you texted your friend Tess to tell her you were coming over and tried to make it look like a break-in.’ She paused here. ‘Except you’re not really a criminal, are you, Charlie? And so you didn’t know how to do it convincingly. You forgot to break a window. To leave footprints beneath it. To make sure the timelines match up. All the things that might have made us believe that story. Now you’re trying so hard to cover your tracks—’

  ‘No!’ I yelled. The tears were coming again.

  ‘My guess is that was why you went back to your flat the night after Oliver died. Because you’d forgotten something, hadn’t you, Charlie? What was it? What were you worried we’d find? Why did you wipe his hard drive clean?’

  I sat dead still, staring at her. This was new information and I had no idea why Brooke had done that. But Holland was staring back at me now, not even blinking. I was about to buckle under the pressure. I opened my mouth to speak, to tell her everything: about Brooke and the spreadsheet and the tracking device, but the moment before the sound formed, I stopped. I couldn’t. It sounded bogus. Like an excuse. And I couldn’t prove any of it. Not yet. Not until those emails came in.

  DCI Holland had the Ganesha with my fingerprints on it, my t-shirt with Oliver’s blood on it and a neighbour stating we’d had a screaming match on the night he died. And the only proof I had was out there, somewhere in London, at the bottom of a Longchamp bag.

  3.39 pm

  My holding cell looked just like the one I’d seen on Google, except the sliver of bed was covered in plastic fabric in a darker shade of blue. The floor was slate grey and had mop marks running over it, like someone had done a half-assed job. There was an opaque, barred window on the wall facing the door and a CCTV camera watching my every move from the upper corner of the room by the door. If I hadn’t been on the verge of an anxiety attack when I walked in here and heard Kowalski shut the door close behind me, I certainly would be now.

  I sat down on the hard bed and all I could hear was my breathing.

  Why were they taking so long?

  Had something gone wrong with the email?

  Had Brooke’s wifi bowed out right at the crucial moment when I pressed send? But then, if that were the case, they wouldn’t have been there in her sent files when I went to delete them.

  No, I had to believe that soon someone would knock on that door and tell me this was all a big mistake.

  I lay on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, running the past week like a movie through my mind. The dating app. The wish bracelet. The police cars. The do-not-cross police tape, that tracking device …

  Had Brooke planned on removing that tracker from my bag at some point? At Pilates perhaps? Or was she just going to leave it there? Allow me to show it to DCI Holland and claim someone was following me. Have DCI Holland put it down to some desperate attempt to shift the blame? Because I doubted Brooke still had that app on her phone.

  But something else was bothering me about my interview with DCI Holland too. A lot of things were bothering me, actually, but this didn’t make sense at all: why would Brooke have gone back to our flat to wipe his computer drive? I could understand why she might have wanted to look through it for evidence, to prove what he’d done to Alyssa, sure, but why delete everything?

  I rolled over onto my side and stared at the blank wall.

  There was nothing I could do but wait.

  Episode 9

  THURSDAY, 14 JUNE 2018 (6.04 AM)

  I woke up early, adrenaline pulsing through me, a white light coming in through the opaque window. But it was a relief to wake up: I’d been dreaming about that morning in the park. The smell of cut grass. Oliver’s wedding ring winking in the morning sun. The wet park bench. The ambulance siren. My heart was thumping.

  I’d been in the holding cell overnight so I was almost 24 hours into the maximum 96 they could hold me for. I sat up, reached for the bottle of water I’d been given before bed and took a sip. How had I ended up here?

  Did I make all the wrong choices?

  Should I have gone to the police straight away? But no, if I’d done that even I wouldn’t know the truth. Brooke would still be just a girl I met in Pilates. And those emails wouldn’t be out there somewhere, about to land on The Evening Standard editor’s desk. Even if DCI Holland ignored them, I still had that to hold onto. The information wouldn’t, couldn’t, go unseen.

  I wondered if they’d spoken to Josh. Holland had asked for his contact details around the same time she asked for Brooke’s. That was just before the lovely Kowalski showed me to my new ‘room’. I took another swig of water. Tess would be manic by now. Justin would be going ballistic – I hadn’t replied to any of his texts. I thought about the day I went to meet him, of how I stood in line at the post office to buy a manila envelope just so he’d help me. I wish I’d seen his face when he opened it and found my headshot and script inside …

  Wait.

  Ba-boom. Ba-boom. Ba-boom.

  Now I was thinking of another envelope.

  An orange one.

  From Easter.

  The one we’d left with Mum and Dad.

  Oliver’s will.

  What had Oliver said about it? ‘My will, and other things you’ll need if something ever happens to me.’ Well, something had happened to him.

  What if the emails I’d sent were not my only hope?

  What if he’d left me something to find in there? He’d known he was in danger – the break-in, the life insurance, the will – I knew that now, so what if he’d left something to help me out if, you know, the worst thing happened? Proof. Maybe the emails Brooke had sent to Hornsby Private Equity, the ones her lawyer told her she needed to stop sending, were in there. Something to prove motive.

  If he knew it was her, there was a possibility. It was slight, but it existed.

  I needed to at least try. But how could I get to it?

  One phone call.

  I was supposed to get one phone call, right?

  There was a buzzer by the door. Kowalski had explai
ned it to me before the heavy metal clanged shut. When I pressed it a voice said ‘Are you in need of assistance?’

  ‘I’d like to make a phone call please,’ I said.

  I needed to call my in-case-of-emergency person.

  8.47 am

  I didn’t know if Tess would find anything that would help me, but I knew that if anyone could do it, she could. I lay there in my cell, staring at the stark ceiling. No music. No Netflix. No view out the window. Just stale air to breathe, and my imagination to keep me company. The same series of thoughts on a continual loop.

  First I thought of our phone call.

  I’d waited until 8.30 am, when I knew she’d be at work and then called her there. Her mobile number was one of the only ones I had committed to memory, but Tess never picked up calls from unfamiliar numbers. And so, by calling her at the office I could at least leave a message with the receptionist and tell her where I was. It would be more reliable than hoping Tess listened to her voicemail.

  But that day Tess picked up.

  ‘Tessa Simmons,’ she’d said, in a very grown-up voice and my breath had caught at the sound of it.

  ‘Tess,’ I started, my voice cracking, ‘it’s me.’

  ‘Charlie?’ her tone a few tones higher and frantic.

  ‘Yeah, I’m—’

  ‘Where are you?’ she interrupted. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m at Charing Cross Police Station. They’re holding me for questioning.’

  Beat.

  ‘What? Do you have a lawyer? Wait, I’ll get someone from the office to come down. Vince can probably do it. I’ll ask him.’

  ‘Tess. No. There’s something I need you to do first.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Oliver left an envelope with Mum and Dad. He said it was his will but I think there might be something in there. Can you go get it first?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Charlie, do not answer any more questions before Vince gets there. Do you understand?’

  I nodded and said: ‘Yes.’

  But now I was wondering if Mum and Dad knew what had happened … ‘Can you tell them I’m okay,’ I said. ‘If they ask?’