The Old You

by Louise Voss

  ‘Don’t forget,’ said Geoff, ‘they might not have any wifi or internet access, especially if they’re on some remote island somewhere. Or on a boat.’

  ‘Good point. But I know them well enough to be certain that they’d make sure they could check in every couple of days at least, even if they were at sea.’

  I scrolled through Sally Prentiss’ pictures, hoping vainly for a scan of an old school photo or something, but there were only a few, mostly of horses.

  ‘I’m not sure this is the way to go. I think it’s a waste of time. Even if April responded to my friend request, she’s unlikely to announce to me, as “Christine”, that she’s run away with her husband’s best friend to a specific place in the Seychelles or the Caribbean, is she? All it would prove is that she’s online and ignoring my emails.’

  ‘Phone records?’ Geoff suggested. ‘Are the bills in both your names?’

  It started to rain, fat droplets splattering with loud plops against the conservatory roof and windows.

  ‘Good idea,’ I said after a while. ‘He’s obviously ditched his mobile and got another one – but the bills for his old one are in his name so I don’t think I’d be able to access them.’

  ‘The police could do it in a moment!’ Maddie wailed. ‘I think you’re insane not to ask them, Lynn, honestly.’

  I grabbed her hand. ‘I know it doesn’t make sense, but promise me you won’t call them? Promise? It’s really important. I can’t tell you why, not yet, but I need to find out for myself before I get them more involved than they already are. I mean, they do know about the missing money and passport, and they are looking into it. I just don’t want to bring up the stuff about Shelagh and April until I’ve got a bit more information.’

  Maddie sighed, following my gaze to watch the rain sliding down the glass. Then she glared at me. ‘All right. But if you go haring off after them, I need to know you aren’t in danger, and if you think you are, you need to swear to me that you will call the police then. And if you don’t, I will. Do you understand me?’

  ‘We’ll come with you,’ Geoff said.

  ‘Don’t be daft!’ I shot back. ‘Not unless you fancy spending thousands of pounds on flights and hotels for what’ll probably be the most unrelaxing holiday you’ll ever have. Seriously, I can handle myself. I just need to see them together and confront them.’

  Geoff stood up, groaning slightly with effort. ‘Sun’s over the yardarm. Who wants a glass of wine?’

  ‘Just a small one for me, thanks,’ I said absently. ‘Maddie, pass that back over, would you?’ I gestured at the iPad. ‘Our home phone bills will be online, although Ed handled all that sort of thing…’ How pathetic that made me sound! How unreconstructed, Fifties housewife. Waitsey would have sneered.

  ‘I mean, he liked to. It was a control thing.’

  I typed Ed’s email address into Virgin Media, my fingers hovering over the empty password box.

  ‘Was he imaginative about passwords?’ Geoff asked, handing me a half-full glass of red. I resisted the urge to throw it down in one gulp.

  ‘Not really. He wasn’t one of those people who has different passwords for everything and makes them up out of a string of numbers and letters…’

  ‘…so that you have no possible chance of remembering them when you need them,’ Maddie grumbled in Geoff’s direction and he smiled at her, tapping his forehead.

  ‘Better safe than sorry,’ he said. ‘So Ed’s would likely be a person, then, or a significant date. Or a pet? A sports personality?’

  I tried as many as I could think of but nothing came up. ‘This is hopeless.’

  ‘Ring them, and tell them that your husband’s run off and closed your joint account and you need access to the bills to be able to pay them. It can’t be the first time they’ve heard something like that.’ Maddie handed me the phone.

  ‘Worth a shot.’ I dialled the number, eventually got through to a lady in a call centre and I explained I’d forgotten the password to the online account. I didn’t even need to give the sob story. All I had to do was to give Ed’s name, date of birth, our address and the first and third letters of the ‘security code’ for the account.

  ‘F and I,’ I said, punching the air in triumph. ‘Great. Yes, please, if you could send the temporary password to Maddie dot Morley at gmail.com.’

  When I hung up, Maddie shook my arm. ‘What was it?’

  I laughed. ‘It just came to me. We always used Fringilla as our code word, you know, the name of April’s boat. Ed changed all the passwords for everything, I bet, but he forgot that they ask for an additional security word when you phone up. Result!’

  The email pinged into Maddie’s inbox and from there it was matter of moments to change the password on the Virgin Media account and access all our home phone bills from the past year as PDFs.

  ‘I’m only going to look at the calls he’s made since his supposed diagnosis. And he won’t know, because I’m on your iPad!’

  ‘You’re amazing, Lynn,’ Maddie remarked. ‘Seriously. If I found out that Geoff had done all this to me, I’d be a gibbering wreck.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be.’ I scanned through the lists of phone numbers.

  Geoff cleared his throat. ‘I think what you mean is, “Geoff would never do that to you.”’

  ‘Yeah, well, that goes without saying. Wait – I don’t recognise that one.’ It was an area code I couldn’t place. ‘Oh, no, it’s nothing. It’s my Auntie Daphne in the Cotswolds, my annual phone call to her on her birthday.’

  Most of the other numbers were local, or 0345. There weren’t too many to sift through, as neither Ed nor I used the home phone all that much.

  ‘How do you know that Ed wouldn’t have used his mobile to make all the arrangements?’ Geoff asked.

  I snorted. ‘Because it’s Ed – he’s far too tight to call a different continent on his mobile. I bet you anything.’

  I called up the bill from October, seven months ago, and Maddie tapped the screen. ‘That one’s overseas, look.’

  I zoomed in closer. ‘A twenty-minute call, at 4.20am. Think we might have something here … area code 001 – that’s America, isn’t it? Ed doesn’t know anyone in the US, as far as I’m aware … So what state is 784?’

  I switched to a new tab and Googled it, slapping the arm of the sofa when the result sprang up: ‘It’s not a state, it’s in the Caribbean! It’s St Vincent and the Grenadines – I knew it! Ed’s such a cliché. He thinks he’s been so clever, and we’ve tracked him down first go.’

  ‘Ring the number,’ Maddie said, her eyes wide.

  ‘OK. They’re only four or five hours behind us, aren’t they?’

  I put it on speakerphone and the faint transatlantic burr of dialling tone crackled around the room, then an answering machine clicked on. The three of us sat stock-still and listened to the American female voice:

  ‘Hello. You have reached the offices of The Mustique Holiday Company. All our operatives are currently busy but please leave us a message and we’ll be sure to return your call. For villa rentals press one, for all other enquiries press two…’

  ‘Mustique! That completely makes sense,’ I said bitterly, hanging up. ‘Trust Ed to go to one of the most expensive, exclusive islands in the whole of the bloody Caribbean.’

  Ed had never taken me to Mustique, or anywhere in the Caribbean, despite his professed love for it. Not even for our honeymoon, which had been in southern Spain. A few years after that, he had begun saying he was claustrophobic and afraid of flying.

  Had he really been planning it for that long?

  Geoff was already looking up the website for the Mustique Holiday Company. ‘Wow. You’re right. It ain’t cheap. There’s only about a hundred villas on the whole island and they start at nine thousand dollars a week, off-season. Look, that one’s forty-five thousand to rent – a week!’

  ‘Isn’t Mustique where Princess Margaret and David Bowie had houses?’ Maddie asked, looking over her hus
band’s shoulder.

  It was getting cold in the room, and she moved into the living room to light the fire, half-laid in the grate. ‘It looks like a stunning place,’ she commented.

  ‘Of course it does,’ I said. ‘Ed and April wouldn’t have gone to all these lengths to run away to anywhere less, I’m sure.’ My stomach was roiling with acid fury and heartbreak. ‘Well, they’re in for a surprise, aren’t they, when I turn up to wreck their little clandestine buzz.’

  ‘You aren’t really?’ Maddie called back through the archway. She was kneeling by the fireplace twisting old newspapers into kindling.

  ‘Of course I am. I told you I wanted to talk to them.’

  Maddie stopped, brandishing a newspaper stick. ‘But what’s the point? Surely you can just confirm they’re there, somehow, and then tell the police? And anyway, you don’t know for sure that’s where they are.’

  ‘I can’t report him to the police for running off with another woman. I’m going to get evidence of what he’s done, and then report him. Plus I want to make April squirm, that treacherous, cheating…’

  My voice trailed off. Was I being ridiculous? What if Maddie was right; I chased them all the way over to Mustique and they’d gone somewhere else, or never even been there? Perhaps Ed had just enquired and found it too expensive. Maybe they were in a caravan park on Canvey Island.

  Ha, I thought. Fat chance.

  It was a start though, proof that instead of being locked in his bedroom Ed had been downstairs at night making phone calls to the Caribbean. Proof that he probably never had Pick’s at all.

  ‘Anyway.’ I forced levity into my voice. ‘They’ll be a whole lot easier to find on an island that tiny than if they’d gone to Barbados. Even if I’ve missed them, someone must know where they were planning to go after that. I’ll take photos of them with me; show everyone, in case they’re using false names. Expensive villas will have housekeepers; butlers probably. Pool guys. The person Ed spoke to about renting the place. Someone will know.’

  ‘I’d never have thought of any of that,’ said Maddie. ‘You’re the one who should be a detective!’

  I turned away so that she couldn’t see my face.

  ‘Bingo!’ Geoff said. ‘I’ve traced the spyware and it’s only on your emails. So that means he won’t be able to see anything else, like flights you’ve booked.’

  ‘That’s good. Thanks Geoff. Can you take the spyware off? No – wait, don’t do that, because then Ed will know I’m on to him for sure. Might even send a few red herring emails, make him think I’m doing something different.’

  Maddie touched a match to the laid fire and it flared up immediately, crackling as the twigs caught.

  I delved into my handbag and extracted my credit card.

  ‘How much do you think a flight to Mustique will cost? I’m going to go home tomorrow, pack my bikini, and get over there. He’s there, I know it.’

  46

  The taxi dropped me off at the end of the lane and I stood for a moment watching the river flow silent and almost black past me. It felt as though the current was sweeping away my old life on its sinister swirls, and I wondered if I would ever get it back.

  I dragged my suitcase over the gravel part of the driveway and up the front doorstep, relieved that I’d not seen anyone I knew on the train back from the airport.

  The case was heavy, full of far more clothes than I had actually needed for the unpredictable weather of the Channel Islands, but I hadn’t known how long I would be away. Now that I was going to Mustique, I’d be packing a different kind of wardrobe altogether.

  It was still and very cold inside. Ed’s wellies were in the hall, there was a circle of cat hair on the armchair, and I felt the absence of both other occupants of the house. I had half wondered if Ed would be sitting in the front room watching TV when I got back, his illness real and returned, but the house was exactly as I’d left it the week before.

  I thought about ringing Ben but decided not to, because then I’d have to tell him that I was about to fly to the Caribbean. I would rather be certain of Ed’s whereabouts before whipping everyone up into a frenzy of anticipation – and I definitely wasn’t ready to share my growing suspicions about his treachery. My car was still outside Ben’s flat, but it would just have to stay there.

  I also wanted to ask him about the photo on Ellen’s mantelpiece, about who that tubby little boy next to him had been. How come I had such a strong feeling that I recognised him, when I hadn’t known any of Ben’s childhood friends? It was still nagging at the back of my mind and I couldn’t think why – but I couldn’t do that either, without admitting I’d been to see Ellen. Ben would go nuts if he knew I’d gone to quiz his auntie.

  It was probably nothing, anyway, just some kid he’d met on the beach.

  Once I’d switched on the heating, opened the post and drunk a cup of tea – herbal, since I forgot to buy milk – I went up to the spare room and tugged out the vacuum-packed bag of my summer clothes from under the bed, along with my bigger suitcase. I picked out all the things I’d usually wear on a summer holiday and rolled them up, slotting them neatly into the case. It felt weird, on such a grim mission.

  There was another reason I’d wanted to come home before flying out again, apart from to pack. I sat down at the kitchen table with my laptop and downloaded a free ‘make your will’ template. I spent the next hour updating it, omitting Ed completely and making Maddie the executor instead, then printed it out. My old will had left everything to Ed, and there was no way I was going to keep it that way. Not that I had a lot to call my own, since our joint savings had gone.

  I also cancelled the life insurance policy I’d had for years, with Ed as beneficiary. Finally, I wrote a long letter ‘to who it may concern’, explaining as best I could my thoughts and fears, and giving directions to the box under the floorboards in the attic. I sealed it into an envelope and took it, and the will, next door to Suzan.

  ‘I’m re-doing my will!’ I said as chirpily as I could when she opened the door. ‘I’ve just survived several terrifying flights in tiny planes and it reminded me that I’ve been meaning to do it for ages – will you witness it for me please?’

  ‘Of course. Come in. My friend Minty is here at the moment. Any news on Ed?’

  I shook my head. I’d supposed we’d have to accost someone on the towpath to get them to act as the second witness, so Minty’s presence was a stroke of luck. She was a lady of around Suzan’s vintage, far less well preserved but very courteous and kind. All I could remember about her afterwards was the one very long wiry hair protruding from her doughy cheek.

  They read through my efforts with an embarrassed reserve – ‘Goodness,’ said Minty, ‘it feels a bit like rifling through someone’s knicker drawer!’

  Suzan obviously spotted the omission of any mention of Ed, but she just raised her eyebrows at me. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘Maddie will make sure Ed’s looked after. I trust her implicitly.’

  Suzan didn’t yet know that Ed had been ‘cured’, and that worked to my advantage. It would have been weird to entrust all my worldly goods to someone who was fast losing mental capacity.

  They both watched as I signed and dated, and did the same. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Much appreciated. I’m going away again tonight – and in my current pessimistic mood, I’ve written a ‘to whom it may concern’ letter in case I get eaten by a shark –’ or bumped off by my treacherous husband, I thought ‘– or run over by a bus. Could you keep it here please? And, er, if Ed comes back, please let me know before you let him read it? I don’t want to freak him out.’

  ‘Is everything all right, Lynn?’

  I shrugged. ‘Well. As all right as everything can be, when Ed’s missing. But I’m going to find him. I’ll let you know as soon as I do, and hopefully we’ll be back home again pretty soon…’

  Suzan narrowed her eyes at me but, perhaps because Minty was hovering, she didn’t push me furt
her. I could tell she thought I was being paranoid; probably had been thinking it for months. I remembered her face, the day I asked her if it could have been Ed on the radio phone-in – which, it only just occurred to me, almost certainly had been him.

  ‘I hope so,’ was all she said, giving me a hug. ‘Stay safe.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.

  47

  The Barbados-bound jumbo jet was a behemoth in comparison with the tiny Channel Islands planes, as if it had eaten them as casual snacks. It seemed impossible to believe that it would ever achieve enough velocity to heave itself into the air.

  Once on board, squashed in the middle seat of three, I stared through the porthole window at the drizzly runway as the captain began his spiel. The man in the window seat wore a baseball cap backward over a grey ponytail, and might have been attractive were it not for the thin crop of black bristles marching down the bridge of his nose towards its tip, like mini porcupine quills.

  ‘Holiday?’ chirped the lady on the other side of me, a matronly sixty-something with such thick foundation on her face that I could smell it, cloying and chemical.

  ‘Yes,’ I lied, smiling at her and hoping she wasn’t going to ask me any more questions.

  ‘Whereabouts are you staying in Barbados?’

  ‘I’m flying on from there straight to Mustique. My brother’s rented a villa there with his, er, partner. It’s his sixtieth birthday so I’ve come out to surprise him.’

  This was partly true. I’d rung the property company back again and spoken to a cheery West Indian lady called Connie, trying to ‘check’ that ‘my brother, Ed Naismith’ was renting a villa on the island. I pretended I was planning a very secret visit to surprise him on his birthday, which really was next week, and was making sure that he’d still be there.

  Connie had been annoyingly discreet. She kept saying, ‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to divulge that information, ma’am,’ in a whiny voice at the end of each of my questions about how long Ed was planning to stay and if he was there with anyone.