by Louise Voss
Sighing, I put away my computer and got off the bed, stripping off my work clothes and getting into sweatpants, Uggs and a long-sleeve t-shirt. Suddenly my unease developed into full-scale paranoia, everything piling up on top of me; him password-protecting his computer, hearing someone on the radio who sounded exactly like him, the memory of someone sneaking around in our house – even his vagueness about the clinical trial. It just felt that there was more to it than the confusion of a man recently diagnosed with dementia.
Was this simply my way of trying to rationalise a situation that defied rationality? Probably. But I knew Ed. I knew the sideways tilt of his eyes when he was hiding something. Perhaps the diagnosis had triggered something else in him, something he needed to deal with. I thought of the message I kept getting on my laptop, saying that my start-up disk was nearly full. If Ed’s brain was his hard drive, and the Pick’s was forcing him to delete data, maybe some kind of pre-deletion memory shuffle had brought something up in him, something he badly wanted to keep hidden?
I hesitated, checking my watch. He had only been gone for twentyfive minutes. I probably had time … and he’d have to ring the doorbell to get back in anyway, as his keys were on the hook by the front door.
I ran downstairs, took a flat-headed screwdriver out of the toolbox we kept under the stairs, then galloped back up to the landing, stopping to pick up the long pole in the corner. I fitted the hooked end of it into the catch of the trap door of the loft, pulling the ladder down in one big, squeaky heft. The metal steps creaked as I climbed up and switched on the light just inside the hatch.
The loft looked untouched – Ed probably hadn’t even set foot up here since we moved in, but I hadn’t taken any chances. I looked around and found the tiny chalk mark I’d made on the wall above the correct floorboard. It was still there, so faint it was ghostly.
I took the screwdriver out of my pocket and set to work. I’d always known it was risky, bringing the box file with me when we bought the lock-keeper’s cottage, but it was my personal proof of his innocence, and important to me because of it.
I wanted to look at it again now to remind myself of this; to remind me that we’d faced other terrible obstacles to our marriage and overcome them, like we would have to overcome this one.
I prised up the floorboard and slid my hand in, closing my fingers immediately on the file and edging it out sideways from where it had been resting on its pillow of yellow loft insulation. It was grey with dust, no other fingerprints visible on its surface, I noted with relief.
I clicked open the folder’s hard cover. If Ed had ever seen its contents … it didn’t bear thinking about. It was a betrayal that he would never forgive. There were a few photocopies of newspaper articles about Shelagh’s disappearance, and a torn-out feature from a glossy women’s magazine that Ed, somewhat ill-advisedly, had agreed to about eighteen months after Shelagh vanished. He was sitting in their front room looking mournful and thinner, but slightly jowly, perched on the padded arm of the sofa in front of the stripped pine door of the first-floor living room.
I read the copy with fresh eyes, and all I could think was how hollow Ed’s words were about the bitter loss of his beloved wife, when by then he had already unofficially proposed to me. How, at night, he would slide under the duvet and giggle while he licked me and ran his hands up and down my thighs.
He’d done that on the day of that interview, I remembered.
The article was a weird, crappy mixture of home-improvement porn and heart-wrenching editorial:
‘Ed Naismith is a broken man. The only thing that has kept him going – apart from his beloved son Ben, of course – are the renovations on his beautiful Victorian villa in East Molesey, one of Surrey’s best-kept secrets; a conservation area within walking distance of Hampton Court Palace. ‘It was our dream,’ he says, as he shows us around sadly. ‘We were always going to do it up together, so I felt I had to finish it, in Shelagh’s memory. It’s what she would have wanted.’
And what a renovation! Naismith has clearly channelled all his grief into making every detail perfect. He proudly talks me through everything he’s done to fill the lonely months since Shelagh’s tragic disappearance, from sanding floors to laying quarry tiles in the refitted kitchen. The only thing remaining untouched are the beautiful original pine doors, albeit now adorned with pottery doorknobs sourced from a village in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco…’
Good grief. Who wrote this shite? I tossed it to one side and looked through everything else, things that could either have been romantic keepsakes from the heady early days of our relationship, or painstaking scraps of potential ‘evidence’ to reassure myself that I wasn’t about to marry a murderer.
It all seemed like a lifetime ago now.
Checking my watch again, I decided that I’d seen enough. There was no point in keeping the folder any longer – best that I burned it. It had done its job and convinced me that he really was innocent. Any weird stuff going on now was either in my own imagination, or a consequence of his illness. He wasn’t trying to hide anything from me.
Sometimes I felt like I was the one losing the plot. All these crazy paranoid thoughts jumping out at me from behind closed doors, when all Ed needed was my support and love. But would it have been easier, if it hadn’t been for all the drama around Shelagh’s disappearance? I had no way of knowing.
It was getting to me.
I was about to put everything back in when a faded Polaroid caught my eye, and I picked it up by its thick plastic corner. It was a shot of the interior of Ed and Shelagh’s East Molesey house before the renovations, taken from the first-floor landing that led to the living room. I remembered now where I’d found it – in the filing cabinet on a search of Ed’s office in the old house. I had only dared steal it at the time because it had fallen out of the ‘Home Renovations’ hanging file and had been lying on the floor of the metal cabinet drawer; I’d taken it because something bothered me about it, although I hadn’t known what.
Then it suddenly came to me – nine years later than it ought to have done. I snatched up the magazine article and re-read the sentence: ‘The only thing remaining untouched are the beautiful original pine doors.’ And yet, in the Polaroid in front of me, those same doors, pre-renovation, were thickly painted with white gloss.
I stared and stared at it, gooseflesh sweeping up and down my body. No, I thought. That’s ridiculous. I’m adding two plus two and making ten. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Ed was innocent then, and innocent now.
So why did I feel so uneasy all of a sudden? I’d gone into the loft to reassure myself; thought I’d succeeded – but now I was even more worried.
12
The drilling of the doorbell made me jump so hard that I bit my tongue. I shoved the Polaroid into the back pocket of my sweatpants, slammed the folder shut and shoved it back under the floorboards, my fingers trembling as I wedged the loose board back into place. The bell rang again, more insistently. I grabbed the large blanket storage bag I kept our winter clothes in and hurled it down the ladder before shinning down it and racing to the front door.
‘Sorry!’ I said as I opened it. ‘I was up in the loft getting the jumpers down. How was your walk? You look better for it!’
Ed’s cheeks and nose were ruddy and his eyes did look brighter. He even smiled at me as he stepped into the house.
‘I’ll make us a cup of tea,’ he announced, shrugging off his coat and heading for the kettle. ‘It’s getting parka out there.’
He must have been making a mental association with the coat, which was a fur-hooded parka. I followed him into the kitchen, not bothering to correct him, pausing instead to think about my next words.
‘Ed – I just tried to check your emails to see if you’d had any information about that medical trial you mentioned, but I couldn’t get into your laptop. Why did you put a password on it?’
Ed tilted his head to one side, considering the question as though it required a tri
partite explanation. He surely couldn’t have any objection to me looking at his emails. At least he’d never had before.
I was going to say that we had no secrets from each other, but I’d have been lying. I thought of the folder under the loft floor and mentally shuddered.
‘I did put a password on it,’ he conceded, getting mugs down.
‘Yes I know. But why? And what is it?’
I picked cat hair off my sweatpants, affecting nonchalance.
‘I don’t remember.’
‘What – you don’t remember why you did it, or what the password is?’
‘Either. Someone on the radio said I should. In case it got stolen.’
‘Oh.’
So much for that, then. The kettle boiled and he poured water on the teabags. I wondered how long he’d be able to continue making tea, before I was afraid of him scalding himself, or putting a plugged-in kettle into a bowl of dishwater, or any of a million other disastrous things he could do…
‘Aren’t you going to work today?’ he asked.
I sighed. ‘I’ve already been in. You followed me in on the bus and punched Alvin, then the fire brigade and the police came. You’ve just given a statement to a policewoman who gave you a warning, but Alvin isn’t going to press charges.’
He wheeled around, teaspoon in hand. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh fuck.’
‘Don’t worry. Could’ve been worse.’
I remembered those words later that same night, when things got a lot worse.
We went to bed early, exhausted after our long and very awful day. The wind was whisking along the river, stirring the black surface into waves that slapped harshly up against the lock walls. I could hear it as I lay on my left side spooning up to Ed’s warm bulk, in a fug of the lavender oil I shook onto my pillow every night to help me sleep. Ed had dropped off immediately, but I couldn’t relax.
It was almost midnight, and I was five chapters into an audiobook I was listening to on my phone. Ed had wriggled away from me and turned onto his back but at least he wasn’t snoring.
Finally I could feel myself beginning to slide gradually under as I was blearily aware of missing words, then sentences, then paragraphs – until a sudden roar from Ed shocked me back into immediate wakefulness. Then came a searing, whooshing pain in my right ear as he slammed his hand down on the side of my head.
I leaped out of bed, dancing around and clutching my ear in pain, seeing bright stars dancing with me in the blue-black darkness of the bedroom. ‘OW!’
‘What?’ Ed sat up, disgruntled, as though it was me who had disturbed his slumbers.
‘You hit me!’
‘Of course I didn’t, you silly bitch. I was asleep!’ he roared.
Ed had never called me a silly bitch before. It reminded me of the night on the boat when April had got chilli in Mike’s eyes and he’d called her something similar. I hadn’t realised how hurtful it was.
‘Don’t you EVER call me that again,’ I yelled back. I got back into bed and curled up on the edge of the mattress as far away from him as I could get, waiting for an apologetic hand or word to soothe me. But instead, my side of the mattress suddenly sagged as he rolled back towards me, quick as a flash, and gripped my throat, squeezing hard.
‘Ed!’ I tried to shriek as he strangled me, but it came out more of a croaky ‘Eee’. His mouth was by my ear, his breath hot and stale like a stranger’s in an alley. I scissored my legs wildly, flailing to try and get him off me, but he put his full weight on me, incapacitating me, leaning hard on my left shoulder.
‘You be very careful, Lynn,’ he said, clearly and concisely into my left ear as I choked, not a hint of the hesitation that had characterised his speech patterns for the past few months. ‘You know who I am. You know what I’m capable of when I want something. Don’t you?’
I moaned. His hair tickled the side of my face and, unbidden and unwelcome, I felt a Pavlovian stab of desire from all the times that his body had been on top of me, whispering in my ear. Then he squeezed harder and all lust vanished, replaced by thousands more twinkling stars behind my closed eyelids. ‘I’m watching you,’ he whispered, the low timbre of his voice even more sinister than when he’d shouted.
Then as quickly as he’d attacked me, he rolled away again, leaving me coughing and rubbing my throat, stunned, both literally and emotionally.
The narrator of my audiobook droned on as I got unsteadily out of bed and staggered into the spare room, too shocked to cry.
13
We didn’t mention it in the morning. Ed was bright and loving, bringing me a cup of tea – tepid, horrible; he clearly hadn’t let the kettle boil – and not commenting on the fact that I hadn’t slept in bed with him.
I had barely slept, full stop. I had purple bruises around my throat that I managed to hide with a polo-neck black jumper and my head was throbbing. What he had said last night, on top of the thought I’d had on finding the Polaroid, replayed themselves on a loop through my brain. It must have been the disease … he didn’t know what he was saying … he did know … he was hiding something from me … I was in danger … of course I wasn’t in danger, it was Ed … but which Ed? The Ed I loved and wanted to be with forever, or the Ed who might have killed his first wife? I ought to have gone to the police then, or at least confided in someone to flag up Ed’s unusual behaviour … just in case…
But I couldn’t. Because that would open a whole other can of worms.
The same sort of thing happened for the next four nights. Ed drifted straight off to sleep and within minutes came the shout and the attack. If he didn’t hit my head, he punched me hard in the shoulder or stomach as if defending himself in a nightclub brawl. I tried putting pillows down at the bottom of the bed and sleeping top-to-toe, but that didn’t help either; it was as if he knew. On the fourth night, he kicked me so hard in the hip that I fell out of bed and banged my head on the wooden floor. Building a barricade of pillows down the middle of the mattress made no difference either, he seemed to know where I was and his punches and kicks always found me, until I went to bed every night rigid with tension. Sometimes it happened two or three times in the night until I was unable to even begin to think about falling asleep.
I went back to work, apologetically, sheepishly – but Alvin couldn’t have been nicer about it. I offered to resign but he pooh-poohed it immediately, and Sandy and Margaret both went out of their way to be kind to me, so I guess Alvin had filled them in too. Nothing was ever mentioned about it again, at least not in my hearing. But they all looked at me with concern and pity, and I hated it.
At times I felt like I hated Ed, too. He was always so defensive about it at the time, the horrible, dark night-time, although by morning he was tearful and contrite when he noticed my bruises.
On the fifth morning, I was making breakfast in my dressing gown. I caught sight of my reflection in the kettle, the black circles of exhaustion under my eyes matching the black bruise blossoming on my jaw as I moved slowly around the room, as though I was underwater. At least it was the weekend and I didn’t have to go to Fairhurst. Toast popped up from the toaster but I was so tired it took me a moment to realise what the sound was. I wondered again if this was how Ed felt.
He wandered in from the front room, where he’d been doing something on his laptop, presumably having remembered his password again. I was too knackered to ask him what it was.
‘I’ll sleep in the, the, sparse room tonight,’ he said, taking the toast out himself and putting it in a bowl, instead of on a plate. ‘Of course, I must. I’m so sorry, Lynn, this is awful.’
‘You can’t sleep in the spare room,’ I said, tiredness making it almost equally difficult for me to form the words as he hugged me tightly, making me wince with pain and pull away. I removed the toast from the bowl just before Ed poured milk over it.
‘Why not?’
I didn’t want to tell him why not. He would only accuse me of babying hi
m again, if I told him that I couldn’t let him sleep alone in case he got up at night and wandered; fell into the river or the lock, or lost his way along the towpath and panicked. It was almost November, he could die of exposure in this weather. He could drown so easily, a single slip of the foot down the riverbank, one misjudged step on a moonless night. Just because he hadn’t started wandering yet didn’t mean it wasn’t an imminent development.
‘Why not?’ he insisted, getting two spoons out of the cutlery drawer and laying them on the table beside the plate of toast. I gritted my teeth and added two knives.
‘Because if something happened to you, I’d never forgive myself!’
I can’t take this much longer, I thought.
‘Nothing will happen to me,’ he said, as bemused as if I’d said I was worried about him being abducted by aliens at night. ‘I’ll only be in the sparse room. What can happen to me in there? Look at you, you’re, you’re, so teeny. You need some sleep.’
‘Tired? Yes. I’m really tired,’ I said, slumping into the chair and buttering a piece of toast, which I handed to Ed. I thought he must be tired too. He didn’t usually forget this many words.
‘Then let me sleep in there. It’s got a lock on the door. I’ll lock myself in so you’ll know that I’m safety. Safe. Safety-safe.’ He chuckled, as though he’d said something hilarious.
That wasn’t a bad idea – obviously not him locking himself in, but I could lock him in. Could I? I closed my eyes and, almost swooning at the thought, imagined a whole night of uninterrupted lavender-scented sleep on fresh bedlinen, the bed to myself, in the knowledge that Ed was safe. Plus, I had a really busy week at work ahead– we had graduation ceremonies at the Barbican on Wednesday to prepare for, and our student ensembles were providing all the music.
‘Promise you won’t ever lock yourself in, Ed. What if you couldn’t find the key? But, if you agree, maybe I could keep hold of it, lock you in myself? Although – what if you needed a pee in the night?’