by Tess Stimson
PART 1 OF RECORDED INTERVIEW
Date:- 27/07/2020
Duration:- 24 Minutes
Location:- Starr Farm Senior Care Centre, Parsloes Ave, Dagenham
Conducted by Officers from Devon & Cornwall Police
(cont.)
RC
Her dad isn’t dead.
POLICE
But Mrs Page said—
RC
It’s what she always says. Easier than admitting he walked out on her. She don’t like the truth; she changes the facts to fit. Far as I know, Ted Clarke’s alive and well, ruining some other poor bitch’s life. Dorking, last I heard.
POLICE
Make a note, Rich. We’ll need to talk to him.
POLICE
Sir.
RC
So what d’you want from me?
POLICE
When did you last see your daughter, Mrs Clarke?
RC
I don’t know. A couple of weeks ago? She comes when she comes. What am I, her mother?
POLICE
Sir, are you sure [inaudible].
POLICE
The doctor said she was fit for interview, Rich.
RC
I’m pulling your leg, son. I’m old, not senile.
POLICE
When you last saw your daughter, Mrs Clarke, how did she seem to you?
RC
She brought the wrong biscuits.
POLICE
Did she discuss her husband at all?
RC
She didn’t tell me she planned to stick a knife in his neck, if that’s what you mean.
POLICE
You think your daughter killed her husband?
RC
Do you?
POLICE
[Pause.] Let me put it another way. Did she give any indication they were having problems when she visited?
RC
She married a cheater. Cheetahs don’t change their spots.
POLICE
Do you mean leopards?
POLICE
It’s a pun, Rich. Are you saying Andrew Page was having an affair?
RC
How would I know? I’ve never even met him. She didn’t invite me to the wedding. How’s that for honouring thy mother? Tried to kill me, then put me in here to rot. If I weren’t dead from the neck up when I arrived, I am now.
POLICE
What do you mean, tried to kill you? Who did?
RC
My loving daughter, who d’you think?
POLICE
Sir [inaudible].
RC
I know what it says in my records. I never tried to top myself. She weren’t trying to cut me down when my neighbour found her neither, she was trying to string me up. But Carol is very convincing when she wants to be. You’ve got no idea what she’s really capable of.
POLICE
Carol? You mean your daughter, Caroline Page?
RC
Changed her name when she left home. But take away the fancy suits and la-di-dah accent, she’s still Carol.
POLICE
Sorry, but are you saying your own daughter tried to kill you?
RC
I don’t expect you to believe me.
POLICE
Can you prove any of this?
RC
Think I’d be sitting here if I could?
POLICE
Sir, I [inaudible].
RC
You were the ones came to see me, remember? You think I’m unreliable? We all tell our own truths, son. You think anyone else is telling you the facts?
POLICE
Thank you, Mrs Clarke, you’ve been very helpful. If we need anything else, someone will be in touch. Rich, you can turn that off now—
RC
His wife came to see me last week.
POLICE
[Pause.] I’m sorry, Mrs Clarke. What did you say?
RC
Louise Page. She was here.
POLICE
What did she want?
RC
Same as you. She wanted to know about Carol. Difference is, she took me seriously.
Chapter 33
Louise
The taxi disappears down the lane, and Andrew picks up his holdall and follows me around the side of the house and in through the half-finished kitchen. I’m about to put on the kettle to make some tea when I think better of it, and fetch a bottle of Glenlivet 18-year-old single malt from the sideboard in the dining room. I pour a rich, thick finger of the amber liquid into a heavy crystal glass, and take it in to Andrew. The last time I touched either this bottle or the best crystal was almost five years ago, the Christmas before he left.
Andrew knocks back the Scotch in a single gulp, and holds his empty glass out to me. I go back to the sideboard to top it up, my concern mounting. I’ve never seen him drink like this.
I don’t normally bother with alcohol myself during the week, but I have a feeling I’m going to need it tonight. I pour myself a large glass of white wine and take both drinks through to the sitting room. ‘What’s happened?’ I ask, setting Andrew’s tumbler on the coffee table in front of him. ‘What did you mean outside, when you said you’ve been a fool?’
He buries his face in his hands. ‘Oh, God. I don’t know where to start.’
‘Try the beginning.’
I sit down next to him, but for a long time, he doesn’t speak. His shoulders heave silently, and I realise with shock that he’s crying. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I’ve seen him sob before.
My arms ache to reach out and comfort him, but I don’t feel I have the right. ‘Andrew, whatever it is, we can sort it out,’ I say.
He raises a despairing face to me. ‘Lou, I don’t think we can.’
What can he have done that’s so terrible? Is it something to do with work? I run through scenarios in my mind, wondering what could have reduced him to such despair. He’s made mistakes before, run with a story without checking every fact, made a bad call that put him and his crew at risk, but instinctively I know this is something more personal. News crews work in close quarters on the road, producers and reporters doubling up in hotel rooms, travelling together for days at a time. Adrenalin and alcohol are a heady combination. And this is the #MeToo era. Has he crossed the line? Is someone accusing him of harassment, or even sexual assault?
There’s a footfall on the stairs, and Bella appears in the doorway. She starts in surprise when she sees her father. ‘What’re you doing here?’
‘Hear you’ve been in the wars,’ Andrew says, getting up to give her a hug. No one but me would see the desperate misery behind his smile. ‘That’s quite the egg you’ve got there. How’s the ball looking?’
‘Ha, ha.’ She tucks her hands into the long sleeves of her grey T-shirt, and I realise I can see the outline of her ribs and collarbone beneath the flimsy fabric. She’s got so thin.
‘You all right, Dad?’ Bella asks. ‘You look a bit weird.’
He does look terrible: red-eyed, and drawn and grey beneath his summer tan. He’s putting on a good show for Bella, but his hand shakes when he reaches for his glass again, and consummate actor though he is, I don’t know how long he can keep up the performance. ‘My daughter spent the day in casualty,’ he says. ‘One day, you’ll understand how that feels.’
‘Back upstairs now,’ I tell Bella. ‘You’re supposed to be resting.’
‘Would you like me to come and tuck you in?’ Andrew asks.
Bella looks alarmed. ‘She’s sixteen,’ I say gently. ‘She doesn’t need tucking in. Go on up, Bella. Dad’ll say goodnight later, before he goes.’
Bella returns to her room, and I pour myself another glass of wine, deeply troubled by whatever’s going on with Andrew. The protective shock from Bella’s accident is starting to wear off, too, leaving me exhausted and emotionally drained. Today has brought back so many unhappy memories. I can’t wait for Bella to fall asleep, so I can sit by her bed and
just watch her breathe.
‘She seems OK,’ Andrew says, as I return.
‘She’s awfully thin. I didn’t really notice it till I saw her in the hospital bed today. She’s lost a lot of weight in the past few months. Do you think we should be worried?’
‘Everyone looks ill in a hospital bed.’
‘You read so much about eating disorders these days—’
‘She looks fine to me,’ he says testily. ‘She’s always been skinny, you know that. But if you’re worried, take her to see someone.’
‘I don’t want to put ideas in her head.’
He sighs. ‘Then don’t.’
He slumps back onto the sofa, staring moodily into his glass. I wait for him finally to tell me what’s troubling him, but he’s lost in his own dark thoughts. His phone buzzes a couple of times with incoming texts – Caz, presumably – but he ignores them.
‘Andrew,’ I begin tentatively. ‘Do you want—’
He looks up suddenly. ‘Let’s not do this,’ he says, and there’s a note of desperation in his voice. ‘Can we just spend a nice evening together, watch some crap TV, and not talk about anything?’
‘If that’s what you want. Would you like something to eat? I can throw something together—’
‘Not for me,’ he says. ‘Unless you’re hungry?’
‘I’m fine. I ate earlier with the kids.’
He doesn’t mention Caz, and I don’t ask. Despite my anxiety, I can’t help a quiet sense of pleasure that it’s me he’s turned to in his moment of crisis, not Caz. She may be his wife now, she may even love him, I suppose, but my bond with Andrew is deeper and older and more profound. Whatever’s happened, whatever he’s done, I’m in his corner, and he knows that, or he wouldn’t be here.
I’ve been such a bloody fool, Andrew said. For the first time, I dare to hope he meant: For leaving you.
He reaches for the remote, and turns on the television, settling on a chilly Scandinavian thriller I’ve seen before, and refills his glass a third time. I get another for myself, too. It’s lucky Andrew didn’t drive here; he’ll clearly be getting a taxi home.
Pressed together on the settee, I’m acutely conscious of the heat of his body against mine, the sweet, whisky-infused scent of his skin. The sofa is the same one we bought seventeen years ago, when I was pregnant with Bella, its chintz fabric now so faded and stained with spills and sunshine and felt-tip pen it’s almost impossible to discern the original pattern. I should’ve replaced it years ago, but it’s the sofa where I breastfed my babies, where one of them was quite possibly conceived, and I can’t bear to part with it. Its springs have long since given out, and were it not for the two sturdy Quality Street tins beneath either end, holding up the cushions, our bottoms would sag onto the floor. As it is, we roll to the centre together as if on a cheap mattress. Andrew puts his arm around me, holding the pair of us upright, just as he always did. It feels as if he never left.
‘Why are you so good to me?’ he murmurs suddenly, into my hair. ‘After everything I’ve done to you. I don’t deserve it.’
It’s a question I’ve asked myself at least a thousand times in the past four years. The heart wants what it wants. ‘No, you don’t,’ I agree, trying to ignore the sudden pulse between my legs.
‘We had so much going for us, and we still managed to screw it up,’ he says, slurring slightly. ‘How did we end up here?’
‘Andrew—’
He silences me with a kiss.
For a split second, I’m too stunned to respond. But my body knows what I need better than I do, and the muscle memory of my heart is too ingrained for me to hesitate more than a moment. There are four years of pent-up yearning in the kiss I return, four years of waiting and wanting and pain and longing. Every neuron in my body comes alive, and I realise that I have been dormant, living in suspended animation, since the day he left.
Abruptly, Andrew breaks away. I brace myself for the garbled apology: too much Scotch, getting late, should never have. But he’s paused only to lever himself from the Venus flytrap of a sofa, and then he holds out a hand to me.
I take it.
I take it, and I let him lead me upstairs, even though I know what we’re about to do is wrong on so many levels. I take it because I’ve had a whole bottle of wine, because it’s late and he has come to me, because I’m tired of fighting how I feel, of pretending to myself that I’ve put the past behind me and moved on. I take his hand and follow him into our bedroom and let him undress me because I love him, and because in my head and my heart he is my husband, has always been my husband, no matter who he’s married to.
We are strangers who know every inch of each other’s skin. It comes as easily to us as it always did, but now it’s enhanced by the thrill of discovering each other all over again. I’d forgotten how much I like sex, the extraordinary capability of my own body to give me pleasure.
Afterwards, we lie in each other’s arms, my head nestled against his chest. Andrew has fallen straight asleep, as always. I listen to his heartbeat, pressing my palm gently against his skin. For so long, I’ve fantasised about this moment. Now it’s here, I can’t quite take it in.
I extricate myself from his embrace without waking him, propping myself up on my elbow as I watch him sleep. I don’t know why he’s come back to me now, after all this time, but I’m not going to question it. This is what I’ve wanted since the day he left: for him to come to his senses, realise what a fool he’s been, and come back to me. He didn’t exactly say that in so many words, but then we didn’t waste much time talking. It’s obvious what he meant. He’s here. That’s all that matters.
So why this strange sense of … anticlimax?
It wasn’t the sex. That was satisfying on both a physical and emotional level. And yet I feel oddly flat, the way you do on Boxing Day after all the anticipation and excitement of Christmas. Wonderful as it was, of course it couldn’t live up to the weight of four years of expectation. Nothing ever does.
I wish I could let him sleep, but I can’t risk Tolly bouncing in at five a.m. and finding his father in my bed. We need to break this carefully to the children, once we’ve worked out the logistics of Andrew moving back in. I know how close Bella’s got to Caz. I don’t want to alienate her any further. This is going to take a bit of finessing as far as she’s concerned.
I nudge Andrew, smiling as he opens his eyes. ‘I hate to wake you, but the kids can’t find you here.’
He glances at his watch and sits up abruptly. ‘Shit. Is that the time?’
‘The spare room’s all made up. You can—’
‘I need to get back to Caz. She’ll be wondering where the hell I am.’
I watch in silence as he yanks on his trousers and sifts through the tangle of clothes on the floor for his socks. I’d assumed, because of the holdall with which he’d arrived, he’d already told Caz he was leaving her. A faint sense of unease steals over me. He must be going back to break the news to her now. He wouldn’t let me down again.
He finds his socks and sits next to me to put them on. Tucking a strand of hair behind my ear, he looks deep into my eyes. ‘You are incredible,’ he murmurs. ‘I can’t tell you how much I needed that.’
I digest that for a moment. Sex is different for men, of course. It’s the way they communicate. How they show love. They don’t need to actually say it.
‘What are you going to tell Caz?’ I ask tentatively.
‘She knows I came over to check on Bella. I’ll just tell her I had too much to drink, slept it off for a couple of hours on the sofa. She won’t like it, but I’ll smooth things over somehow.’
Smooth things over? You don’t smooth things over when you’re leaving your wife. You do it when you don’t want to be found out.
A cold stone settles in the pit of my stomach. ‘Andrew,’ I say slowly. ‘Andrew, when you said you’d been a fool, what exactly did you mean?’
Four days before the party
Chapter 34
> Caz
I pace the empty house in the dark, waiting for Andy to come home, too agitated to sleep or even distract myself with mindless television. Midnight comes and goes, and his locator dot steadily pulses from Louise’s house. It hasn’t moved in hours. I picture Andy glancing at his phone when it buzzes with my texts, dismissing the notification without even bothering to open it, or maybe showing it to Louise, the two of them laughing at me as I wait pathetically for him to return. Or is his phone unattended in his jacket pocket, flung over the back of a kitchen chair or strewn on the bedroom floor? Is he fucking her, right now?
With a shout of frustration, I fling the phone across the room and collapse sobbing onto the sofa. He’s never stopped loving her; I’ve always known it. My mother was right: you can’t build a solid house on shifting sands. He’s weak. It’s the reason we’re together in the first place.
The story Andy believes, the story I’ve told and retold so often I’ve almost come to believe it myself, is that we met by chance. A fender-bender at the junction of Clerkenwell Road and Hatton Garden: we literally met by accident, Andy always says, when he tells the story, the happiest accident of my life. He doesn’t remember that we’d already met, fleetingly, six weeks earlier when Tina introduced us at the RSPCA charity auction. We barely exchanged three words that night, but for me it was enough. It wasn’t hard to find out Andy’s routine, and to be in the right place at the right time: he presented the evening bulletin at INN every night, and took the same route to work at the same time each day. All I did was create an opportunity.
But I didn’t force him to start an affair with me. You can’t steal someone’s husband; they’re not lipsticks to be pocketed when the store manager’s back is turned. If Andy’s marriage had been happy, we’d have exchanged insurance details, and that would’ve been the end of it. He wouldn’t have called me the next day, and asked me out for a drink. He wouldn’t have leaned across the pub table and tucked my hair behind my ears and told me I was lovely.