Mine

by J. L. Butler

  ‘Once Alex got full control of the company, the plan was to help him build it. Gassler delivers such a great return, people would soon forget about Martin Joy and his involvement in the company. And I’ve got investors lining up. Befriending rich wives is a powerful strategy,’ she said.

  ‘Then I was going to divorce him. Unlike Donna, my claim to a 50 per cent split was much stronger.’

  ‘What was in this for Donna?’

  ‘Do the maths. Thirty per cent of Martin’s assets or split a much bigger pie with me. Donna was greedy. She was easy to persuade.’

  ‘Was it all worth it?’ I said, so quietly I wasn’t sure that she heard me.

  ‘It wasn’t about the money. It was about the principle,’ she hissed as if she had found energy from some deep well of fury.

  ‘You cared so much about that principle, you were prepared to kill me?’

  ‘It wasn’t supposed to pan out like that.’

  She met my gaze and at that moment, I believed her.

  ‘I just wanted Martin out of the company,’ she said slowly, deliberately. ‘I wanted him disgraced, and gone. We just needed enough suspicion to force him out. That’s all. That’s why Donna left the house as she did. She didn’t ransack it, or broadcast violent struggle. We were subtle, suggestive.’

  ‘What about the blood in the bed?’

  ‘Simple. A finger-prick blood test. Surprising what you can get from fleshy fingertips. As I said, we didn’t want The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Just a hint of trouble.’

  Sophie gave a weak sniff of irritation.

  ‘But then Alex told me you’d followed Martin that night. Followed him back to Donna’s like some lovesick puppy. You were Martin’s alibi and so you spoiled everything, by being as pathetic as the other women who hanker after men like Martin Joy.’

  All I could do was shake my head. She was pale, broken in her bed. It took a few seconds before she continued her story.

  ‘But I’d started something, Francine. So I had to finish it. I suggested that Martin come and stay with us after his arrest. I wanted to keep an eye on him. I had a heart-to-heart with him one evening and asked about his relationship with you. He told me he loved you but was worried you were mentally fragile. He didn’t need to tell me that, though. I’d already seen the razor scars.’

  ‘You thought I’d be easy to get rid of. The unstable lover who’d already tried to kill herself.’

  ‘Alex said you rang him last night. Said you were paranoid. Delusional. But he also said you’d found Donna’s necklace that I’d planted at Dorsea. That was meant for the police. I couldn’t believe they didn’t find it. Sloppy.’

  ‘So I was too troublesome to have around.’

  ‘Donna was the same,’ she muttered.

  I noticed that she’d said it again. Donna was.

  ‘Why do you keep referring to Donna in the past tense, Sophie?’

  ‘Past tense?’

  ‘I noticed it when we met at the Gassler office.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  I felt the cold prickle of goosepimples as I began to understand.

  ‘She’s dead, isn’t she? You’ve told the police that she’s in France. But she’s not, is she?’

  Sophie didn’t reply.

  ‘Donna is dead, isn’t she, Sophie?’ I said, taking another step towards the bed. ‘She could have just come home at any time when you were worried that Martin had an alibi. But she didn’t. Because she couldn’t.’

  ‘She was as stupid as you are,’ Sophie whispered. ‘A reckless coward. I didn’t trust her to stick to the plan. I knew she would have slipped up, bought a phone, left footprints on social media. Or had a wobble and decided she just couldn’t go through with it.’

  ‘You didn’t want to split the money with her, did you?’

  I heard the door open behind me. I turned and saw Doyle holding a coffee cup, looking at me with disappointment but not complete surprise.

  ‘You should leave,’ he said firmly. I knew better than to argue.

  ‘I didn’t want to hurt you, but you got in the way,’ said Sophie and I walked out of the room and didn’t look back.

  Chapter 49

  Two months later

  The Summerhouse restaurant in Little Venice seemed the perfect place to meet Clare for lunch. It was near the counselling centre and its location, right next to the canal, was perfect for early summer afternoons.

  ‘I can’t believe it’s gone for fifty grand over the asking price,’ said Clare, spearing an olive as I told her about the sealed-bids frenzy on my flat.

  ‘For a minute I was tempted to keep hold of it,’ I confided, sipping my apple juice. ‘I thought the heat had gone out of the London property market, but clearly not.’

  ‘No, you did the right thing,’ said Clare sagely, resting a hand on her belly.

  I nodded, knowing that she was right. Pete Carroll moved out within a week of everything that happened at Dorsea. Whether he was ashamed, or afraid that I would report him to the police, I would never find out. I didn’t know where he’d gone. Even his post petered out quickly. I sometimes wondered if he’d ever even existed.

  Even now, I wondered if I had made the right decision not to press charges against Pete in those days after Sophie’s arrest. He had taken advantage of my vulnerability. He had abused me and deserved to be convicted and punished. But after everything that had happened, I simply didn’t need the additional stress of formally reporting what he had done, despite Michael Doyle and Tom Briscoe’s encouragement. My sanity was the most important thing to me, not revenge or even justice. Was that right? Was it selfish? I don’t know what other people would have done under the same circumstances, but for me it was the right choice, at least at that moment in time. I needed to regroup and get stronger. Getting rid of the flat was part of the process of moving on from everything that had happened. But at some point, I liked to think I would find Pete Carroll, and report him, because I wasn’t sure if I would ever properly heal if I didn’t. I owed it to myself and I owed it to others who have been in my position.

  ‘How did your meeting go with Dave Gilbert?’ I asked as the waitress brought over a salad, bursting with heritage tomatoes the colour of newly minted pennies.

  ‘I liked him.’

  ‘Best divorce solicitor I know. And how’s Dom behaving?’

  ‘Moved the waitress into the upstairs flat with him. I’m sure she imagined it would be quite glamorous, hooking up with the boss. Just wait until she finds out how cramped it is with all his man-crap.’

  My friend gave a rueful smile. She was putting on a brave face, but I knew that she wasn’t finding the separation easy. As it turned out, everyone who worked at Dom’s had known he was having an affair with his Polish waitress. It had been going on from the moment he had recruited her, and they’d been slipping away for a quickie, either upstairs or back to her house, even before the restaurant had opened.

  At least Clare and I had our cruise to look forward to. We were going to sail around the Adriatic and Aegean seas the following month and I couldn’t wait to walk around the fruit markets of Venice, the whitewashed back-streets of Mykonos, and see the terracotta rooftops of Dubrovnik. I had bought a dozen sundresses for our trip, quite unlike anything else in my wardrobe, strappy, flirty things in a kaleidoscope of colours and patterns. Clare, meanwhile, was calling it her baby-moon and had already invited me to be her birth-partner.

  ‘So come on. How was your date with Gil last night?’ I asked, when we had finished our food.

  ‘It wasn’t a date,’ she said indignantly.

  ‘I thought you went for a meal,’ I chided.

  ‘We went for a burger in a pub where a Smiths tribute band were playing. It was all about the music.’

  ‘Right,’ I smiled.

  ‘So what time are you seeing him?’

  ‘Two-thirty,’ I said, glancing at my watch. ‘It’s only a ten-minute walk from here, isn’t it?’

  Clare nodded. ‘I’
ll come back with you.’

  She looked at me more intently. ‘Are you ready for this?’

  I nodded. It had taken me a while to come round to the idea of counselling to process everything that had happened. I’d had enough therapy and medication in my life for my bipolar, but the flashbacks and nightmares wouldn’t go away. I still found it difficult to go to isolated places, even the changing rooms at the gym sometimes unnerved me when no one else was around.

  But I trusted Gil Moore, and agreed that I needed to work through the various issues that I had probably always had, but which had been inflamed by everything that had happened with Martin and Donna Joy and Sophie Cole.

  It had taken several weeks before I’d been willing to talk about it with anyone, even though I had read every column-inch of news, every feature that had been penned on the case that seemed to have picked up the nickname, ‘the First Wives’ Revenge’. Sophie had become notorious, but she had also managed to collect some heat as an ultra-feminist icon, a symbol of empowerment for waging war on controlling capitalist husbands. I wondered if the people who lauded her knew how terrifying it had been for me on Dorsea Island. Or that she’d killed Donna Joy in the pursuit of her plan.

  The police never did find Donna in France, or anywhere else for that matter. She is still missing – Chelsea’s very own Lord Lucan, although there have been ‘sightings’ in such far-flung locations as Paraguay and Papua New Guinea.

  Sophie Cole denies having had any conversation with me about having harmed Donna. It’s true – she didn’t admit it to me outright, but I saw the look in her eye and I knew. I knew what she had done to her. How that will stand up in court, I don’t know. That day will come. Inspector Doyle is building his case against Sophie, trying to pin her down for something more than breaking into Dorsea House and attacking me, scouring CCTV footage to see her leaving London with Donna, to find out where they went. I will help in whatever way I can, although deep down, I know that if interest in the case wanes, if Donna’s body is never recovered, if there is no evidence to suggest that Donna has done anything other than abscond, then Sophie will get away with murder.

  Better than anyone, I know that there is no room for speculation and conjecture in the witness box, but whenever I am still and alone, I think about what might have happened to Donna Joy in those hours after her disappearance.

  I think about what I would say, what I would hypothesize, what story I would weave as the prosecuting barrister, not as a civilian giving evidence.

  I think about Donna Joy getting into Sophie’s car that night, after she had asked Martin to leave her bed, and Sophie, anxious but prepared at the wheel of a car she had bought for cash, waiting for her. I think about them driving out of London, a gleeful Thelma and Louise, high on friendship, freedom and adrenalin, and their arrival at an out-of-season rental or an off-the-radar outbuilding, somewhere remote and undetected.

  I think that Donna didn’t leave for France immediately. In fact, I think she didn’t go to France at all, even though she had taken her sister’s passport and done a dummy run on the Eurostar – that mysterious mini-break that Phil Robertson had witnessed all those weeks before. I believe that Donna Joy stayed in her lonely hideaway, waiting impatiently for Sophie’s next command. But I believe that she had got cold feet about the entire plan, and wanted to back out before she had even been reported missing. And when Sophie came to see Donna, to persuade her to remain committed to their idea, that was when she killed her, when she hid her body in a shallow grave or a sceptic tank. Or maybe Donna met some other desolate ending that she’d never imagined for herself.

  I know how easily Sophie Cole’s defence barrister could destroy my story. I have a notebook at home, hidden away in my gym-clothes drawer, with the lines of arguments I would use in court, if I was representing Sophie.

  I know how I would fight to make any grainy CCTV footage and recognition evidence of Sophie and Donna inadmissible. How I would hunt down answers about Martin’s obsessive girlfriend. The woman who watched Donna’s house the night she disappeared. The unreliable mistress who had reason to want Donna dead.

  But those thoughts stay in my notebook, because I don’t want to think about them any more than I have to.

  We walked to the West London Counselling Centre in near silence. I liked watching the sunlight glint off the canal and the swans glide across the water. Clare had recommended that I start looking for the good in everything, reminding me that simple pleasures were all around us. And she was right, there were plenty of things to smile about in my life. My flat had sold quickly and for a healthy profit. I remained with Burgess Court chambers – our merger with Sussex Court would happen any day now – and Tom Briscoe had become a close friend. He’d tried to persuade me not to withdraw my Queen’s Counsel application, but as I’d told him half a dozen times, I wasn’t sure I could handle the rejection this time round. Besides, there would be other opportunities to apply.

  Daniyal Khan came back to the UK after a two-week holiday in Pakistan, just as his father had promised. Perhaps Yusef Khan’s relationship with his new girlfriend in Bedford was more serious than we’d imagined. Perhaps Yusef wasn’t quite the villain we’d thought, certainly not where his son was concerned. Love conquers all.

  As for my own love life, I had decided that I was better off alone. At least for now. Martin Joy still rings me sporadically. We are still linked by Donna Joy – now as witnesses for the prosecution against Sophie Cole. At some point we will no doubt see each other in court.

  But my feelings for him dissolved as quickly as they had ignited.

  I just wanted to forget that entire period of my life and it was as if my emotions understood that too.

  I said goodbye to Clare as she collected her messages from reception. I was instructed to go to the first floor, which was a departure from my earlier visit.

  ‘Nice room,’ I said to Gil, looking around the bright space of his new office.

  ‘Someone left. I was prepared to pay more, but I like to tell myself it’s a promotion,’ he smiled.

  ‘So no blue lights today.’

  I wasn’t sure they’d be helpful. Whenever I closed my eyes at night, I could still see the flashing sirens closing in on Dorsea House. I knew Gil wanted to get me to talk about that night, but I wanted it to be as stress-free as possible.

  ‘No lights. Just conversation,’ he said.

  I sat in an old club chair and rubbed my palms nervously on my lap.

  Gil came and sat down opposite me. I wondered if there had been any spark between him and Clare at the pub in Putney. Whether it was just two friends on a night out, just as Tom Briscoe had invited me to a comedy club the following Friday. Or whether there was more to it? As they were co-workers, I wondered whether it was sensible for Clare and Gil to get involved. But then, how else were people supposed to meet a partner? I had tried to remind myself of that on the many times I had cursed myself for getting involved with my client. It wasn’t wrong. It was normal. No one is perfect. We follow our leads and cues, taking opportunities where they present themselves, mixing with people with whom we have things in common. Perhaps that was why I had bought a new dress for my night out with Tom. Perhaps why I had started to feel butterflies when we made mugs of tea together in the tiny kitchen at chambers.

  Gil and I made small talk. He asked me a few questions, writing my responses down in his notebook.

  ‘So today we’re going to talk about that night at Dorsea Island. Are you ready for that?’

  ‘Be gentle,’ I said with a soft, nervous snort.

  Gil crossed his legs and put his hand on his lap.

  ‘I know it’s difficult to remember that night, Fran, but without it, Sophie Cole might never have been caught. If you think about the positive things that came out of that evening, it will help to heal the negative emotions you associate with it.’

  ‘Where do you want me to start?’ I asked haltingly.

  ‘Why don’t you tell it to me like a
story. I find that helps. Creates an initial distance before we work through your feelings in more depth.’

  I nodded at his suggestion. I was the little girl who loved books. The teenager who wanted to write a novel. As an adult, stories sounded like a good way of working through everything that happened.

  I took a deep breath and steadied myself. I was strong and ready to move forward. I closed my eyes and allowed the silence to transport me back to Dorsea Island as I began to speak.

  ‘It’s funny how the mind can block out the memories it no longer wants to store, you must know that. But if I close my eyes, I can still hear the sounds of that night in May. The howl of an unseasonably cold wind, the rattle of the bedroom window, the rasp of the sea against shingle in the distance . . .’

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to my agent Eugenie Furniss, Liane-Louise Smith, Rachel Mills and Lucy Steeds at Furniss Lawton. Also to Drew Reed, Marcy Drogin and Toby Jaffe at Original Films.

  Kimberley Young, Eloisa Clegg, Felicity Denham, Claire Ward and all the team at HarperCollins haven’t just helped bring the book to life but have made the publishing process such fun that I’ve been known to pop in for a marketing meeting and still be found lurking in the offices three hours later. Thanks also to Katherine Nintzel and the fantastic team at William Morrow.

  Lots of people generously gave me their time and expertise to help out with the plot. Brilliant family lawyers Michael B and Fiona S walked me through up-to-date developments in family law, divorce proceedings and financial remedy. Any mistakes are mine. Suzanne P was my early reader, sounding board and eagle eyes. We started our legal career together and are still great friends, even though I left working in law a long time ago. We can talk books and law over rhubarb cocktails any time. Dr Jim gave terrific insight into the fascinating and complicated subject of blackouts and memory retrieval. Thanks also to Goat, Scarlett Taor and Benny Harvey.

  Mine was just a word document called ‘Thriller’ sitting on my desktop for a very long time. Thanks to all my family for their support, especially my son Fin, who cheerfully wandered the streets of Chelsea with me, plotting Francine’s moves, and my husband, John, who championed it from the start and never seemed to mind when I wanted to talk about plot points when he wanted to watch Game of Thrones. This one’s for you.