The Old You

by Louise Voss

  If I could have changed anything, it would have been that decision.

  On that hot night down by the river, to a soundtrack of the delicate splash of minnows and the distant crying of a fox, Ed made love to me in a way so perfect that I thought I could die with happiness – until I sobered up, and it started to become apparent just what a complete fuck-up I’d made of everything.

  It got a hell of a lot more apparent three weeks later, when I found out that I was pregnant.

  37

  2007

  I was an idiot. What the hell was I going to do now?

  I was six weeks gone before I made up my mind, living with morning sickness and indecision that made my stomach churn constantly. I became intimately acquainted with the porcelain interior of my bedsit’s toilet.

  Naturally I didn’t tell Metcalfe at any of our fortnightly meetings. I was mortified and ashamed of myself, wracked with confusion and rigid with panic, veering between making appointments for a termination on three separate occasions, only to cancel them on the day, and fantasising about the sheer joy of having a child.

  Immediately after the event – and before I discovered I’d conceived – I told Ed that the sex had been a drunken mistake, that I was sorry but however incredible it had been, it couldn’t happen again. I told him that I’d heard from my army-officer ex-husband Dave, and he was putting pressure on me to meet up, talk about what had gone wrong for us.

  Ed seemed genuinely upset by this and I felt terrible, but I had to say something. I felt a fingernail’s distance from it all getting completely out of control.

  We continued to see each other once a week or so now that the play was over, but emotionally I retreated, making haughty small talk and teasingly rebuffing his advances just enough that he didn’t give up altogether, rewarding him with little smiles and the occasional Jane Austenesque eyelash flutter that I hadn’t even been aware I knew how to do. I was amazed he didn’t tell me to bugger off.

  All the while I was aching for him inside, clueless as to how I was going to be able to extricate myself from the situation without leaving my heart in a dozen pieces.

  If I kept the baby, I lost my career and possibly Ed too – although he’d told me several times he’d love more children, being faced with the imminent reality could have been a very different matter.

  If I had an abortion I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to live with myself. I was thirty-seven – the clock was ticking and it might be my only chance … How could I just get rid of something I yearned for?

  I kept up appearances as best I could. I carried on pumping Ed for information as often as possible, while simultaneously trying to avoid telling him much about myself, and certainly not my latest news.

  He knew that my parents were dead, I was an only child, I was separated from Dave and I had no children and no other relatives. I was born in Rayleigh, Essex, had studied English at Leicester Polytechnic before it became a university, I had a scar on my leg where I’d fallen off a horse aged nine and my shin bone had snapped in half and broken through the skin, sticking out in front of me like a turkey wishbone. It was like being on that TV show Would I Lie To You? Sometimes I had trouble remembering which facts were true and which made up – except the fact of the tumbling ball of cells in my belly that was growing bigger by the day and which would, soon enough, no longer be able to be kept secret.

  I made it my business to know as much about Ed as my memory could retain; more, after we slept together, as if it would somehow counterbalance my extreme unprofessionalism. I lay awake at night making mental notes:

  Sent to boarding school in England aged eight, parents lived in Kuala Lumpur.

  Scar above lip from having cancerous growth removed ten years ago.

  Met Shelagh when she was a dental nurse and he was having a wisdom tooth out.

  Proposed to Shelagh on a fairground Big Wheel – she turned him down for the first three revolutions and agreed to marry him on the fourth. Was a GP for twenty-four years, dreaded patients with foot or crotch ailments as fungus of any sort makes him gag.

  Good at DIY, cooking and dancing, a terrible singer.

  Fuck, I’m pregnant.

  Fuck.

  I even started wishing I could find some evidence that he’d killed Shelagh, for then surely my mind would be made up about what to do about our relationship.

  On a hike in the Surrey Hills one day about six weeks after the closing night of Make Do, I asked casually, stopping to tie my jumper round my already-swelling waist: ‘So – what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’

  As far as discreet intel-gathering went, I was pretty sure that this wasn’t in any Bumper Book of Undercover Investigating, but I was desperate.

  He stopped with me, looking surprised. ‘Worst in what sense?’

  He was used to me bombarding him with questions.

  ‘Um … I don’t know, just worst. Like, the thing you feel most bad about.’

  He thought about it, wiping his forehead with his forearm. It was a very steep hill, and a hot day.

  ‘I snogged Mandy Jennings when I was going steady with Susie Holliday. We were seventeen.’

  I laughed. ‘Oh come on! That’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’

  ‘What about you? What’s yours, then?’

  ‘I asked first.’

  ‘And I told you,’ he said, grabbing me from behind and trying to tickle me. I giggled and twisted away, still looking expectant.

  ‘Are you serious? You want more than that?’

  I pretended to look stern. Obviously I didn’t think he was going to say, ‘Er, let me think – yes – I murdered my wife’, but I scanned his face for any change of expression. ‘I need to know what sort of man I might, at some point in the future, be committing to…’

  He brightened and I couldn’t prevent my heart giving a little jump. ‘Really? You want to commit to me?’

  I shrugged. ‘Well, it’s been – how long now? Four months, since our first date?’

  ‘Four months, two weeks and four days,’ he said, taking my hand. ‘When we slept together, I thought that was it, that we’d be a couple. You’ve backed away so much.’

  ‘I told you why that is,’ I said, shamefacedly. ‘I’m really sorry, Ed. You know it’s not because I don’t like you or don’t want to be with you, but…’

  ‘I know,’ he said impatiently. You so don’t, I thought. ‘But why would you even think about going back to someone who’s cheated on you and messed you around for years?’

  That was what I’d told him, that ‘Dave’ had had an affair with one of his subalterns. I imagined her to be as busty as I was flat, with full, cherry-red lips and curly dark-brown hair, curvaceous and vivacious, flirting with him until he couldn’t resist. Their affair had been going on for years but he swore it was over now and that she – Sinead, I christened her – was getting married to someone else.

  I sat down abruptly under a tree, its twisty roots providing a natural seat, and patted the root next to me. Ed flopped down, fresh sweat glistening on his forehead and blooming under his arms, and I handed him a bottle of water.

  ‘We’ve only slept together once.’ I watched him deftly uncap and swig at it.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ he replied, with feeling. ‘You aren’t half giving out mixed messages, you know.’

  ‘I wasn’t ready. It was only because I was drunk,’ I said primly.

  He stared challengingly at me, lifting up his Ray-Bans so that I could look into his piercing blue eyes. ‘And do you think you might be ready again any time soon? I don’t want to lose out to Dave.’ He said the name like it was a bad smell.

  Actually I’m so ready, I thought, fortunately managing to stop myself saying it out loud and adding to the arsenal of mixed messages. Poor Ed. But I wanted him so much. It gave me a faint shock. I wriggled closer to him, drinking in the smell of his warm sweaty body. Even his sweat turned me on.

  This was another fact I was not prepared to share with
Brian Metcalfe in our fortnightly debriefings.

  ‘The thing is, Ed,’ I arranged my expression into something close to tearful. ‘I do want to. It was fantastic when we did – well, what I remember about it, of course. I really, really want to be with you, but…’

  ‘But what?’ His voice was teasing, with an edge of frustration. He pushed my damp fringe out of my eyes.

  I looked away, at a nearby crow pecking something on the grass. ‘Dave aside, what if…?’

  ‘What if what?’

  I could tell he was trying not to get impatient with me. Play it cool, I told myself.

  ‘What if we were to start getting serious and then suddenly Shelagh comes home? What then?’

  He slumped back against the tree, sighing heavily. ‘So that’s it.’

  ‘Well, it’s certainly not because I don’t fancy you,’ I said with feeling. ‘And it bothers me more than a few pleading emails from Dave, who’s probably just feeling lonely and horny. I love my life here. I don’t want to leave.’

  This at least was true.

  There was silence for a few minutes.

  ‘Look,’ he said eventually. ‘I can’t tell you for certain that Shelagh won’t come back, because I don’t know where she is. As I’ve told you from the start, my instinct is that she’s committed suicide because I don’t believe she would abandon Benjy like she seems to have done. She didn’t leave a note – which I suppose could mean that she isn’t dead – but that’s not very helpful to you, is it?’

  He leaned in close to me again and touched the side of my arm, sending goosebumps skittering up and down my skin in a small Mexican wave of desire.

  ‘All I can say, Lynn, is that I really, really like you. I can see us having a future together, I honestly can. And I’ve said this to you before too, but if Shelagh walked in through the door tonight, I’d still want to be with you. I’d be happy she was back, of course I would, because Ben would have a mother again – if he ever forgave her, that is – but as far as her and me continuing to be married? No chance. I wish you could divorce a missing person, but you can’t. I can’t have her declared legally dead for seven years, but as soon as I do, I hope that you and I are the ones getting married.’

  He kissed me, long and slow and hot.

  ‘Does that help? I want to marry you, Lynn. I love you.’

  That was the clincher.

  ‘We’re having a baby,’ I blurted, bursting into tears. He reared back in shock and my heart sank – but then his face lit up and an enormous beam spread across it, tears springing to his own eyes as he hugged me tightly and almost yelped in my ear:

  ‘Oh my God! Really? Are you serious? Oh Lynn, that’s … wow … that’s … When? A baby! I can’t WAIT!’

  I would always remember that moment as the happiest I had ever been. Ever.

  38

  2007

  ‘You’re really quitting? Why?’

  This was the question I’d been dreading for weeks.

  I didn’t want to tell Superintendent Nicholls the real reason I was leaving the police force but I knew I had to bite the bullet. Off the record, I’d already informed Brian Metcalfe, and his disgusted reaction had made me cringe. I’d told him that I felt out of my depth, that I’d not had enough training to merit being sent straight into deep cover without experience of some less stressful deployments first, but my voice sounded whiny and plaintive, even though it was true. Telling his boss, a man I’d never even met before, was even harder, but I was pretty confident that Nicholls would have to accept my resignation, for fear of being sued.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but this was my first UC job and it was too much for me. It would have been, even if Ed Naismith and I hadn’t fallen in love. We’re engaged and I want to be with him. I’m having his baby. I’ll keep my new identity and there’s nothing tying me to the past. No one will ever know. He has no idea. Nobody does.’

  ‘Good God.’

  I did not believe it was possible for anybody to look more disapproving. He took off his cap and ran a hand wearily through his thinning brown hair.

  It was odd to be back in the building where I’d done my training. It felt as though as I was being fired – which in fairness I would have been, had I not got in there first. My Level One and Two undercover courses and subsequent assignment had been a complete failure and a waste of taxpayers’ money, because I hadn’t managed to find a shred of evidence that Ed had killed Shelagh.

  And now nobody would even believe I’d tried very hard.

  Superintendent Nicholls shook his head. ‘Well. I wasn’t expecting that. I have to ask you, Waites, are you absolutely, one hundred percent sure that Naismith’s not manipulating you for his own ends; playing us at our own game?’

  ‘Absolutely not, sir. I did the best I could, despite my inexperience. I have witnessed his utter incomprehension and sorrow at his wife’s disappearance. I’ve searched his house with a fine-tooth comb, and Brian and I are agreed that there isn’t a trace of intel to suggest he had anything to do with it. Shelagh Naismith was suffering from mental-health problems and was on prescription medication for depression. Here’s my full report.’

  I laid the folder on his desk and he lifted his chin slightly in acknowledgement as I doggedly carried on:

  ‘His interactions with others – not at all suspicious. His house – clean, nothing incriminating. His repeated concerns about her mental health, backed up as I said by her medical records, and by verbal evidence from their son Ben, who recalls overhearing her on more than one occasion saying she wanted to kill herself and if it wasn’t for him, she would.’

  ‘If it wasn’t for him,’ repeated the superintendent with heavy emphasis. ‘So why should we believe she did?’

  ‘With respect, sir, I really can’t see why we should believe she didn’t, apart from her sister’s assertions. Which, from the interviews with Ellen Brigstock that I’ve read, are based on nothing more than her own concern for her sister and her confessed dislike of Ed Naismith. Besides,’ I added, knowing that this was the rub, ‘there’s nothing that would stand up in court. Nothing at all. She wouldn’t have wanted to leave her son, but if she was mentally ill, she would have convinced herself that he would genuinely be better off without her in his life.’

  ‘Then how do we explain the lack of a body?’

  ‘It happens, sir. I’m convinced her remains will be found at some point. Ed is certain she’d have taken herself off somewhere very remote.’

  ‘And you are seriously planning to marry the man?’ he asked, staring at the discreet diamond ring on my left hand.

  ‘Yes, sir, at some point, once Shelagh Naismith has been officially declared dead. We’re aware that we might have to wait the full seven years for that.’ I stood up a little straighter, gazing defensively at a point past his right ear. He’d missed a bit shaving and a small square of stubble on his cheek briefly snagged my attention.

  ‘You know you can’t legally get married with a false name?’

  ‘I am aware, sir. I told him I was going away for a couple of weeks to finalise my divorce and sort out the necessary paperwork. During this time I am in fact going to change my name to Jackson by deed poll. I’d already led him to believe that Jackson was my maiden name, that I ceased using my married name when my imaginary husband and I split up.’

  Nicholls groaned, without bothering to hide it. ‘So you will be Lynn Jackson permanently.’

  ‘Just until we get married, sir, then I have decided I will take his name. I’m confident that I’m untraceable as Lynn Waites. I was never on any social media. I have no family and I’ve cut all ties with friends I had before moving to Hampton. Nobody knows that I am – was – in the police, and Waites is not a particularly unusual name. I have gone to great lengths to leave no traces of my investigation.’

  I thought apprehensively of the box file in which I’d kept any potential evidence. It was very well hidden, but I’d need to dispose of it as soon as I got back to Molesey. We were
moving to a new house by the river soon, downsizing from Ed’s Victorian villa, as much for a fresh start in our own place as for any financial reasons. I couldn’t wait for my new life with Ed to begin properly, without the guilty shadow of duplicity hanging over me.

  I didn’t mind legally changing my name. It was no big deal. I’d be doing it again one day anyway, at the registry office with Ed. Lynn Jackson was a good enough name for me in the meantime.

  To try and take my mind off the harsh words and disgusted reactions from my police colleagues as my career limped to its inglorious end, I hugged myself with pleasure at the thought that Ed and I would one day be married. I thought then that it would be with our child proudly standing between us as a beribboned bridesmaid or a sailor-suited little ring bearer.

  But that part of it was not to be.

  I lost the baby, a month after quitting the police. Just like that. Ed and I had gone to bed, made love, he’d kissed my stomach and then we’d gone to sleep – to wake up to a horror movie in the dark, small hours; our baby, my precious beloved child, a mere tiny clot in the sea of metallic-smelling blood on the mattress, me not even realising that the howling sound I heard was coming from my own throat. I was screaming, ‘Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!’ but I didn’t know if I was talking to Ed or the baby.

  ‘We’ll try again!’ Ed had pleaded, covered in my blood, desperation in his voice. ‘We’ll have more, I promise. Two – three – as many as you want, my darling. I’ll never leave you. Just don’t leave me, please?’

  Of course I didn’t leave him. I loved him, even though his promise never came true.

  In the end we didn’t have to wait seven years to get married. It was only a year later that we got the call saying that Gavin Garvey had confessed to Shelagh’s murder. Garvey refused to say what he’d done with the body, but her necklace was found in his pocket on the night he was arrested.

  There was a trial, from which I stayed completely away, claiming it was too upsetting, but really in case anybody who knew me as Waitsey happened to spot me in the papers, or in the couple of brief local news items that ran on TV. I thought Ed would have a big problem with me not accompanying him to court, but to my surprise he didn’t seem to mind at all.