by TM Logan
I stared at them. Too many questions.
‘The social media,’ I said, ‘the messages from David Bramley, posts on his Facebook profile, the texts, the message on my computer screen on Monday. It was all you?’
‘Both of us,’ my wife said.
Beth said: ‘It turns out that misdirection and improvisation will take you a long way in today’s world. People put their trust in the strangest things – things they can’t actually see with their own eyes – and then refuse to believe what’s right in front of them.’
I shook my head, amazed at my own stupidity.
‘You handed us the situation,’ Beth continued, ‘and we improvised like a couple of Oscar winners. We had our share of luck as well, but improv is like anything else, really – the more you do it, the more it comes naturally. And I realised, we’re really good at it.’
‘Good at lying,’ I said. ‘Congratulations.’
‘Not lying,’ she said. ‘Acting.’
‘Your degree, at university. You did drama, didn’t you?’
‘Well remembered! Ben never let me finish my degree, never let me become an actress. He never let me do what I loved. And he never realised that I had actually been acting for years – acting like the faithful housewife, perfect and calm and satisfied, always happy in hubby’s shadow. But this week has been the performance of a lifetime, don’t you think? And you played along so well without even realising what you were doing!’
‘The stuff about Alex Kolnik,’ I said wearily, ‘what about that?’
‘All nonsense. Never seen the man. Ben was going to get a restraining order to keep him at arm’s length anyway.’
‘But you rented the black Range Rover to give the story a little bit of colour.’
‘That was your idea too – you mentioned early on that you saw one at the hotel on Thursday night, and we thought there might be a chance to throw it into the mix. We rented it for a week and kept it in long-stay parking, then Mel drove it over when I met you at the park yesterday. And it came in handy today as well.’
‘What about the deleted email from Ben saying he was “going home”? I might never have found it.’
‘We knew you would, eventually – you’re a very easy person to read. Although Christ knows it took you bloody long enough to hack Mel’s bogus email account, even though she’d used the most obvious password ever.’
‘How did you know I’d found the email?’
‘A fairly basic piece of gatekeeper software told us which emails you’d opened. And of course you took the bait, you ran away up north just when the police were going to arrest you again. It made you look even guiltier, like you were fleeing the inevitable.’
There had been no messages from Ben in Mel’s email account from before Thursday night. My assumption was that she had deleted anything incriminating that dated back before their liaison at the Premier Inn.
But now I knew the truth: there were no messages before that day. Because there was no relationship with Ben. It had all been a fiction, constructed online, fed by social media and fuelled by good old-fashioned suspicion and jealousy.
And I had eaten up every last word.
81
I sat up straighter in the chair, swallowing hard on a dry throat.
‘You said was.’
‘What?’ Beth said.
‘Ben was going to get a restraining order.’
‘Yes I did, didn’t I?’
‘Past tense,’ I said, holding her gaze.
‘Click-clock, tick-tock, and finally the penny drops,’ she said.
There was silence for a moment as I weighed my next words carefully.
‘So it was you all along. You did it.’
‘Did what, Joe?’
‘You killed him.’
‘But how do you know it wasn’t you, Joe? My poor darling husband – you hurt him and then you left him, you abandoned him. How do you know you’ve not been walking around as a murderer for the last nine days?’
‘Because then there wouldn’t have been a need for any of this.’ I gestured at her, at Mel, at the mess in the bedroom. ‘All these lies. All this misdirection. I would have gone down for it and that would have been that, justice would have taken its course.’
‘But instead you handed him to us on a plate. It’s a lot easier to suffocate a man when he’s unconscious, believe me.’
She said it in a matter-of-fact way, as if she was talking about the weather.
‘And then you planted evidence in the boot of my car,’ I said. ‘Suspicious searches on my phone. Planted my phone at the country park.’ I shook my head. ‘This is so screwed up it’s unbelievable.’
Beth laughed.
‘It’s completely believable, that’s the whole point! Cuckolded husband takes revenge on wife’s lover – it’s been happening for thousands of years. And the more you acted like nothing had happened to him, the more guilty you appeared to the police.’
‘I was the fall guy, all along.’
‘And a convincing fall guy needs convincing motivation.’
‘The pictures on that mobile phone, the naked selfies of Mel – what about them?’
My wife said: ‘A very busy Saturday morning while you were out doing pools and parties with Wills.’
I knew the answer to my next question, but I had to ask it anyway.
‘So there was never any affair between you and Ben?’
‘He’s not her type,’ Beth cut in. ‘She told you that on Sunday.’
I was silent for a moment, trying to take it all in. Trying to make sense of my emotions. Disbelief. Anger.
Heartbreak.
‘How could you do this?’ I said to Mel, quietly.
She said nothing.
‘We didn’t have any choice,’ Beth answered for her.
It was clear that she was in charge. She was the alpha female and Mel, my confident, outgoing wife, was the beta. Just like her mum, Mel had ended up in thrall to a dominant, controlling personality, pulled along in her slipstream. Beth was calling the shots – serene Beth, the shy other half who had always seemed to be in Ben’s shadow. Not any more. Now she was the boss. Maybe for the first time in her life.
‘I was asking my wife,’ I said.
Mel looked away from me.
‘Mel?’ I said again.
‘We have to protect what we’ve got,’ she said, looking at the floor.
‘And what’s that?’
‘Each other.’
‘And that’s worth committing murder for, is it?’
Beth cut in, her voice hard.
‘Absolutely.’
The last time I had seen them in the same room, one had been screaming obscenities and the other crying. More lies, all for my benefit – and for our friends and dozens of customers who could testify to the ferocity of a hatred between spurned wife and secret lover.
‘How long?’ I said.
‘What?’ Beth said.
‘You two. How long?’
‘Does it matter? What’s important is that we lost each other for too many years, and then we found each other again.’
‘You had a fling when you were fifteen, the two of you.’
‘You spoke to Mark Ruddington, then.’
‘He told me about the party after the school play when you two first got together.’ Another piece of evidence that I had held in my hands – and failed to see what it meant. ‘But that was when you were teenagers. How did you get from that to this?’
‘Teenagers are real,’ Mel said quietly. ‘It’s adulthood when we get lost, forget who we are.’
‘Come on, Mel, you can do better than that. This is me you’re talking to, your husband. I know who you are.’
‘You don’t get it, do you? Teenagers are honest. They’re true – that’s why they feel so vulnerable. It’s easy to forget that with all the other junk that gets in the way as you get older. Work, marriage, kids, mortgage. I woke up one morning and realised I’d turned into someone I didn’t recogn
ise, someone I didn’t even like any more. And then Beth and I bumped into each other again at Charlotte and Gary’s wedding a couple of years ago and it all just came back, like being teenagers again.’
‘That was the party where you said you made the mistake. A drunken kiss that led to his obsession with you.’
Beth said: ‘There was a drunken kiss all right, but not with boring old Ben.’
‘That was where the two of you got back together?’
‘Like waking up again after twenty years in a coma,’ Mel said quietly.
‘This is not you, Mel. This isn’t reality.’
‘I haven’t forgotten what’s real,’ she said. ‘Who I really am.’
‘Then what about our son? What about William? What about me?’
‘You pushed us into this corner,’ Beth said. ‘If you’d kept plodding along like you’ve done for the last ten years of your life – boring old Joe, head down, stuck in your rut – you needn’t have been involved. But as it is –’
‘As it is, you’re framing me for a crime I didn’t commit.’
She jabbed the shotgun towards me.
‘That was your choice. You got involved when you didn’t have to, when you stuck your nose in. And then, almost like it was fate, you presented us with an opportunity that was too good to pass up. Gift-wrapped and tied with a bow.’
Now the shock was receding, it was starting to become clear: I needed to get out of this house, grab William and take him somewhere safe. Somewhere far away from these two.
I needed to take the initiative.
‘There’s something you should both know.’
‘What’s that?’
‘DCI Naylor agreed to meet me here,’ I lied, checking my watch. ‘He’s going to be here any minute.’
‘You called him?’
‘At King’s Cross.’
‘Not from your mobile, you didn’t. Or did you use a landline, like you did on Wednesday?’
‘What?’
‘The hang-up call on my secret mobile? I called the number back – it was a payphone. The caller didn’t identify themselves and we started to get a bit jittery. But then Mel saw a picture of you on Twitter that some random chav had retweeted and the time corresponded exactly with the mystery call. And hey presto: where were you in the picture? A phone booth in West Hampstead.’
Ryley Warner. He’d taken a picture of me in the phone booth after I’d told him to fuck off, then posted it on Twitter. And then one of his followers had retweeted it to all of their followers, and Mel happened to be one of them. And so it continued: endless, circular, like some mythical beast that ended up consuming itself, an unending sequence of pictures and status updates and tweets and retweets and comments and favourites, all going round in ever-decreasing circles until –
‘You didn’t use a phone booth today, did you?’ Beth continued. ‘There was no reason for you to do that, because you thought you’d found the little spy inside your mobile already. Thought you’d got rid of it and that your mobile was safe to use again.’
‘The app you installed on my phone. System Track or whatever it’s called.’
‘SysAdminTrack,’ she corrected me. ‘Best sixty dollars I ever spent. It’s been on all your phones, by the way: the one you lost at the park, the replacement and the one you’ve got now.’
‘I deleted the app.’
‘You thought you deleted it. It stays in the system memory, hidden. The only way to properly get rid of it – if you’re not the one who downloaded it – is to do a full factory reset or get a new phone.’
‘You sound like an expert on this stuff.’
‘I installed it on Alice’s phone last year when she started going to the park with boys after school. But I’ve always kept up with Ben’s line of work. He never told me anything about what he did, about the industry that made his fortune – our fortune – so I made sure I kept up to speed. Waiting for the day he asked me to join him in the business.’ She frowned. ‘He never did, of course. Never thought I was worthy.’
‘Is that why you killed him?’
She ignored my question.
‘You didn’t call your detective chief inspector, did you?’ Her gaze was cool, unflustered. ‘You’re a terrible liar, Joe. It puts you at a big disadvantage.’
‘I guess I’ll bow to your expertise in that area.’
‘On the other hand, you made the perfect patsy – you’re so predictable. Combine that with an app that turns your mobile into a little tracking, spying device, and we knew exactly what you were doing from one minute to the next. We could switch on the phone’s cameras and microphone remotely without you knowing, record video, audio, take pictures, access your texts and web browser, check your location via GPS, see what you were searching for on Google.’
‘Like a hotel in Sunderland.’
‘Yes! Or that awful casino. Or train times from King’s Cross, or Fryent Country Park, or my little trail of breadcrumbs to lead you to Steven Beecham – even though we couldn’t figure out what the hell you were looking up STEB for at first! But yes, every single search. Sometimes it was like you couldn’t even make a cup of tea without googling exactly how, when and where you were going to do it. Even when you found out about the app, we knew that too – because you did a search on it.’
I realised something else, another piece slotting into place.
‘You had it installed on Ben’s phone as well, didn’t you?’
She smiled.
‘For months. So we knew exactly what he was planning.’
82
‘What was he planning?’ I said.
‘A renegotiation of our relationship.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Two options. One – complete and utter humiliation, admit my guilt, capitulate and grovel for another chance. Or two – divorce. But not amicable, nothing civilised for the sake of the child. That wasn’t Ben’s way at all.’
‘Not enough for him to win – everyone else had to lose, right?’
‘Exactly. He was going to screw me over completely, either way – it made it worse for him that it was another woman, rather than a man. I would have been left with barely a fraction of what should have been mine. Scorched earth, he called it. All the sacrifices I’d made for him: my degree, my body, my freedom, my career. My life. All those sacrifices, to get screwed again at the end of it. But this way, my way, we get everything.’
‘He found you out, didn’t he? He found out about the two of you.’
‘He was way ahead of you, Joe.’
‘It seems like most people are,’ I said, mostly to myself.
Mel added: ‘He asked to meet me that Thursday night supposedly for some off-the-books HR advice. But when I got there he just showed me a picture of me and Beth together, said he knew everything, and gave me an ultimatum.’
‘Which was?’
‘End it. End the affair and admit in writing to everything that had gone on. Apologise in person and in writing, to him and to you, apologise to his daughter, to his mother. Like Bee said, complete humiliation.’
Beth cut in.
‘And I would then have to agree to dissolve our prenuptial agreement and sign a post-nup in its place, with various clauses covering total forfeiture of assets and guardianship of Alice in case of further adultery.’
‘Using Mel as the messenger,’ I said.
‘Yes. To show who was the boss.’
‘But you knew what he was planning anyway, because you were monitoring his calls, texts and emails.’
Beth said: ‘We knew it was coming, we just didn’t know when. Turned out it was one boring average Thursday evening at a shitty little hotel off the North Circular.’
No wonder Ben didn’t want to talk when I saw him in that underground car park. He already had a lot on his mind.
I realised something else.
‘When he gave that ultimatum, you were listening in to the conversation, weren’t you?’
She nodded.
&
nbsp; ‘Every word.’ She gestured at me with the shotgun again, the twin black barrels pointed at my head. ‘And then who should walk in at the end, right into the middle of everything like Forrest bloody Gump?’
‘Me.’
‘Poor old Joe, about ten miles off the pace as usual, stumbling into the game without even realising it was in play.’
‘I got there in the end.’
She looked amused by that.
‘So what was it that finally clicked for you?’
‘The selfie on Mel’s secret phone – the one with her topless in the kitchen. The one you showed me at the pub on Sunday. Something about it bothered me, and I couldn’t work out what. It was only on the train back here today that I realised.’
‘What?’
‘It wasn’t where it was taken, it was when. All the date and time data had been deleted from the image, but the kitchen noticeboard was in the background of the shot, and William’s Superstar certificate from school was on it. He didn’t bring that home until Thursday evening, which meant that picture had to have been taken after she’d supposedly had this massive bust-up with Ben that sent him over the edge. So I knew Mel was involved in something, that she was still lying to me. I hadn’t put you two together yet, but I knew the picture was a lie.’
‘Indeed,’ she said with a half-smile. ‘Like all the rest of those naughty pictures. Pictures usually lie better than words.’
‘Then there was the escort agency. They were keen to get their repeat booking.’
‘Ah, yes. Young Jules.’
‘They sent me his picture, just a head and shoulders. But as soon I saw it, I knew.’
‘You knew what?’
‘He was the man I saw at the country park on Monday morning. Not Ben, but his double. Same height, same build, same hair. Put Ben’s jacket on him and he’s a dead ringer for your husband, or at least he was from fifty yards away.’
‘We were worried that he might not keep quiet after the police started searching the park,’ she said in the same matter-of-fact tone. ‘But it turns out that prostitutes are more easily bribed than most, and young Jules was no exception. Not really a surprise, is it?’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘You win.’