The Mistress: A gripping and emotional page turner with a killer twist

by Jill Childs

  It was a mild evening but as I rounded the corner and entered the far end of the car park on foot, a salt-sharp breeze caught me from the sea, scouring my cheeks. Several vehicles were parked together in the darkness, noses towards the water. The stripes down the side of the nearest vehicle shone in the half-light. A police patrol car.

  Heart pumping, I ducked my head and ran for the line of boathouses, trying to make myself invisible in the shadows there and take shelter from the wind.

  I crept into the gap between the first two boathouses and stopped. My breath stuck in my throat. The beach was thick with shadow but as my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I made out two dark figures, stocky with equipment, their heads squared off by caps, sitting shoulder to shoulder on the wall, looking out to sea. Police.

  I froze, frightened to move closer in case they heard me. They were speaking in low voices, a man first, then a woman. A silence, interrupted only by the wind blowing in from the water. The woman said something else, then laughed and got to her feet, shook out the dregs from a takeaway coffee cup onto the shingle and stretched her arms.

  I pressed against the roughened wood of the boathouse for support and stared out towards the water. For a while, all I could see were strands of stray light bouncing off the surface, flashing on the sudden surge of foam each time a wave broke and hurtled up the beach, only to draw back with a grumbling clatter of loose stones. Then, lifting my eyes to scan the waters further out to sea, I saw the swinging light of a boat. My legs buckled and I grasped at the wooden wall to keep myself steady. A small motorboat or launch, bobbing there on the water.

  The male police officer heaved himself to standing and they both turned and crunched back across the shingle to their car, their movements easy and relaxed. I kept to the shadows as they started the engine of their patrol vehicle and left.

  When I looked out to sea again, the lighted boat had disappeared.

  I sank to the ground and trembled on the stones, dizzy, wondering what they knew, what they might have found.

  Nine

  I barely remembered driving home, just the sense of my heart pounding so forcefully that my chest ached and my breath coming short and hard as if I were running. This was it. I’d had the sense, until that moment, that it might still be possible to change my mind, to present myself to the police, to confess everything and have faith that they’d believe me, whatever Helen’s version of events might be. They had to believe me. I had the power of the truth on my side.

  But there on the shingle, frightened out of my wits at the sight of the officers, I realised it was too late. My moment to speak had passed. I was part of this now, whatever I thought and however it had happened. No one would believe me if I described it as a freak accident – our disposal of his body gave the lie to that. I was too wracked with guilt to be credible. It was a crime and I had to move quickly and protect myself as best I could.

  At home, I ran up the communal stairs two at a time and fumbled my way into my flat, hands shaking. I switched on the bright overhead lights and started to search through cupboards and drawers, pulling out anything that connected me to Ralph. His deodorant and shaving foam in the bathroom cabinet, preserved in the hope he might yet stay another night. In the kitchen, the packet of fancy coffee he kept here for himself, already half-empty and becoming stale, and the oat biscuits he snacked on with cheese.

  In the sitting room, I tore along the bookshelves, pulling out the paperbacks he’d bought me. There weren’t many. Some volumes of poetry by writers I’d admitted I’d never read, novels he’d bought me because he wanted to share his love for them and which served as the basis of long discussions over drinks, over dinner, my eyes locked on his as he talked, our hands entwined on the table top.

  In my bedroom, I rolled up the old jumper he’d once brought over here and I’d never given back. I pressed it to my face. The smell of him had already gone. In my bedside table, I rummaged through random scraps of paper bearing his handwriting, each one a memory, a torn-off shopping list for a champagne picnic, a cryptic, flirtatious poem he’d written for me soon after we’d met, a scribbled love note I’d come home to find on my pillow.

  From the bottom drawer, I drew out the worn, leather-bound volume hidden under papers, an anthology of nineteenth-century poetry, and lifted it to my face. The musty smell of the pages took me straight back to our first days together. To the heady excitement and restlessness. It was one of his very first presents and the most precious. He’d had it for years, he’d said, turning the pages to show me his favourite. I shook my head and pushed it back into the drawer. That was one thing I couldn’t just throw away.

  I ripped the other pieces of paper to shreds, then bundled everything into a bin bag and took it outside to the back of the flats. Silence. The only sounds were my footsteps and the pant of my own breath. I hid the bag deep in the piles of residents’ rubbish in the giant bins there. Another day and it would all go to the public waste dump to be incinerated.

  Before I went to sleep, I sat up in bed with my phone and did the hardest job of all. I deleted every message from him, every email, every photograph and finally, deleted his number. By the time I switched off my bedside lamp and crawled down under the duvet, exhausted, I’d taken a step I could never have taken until now. I’d erased him from my life.

  If Helen or any other piece of evidence led the police to my door, I was ready for them.

  He’d probably done the same to me long ago. Tore up my little love notes and dumped them in some public bin. Deleted messages. Dropped the spare keys to my flat down some drain. If he hadn’t before, his wife certainly would now. I wondered what else she’d find once she started emptying his pockets and clearing his study. I wondered how much she already knew about her husband’s darkest secret which might now rise, blinking, to the light.

  I barely left the flat that weekend. I hid, my curtains drawn, lying all day on the settee in pyjamas, tucked up in a blanket, watching TV. I couldn’t eat.

  At night, I struggled to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, Ralph was there, waiting for me. Sometimes he hung in the sea, gently rocked by the current, limbs spread, hair floating. His eyes, open, fixed me with a look which was sometimes mournful, sometimes malevolent. I’m still here, it seemed to say. You won’t get away with it.

  Ten

  Ralph rescued me from myself. It was his doing, not mine. He pursued me. I was helpless to resist.

  It began last September, not long after the start of term.

  I’d stayed late at school, marking a pile of year three exercise books in the Lower School staffroom, writing positive exclamations illustrated with smiley faces and occasional sticky stars. A dirty cup, the coffee already finished, sat beside me. The staffroom was deserted. It was nearly five-thirty. Another half an hour and the school janitor would patrol the building on his rounds, switching off lights and closing doors.

  I needed to go home. I just couldn’t face the empty flat, not quite yet.

  I rarely walked up the slope to the Upper School buildings. It was foreign territory, for me, populated by strangers. Some Lower School teachers like Hilary Prior, who seemed to know everyone, popped up at lunchtimes now and then to sit in the larger, better equipped staffroom there but it intimidated me. Everyone knew the hierarchy within school. Upper School teachers had higher status than we did in the infant school, however valuable our work. There was an unspoken sense of snobbery as if we, mostly women and caring for four- to eleven-year olds, were only capable of wiping noses, reading picture books and decorating paper plates whilst they, tasked with teenagers as old as eighteen, were practically university lecturers.

  The janitor’s heavy footsteps sounded down the corridor and I packed away the books I was reading and stowed them in my locker. A photocopied poster about the new teachers’ writing group was pinned on the corkboard above it. I looked at my watch. It was just starting.

  My heart thudded. Maybe I could just have a quick look? I needn’t stay.

&
nbsp; I hesitated, suddenly gripped by nervous excitement. I looked again at the poster, trying to work out where the classroom lay. I licked dry lips and tried to gather my courage. Just do it. Why not? It would while away an hour.

  I got lost in the Upper School, taking a wrong turn in the maze of corridors that ran to and from the school hall. I was about to head for a stairwell and leave for home after all when a classroom door shot open just behind me.

  ‘Looking for us?’

  Ralph, of course. Ralph Wilson. It’s strange now, looking back, to remember that there was ever a time I knew nothing about him. He told me later that he always kept half an eye out for me, that he saw me walk past, my face flushed, and guessed I might be lost.

  All I knew then was that he was standing there at the door, a handsome, charismatic man, with an inviting grin on his lips. He was wearing a crimson corduroy jacket with black faux leather elbow patches and a grey, scoop-necked cashmere jumper. Behind him, half a dozen faces turned to me, teachers staying on after school, sitting in a loose semi-circle round his chair. Blank and uninterested features, for the most part, waiting for this little-known Lower School teacher to hurry up and join or to leave; either way, they didn’t care, as long as I ended the interruption to the reading.

  I shrugged and nodded, caught, keeping my eyes low and feeling myself flush as I scurried in and found an empty seat towards the back of the group. They were mostly Upper School teachers. Olivia Fry, her long legs delicately crossed, her long hair falling in a curtain down her back, was one of the few from Lower School.

  Ralph settled again and carried on reading. It was one of his own poems, about love and time. I barely heard the words, it was his voice which entranced me, deep and mellow and dramatic. He didn’t so much read as intone, like an old-fashioned stage actor. Something inside me twisted and knotted. When he finished, there was a moment’s silence and he looked straight at me, his gaze direct and open, as if he knew me already and was just waiting for me to realise, to catch up.

  As he followed me out of the classroom at the end, he asked, ‘Do you write?’

  I shook my head, embarrassed by his attention. He had such presence, such good looks, he daunted me. I worried too that I was already disappointing him. Olivia wrote children’s stories, I’d heard her discussing them with Elaine Abbott in the staffroom, asking for permission to read them to the children in class.

  He didn’t look disappointed. He just smiled and held my gaze and I found myself smiling back, stupidly.

  Another teacher, a bearded man who’d mentioned he taught physics, called over, ‘Fancy a pint, Ralph?’

  ‘At the Half Moon? Maybe. I’ll catch you up.’

  The men disappeared in a group, familial and collegiate. Olivia and another young female teacher followed along behind. I turned away, willing him to stay and talk to me, but feeling awkward. I was uncomfortable in groups.

  ‘Well, thanks for coming.’

  I nodded, hardly daring to wonder why he was still here, still smiling. His eyes were still on mine. My stomach contracted and – fearing it, fearing him – I turned and started walking away.

  Abrupt. John Bickers, in my end-of-year appraisal in the summer, had said I was sometimes described as abrupt. I still wondered who’d said that about me. Hilary Prior, perhaps, so friendly on the surface but with a reputation for gossip and treachery? Or one of my more demanding year two parents?

  John had been sitting in his office, his elbows on his desk, his hands raised into arched fingers, touching at the tips to form a bridge, and looked at me appraisingly. I knew that look. The kindly old head of Lower School. Seen it all before.

  ‘We’re all different, Laura,’ he’d said. ‘Nothing wrong with that. But best to fit in, you know, where one can. Makes for an easy life.’

  Now, Ralph hurried after me and fell into step at my side. He held out his hand. ‘Ralph Wilson,’ he said. ‘English. Upper School.’

  His hand was warm and soft. I thought then, a poet’s hand.

  ‘Lower School, year two.’ I hesitated, then grinned. ‘Laura. Laura Dixon.’

  He said, lightly, ‘Well, Laura Dixon, come for a drink. Do you know the Half Moon? It’s just around the corner. You’ll have plenty of school chaperones. Come on, you know you want to!’

  He looked disappointed when I panicked and said a hasty ‘No, thank you.’ I fled, shoulders hunched, along the corridor and back down to the Lower School car park, cursing myself all the way.

  What was the matter with me? A drink wouldn’t have hurt, would it? He was just overwhelming.

  I thought about little else for the rest of the week, going over our short exchange in my head like a love-struck schoolgirl, thinking back to his poetry, his voice, his smile.

  He said he thought then that he’d blown it, missed his one and only chance with me.

  But he told me too that his spirits soared when I appeared again the following Tuesday evening. And the one after that.

  Of course I was there. I counted down the days until Tuesday. I ticked off the hours to the end of the teaching day, hurried up the hill towards the Upper School classroom, then slowed, excited, shy, full of anticipation, as I approached the classroom and looked for the first glimpse of him, increasingly sure that, every time I glanced across at him, his eyes would be on my face.

  His smile. It was utterly captivating.

  Each time, he stole a word with me in the deserted corridor, once the others had headed home or to find the bar. We strung out the minutes, strolling together past empty classrooms, down towards the Lower School car park, relishing the tension, the flirting, the anticipation of what might be to come.

  We fell into easy roles without knowing quite why. He was the admirer, the would-be seducer. I made a show of resisting him.

  His enthusiasm was puppyish. ‘One drink. We can join the others if you like. Or not. Obviously, I’d prefer not. Come on, Laura. Live dangerously.’

  I longed to. It wasn’t a lack of interest that made me hold out, it was the thrilling pleasure of being pursued with such determination. And trepidation, too. I sensed from the start that if I fell for Ralph, I’d fall long and hard. I’d lose myself all over again.

  It was two years since Matthew had packed his bags and walked out on me, leaving me desperate and bereft. I’d finally adjusted to being alone. I’d learned to close myself off from other people, to protect and guard my heart.

  I didn’t want my heart broken into pieces again so soon.

  But Ralph didn’t give up. He charmed me. He persuaded me.

  And, I know now, he also lied to me.

  Eleven

  The Monday after Ralph’s death, I dressed for school with care in my smartest dress and a pair of low-heeled shoes. My face in the bathroom mirror was pale and pinched. I outlined my eyes in kohl and tried to rub colour into my cheeks, darken my lips. Painted lady.

  I practised in the mirror, thinking what to say if anyone asked.

  ‘I’ve had the flu. Dreadful. Hardly been out of bed all weekend.’

  My eyes looked back at me, dull and lifeless.

  The staffroom crackled with a low hum, an electric current of gossip, jumping from one person to the next.

  Hilary Prior raised her eyes to me as I headed for my locker to gather the year twos’ exercise books.

  ‘Have you heard?’ she whispered. ‘Ralph Wilson. They’re saying it might be suicide.’

  I started. ‘Who is?’

  ‘The police.’ She looked exasperated. ‘Don’t you remember? His wife reported him missing? Still no sign of him. Girl trouble, maybe?’ She arched her eyebrows. ‘Anyway, it’s nearly a week now since he went out. That’s the last she saw of him.’

  The exercise book on the top of the pile in my arms slipped off and crashed to the floor. I stooped to pick it up, then tilted too far forwards and another three cascaded after it. Pages of crayoned drawings and unsteady lines of pencilled words flapped like dead fish.

  Hilary duck
ed down beside me and helped me to pick them up, then stacked them back on the pile.

  ‘His wife’s in a real state. I mean… you wonder, don’t you? Was he really so depressed he’d… you know? Awful.’ She blinked. ‘Wonder if they’ll keep Anna home?’ Ralph’s daughter was in her class. ‘Poor thing. What can you do?’

  In the corridor, Elaine Abbott hurried to catch up with me before I turned into my classroom. Another ten minutes and children would start streaming in from the playground, pushing and scurrying, bustling with sports kit and bookbags, amid fierce adult cries – Quiet, year two! Don’t run!

  ‘John’s composing a staff email,’ Elaine whispered. ‘Check your inbox. Should be there by morning break.’ She looked round, unusually wary. ‘Let him know if you have any concerns or see, you know, signs of distress in the children. I’m arranging support in school.’ She sucked on her teeth as she turned away. ‘Dreadful thing. Quite dreadful. Poor Anna.’

  I set down the pile of books on my desk and sat heavily, looking out over the deserted classroom. In a moment, the day would rush in on me in all its noise and fury.

  Split diagraphs and the eight times table. A playlet about the Great Fire of London. Models of seventeenth-century houses fashioned from painted cereal boxes, with straw for thatch.

  Hilary’s news had pulled the rug from under me. I sat in the silence, trying to stop trembling, trying to find calm. I had no idea if I could make it through.

  To all staff, Lower School

  Status, Confidential

  Dear Colleague,

  It is with great sadness that I am writing to you about concerns for our Upper School colleague, English teacher Ralph Wilson.

  As some of you may have heard, the police are pursuing several lines of inquiry. I will update you when more information is available.