by Louise Voss
Which meant that Adrian and Ed had definitely known each other, too, from way before I’d even met Adrian.
I handed the phone slowly back to him. A failing fluorescent tube flickered above his head, as if transmitting my panic. I could feel the colour drain from my face and began to back away from him, my legs shaking so much that I could barely stand. We didn’t speak, he just nodded.
‘I’m sorry, Waitsey. I didn’t want you to find out.’
For a second Adrian looked regretful, but then his expression changed. In one swift move he yanked open the cutlery drawer, from which I’d just taken a teaspoon, and grabbed one of the sharp knives, a lethal-looking serrated number that I’d last seen Alvin use to cut up chorizo for the MA cheese and wine party … I even remembered Alvin commenting on the wisdom of keeping sharp knives so accessible, with all the teenage hormones flying around! That had been my mistake. I shouldn’t have let Adrian spot them.
But then, how could I have known that my friend, my lover, the one man in whom I’d been able to confide, had used me as much as Ed had?
I wanted to vomit, but there was no time for that. I needed to call the police, and fast.
I spun on my heel on the worn parquet floor and fled into the instrument store, which had a lock on the inside of the door, but as I was trying to slam it shut, Adrian jammed his foot in the doorway and forced his way in behind me. It was he who locked it, trapping me. We faced each other, panting, the bells and gongs of the gamelan between us like some sort of bizarre obstacle course.
This whole thing had been a set-up from the start.
‘You sent me to spy on Ed! Fuck! Why? How did you know that I wouldn’t get something on him?’
He gave a harsh bark of laughter, the knife steady in his hand. ‘Isn’t it obvious? Because I knew you. You were desperate for kids, for a husband, you were ripe to fall for someone. I’d known Ed since we were kids, I knew he’d be able to seduce you.’
I gave a sob of outrage. We were circling one another like tigers, but he made sure he kept himself between the door and me. There were metal security grilles on the windows. No other way out.
‘You played me. You both did! You fucking bastards!’ I paused, the full horror still sinking in now that my suspicions were confirmed. ‘But why would you do that, risk everything, for Ed?’
‘I owed him,’ he said. ‘We were best friends at school, then as adults too, family holidays together and so on, when the boys were little. He saved my arse once, gave me an alibi for when some stupid bitch accused me of rape, when Kit and Ben were five or six. We agreed never to see each other again after that. The kids forgot about their friendship; forgot they’d known each other. We didn’t speak for years, until Ed came to me saying he’d accidentally killed Shelagh and it was my turn to help him. He threatened to go to the police and retract his alibi, get me convicted for that rape if I didn’t. I found out that they wanted to send in someone undercover, and pulled a few strings to make sure it was you. You got nothing on Ed; and then we were eventually able to frame that homeless bloke…’
So it wasn’t Ed who’d framed Garvey, it was Adrian. Poor Gavin Garvey. Imagine confessing to something you didn’t do, just for the sake of three hot meals a day and a prison bunk to sleep in – although, knowing Adrian as I now did, there had probably been some unpleasant behind-the-scenes coercion going on as well. And jail obviously hadn’t been as much fun as Garvey had thought it would be, since he’d hanged himself.
‘And it all worked out very well … until now. Ed came up with that stupid dementia scheme and forced me to get involved again. I didn’t want to. I told him I’d done my bit. But I needed the money, once I lost my pension. All because of what some bimbo sergeant accused me of doing to her.’
I knew it. I knew him getting booted out of the police had been something to do with a woman. Why had I not listened to my intuition?
‘Ed paid you?’ I couldn’t prevent a moan escaping. ‘So it wasn’t an accident, us meeting at the Barbican?’
I didn’t even want to think about what he might have done to the ‘stupid bimbo sergeant’.
‘Of course it wasn’t an accident. He rang and told me to meet you there. That you needed a shoulder to cry on.’
‘Did he … did he know we slept together?’ At that moment I couldn’t imagine things being any worse.
‘He suggested it.’ Adrian’s smile was cold. ‘I did always worry that you might somehow recognise Kit. I knew you’d seen him once or twice with me back in Salisbury, and I had a photo of him in my office, didn’t I? I told Ed to get rid of any photos of the boys together, but I couldn’t be sure if he had. Did he not?’
‘I … I saw a holiday photo of them … it was at Shelagh’s sister’s place,’ I stuttered, barely able to get the words out.
The smell of Adrian’s aftershave was toxic again, mingling badly with his sweat, almost choking me. He was stalking me now, the knife held high in his right hand. I realised only one of us would be leaving this room alive but I swore, on the memory of my dead child, it was going to be me.
‘So when did you figure out that Ed really had killed Shelagh?’ he demanded.
I was not going to die here. I would not. If only I’d asked Ellen who that boy was, when I saw the photo. I’d have remembered that Adrian’s son was called Kit and made the connection straightaway. Then I would have known everything. Ed would still be alive. In prison along with Adrian, but alive…
‘I never knew how he did it, or when. I just worked out what he must have done with her body. He put her into an acid bath at a doorstripping place, I’m sure of it. In fact,’ I went on, holding his gaze, ‘it was you who made me realise it. I’d forgotten who once said it to me, that if they ever killed someone and wanted to dispose of the body, that’s what they’d do, but I remember now, it was you! I always felt creeped out by those door-stripping places after that. You suggested it to Ed, didn’t you?’
I was gabbling. Adrian said nothing.
I felt around behind me for something I could use as a weapon. Keep him talking, I thought. ‘Ed did a magazine article about his house renovation and said that he hadn’t touched the stripped-pine doors, but I saw an old Polaroid from before the work started and all the doors were gloss-painted, so I knew he’d been lying about it. I just worked it out from there – although not till recently.’
Another brief snippet of memory returned to me. A dodgy-looking guy in stained white overalls once came to the front door of Ed’s old house in Molesey, soon after we’d started dating. I was sitting in the upstairs living room learning my lines for the play and I’d seen the guy storm up the garden path, then pull the doorbell so aggressively that it jangled on for ages and ages. He’d definitely got out of a van bearing the name of a furniture-stripping company.
Ed hadn’t come back upstairs after he answered the door, even though I saw the man climb back in his van and drive away. I went down to the kitchen and found him, Ed, standing by the Aga, an expression of utter shock and panic on his face. When I asked him what the matter was, he had snapped at me and pushed past me, the first time I had ever seen him lose his cool. Perhaps the guy had threatened to tell the police he knew Ed had been sneaking around his yard at night – or maybe he’d given Ed a key and then regretted it, or not been paid for his services…? I never saw him again. For all I knew, Ed killed him, too.
Turn it into rage, I urged myself. Don’t let Adrian get away with it as well.
He nodded, looking briefly sorrowful. ‘I wish it hadn’t ever had to come out, Waitsey. We could have had something good this time, now that Ed’s dead. But I can’t let you go, not now.’
‘Another relationship with another arsehole who’s never respected me and never would? Thank fuck that’s never going to happen. You must think I’m stupid – but I’m not that stupid. I’m going straight to the police.’
‘You won’t have the chance, I’m afraid,’ he said, advancing on me, beads of sweat glistening on his bal
d head. ‘Shame, Waitsey. I really was fond of you, you know.’
Where was everybody? I longed to hear the sound of the campus security van outside, or the uni’s postman letting himself in, but the house was silent. My phone was in my jeans pocket. I slid my hand in to get it, and that was when he lunged at me across the gamelan’s floor drums. I dodged out of the way, but he came at me again and this time the knife made contact with my side. I felt a sharp pain and then the sticky sensation of blood blooming on my white shirt, thick and hot, but I refused to look down. Instead, I yelled as loudly as I could, jumped over the drums and the bells and launched a kick at him.
If I missed, I really was dead.
I didn’t miss. I’d been aiming for his groin but my taekwondo skills were rusty and I only connected with his thigh. It was enough to topple him, though, and he crashed to the floor, hitting his head on the metal frame of a gong.
This was my chance. I snatched my phone and dialled 999, shrieking ‘POLICE’ as soon as the call connected. Adrian was bleeding from his head, he’d dropped the knife and his eyes rolled back. I thought he was out for the count – but then he grabbed my ankle and tried to pull me down.
I wanted to stamp on him but if I lifted my other foot, I’d topple over. I cast wildly around me to try and find something to hit him with, but nothing heavy enough was within reach, except perhaps the double bass that I’d left leaning next to the door earlier that morning. Could I reach it? I wasn’t sure.
I leaned as far as I could towards it and, grasping its slippery wooden sides like I was trying to heft a wide-hipped old lady into a car, I managed to get purchase on it, enough to lift it up, only then remembering that it rested on a long, lethal spike…
I raised it as high as I could. Realising what I was trying to do, Adrian let go of my ankle and attempted to roll away, just like Ed had managed to do when I’d held the ammonite over him. I wasn’t going to miss a second time. I wasn’t going to let another dishonest bastard get away with it. And I certainly wasn’t going to die, not now, not after I’d survived everything else.
Screaming at the top of my lungs, I brought the instrument down on his face, its maple wood bulk mercifully shielding me from the sight of the spike driving straight through Adrian’s right eye. His own scream did not drown out the squelching noise it made on impact.
Then everything was silent again, a sea of blood flowing across the carpet tiles just like the one in my recurring nightmare.
I stepped over his body, unlocked the door and sank to the floor to wait for the police. The last thing I remembered was the sight of my own, brighter, blood spreading slowly across the worn parquet of the corridor. I closed my eyes and saw my baby being swept away, anguish on its tiny face as it waved goodbye.
It was all over.
EPILOGUE
December 2017
I’m standing at the edge of the harbour in Alderney, and it’s much colder than last time I was here. Wind reddens my cheeks and tips the waves with angry white crests, and I think briefly of the calm, turquoise sea in Mustique. Just briefly, though – I don’t want to be reminded of that.
I am making a trip I’ve been putting off since I moved to Jersey. I lived with Maddie and Geoff for almost six months while the sale of the house went through, but it’s only now I have my own place to go back to, a squat stone cottage in a green valley half a mile away from my friends, that I feel strong enough to face this meeting.
I turn and see Ellen waiting for me, no longer on crutches. She looks different, less harried than when I first met her. Her wiry grey hair has been cut short and looks far better, and she looks like she’s probably lost a bit of weight – her bottom doesn’t look nearly so massive. We go to a cafe overlooking the harbour.
‘I’m so sorry for storming out like that last time,’ I blurt, before our coffees even arrive.
She smiles, slightly tightly. ‘I understand. He was your husband. Anyway, I asked you to leave. It’s me who should apologise. I was worried for you – I know we didn’t see eye to eye, but I really didn’t want to read in the newspapers that you’d gone missing, or been found dead somewhere,’ she said.
I’d forgotten about her accent, the way she had of saying ‘r’s as ‘w’s. Somewhewuh.
‘I must seem so gullible to you.’
To her, to Surrey police, to Ed, to Adrian … I still quiver with shame at the thought.
‘No more than my sister did. Psychopaths are very convincing.’ She looks down at the table and plays with a beaded silver bracelet on her wrist, twisting it around and around.
I point at it. ‘Was that hers?’
‘No, but it was a present from her to me on my thirtieth. I still miss her.’
‘I’m sure you do.’
‘How is Benjy?’ she asks, and I start to laugh at her calling him Benjy instead of Ben, then stop. He was still Benjy last time she saw him.
‘He’s OK, all things considered. Devastated about his dad, but relieved that he won’t have to watch his illness progress…’
And at least he doesn’t know the whole truth. Like everybody else apart from me and April, he still believes that Ed threw himself off that cliff in Mustique. He doesn’t even know that his dad had faked dementia for all those months, and I’m glad of it.
‘Poor Benjy. And poor you. At least it’s all over now.’
It’s over, only my nightmares and a jagged scar on my side left to remind me. I had a tough few days being interviewed by the police as they tried to make sense of the whole story before concluding that I had definitely killed Adrian McLoughlin in self-defence and not pressing any charges. I claimed that he had gone at me with the knife after I rejected his advances. There were plenty of witnesses who’d seen us flirting in the pub that lunchtime, and the CCTV footage from the camera in the corner of the instrument store clearly showed him chase me in and stab me.
I said Adrian was an ex-lover I’d got back in touch with after my husband died. That he was bitter about women after his divorce and expulsion from the police and, in a moment of madness, hadn’t wanted to take no for an answer. The original rape charges came out, the ones that Ed helped him wriggle out of all those years ago, and it also transpired that the reason he’d been fired from the police was indeed because he had harassed another young officer. The poor ‘bimbo sergeant’ he’d so scornfully mentioned, presumably. How had I not realised what he was really like?
I was on tenterhooks wondering if the detectives investigating would make the connection between Ed and Adrian, because if they did, I was screwed for not disclosing it. The whole sorry saga would come out. But the police made no connection between any of it – Mike’s murder, which remained unsolved, Ed’s ‘suicide’, Adrian’s death. If they’d looked just a little harder they would have seen that it was me, and April, who were the connections, but with the CCTV evidence, they saw no need to dig deeper.
I wonder now if any other woman in the history of womankind has ever had such appalling judgement when it came to choosing lovers.
It is galling to me that April and the fake consultant, Bill Brown, both escaped without any sort of justice, but April has to live with her own conscience and the loss of Mike – and I don’t give a shit about Bill Brown other than praying that he doesn’t have a rush of his own conscience and go running to the police to confess. I suppose that this is an uncertainty I’ll just have to live with.
‘My poor nephew, losing both his parents.’ Ellen’s eyes fill with tears.
‘But the good news is that he’s going to be a dad himself – his girlfriend Jeanine is three months pregnant. They’re thrilled. It’s really helped, I think; given him a reason to look to the future.’
I suddenly want to tell her that she’d been right about everything; Ed had been having an affair. Ed had killed Shelagh, and Mike – but fortunately I stop myself. It’s all in the past, and I am desperate to move on with my life now.
I will always wonder exactly what Mike discovered and blackmail
ed Ed about. I suppose it wasn’t impossible that Mike, on his way to or from a night-fishing trip, might have spotted Ed’s car and followed him to the paint-stripping yard out of curiosity, putting two and two together as I did much later, hugging the deadly secret to himself until he could deploy it to devastating effect. He had discovered about Ed’s affair with April and decided that the best way to punish him was by hitting him where it hurt – his bank account. Particularly if, as April claimed, their show of wealth had been just that – a show. They had both probably managed to piss hundreds of thousands of pounds up the wall with their debts and boats and swanky holidays. Mike had found a way to keep April, get more money and make Ed suffer, all at the same time. He must have thought it was a win-win situation – he wouldn’t have wanted to continue the friendship anyway, once he knew Ed was screwing April. But he forced Ed to pretend that everything was normal.
Ellen changes the subject. ‘So you’re living in Jersey now – are you working?’
‘Not yet. I’ve applied for a job in a school office and I’ve got an interview next week.’
I think back to my brief time at Hampton University. I don’t particularly miss the job or Margaret and of course haven’t ever set foot in Fairhurst again, but I do miss Alvin. He was upset when I said I wasn’t coming back, but very understanding. He dropped round a couple of weeks later with an embarrassingly glowing reference for me in a white envelope.
‘I’ll email it to you as well of course,’ he said. ‘But I actually just wanted to see you, make sure you’re OK. We’re mates now, aren’t we?’
‘Of course we are. I’m, er, sorry for making such a mess of the instrument store. Please let me pay for—’
He cut me off with a traffic-stopping gesture. ‘Certainly not. Please. That’s what we have insurance for.’
I wasn’t sure which of us was more embarrassed. In truth, I was slightly in shock at the sight of him, standing in my porch with his shoulders stooped so as not to bump his head, amongst my muddy wellies and all the old umbrellas and coats. His hair was sticking up all over the place like Krusty the Clown’s, and I had to stop myself from hugging him round his pipe-cleaner-thin middle.