Mine

by J. L. Butler

  ‘Why did you report Donna missing?’ I asked quietly. ‘What made you think something was wrong?’

  Jemma gave a sad shrug.

  ‘A few days after I went to her house in Chelsea she came back to Colchester for the afternoon. I closed the salon and we came back here. We dug out old photographs, talked about old times. It was like old times. She liked it so much, she said she wanted to see everyone again. I decided to throw a birthday party and invite all the old crowd. She was looking forward to it so much. But when she didn’t turn up, when she didn’t call me on my birthday, when I couldn’t get in touch with her, I knew something was off.’

  ‘Even though she goes away so often?’

  ‘If you’re asking me if my sister is unreliable, I think we both know the answer to that one. But she wanted to come to my party. She promised.’

  I bought some time before I spoke again, sipping my tea even though it had lost its heat.

  ‘Did she tell you she was having an affair with Martin’s business partner?’

  ‘An affair?’ she repeated, frowning.

  ‘Did she mention him?’

  ‘No. Never. I don’t believe that she was having an affair.’ She looked at me with those cat-like eyes, so like her sister’s.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just got the impression she was a bit sick of men.’

  ‘You were hardly close, Jemma, and it’s a very personal thing to discuss.’

  ‘We were close enough,’ she said defensively. ‘Our lives were very different but we are still sisters. We shared a bedroom for six years when we were growing up, laughed, cried, worried about boys. We used to lie in our twin beds at night, not able to quite get to sleep, talking for hours. I just think I’d have known if she was involved with someone else, happy about being with someone else.’

  ‘But something did happen with Martin’s business partner. He admitted it.’

  She looked at me, her expression harder this time.

  ‘We don’t know what’s happened to Donna, but don’t go putting the blame on my sister,’ she said coldly.

  ‘I’m not blaming her—’

  ‘You’re dealing with a charming, brilliant and manipulative man, Miss Day. A man who will stop at nothing to keep his money.’

  She was interrupted by a knock at the door. Jemma pulled back the curtain behind her and peered outside.

  ‘My daughter’s home. I think I’ve said enough,’ she said, standing up. She waited for me to stand up, to indicate that my audience with her was now over.

  And as I stepped back out on to the unfamiliar provincial street, I wondered if it was a good idea even going there.

  Chapter 43

  ‘Is that Fran? It’s Jenny.’

  ‘I’m just driving,’ I said, stretching the truth a little. I’d put the key in the ignition, but I was still parked outside Jemma’s shop checking Instagram, scrolling through Donna’s feed, seeing if I could find evidence of a bruise.

  ‘Can you pull over a minute? We need to talk.’

  I sat back in my seat, knowing I couldn’t avoid her forever.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve not got back to you about the interview yet. I haven’t even spoken to Martin. As you can imagine, things are a bit difficult for him at the moment. I’m only his divorce lawyer, so I’m not high on his list of priorities.’

  ‘Whatever happened to “he’ll do whatever I say”?’ replied Jenny, and I deserved the remark.

  ‘I’ll definitely push for it, Jen. I will, although I have to warn you, this isn’t America. You know, fugitives doing Barbara Walters.’

  ‘Fran, the news team want to run a story on you,’ she said.

  For a moment I was almost flattered.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They think you’re involved with Martin Joy. Romantically.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  I hope she didn’t know me so well she’d notice the quaver in my voice.

  ‘You’ve been spotted together. By a pub landlord in Essex, by a neighbour of Martin’s . . .’

  ‘I’m his lawyer,’ I said, feigning indignation. ‘We’ve had to see each other. On many occasions.’

  ‘It’s just a heads-up, Fran.’

  ‘That’s nonsense. Absolute nonsense,’ I said, feeling myself go red in the face.

  ‘You are involved with him, aren’t you?’ she said more quietly. ‘That’s why you care so much.’

  I realized she didn’t have to help me like this.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ I said finally.

  ‘It always is.’

  The sky was turning dark. There were flat black clouds ahead, coming in from the North Sea.

  ‘Can you hold them off?’ I said, my turn to ask for the favour.

  Jenny hesitated.

  ‘I’m the deputy features editor, Fran. I commission interviews with the cast of TOWIE, I don’t have any sway over the news team. I’m only telling you what I’ve heard. But if you give me something with Martin, some sort of exclusive, then maybe the editor will be prepared to do you a trade.’

  ‘I’ll call you tonight,’ I said, ending the call, then gunning the engine, venting my frustration on the accelerator.

  The rain started within minutes, so hard that it covered the windscreen in sheets of water.

  I sat forward, and peered through the glass like an old lady reading a book. I could hardly see anything and had no idea where I was. I regretted not taking the satnav option at the rental-car place. With my phone battery on 25 per cent, I didn’t want to drain it any more just to find my way out of Essex.

  My trip to Colchester hadn’t really got me anywhere. I’d heard the domestic violence rumours from Doyle, and although they sounded more authentic coming from Jemma’s mouth, I tried not to take them as gospel. I just couldn’t. And now, with the newspaper on my back on top of everything else, I felt as if time was slipping through my fingers and I had no way to stop it.

  I forced myself to think. The police had nothing concrete on Martin, nothing on me, so long as there wasn’t a body. On the mind-map that I had drawn that morning, that was the glaring hole, the missing piece, where was Donna? I had suspects and motives, but I had absolutely no idea what happened in those hours after Martin Joy had left Donna’s house.

  Had he doubled back after I had seen him leave? Did someone else call on her? Did I, came the niggling voice? And where did you hide a body in Chelsea without anybody noticing?

  I wiped the steam away from the window and looked up at a signpost ahead.

  I was obviously going the wrong way for London, and was prepared to signal to turn around when I saw the word Dorsea.

  I had no idea that Colchester and Dorsea were so close, but when I stared hard at the horizon, I could make out a line of charcoal sea ahead.

  I knew immediately where someone might take a body. To a lonely house, by the sea, a mile from the nearest village, a house with the soundtrack of the sea, where the waves crashed and scraped on the shore and no one could hear you scream.

  The causeway was clear when I got to the island a little over ten minutes later. I had no idea when the tide was due to come in, whether I would find myself cut off. I passed Dorsea’s strip of shops, the tiny fire station and the pub where Martin and I had sheltered from the storm. I felt a stab of annoyance at the bar manager who had reported us to the police, and kept on driving.

  Dorsea House loomed on a thin ridge of bluff after just a few minutes. It looked magnificent, framed by a darkening violet sky. There was a line of yellow police tape across the gates at the entrance to the drive. The police had been here. Of course they had. If you had a missing person and a husband who was the prime suspect in her disappearance, of course you would search his remote, empty house by the sea, where it would be so easy to hide someone, so easy to kill someone. Why hadn’t I thought of it before?

  There was no one here now and I couldn’t help but think that was a bit shoddy. If I was in charge of the investigation, I
would have combed the place from top to bottom. Instead they had the forensic team and the cadaver dogs at Donna’s Chelsea home.

  I snaked around the building to the conservatory, remembering the door that was sticky but unlocked and as I pushed against the splintered frame, it opened with a rattle.

  The house had definitely been searched. There were rings of dust where vases and plant pots had been moved, books had been pulled off shelves.

  I moved around the house, eyes scanning every corner, not really knowing what I was looking for, but trying to think like Martin if he had brought Donna here.

  Would she have been alive or dead?

  Was I looking for signs of a body being dragged across the parquet, or blood splattered on the wall? If Martin had brought her back here, how and when had it happened? I didn’t know the answers to any of those questions.

  I went upstairs, hearing the stairs groan as I ascended. There was a gentle breeze coming into the house from a crack around a skylight window overhead. A voice in my head, the sensible side of me, told me to go back to London. It was gone six o’clock, dusk had fallen and it was almost dark. What would it achieve, me being here, other than landing me in further trouble with the police, who had obviously been here, searched the place and found nothing of interest.

  The stairs led to a wide-open landing with rooms going off in every direction. I looked in one, and then the other. Most were empty except for threadbare carpet, but two or three were partially furnished with stuff from its days as a nursing home, the old, half-broken things the previous owners hadn’t been able to sell off and hadn’t wanted to take with them. Humming with nervous energy, I poked around an armoire, opened a chest of drawers, then stopped, almost laughing at the ridiculousness of my actions – as if I was going to find Donna Joy’s dead body behind a couple of cushions.

  I pushed the conservatory door open and walked towards the shore, inhaling deep breaths of salty sea air to calm me. Part of me wanted to keep walking into the sea until the water came over the top of my head and I too disappeared.

  I stopped at the oyster shed and thought of happier times. Back when I thought that Donna was still at a spa or on a shopping break, and that her going missing was just a cry for attention. I’d been annoyed with Martin at the start of that day. Angry that he’d met his ex-wife for dinner that week and lied to me about it. I wondered how many other lies he’d told me.

  I bent down and picked up the brick where I knew the key was hidden. I opened the shed and went inside.

  My energy levels sagged as I entered the tiny space. This was where it all began – the turning point in our relationship, when it went from one fraught with the usual frustrations and suspicions to something more sinister. The phone call that woke us up, the call for Martin to go back to London. The police were on to him even then. Our normality over.

  I looked at the wood fire and saw there were still embers in the grille, no doubt from the night that we were there, the blanket left as I had folded it on that Saturday night. I reached out and touched the iron bed on which we had made love.

  I knew that everything pointed to Martin having had something to do with Donna’s disappearance, but I didn’t want to believe it. The police didn’t know Martin like I did. But still . . . It was hard not to think about Donna’s beautiful face, hard not to think about what Jemma Banks had said. I knew that he’d hit her . . . Exhaustion crystallized into anger. My hands, still touching the mattress, clenched into a fist, grasping the folds of white. I thought of Martin and Donna and Pete Carroll, and cried out in frustration, dragging the fabric off the bed in one violent swipe, and then fell to the floor, sobs choking in my throat.

  For a moment, I couldn’t even hear myself breathe. It was as if the whole world had fallen still. I opened my eyes, seeing and hearing everything come back into focus, and there, on the floor, was a wink of gold I hadn’t noticed before. It must have been dislodged from its hiding place when I had tugged at the sheet. I leant forward and picked it up. It was a necklace – a twist of metal on a delicate chain. I put it in the palm of my hand, examining it like a fossil hunter inspecting a stone.

  It was intricate and expensive-looking. I turned it over with my fingertips and against the pink of my skin, I could see that the curve of thin gold was shaped into the letter D. I knew then that it was not the first time that I had seen this necklace. There had been another time. That day in court. The day when this necklace had been hanging around Donna Joy’s slender neck.

  Chapter 44

  He told me she’d never been here. He’d told me that himself. Martin Joy was a liar. I couldn’t remember exactly what Donna’s necklace was like from those few minutes I had spoken to her at the High Court, but I distinctly remembered the initial sitting at the base of her throat like a shell settled on the sand, and I knew it would be unlikely for her to have two such similar pieces of jewellery. They had to be the same.

  And now Donna was missing, gone without a trace. There was no trail of breadcrumbs, nothing to help anyone find her – until now.

  For her necklace to be here, in the oyster shed, meant that she must have come here sometime between the moment I saw her in court and the day she disappeared.

  An image flashed into my mind in a shutter of light, Martin and Donna, naked on the day bed, hands grasping, fingers in mouths, hands in hair, frenzied, desperate as they approached climax, just as I had been. It would have been so easy for a delicate necklace to snap and slither off her sweat-soaked body and get lost in the folds of the bedclothes.

  It was strange that I wanted it to be true, because I couldn’t think about the alternative. A struggle, right here in the shed. Where we’d made love and slept.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, holding my head in my hands as if I could keep it from splitting. I had been here before, of course, I recognized the darkness, the black thoughts creeping in from the corners – and I knew what came next. I could feel a blade slicing through my skin, see the beads of red rise to the surface, feel the release, like a pressure valve hissing, squealing, screaming to take back control.

  I opened my eyes and tried to steady myself. I was desperate to give Martin a chance. Another one. I needed to know if he could lie to me again.

  Was I so worthless, useless, unlovable that he could treat me like this.

  Although he treated Donna worse.

  I had to know. Pulling out my phone, I dialled his number. My heart was pounding as I listened to the ringtone, waiting for him to answer.

  ‘Thank God you called. I’ve just spoken to Matthew Clarkson. He said you were interviewed by Inspector Doyle last night.’

  ‘Did Donna ever come to Dorsea House?’ I asked, willing my voice to stay calm.

  ‘What’s this about, Fran? Was everything OK at the police station?’

  ‘Answer the question, Martin. Did Donna ever come to Dorsea?’

  ‘No,’ he said after a second. ‘Never. Her sister doesn’t live too far away, but she’s never shown any interest in going. Not while it’s still a wreck.’

  I forced myself to think. I forced myself to be brave.

  ‘So you’re sure she’s never come?’

  ‘Why? Where are you? What’s all this about?’

  ‘I’m in Essex. I’m at Dorsea.’

  ‘What the hell are you doing there?’

  I could hear the worry in his voice. The wind was whipping around the shed so it was hard to hear, but the quaver of panic was unmistakable.

  ‘Fran are you all right? Why the hell have you gone to Dorsea? Are the police still there?’

  ‘No, it’s empty. I came back to the oyster shed. I’ve found Donna’s necklace.’

  ‘Donna’s necklace?’

  ‘A golden D on a chain.’

  ‘How do you know its Donna’s?’

  There was a longer pause now. I could see him frowning, thinking even though he was dozens of miles away.

  ‘I saw her once. In court. The day we thought she’d missed the
First Appointment hearing. She came late and I met her. Only briefly. She didn’t know who I was. But I knew her. I remember her pink coat and a chain with a D on it – identical to the one I’ve just found in the oyster shed. Did you take her to Dorsea House, Martin?’

  ‘Never. I swear to you. She never went. Fran, we need to talk about this. Come back to London and let’s meet. Not at Alex and Sophie’s. Somewhere private.’

  ‘I don’t want to see you, Martin.’

  ‘Fran, please. Be sensible. Will you just come back? How did you get to Essex? I can send a car for you if it’s too late to get the train.’

  ‘Why is her necklace in the oyster shed?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps someone put it there,’ he said.

  He paused.

  ‘Fran, this is important. You need to bring me the necklace.’

  ‘So you can get rid of it?’

  ‘You have to believe me: Donna has never been to Dorsea House. Yes, it might be her necklace, but I can’t think of any reason why it would be there, unless someone put it there. Someone like Alex?’

  I tried to catch up with his train of thought.

  ‘Alex might have seen Donna wearing the necklace,’ he said, with more panic. ‘He might even have bought it for her. But if he had anything to do with her disappearance, if he wanted to frame me for it, because he wants my shares in the company, he could easily have bought another one and planted it in Dorsea. You have to believe me,’ he said, now sounding distressed.

  I didn’t know what to believe. He was either a desperate man fearfully trying to prove his innocence or a slick and convincing liar. Was I being a fool?

  ‘Please, don’t go to the police, Fran?’ his voice was soft and pleading.

  ‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t,’ I replied.

  ‘I don’t have one.’

  It felt like the first honest thing he had said to me in the entire conversation.

  ‘I am being set up by Alex, Fran. I know it. He wants the company. All of it. If you only believe one thing I say, trust me on this. Help me prove I’m innocent.’