by Louise Voss
Ed, lying? Surely not.
I took a forkful to show willing. ‘It’s good. So…’
‘So,’ he echoed.
‘Want to talk me through why you decided to leave the country without telling me, emptying our joint savings account at the same time?’
He sighed. ‘I’m so sorry. I really am. I had my lunch that day with Bill – we went to a little Lebanese place near his clinic – and he warned me that the Pick’s might come back, that it was brilliant that it appeared I’d been cured, but it could have been some sort of anomaly that they’d have to keep a very close eye on, and he wanted me to take part in tons more studies and suddenly I felt myself getting panicky and depressed, and we got quite pissed—’
‘Bill, who I’d never heard of before and who the police could find no trace of when they tried to get hold of him? Bill, who there was no record of at the clinic?’
Ed shrugged, peeling the label off his already-empty bottle of beer. ‘He exists. You met him! That was only his temporary office, he told me, while his regular one was being decorated. Anyway, we talked about me having been ill, and how extraordinary it was that the trial worked so incredibly quickly and so well, and how hard it had been on me and you when I was ill, thinking I was going the way Dad went and, I don’t know, the depression got worse and worse. I felt suicidal, Lynn, perhaps it was delayed shock, I don’t know. I stood on the platform at Waterloo after lunch and I couldn’t shake the sense that the Pick’s would come back for me, that I couldn’t possibly have been healed for good, it was some sort of temporary blip…’
His eyes were full of tears and he scrubbed his arm across his face. God, he was good.
‘What about the money? Why did you take it all out? There was ninety grand in that account!’
He leaned forward and grabbed my hand, holding it tight in his sweaty palm. ‘I wasn’t thinking straight, Lynn. I just had this mad idea that I wanted to get away, on my own for a bit and then send for you. I didn’t want to tell you because you’d have been upset at the idea of me going without you…’
‘Not as upset as Ben and I were at the thought of you lying in a mortuary drawer somewhere,’ I interrupted, but I let him continue to hold my hand. He had the grace to look ashamed.
‘I transferred the money into a new account online. I thought I’d need your signature but it turns out I didn’t. I was hoping you wouldn’t notice. It’s still our money though. I hadn’t actually intended to transfer the whole amount, I was only going to take nine grand for our holiday, but I was drunk when I did it, and only realised later that I’d accidentally added an extra zero. Obviously I’ll put the rest of it back!’
I rolled my eyes. ‘But, Ed, you took your passport with you. That means that you must have planned it.’
‘I didn’t plan it!’ he retorted hotly, as if he was outraged I’d think such a thing. ‘I’d taken that canvas bag with me, remember, just for my laptop and headphones and stuff, and found my passport in the side pocket when I was on the train on the way up to town! I didn’t know it was in there; I haven’t used it for years. It was what gave me the idea. As soon as I saw it, I wanted to run away, just for a little while. I thought, I’ve got my passport and I could get money – originally I thought I might head over to Spain then I decided to come out here, have a week of fishing and relaxing and getting my head together, then bring you out to join me. It’s been so many years since I could face getting on a plane, and it felt so liberating. Rush of blood to the head, you could say. I stayed a couple of nights in a hotel at Heathrow first but I was still on too much of a bender to bring myself to call you. I sobered up halfway across the Atlantic wondering what the fuck I was doing, but it was too late by then.’
His lies were almost entertaining. Almost.
‘You told me that morning that even though you’d managed to have scans, you were still afraid of flying. And you can’t have been that drunk at Heathrow – the police just told me that you were interviewed at the airport. You were convincing enough that they let you fly.’
Even he couldn’t answer that. We sat in silence and I watched a tiny iridescent hummingbird hover next to a hibiscus bloom, before darting away into the bushes.
Ed was gazing at me now with what looked like such love that even though he didn’t have a good answer, even though I’d seen April with my own eyes, I still thought I must surely be mistaken.
I wanted so much to be mistaken.
I suddenly felt twice as hot as before, as if sweat was popping out of every single one of the pores on my body, and felt an urge to jump into the pool.
‘I’m going to open that wine.’
I headed back inside to the air-conditioned coolness of the kitchen, found the glasses and uncorked the white wine. I poured him an enormous glass and myself a much smaller one that I topped up with water from a jug on the counter, making sure that Ed hadn’t seen me do it. He was still outside, gazing at a piece of squid on his fork. My phone was in the pocket of my dress, so I took it out and surreptitiously switched on the voice recorder app before replacing it. I didn’t think that he was likely to confess to any crimes more serious than an affair with April, and I knew that even if he did, it was unlikely anything I captured would be admissible in court, but it was worth a try.
‘I’m glad you’re safe,’ I blurted when I returned, the bottle tucked under my arm and the phone recording in my pocket. I handed him his glass and forced myself not to reach out and touch his face. His cheek looked hot and bristly, wonderfully familiar. The marionette lines either side of his mouth seemed to have deepened since I last saw him, and the creases on his forehead, but I wanted him. To my fury, I wanted to rip off his clothes right there, and not just to force a confession out of him. We hadn’t had sex for months – but he’d been ill (hadn’t he?) and anyway, surely even the most passionate couple didn’t carry on swinging from the chandeliers after almost a decade together. He was sixty, after all. Sixty today.
I wasn’t ready to wish him happy birthday though.
‘I know you and April had an affair,’ I said, making it easy for him. I held my breath and waited for his expression to change.
But he merely rubbed his hand through his sandy hair, making it stand on end.
‘Of course we didn’t,’ he said mildly. ‘I would never cheat on you. I love you, Lynn.’
‘And you honestly didn’t plan this trip in advance? Just … took off?’
He swigged his wine, as I knew he would. He always drank when he felt pressured. I topped up his glass.
‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘I see.’
‘Don’t you believe me?’ He sounded hurt.
‘Well,’ I said, in the same tone as if I’d asked him to pass the salt, ‘it’s all a bit of stretch, don’t you think? What with the savings going missing and all.’
‘I told you, that was an accident. I only meant to borrow some of them. They’re still our savings, darling. And I did it all for you.’
I clenched my teeth, forced myself to smile and raised my glass, clinking it against his. ‘That’s a relief. I would hate to lose you.’
‘And I you. I really do love you, Lynn.’
I decided to continue to play along, although what I felt for him at that moment was very far from love. ‘I love you too. Cheers.’
I clinked glasses with him and took a gulp of my watery wine. ‘So now I’m here, let’s start our holiday, shall we?’
He grinned with relief, believing he was at least temporarily off the hook. ‘Cheers to that.’
I don’t know how I managed it, but for the next half-hour my acting skills matched Ed’s. I was determine to lull him into a false sense of security to see what I could get out of him once his guard was down and his alcohol levels up. To any casual observer we would have appeared as a normal married couple on holiday. We chatted; about Ben, about Ed’s ‘illness’. The cat. Suzan. Naveeta’s love life, April’s holistic sheep farm. Memories of our lives togeth
er, plans for the future. He fetched another bottle of wine from the kitchen and I drank as little of it as I could while ensuring he drank as much, until I noticed his speech beginning to slur slightly.
I also noticed that he changed the subject when I mentioned Mike’s name.
How cocky he was, to think he could get drunk and not slip up.
Our heads were edging closer together, our eyes locked. Chemistry fizzed and crackled between us and, perhaps because I knew it would be the last time we would ever be that close, I encouraged it. I forced myself to pretend it was real, that we were fine.
It was dark by the time our lips touched, the black shapes of bats flitting around us, zoomorphic winged fibs. We kissed harder. I put my hand in his lap and felt him hard under my fingers.
‘I’ve missed you so much,’ he said.
‘I’ve missed you too.’
‘I want you, Lynn.’
We stood up, Ed so fast that his metal chair clanged to the ground. I took his hand to steady him and we clung to one another. He pushed me up against the wall of the villa and stuck his hand up inside my sundress, saying my name over and over again, suddenly as soft and damply vulnerable as a newly hatched baby bird, as if all the strength in his body had diverted itself to his hard dick.
I couldn’t risk my phone falling out of my pocket and him seeing that it was recording – and besides, I suddenly felt a wave of revulsion for him as I mentally recalled the sight of him and April on that beach towel earlier.
‘No,’ I said forcefully, shoving him away. ‘No.’
Time to go in for the kill.
53
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, alarmed, but trying to hide the traces of anger settling in the creases by his eyes.
I took a deep breath and squared up to him, every muscle in my body tensed for flight. I kept my voice level, though:
‘Can we just stop this … this … charade? Right now. You need to start giving me some credit, Ed! I’ve thought about nothing else since you vanished. I hoped that by tracking you down I’d be able to put my mind at rest – but you’ve confirmed all my worst suspicions.’
His body jerked, once, and he stalled for time. I couldn’t read his expression any more.
‘What?’
‘I know April’s here, for fuck’s sake. I saw her on the beach with you earlier! But what doesn’t make sense is for you to fake Pick’s for all those months, just to be with her. You wouldn’t be that cruel to Ben, not unless there was more to it.’
He was rigid now. I felt behind me on the table for the empty wine bottle, just in case.
This was it. No going back.
‘Bill was a fake, there was no medical trial. Your illness was faked and I bet those scans were, too. April helped you. You did it so you had an alibi for killing Mike – but why would you need to kill Mike? You and April only needed to get divorces if you wanted to be together, so there’s more to it. This is all about you having killed Shelagh, isn’t it, Ed? And I tell you something else, just from a Polaroid photo I found of your old house, I’ve worked out what you did with her body.’
With one powerful movement he sprang at me and grabbed my throat with both hands, choking me. Shit. He’d been too fast for me. I tried to swing at him with the bottle but he released one hand and easily disarmed me.
‘Oh dear,’ he hissed in my ear, my husband gone and replaced in a flash with this murderous stranger. ‘I’d really hoped it wouldn’t come to this. Let’s hear it then, Miss Marple – how exactly do you think I killed Shelagh? Like this?’
He squeezed harder.
‘Turns out you are smarter than I gave you credit for,’ he said, squeezing so hard that black spots danced before my eyes and my feet went numb. ‘I didn’t think you’d work it out. I wish you hadn’t, though, because obviously I’m not going to be able to let you go home now.’
Of course it had occurred to me that I’d be in danger by confronting Ed, and Maddie’s warning rang in my ears, about calling the police if I needed to. I’d re-written my will, for God’s sake! Yet now it was happening, I felt nothing but surprise and shock.
I could feel myself losing consciousness, but at the last minute he loosened his grip and pincered my forearms instead, pulling me up and frogmarching me over to the same wall we’d just kissed against. There was no passion in the way he shoved me against it this time.
I’d researched the emergency number, 8111, but how could I call it? And anyway, he’d have killed me long before anyone showed up … I heaved air into my lungs, coughing and gagging. ‘Let me go, Ed, unless you want me to be sick in your face.’
He let go of one arm, enough to allow me to twist round. I retched and pretended to vomit – it wasn’t difficult, my stomach really was contracting – and he released the pressure on my upper arm enough for me to double over. I gathered all my strength, tensed my muscles then jabbed my free elbow into his groin, with as much weight behind it as I could.
He groaned and let go of me, cupping his hands instinctively over his crotch. I leaned sideways and karate-kicked him in the face, although the impact knocked me over, too. He was winded, which gave me time enough to scramble to my feet and grab the stone fossil by the door – it was so heavy that I felt my arms almost pull out of their sockets but I managed to heft it as if it weighed nothing. I jumped onto his chest, pinning his arms down with my knees and holding the fossil above his face. It was the size and girth of a beach ball and would shatter his head like an egg if I dropped it.
‘You bitch,’ he managed, blood pouring out of his nose and mouth.
‘You strangled Shelagh, didn’t you, then you dumped her body in an acid bath at one of those door-stripping places and destroyed the evidence.’
He froze. My arms ached and shook from holding the stone and my throat throbbed, but I gritted my teeth and blocked out the pain. Please still be recording, I silently beseeched my iPhone.
‘And now, unless you want me to drop this on your face, I want to hear you say that you killed Mike, too. You faked Pick’s for almost a year for the sole purpose of getting me to lock you in a bedroom at nights so you’d have an alibi for his murder. Correct?’
Ed didn’t answer, but I knew I was right.
‘Why, Ed? Money? Did someone pay you to do it? Did he find out you’d killed Shelagh, is that it?’
He didn’t reply, not even struggling any more. I felt the flex of his biceps pinned beneath my knees and the warmth of his prone body under my thighs.
My husband.
The man who knew that spicy food and hot soup gave me hiccups, that I was prone to blisters, that I hated anchovies and cooked celery. The man who brought me soup in bed when I was recovering from flu, feeding it to me in tender spoonfuls. The man who knew everything about me.
Almost everything. There was one thing he didn’t know; how and why we originally met.
That’s what I’d always believed, anyway.
Without warning, he bucked hard enough to knock one of my legs off his right arm, giving him the velocity to roll sideways, jerking his head out of the way within millimetres of the ammonite as I dropped it. It smashed on the ground next to him and shattered into pieces.
Within an instant our roles were reversed and he had my arm twisted up behind my back again and my face pressed painfully into the shards of stone.
What he said next shook every happy memory of our years together straight out of my head, forever.
‘So, PC Waites, not as good a cop as you think, are you? You thought you were so clever but you know what? I’ve known what you were since before I proposed to you; why the hell else do you think I’d have married you? I used to follow you when you went off to meet your, what did you call him? Your handler. Metcalfe, wasn’t it? God, how it made me laugh. Yes, I killed Shelagh, but it was an accident, and yes I killed Mike because the fucker has been blackmailing me for the last three years, he found out about me and April, and he already had a good idea about Shelagh, but you can’t prov
e it, and you won’t live to. Interesting, though, how you can accuse me of lying – our whole fucking relationship has been a lie.’
He yanked me to my knees and before I could wriggle out of his grip, he had lifted me round my waist like a sack of coal. I screamed as loudly as I could but with bewildering speed he lugged me to the edge of the plunge pool and dropped me in.
Goodbye, iPhone voice recording.
The cold water closed over my head and as I tried to right myself I felt Ed’s big hands pressing me down, holding me under.
Goodbye, Waitsey…
No no no no, I’d got this far, it couldn’t end this way. It couldn’t … My chest compressed and contorted and I felt pressure build behind my eyes. I thrashed about, trying to shake him off, my arm agony where he’d twisted it but he had his fingers entwined in my hair and it was impossible to get out of his grip. Kaleidoscopic colours danced and swirled behind my eyelids and I felt my movements grow weaker. I couldn’t fight him. I couldn’t breathe.
This was really it, and it was so sudden and brutal.
I prayed and struggled to the best of my muddled abilities and then my thoughts simply began to dissolve in the stilling water, no longer fizzing like aspirin but just slowly melting away into nothingness.
54
Then, through the dark water, the distorted sound of another voice screaming. I felt the pressure on the crown of my head replaced by the cloying Mustique night air.
Arms dragged me to safety, yanking and rolling me awkwardly onto the ground, choking and coughing again to get the water out of my lungs. Where was Ed? I opened my eyes slowly to see a silhouetted figure crouching down in front of where I lay spluttering and panting on my side.
‘Oh my God, Lynn, I’m so sorry, you have to believe me, I didn’t know he’d killed anyone, let alone Mike. He killed my husband…?’
‘April,’ I croaked. ‘Where’s Ed?’
April sobbed. She was deathly grey-white beneath a suntan, tears and mascara all over her face, her hair matted and her body shaking with emotion.