The Exes' Revenge

by Jo Jakeman

  Phil always opened Naomi’s mail. Why shouldn’t he? If she objected, it was because she had something to hide. But this particular letter had been different. The handwriting was small and deep. Someone had taken great care over addressing the envelope. It wasn’t Naomi’s birthday, nor was it Christmas. It was obviously not a bill, nor nuisance junk mail from some company. It was personal. Intriguing. Dangerous.

  Of course, the claims in the letter might have been preposterous. Anyone could have made them without a shred of evidence to back them up. Phil wouldn’t have been doing his job as a boyfriend or a police officer if he hadn’t investigated further. So, in a way, he was protecting Naomi.

  The woman who wrote the letter lived over two hundred miles away, so he’d had to call in favors from another force. No one was more surprised than he was when it all checked out. Right age, right name, but, unfortunately, completely wrong for Naomi.

  The note said she’d been looking for Naomi for six years. Wondering, crying, lighting a candle on her birthday, telling her brother and sisters about her. Six years. What about the other years? What was she doing for over a decade before that? Not wondering where her firstborn was, that was for sure. Not imagining the childhood years she’d spent with her grandparents or the teenage years she’d spent in care. She could dress it up however she liked, but she had abandoned Naomi and it had been left to him to pick up the pieces.

  She said her name was Helen. It checked out on Naomi’s birth certificate. The father’s name was noticeably absent. Helen was settled now and would do anything to be reunited with her daughter. Well, she would, wouldn’t she? It was safe to crawl out of the woodwork now that Naomi didn’t need anything from her anymore.

  Naomi wasn’t the only one she’d had taken from her. To read her letter, you’d think this woman was blameless. Life had put her in a bad position, dealt her a terrible hand. She couldn’t help the past but, as God was her witness, she was ready to make amends—if Naomi would let her.

  Initially Phil had considered taking the credit for this woman’s reappearance. It would be the best gift that he could ever give Naomi.

  Ta-daaa, I’ve found your long-lost mother.

  Naomi would be forever in his debt. He would have done what no one else could. She’d be grateful at first—of that, there could be no doubt—but what if the woman turned out to be a money grabber or a sponger? Or, worse, what if she lived up to Naomi’s expectations?

  He was all Naomi had in the world. Until now. He had to consider his options because, after all, it didn’t just affect Naomi. Bringing someone else into the fold would mean turning his life upside down too.

  Phil had uncovered the basic facts. She’d changed her surname on more than one occasion, so it wasn’t a surprise that Naomi had hit dead end after dead end when searching for her. Married, divorced, married again. In some cases, the surname had changed without there being a marriage certificate to back it up. These types were always the same. Always running from something or someone.

  He’d had a couple of the lads from the local force go check her out for him. She had a skeletal figure, a hard face, and more tattoos than brains. She was living alone and claiming benefits. He thought of his own mother. Why couldn’t more women be like her? His mother had been a hard worker, not prone to womanly vapors or emotional outbursts. She was as strong as any man and twice as clever. If Naomi’s mum had been halfway like Mam, he would have made up the spare room himself. But she wasn’t, and the rational decision was to sever all ties with this woman as quickly as possible. He’d already left it too long and he was worried it was giving the woman hope.

  He took a pen and paper from the sideboard.

  Dear Mrs. Beresford,

  Sorry to write with disappointing news, but I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake. I am not the Naomi that you are looking for. My parents are alive and well, so I am quite certain that I am not your daughter. Please do not contact me again, as it has upset my mother greatly. Wishing you the best of luck with your ongoing search.

  Yours sincerely,

  Naomi

  CHAPTER 36

  8 days before the funeral

  “This doesn’t have to change a thing,” Naomi said.

  “I want him gone.” I couldn’t settle.

  I paced the living room, walking into the blackened and blistered hallway to look at the cellar door and then back to Ruby and Naomi.

  Ruby was standing by the window with her eyes glazed over, and Naomi was lying on her back smoking. I’d given up asking her to go outside. It was a small problem compared to everything else we were dealing with and, besides, the whole house still smelled of smoke from Saturday night’s fire.

  “Look, we have a plan. And I’ve not heard anything to make us change that. We take all the information we’ve collected and go to the police station with photos, dates, and times. It’s obvious we can’t trust Phillip. He will always seek to manipulate and control. That’s what men like him do.”

  “He’ll tell ’em we locked him up,” Naomi said, knocking ash into a disused coffee cup.

  “And we’ll tell them that it was self-defense after he tried to kill us. The evidence is all there if they care to look. And as for the first time I locked him in the cellar . . . well, it’s his word against mine.”

  “Ours,” said Ruby. “I’ll back you up. I’ll tell the police I had dinner with him on Friday, as planned, so he couldn’t have been here.”

  “Yeah,” Naomi chimed in. “I can vouch for that, and then we came round here to see you, what with Ruby not having seen you for so long, and Phil overpowered us and locked us in the cellar. Lucky we escaped. Rachel’s neighbor can vouch for timings of us getting out and the state of our faces. And the fact that you sent Alistair out of the country backs up how scared we were of him.”

  “That’s right,” said Ruby, picking up the story. “We all stayed together on Saturday night, knowing what a foul mood he was in, and woke up to find graffiti on the walls, the gas on, and then he poured petrol through the letter box. As far as we know, he scarpered and we thanked our lucky stars that we were alive. It’s not like we’re stretching the truth very far, darling.”

  “I couldn’t ask you to lie for me,” I said.

  “You didn’t,” Naomi said. “We offered. In fact, why don’t we go to the police now before any of us cave? I got to tell you, it’s bloody tempting to find out where me mum is, so let’s go give our statements now before I change my mind.”

  “No. I don’t want them to find him locked in my cellar. If we let him go in the morning, he’ll go straight to the hearing and I can clear out the cellar as if he’s never been in there. Right now, there’s nothing more important to him than clearing his name.”

  I watched the soft clouds blow by the window. They were in a hurry.

  “He must know we’ve got something planned,” said Naomi. “Perhaps if we tell him one of us is going to cave in tomorrow he’ll accept the fact that he has to stay put for a bit longer.”

  We sat in silence for a moment, wondering how much he knew and what we could get away with.

  “It’s not a bad idea,” I said eventually. “He doesn’t know that we were planning to let him go in the morning anyway. I think that we should at least get something else out of this. Naomi, you need the information more than I do. We’ll get him to tell you where to find your mum. The only thing we need to work out is how we can unchain him safely without having a repeat of what happened last time.”

  Ruby looked at me sideways. Was it my imagination, or did she look relieved?

  “Thanks, but I don’t know. Perhaps it should be you. It must be eating you up not knowing.”

  Naomi was trying to show how much she didn’t care about her mum, but she was transparent. She cared very much. I hadn’t known her for long and yet I knew how much she wanted to connect with her mother. The knowledge that she would gi
ve that up for me was a warm glow in my chest.

  “That bike lock has a combination code, right?” said Naomi.

  I nodded.

  “How about we hide a phone down there close enough for him to reach but not in plain sight. I reckon we take him some clean clothes, wrap the phone in a shirt or something. And then we get out of the house, leaving the doors unlocked, and call him. Tell him that we’ll text him the combination code if he tells us . . . you know . . . whatever.”

  I looked up at her. It might work.

  The three of us had spent only a few days together, yet it felt so much longer. We had reluctantly agreed we wouldn’t contact each other for a while. We didn’t want the police to think that we were plotting to bring Phillip down. As we’d had little contact in the past, it was unlikely the police would think this was part of a master plan. Though they were bound to be suspicious, we could honestly say that until a few days ago we hardly knew each other and it was only Phillip’s actions in the cellar that made us confess to each other how much we had lost because of him.

  As far as anyone else was concerned, we were nothing more than three ex-partners of the same man who couldn’t stand each other but had all suffered at his hands. Circumstances had thrown us together, but if anyone asked, they weren’t enough to keep us there.

  “Taxi’s here,” Ruby said. She sounded glad to be leaving.

  She embraced Naomi and me at the same time. It was an awkward tangle of arms that gave me a mouthful of her hair and crushed Naomi’s elbow into my breast.

  “Be wary of him,” she said. “And if the dogs turn up . . . ?”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll call you straightaway.”

  Ruby climbed up into the passenger side of the taxi and sat watching us for a long minute. Suddenly I didn’t want her to leave. I felt tears come to my eyes. We had shared something life-changing, something that we might never speak of again.

  Naomi linked her arm through mine as the taxi disappeared into the hazy afternoon, and neither of us mentioned the tears falling down our faces.

  CHAPTER 37

  8 days before the funeral

  There was no guarantee that Phillip would deliver on his end of the promise. But that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he believed he was getting one over on us. Our time spent with Phillip hadn’t been entirely wasted. We’d learned about duplicity from the best.

  I took a cup of tea into the garden. It was a golden evening with far-reaching wisps of cloud. I settled into the tree swing and swayed gently. Perhaps I should have been worried about what tomorrow would bring, but it felt like a fresh start for all of us. Whatever happened to Phillip now would be up to the courts to decide. We were finally standing against him and he would never have the same kind of power over us again. The three of us had survived the worst he had to throw at us and we’d found that there were others who’d suffered more than us because of Phillip’s nature. Women who had suffered worse abuse, and it was as important to get justice for them as it was for us.

  Ruby was finally able to move on from Phillip. She could stop feeling responsible for him and let herself love another person—not only her dogs. Naomi was on the cusp of a new life. If Phillip delivered what he’d promised, she would meet her mother for the first time. And she knew now that, though it might be twenty years later than she would have liked, her mum wanted to be with her.

  Naomi came out into the yard dragging a case behind her and with her jacket slung over her arm.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “I’m off,” she said.

  I placed my cup on the ground and got up.

  “Why? What’s happened?”

  “Nothing.” She smiled at me. “You’ve been dead good to me, and you didn’t need to be. If anyone deserves answers, it’s you. I’m not going to be the one to let him go. If my mum is trying to find me, then she’s out there somewhere and there’ll be a record of her. She’s not going to be in hiding, is she? Never underestimate the power of social media for tracking people down. Of course, he could have been talking bollocks all along, in which case me letting him go wouldn’t change anything anyway.”

  “But . . . you’re leaving? You don’t have to go,” I said.

  “I do. I’m not going to give you the chance to change my mind. Besides, we’re only guessing he’s going to go straight to the tribunal in the morning. He might go back home, and I want to get there first and get my things out. I want to get photos of the broken table and the blood on the carpet too, to show the police fella tomorrow. What was his name? Chris, was it?”

  I nodded.

  “But where will you go?” I asked, with my hand on her arm to stop her from leaving.

  She shrugged. “Anywhere I like. I’ve got his credit card, so for tonight, at least, it’ll be a fancy hotel. I’ll check in from time to time so I know when it’s safe to come back. Now come ’ere and give me a hug.”

  I held her tightly. She dropped her bags and returned the hug. I didn’t want to let her go but my tears wouldn’t make her stay.

  “Get out of here,” I said with a smile.

  “You’ll call me, yeah? If there’s a problem tonight or any night?”

  I nodded. She leaned toward me again and gave me another squeeze. I watched as she disappeared through the gate and I stood and listened as she started her car and drove off.

  And then I was alone with him.

  I walked inside. The house was quiet without Ruby and Naomi in it. I opened the front door and looked out. I don’t know what I was hoping to see. But, whatever it was, it wasn’t there. It struck me that I was without a car. I didn’t know what Phillip had done with it. I would have to rethink how I was going to get to the police station tomorrow.

  I locked the door and walked from room to room. The house was a mess. Empty cups. Discarded socks. A book facedown with its spine bent. The ghosts of a normal life.

  I wiped the table, I loaded the dishwasher, I even put in a load of laundry, and when I’d run out of anything else to do I sat at the table and allowed myself to remember.

  The morning after the accident played in my head as if I were viewing it through the fog. It loomed without a specific size or face. It was an undisclosed mass that blocked out the sun and stopped me forging onward.

  The accident had nearly killed me. My pelvis had been crushed, my right leg broken, and two ribs had pierced my lung. Lucky to be alive, they had said, but I didn’t agree. When I awoke inside the pristine white walls, the first thing I knew was not where I was or what had happened, but that my baby was gone and the pain was more than the morphine could ever touch.

  A thin tube held my hand to a drip that was tip-tapping above my head. Another tube ran beneath the covers into a bottle to collect urine. A pale blue gown was over my front but wasn’t tied at my back and I didn’t care. The foot of the bed was at an angle to match that of the head and I looked away as they injected something into the tube affixed to the back of my hand—apparently to help keep blood clots at bay. Like I cared.

  Phillip hadn’t left my side for forty-eight hours. We clung to each other under the umbrella of the “there-theres” and the “one days.”

  I’d lain in that field for five hours. A late-night reveler on his way home, stopping to pee in the hedge, had spotted my shoe hanging on a low branch. When he looked closer, he saw the other shoe still attached to my foot. Thinking he had found a dead body, he called for help. The nurses said I owed him my life, but I couldn’t find it within myself to be thankful.

  He visited me in the hospital, a bunch of supermarket flowers in the crook of his arm. They made quite a fuss of him. Phillip shook his hand and the doctors slapped him on the back.

  “Right place at the right time,” he said, but I couldn’t look at him.

  He left. They all did eventually. Shift change, lunch times, their lives
going on around me as I lay immobile. Silently suffering. Time ticking by, taking me further away from her. They say time’s a great healer. They lie.

  CHAPTER 38

  7 days before the funeral

  The night had passed into the hour before morning, when secrets unfolded and lies were covered up. Birds were beginning their songs of freedom and joy at the sight of the lightening skies. I sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee. It was strange how calm I felt.

  I refilled my coffee cup, made Phillip one too, and then went down into the cellar to wake him. Like a fearful child, he’d slept with the light on.

  I stood over him. Most people looked angelic when they slept. Fluttering eyelashes on smooth cheeks giving an air of serenity and purity—but not Phillip. His face was chiseled from granite, with a lifetime of disapproval etched between his brows. It wouldn’t have been out of place between the gargoyles and stone sprites that adorned the squat church where we wed. It had been months since I’d studied that face. Strong nose. Full lips. Square chin. To those who didn’t know, he looked like a savior, my knight in shining armor. But I’d seen his eyes when the mask slipped and I knew the devil lived in his soul.

  I watched him wake slowly. He jolted when he saw me and forced his eyes wide. He sat up, yawned, and took the mug from me.

  “No milk?” he asked.

  “Haven’t been shopping.”

  I placed the folded-up clothes, with mobile phone in the trouser leg, on the back of the sofa.

  “You want to know, then?” he asked with a gradual smile. “I knew you would.”

  I took a deep breath and considered him. His skin was sallow; a few days out of the sun was all it took for him to lose that healthy outdoor look that was part of his charm. His teeth were yellowing and I could see every line on his face. I’d mistakenly thought his tired face and thinning frame had been because of cancer, but it had been the stress of being suspended. I should have known.