The Old You

by Louise Voss

  ‘He’s here … I think he’s dead.’

  She moved away from me and, through my double vision I saw two Aprils pick up two limp hands and feel for a pulse. Then the two Aprils began to attempt CPR, pounding on Ed’s chest and wailing. I crawled over to them and tried to push her away.

  ‘Get off him.’

  She shook me off. ‘But he’s not breathing!’

  ‘Good. Leave him, April, or I swear to God I’ll kill you.’

  I couldn’t have killed her if I’d tried, though. I had no strength in me at all, but she sat back on her haunches and stared at me, wild-eyed.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, my voice rasping and unfamiliar.

  She nudged her chin towards the heavy iron chair, now lying by the pool with a dark stain on it. ‘I … I … hit him with the back of that,’ she whispered.

  Because he was drowning me, or because she heard him admit to killing Mike? At that moment I didn’t even care. I was just glad that my husband was dead and I was alive.

  ‘Have you been here all along?’

  April nodded. The tears pouring down her face kept my own eyes resolutely dry. ‘I was in the bushes with my suitcase. He thought I’d gone out but I wanted to hear what he said to you. I heard everything. I didn’t know, Lynn, I swear. I didn’t know he’d killed my Mike. I thought he’d been murdered ’cos one of his dodgy business deals went wrong, that he’d pissed the wrong person off. I didn’t know Mike was blackmailing him. I never thought it could be Ed … I’d never have … I wouldn’t…’

  She tailed off. I felt a swirl of dizziness but forced myself to focus, getting onto my hands and knees like a dog to drop my head as the blood returned. My face throbbed.

  ‘Can you get me some painkillers? We need to work out what we’re going to do.’

  April obeyed, staggering into the villa and returning with a glass of water, a roll of kitchen paper and a box of paracetamol. I took four tablets, thinking that I should probably drink the rest of the water, but finding that I couldn’t. There was so much water in me already that I felt like frogspawn, gelid, drowning from the inside.

  About ten minutes later my double vision had gone and I could breathe properly again. We were both sitting on loungers on either side of Ed’s blood-soaked body. April had put down kitchen roll around his head, to try and stem the slow thick spread of blood across the marble verandah.

  ‘Why would Mike blackmail Ed?’ I asked. ‘It’s not like you guys needed the money.’

  April gave a sob. ‘The thing is, we did need it. Everyone thinks we were so loaded but we weren’t! Mike did sell the company for a shitload of money, but he spent and owed most of it, then lost the rest on the stock market and wouldn’t admit it to anyone. All of it, Lynn!’ She sounded almost accusing, as if Mike’s profligacy and bad financial planning was my fault.

  ‘But where did Ed get the money to pay him? Our savings were all still there till a few days ago.’

  April shrugged. ‘He must have had a secret account. He did once tell me that he got seventy grand more for his and Shelagh’s house than he told you. I remember that we laughed about you not knowing.’

  I wanted to kill her, and it helped me stay calm. Hate was a more empowering emotion than betrayal.

  ‘Then there was Shelagh’s life insurance,’ she mused, almost as if she was talking to herself. ‘That was a hell of a lot more than he told you it would be.’

  ‘Right. So it all ended up in yours and Mike’s accounts then? Nice to know that we’ve been bankrolling you for the past few years. My God. And I had to go out and get a job because we didn’t have enough income. How the hell did you have the brass neck to pretend to be my friend all this time?’

  I didn’t think I had ever been so disgusted in my entire life.

  ‘I didn’t know he was blackmailing Ed,’ she insisted, doe-eyed. ‘I think that’s terrible.’

  ‘Right. So it’s fine that you were sleeping with my husband, but you think it’s unforgiveable that Mike was extorting money from Ed. You know what? I bet Ed was only shagging you to get his own back on Mike.’

  It was a chicken-and-egg situation, a circle of hate and vengeance; was Mike blackmailing Ed because Ed was sleeping with April, or was Ed sleeping with April because Mike was blackmailing him about Shelagh? I supposed I’d never know. Something else occurred to me: ‘You must have known that Ed killed him, if you knew that he faked having Pick’s. You helped him, didn’t you? You faked those first scans.’

  She couldn’t meet my eyes. ‘Yes … I put his name on the films of someone else’s diseased brain and printed them out. But he told me he was doing it so that we could run away together. I never would have done it if I’d had any idea he was going to kill Mike … I didn’t want to be with Mike anymore but I’d never, ever have wanted him dead…’ She tailed off, sobbing again.

  ‘Did you know that Ed killed Shelagh, too?’ My head was still pounding but I felt an icy calm settle on me. I was alive. Ed was dead. Ed was a murderer.

  She shook her head violently.

  I eased myself back on the lounger with difficulty, letting the warm night air soak like dark sunshine into my aching bones.

  ‘So you’ve been having an affair with my husband since before he and I got together. You let me and Ben go all those months, thinking we were losing him. Top friend you were, April.’

  She blustered through her heaving sobs. ‘Come on, Lynn, don’t play the innocent – let’s not forget how you and Ed met. You were trying to get him sent to prison!’

  I groaned. So she’d known that all along, too? So many secrets, so many hollow friendships. ‘Only at first. Then I stupidly believed he was innocent, and quit the police. Why did you befriend me in the first place then, if you were shagging Ed, and I took him off you?’

  She laughed mirthlessly, a kind of huffing sound. ‘Because you marrying Ed and me befriending you was the only way I’d get to keep him. If he hadn’t seduced you, you’d have had him arrested and locked up. He only did it to stop you investigating him.’

  ‘Ed loved me,’ I said hotly, trying not to look at his bleeding body. ‘I don’t care what you think, or what was going on between you two, but he loved me as well. He wasn’t faking it, not all the time anyway. He couldn’t have managed that. It was so … real…’

  April nodded. ‘He did. He loved both of us, he used to tell me so. It kind of made me feel better about it all, in a way. Better about what I was doing to you. But I never believed he’d killed Shelagh. Never!’

  I made a scornful noise in my throat that she ignored, continuing: ‘At least, I wouldn’t let myself believe it. He said he was innocent, that he couldn’t face being arrested for something he didn’t do, and going through a trial, risking imprisonment … he said if he married you, then we could just carry on having an affair until he could divorce you and then we could be together. Then you got pregnant and, let’s face it, Ed was delighted – for all the wrong reasons.’

  That was such a low blow that I felt like crawling right back into that cold pool and letting the water swallow me up for ever this time. Our baby, my only chance at being a mother, and Ed used it to his own ends. Thinking he’d got me properly onside – that he was free and clear. He was probably thrilled when I had a miscarriage.

  ‘He got a vasectomy after that,’ April added spitefully. ‘That’s why you never conceived a second time.’

  I vomited again, not caring that it splattered over my feet and legs and the sun lounger I was sitting on, retching and retching until it felt like my insides were being pulled out of me and there was nothing left except foul strings of saliva. The number of times he’d soothed me by saying we’d have another baby, lots of babies, when all along he knew it would never happen … No wonder he’d refused to go for fertility tests. Right then, if I’d had the energy, I’d have got up and danced on his dead body.

  When I finally stopped I wiped my arm over my mouth and turned on April, bunching my hands into fists to stop
myself slapping her.

  ‘Could you have been any more naive?’

  ‘Me?’ She shot straight back. ‘What about you? I believed him, the same way he fooled you! And I wanted to be with him … I told you, I didn’t know Mike was blackmailing him until just now. I was so shocked.’

  Even though she seemed to know more about the state of Ed’s finances than I did, I realised that I believed her.

  ‘Did Mike find out that Ed killed Shelagh, then? Or was it about you and him? But Mike wouldn’t have stayed with you if he’d known, surely.’

  ‘I have no idea. I think he must have found out something – some evidence. I bet he also knew that Ed and I had been lovers; I bet he was doing it to punish him. That’s the sort of thing he’d do. Not the other way round – not what you just said: that Ed was only sleeping with me to get at Mike.’

  ‘Whatever. What evidence, though?’ I thought of the months I’d spent searching for evidence against Ed, and somehow Mike had managed to unearth it? ‘And why did they – how could they – carry on being friends under those circumstances? No wonder they didn’t want to see so much of each other. That’s insane.’

  ‘I have no idea what evidence he got. Maybe he saw something that he didn’t realise the significance of till later, like, I don’t know, Ed taking her body somewhere at night. Or Ed talking to that homeless guy, the one who confessed. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know for sure now.’

  I suddenly remembered that night when I’d woken from a drugged sleep, sure that I’d seen Mike smoking by the front gate in the early hours. It had to have been him. Presumably he’d have wanted cash from Ed, so it wouldn’t show up in any bank accounts, and had come to collect. I suspected April was right; Ed must have had an account I didn’t know about – possibly the same one he’d just transferred our savings into.

  The last of our savings, as I now realised.

  I looked over at Ed’s body again, and then at April, who suddenly resembled a very old lady. I felt the same, like we were two residents propped in wingback armchairs in a swirly carpeted old folks’ home, gazing vacantly at a too-loud television – instead of at the dead body of my husband with his skull staved in.

  ‘We need to get rid of him,’ I said bluntly.

  She lifted her head slowly, like a tortoise. ‘What? You aren’t going to call Security?’

  ‘I could do. But do you really want Caspar and Monty to find out the truth? How do you think Ben will feel, to learn that his dad killed his mum? That Ed faked the illness and you helped him do it? How could you live with yourself?’

  In the light from the kitchen window I could see the white marks on her face in the shape of her sunglasses, the freckles on her nose that I knew only popped out in the sunshine and the slightly wrinkled skin on her cleavage as she processed this. She was utterly familiar and yet suddenly a complete stranger.

  ‘You’re just saying that because you don’t want it to come out that you were an undercover cop who totally fucked up.’

  Had she always been this much of a manipulative bitch? Temper flared in me, mostly because she’d put her finger on exactly what I thought.

  I denied it anyway.

  ‘Well, that’s bullshit. I didn’t fuck up – I found no evidence, then I fell in love! But OK, then, have it your way. Let’s call security now, tell them everything. I’ll be happy to explain that you killed my husband, that you’re a liar and a narcissist, not to mention the shittiest, most disloyal friend in the entire history of friendship. You’re probably an accessory to the crime of Mike’s murder, even if you didn’t know it – because you knew all along that Ed was faking Pick’s. You’d been cheating on Mike with Ed for years. You benefitted from all the money that Mike blackmailed out of him, while shagging Ed behind our backs. Your children will never speak to you again. You’ll go to prison.’

  Bitterness like battery acid ate away at me as I visualised April’s designer wardrobe and their luxury holidays, funded by my retirement pot.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she conceded, trying to hide her relief. ‘But what do we do with his body?’

  I’d been thinking about this. ‘We’re on top of a cliff, aren’t we?’ I said slowly. ‘We tip him over and hope he gets eaten by sharks. You report him missing tomorrow. I’m going to pretend I was never here at all – at this villa, I mean. People know I was here on the island looking for Ed, but if I’m asked I’ll just say I never found him. I’ll say I was worried for his mental health, that he was afraid the drugs trial hadn’t worked … The police think he’s in Barbados.’

  I remembered Ed’s face earlier when he’d called me Liz, the genuine shock on it. ‘Speaking of the drugs trial, who was that Bill guy then? He clearly wasn’t a real doctor.’

  April looked at the ground. Ants were scurrying around, perhaps attracted by Ed’s blood, and she deliberately lifted one foot and began crushing them one by one under her designer flip-flop.

  ‘Stop that,’ I snapped and she drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around them and rocking back and fro.

  ‘He was just a petty criminal who could act,’ she confessed. ‘Ed paid him to pretend he was an old friend and rent that consultancy room, for the one day, just for you to see it and think the whole thing was kosher. He faked the certificates, the lot. I don’t know where Ed found him.’

  I shook my head. ‘He used you, just as much as he used me,’ I said. ‘You thought he was doing it so you two could play happy families together. But he was only doing it so that I’d give him an alibi for the night he killed Mike, to get him off his back.’

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ April whispered, crying again. ‘I’m sorry.’

  I ignored her. ‘We’re going to have to get rid of all this blood before the cleaners come tomorrow.’

  ‘Thank you, Lynn. Really.’ April reached for my hand but I moved away.

  ‘I’m not doing this for you. I’d happily see you rot in jail. I just want to keep the kids and, frankly, me, out of it. Come on, we’ve got to move him.’

  I stood up. ‘We’ll put a bin liner over his head to stop him bleeding through the garden. Can you go and get some?’

  April didn’t move. She just stared at me, her lip wobbling like a child’s. I wanted to slap her.

  ‘I am really, really sorry, Lynn. For all of it. Please forgive me, I know I’ve been a terrible friend. I did – do – really love you, you know. I always hated myself for being so two-faced, but Ed … was just Ed.’

  ‘He was,’ I agreed, ‘Thank you for the apology – which you’ve clearly only made because you’ve been busted. Now go and get bin liners, and find bleach and mops for later.’

  ‘So do you? Forgive me?’

  ‘No chance,’ I said, hobbling towards Ed’s body.

  The shadowy bats continued to whisk out of the eaves, swooping across to the trees and back as the frogs and cicadas switched up the volume on their night-time serenade.

  ‘And if we do make it back to England without being arrested,’ I continued, ‘I never, ever want to see you or hear from you again.’

  She turned and went inside, leaving me alone on the terrace with Ed’s face-down body among the smashed shards of the ammonite.

  55

  The rest of that night was a blur of heat and trauma. Dragging Ed’s corpse through the bushes to the precipice, I forced myself to try and dissociate completely; to turn myself into an automaton with no remorse, no regrets, no emotion. Not then, anyway. Time for that later when this was all over. The bin liner over his head stopped him trailing blood from his skull through the garden, but I was more glad of it because it meant I didn’t have to look at his face.

  Ripping off the bin liner and rolling him over the edge of the cliff without a word, the sound of his body crashing and bouncing off the rocks on the way down, audible above April’s sobs, the tiny splash as he vanished under the surface. It was so, so risky, but we had no other choice.

  I thought about forging a suicide note, but decided a
gainst it. We’d stick to our story, if questioned: he and April had a row during which he said he was going to top himself, but she didn’t believe him as he’d said this before. She would say he stormed out and didn’t come back that night. She would then report him missing in the morning, claiming he thought the Pick’s was back and couldn’t handle it.

  If asked, I would maintain I never clapped eyes on either of them while I was in Mustique.

  ‘But I’m bound to be a suspect, if I’ve got no alibi!’ April moaned, as we scrubbed and scrubbed at the marble verandah until all traces of his blood were gone – at least all traces visible to the human eye. If CSI ever showed up in their paper suits and overshoes, we were doomed.

  ‘Your problem,’ I said, shortly. ‘You killed him. And if you tell the police I was here, we’re both screwed. I’ll spill the whole story and you’ll be in it up to your neck.’

  When it began to get light, fluffing up the branches of the bushes, trying to hide the crushed path Ed’s body had created. Checking that anything with Ed’s blood on it was securely wrapped up, for me to dump in a trash can on my way back to my room. Fishing my dead mobile out of the pond, where it had fallen out of my dress pocket. We worked in silence, nothing left to say, the horror filling any spaces where words might have been.

  I was back in my bed by six in the morning. Unless I’d been really unlucky, nobody had seen me.

  56

  April reported Ed missing later that day. She must have given a very convincing rendition of ‘distraught mistress’, because when the coast-guard found his body two days later, the police from St Vincent and the Grenadines immediately accepted her insistence that he’d been in a suicidal frame of mind when he stormed off.

  I had only been home for a day when I received a third visit from Martine and Constable Laurie, who took off their hats and informed me of the sad news that Ed Naismith’s body had been recovered from the sea off Mustique where he had been on holiday with his lover. He must have flown on from Barbados to Mustique to meet her. I acted my socks off: the betrayed, bereaved wife, finding out that not only was her husband dead, but that he’d cheated on her with her best friend…