by Jill Childs
Her lips pursed. I remembered how battered she’d looked, struggling down the aisle to her seat in the chapel, leaning on her relative’s arm for support. She hadn’t realised. She hadn’t known I was there too, paying my own respects to her husband. To my lover.
‘Anyway, we mustn’t keep you.’ She held open the sitting-room door to usher me out again. She added with fake brightness as she propelled me towards the front door, ‘So kind of you to pop round.’
Who was she really speaking to, in this strange, brittle tone? Not to me, clearly. Was it all for the benefit of the girls?
I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to sit her down and ask her so much more. Ask her how she was, how she really was. If she could sleep at night. What the police had asked her. Were they suspicious? What had she told them about Ralph and the true state of her marriage? What did they know about me?
And what did we do next? What did we do when his body washed up, which it must, surely, eventually, whatever state it was in, what did we do then?
I leaned in close and whispered: ‘I keep thinking, what about when they find him? What then? They’ll know he didn’t drown. They’ll be able to tell. They’ll know he was already dead when he hit the water. Then what do we do?’
Anger flared in her face. She didn’t speak, just gripped my arm and pushed me towards the front door. Before she opened it, she hissed, ‘Don’t ever come here again. You hear?’
I nodded, dumbly.
‘Keep your mouth shut. I’m warning you. Whatever happens. Keep away from me. And keep away from Anna.’ Her eyes were sneering. ‘You are not our “secret friend”. Get it?’
She opened the door and pushed me past her onto the path.
‘Miss Dixon? Hello!’
A woman in a belted mac, a battered leather messenger bag hanging from her shoulder, had her hand on the gate. She looked familiar. It took me a moment.
‘Bea Higgins. Clara’s mum.’ She came striding up the path to join me at the front door. ‘Hi, Helen. Girls okay?’
‘Fine,’ Helen, speaking from behind me, cut me off as I opened my mouth to explain. ‘Miss Dixon brought Anna’s bag round. She’s just leaving.’
‘That’s kind.’ Bea gave me a thoughtful look. ‘Clara’s always losing things. I’m short a cardigan at the moment. It’s named.’
‘I’ll keep an eye out.’ I tried to look concerned. ‘Always worth asking Jayne in the office.’
Bea shook her head. ‘I’ve emailed her but, you know, if you’re not there in person…’
I remembered what Hilary Prior had said about Clara’s mother being a single parent who worked full-time.
‘You should’ve told me,’ Helen said. ‘I can ask Jayne for you.’
Bea smiled. ‘Well, if you really don’t mind. I don’t want to be a bother.’ She turned back to me. ‘Thank God for Helen. Honestly, I don’t know how I’d manage if it weren’t for her. I know there’s After School Club but it ends at five and then what are you supposed to do? Who’s home from work by then?’
Helen said, ‘Anyway, come on in, Bea. They’re having screen-time.’
Helen bustled her friend inside before she could say anything else, frowning at me as she closed the door in my face.
On the drive home, my hands trembled as they gripped the steering wheel. Helen’s anger clung to me. I don’t know what I’d expected. Of course, we weren’t friends, she was right about that. And I had no business turning up at their home and intruding on their family life. I just couldn’t help myself.
She’d warned me right from the start, on the night we disposed of Ralph’s body.
Don’t get some idea we’re bound together by this. I’ll curse you till the day I die.
Even so, her vehemence frightened me. It felt as if she’d just punched me in the face.
I checked my mirrors nervously as I drove, the rear-view, the side, the far side, looking out for the crimson saloon car. I didn’t see it, but I couldn’t shake off the feeling that someone was following me. That unseen eyes were watching me. Maybe Helen was right. Maybe I was starting to imagine things.
At home, I waited at the communal front door before I put my key in the lock. I let my breathing settle and checked behind me, looking over my shoulder down the path and into the bushes, trying to reassure myself there was no one there. What was wrong with me? I remembered the tablets the doctor gave me after Ralph left me. I didn’t want to run out. I’d have to go back to her, to ask for more. Something to quieten my nerves and help me sleep.
Inside the block, the ground-floor hallway was silent. I waited until the heavy communal door clicked shut behind me. I was in a safe space now. Alone.
I started up the carpeted stairs. The flat below mine, where the young man lived, was in darkness. I carried on to the top floor and my own front door and fitted my key in the lock.
I knew as soon as I opened the door that something was wrong. Very wrong.
It was the silence.
It took a second for me to register. No beeping security alarm. I always set it when I went out. My heart thudded. Surely I’d set it that morning, as I headed out to school? Hadn’t I? It was instinctive.
So why wasn’t it beeping now?
Twenty-Three
I closed the door behind me with a bang. Unnecessarily loud. If someone was here, inside the flat, some burglar ransacking the place, this was their cue to run. To climb back out of whatever window they’d forced and shimmy off down a drainpipe.
Stillness. Nothing.
I dropped my bag on the carpet and started to walk through the rooms. There was no sign of a break-in. Nothing was disturbed.
Halfway down the hall passage, something reached out, caught at my heart and twisted it hard. That smell. Ralph’s smell.
I opened the bathroom door. The shower mat was rumpled. The door to the bathroom cabinet was ajar. There was a faint, lingering smell of soap – different, surely, from the shower gel I’d used that morning?
‘Ralph?’
My voice sounded thin, all alone in the emptiness. What was I thinking? Did I really expect him to answer, to appear in the doorway and say hi?
I stood on the threshold and strained to listen. Silence. My nerves strained.
I hurried into the kitchen. Everything was just as I’d left it. Toast crumbs on the bread board. Plate and knife in the sink. So why did I have the sense that someone else had been here?
I shouted, ‘Is anyone here?’
I ran back through the flat, slamming open the doors and looking wildly round each room. Nothing. No one. I came to a halt in the middle of the sitting room, panting, staring round.
Nothing appeared altered and yet something was different. I didn’t know why. I just knew. I couldn’t shake off the feeling that someone had invaded my home.
My phone pinged. A message.
I looked down at my phone, lying there on the coffee table in its case. My hands hung stiffly by my sides. I should look. Something held me back. I thought of the strange message I’d received so recently. A wrong number, I’d decided. Sent to me by mistake.
My hands seemed to know better. They trembled, suddenly ice cold. They didn’t want to pick up my phone and see.
I forced myself to open up the case and look, then, as soon as I’d read the words, let the phone drop to the carpet.
Like last time, the number was withheld and the message brief.
Did you really think I’d gone?
Twenty-Four
Ralph had given me a smart speaker that Christmas, the must-have gift of the season. He came round on Christmas Eve to set it up for me, knowing how anxious I was about new technology. Matthew had loved gadgets. He used to keep me up-to-date. Since he’d left, I hadn’t had the heart to bother.
Ralph found me amusing.
‘My old-fashioned gal,’ he’d say if we settled down in front of my TV, the old kind that sits in a corner on a stand with its DVD player on a shelf beneath. ‘Let’s select one of these – what
do you call them, madam – DVDs, shall we?’
I didn’t mind being teased by him. He and Helen streamed their films, of course. I understood the advantage, but I didn’t see the point of committing to a monthly contract when I didn’t really need it. I was trying to save from my salary, not pay out for things I could manage without. We had a perfectly decent local library. I could rent a DVD from there for a pound, if I fancied something different.
I already had a drawer filled with DVDs and I didn’t want to buy those same films all over again. I never told him about the VHS tapes I still stored in another box under the bed.
I was careful with money. It was one of the issues Matthew and I argued about, towards the end. He was eager to be out every weekend, burning through cash. I didn’t see the point of dining in a restaurant if you had a perfectly good kitchen at home. Or drinking in a bar when you could buy the same stuff from a supermarket for a fraction of the price.
Ralph and I had agreed to celebrate Christmas Eve together as if it were our Christmas Day. I understood why. He could get away on Christmas Eve. His wife wouldn’t be too suspicious if he said he needed to dash to the shops. Christmas Day was important for his daughter, for Anna. I didn’t like any of it, but I respected that. Even in the future, I thought, after he’d left Helen, he should make an effort to be with Anna for special holidays, at least while she was still a child. I’d always let him do that.
So that Christmas Eve, I cooked a small turkey and all the trimmings, chose a good wine and picked up a bottle of malt whisky. I set the table with a linen cloth and we pulled crackers and wore paper hats and ate and drank too much and, finally, made love on the sitting-room floor.
I thought of the Christmas I’d spent at my cousin’s house the previous year, a mercy guest, the oddball at the table, a spare part in the midst of the happy chaos of their family, tolerated but not really wanted.
This year, I couldn’t have felt more different. I felt loved. I felt special. I felt understood.
I gave him his presents. A grey cashmere scarf. An expensive silver pen, for writing his poetry.
As well as the smart speaker, he’d bought me a gold bracelet. He’d have it engraved, he said, he just hadn’t had time yet. And a book of John Clare’s poetry. No inscription. I lay in his arms on the carpet, cuddled under a wool blanket, and listened as he read to me.
‘“I am” is one of the most profound poems in the English language,’ he declared, and bent down and kissed the tip of my nose. ‘Poor John Clare. He was locked up in the loony bin when he wrote that.’
I twisted in his arms and looked up at him, at his stubbly chin and long nose and soft brown eyes.
‘Love you, Ralph Wilson.’
He kissed me on the lips. ‘Happy?’
‘Very.’ I nodded. I was but, as always, it was bittersweet. I didn’t want him to leave. I didn’t want him to go home to Helen and Anna. I wanted him to stay here with me. Be mine, always. ‘Don’t go.’
He didn’t answer.
As the afternoon wore on, darkness fell outside. There was a sense of Christmas drawing in. If we were a real couple, I thought, we’d put a film on now and stay snuggled up in front of it, only stirring for more drinks and snacks.
But we weren’t. He lifted my arms from around him, got up, stretched and started to dress. I lay there, anguished, watching him hunt for his clothes, find his shoes, tie the laces.
I said again, ‘Don’t go.’
He acted as if he hadn’t heard. I sat up, the blanket tucked around the naked lower half of my body, trying to hold him here with my eyes.
‘Leave her. Please, Ralph.’
I’d had too much to drink. I’d thought it, of course, during all those heady, happy weeks. I’d always had more sense than to say it. Now, it seemed, I couldn’t stop myself.
‘Not today. Not at Christmas,’ I went on. ‘In the New Year. Make a clean break. Come and live here, with me.’
‘Don’t spoil it, Laura.’ He fastened on his watch. ‘Be satisfied.’
He went off to the bathroom. When he came back, he was buttoning up his coat, picking up the shopping bag that was one of his props. He knelt down and gave me a peck on the lips.
‘Merry Christmas.’
It was childish, but I was so hurt that I turned away and wouldn’t say it back.
It didn’t make any difference. He still left.
The moment I heard the door close, I ran out into the hall, the blanket wrapped round my waist.
‘Ralph!’
In a corner, folded back inside the wrapping paper were his new cashmere scarf and silver pen. For a second, I thought he’d forgotten them. Then I realised.
He couldn’t take them home. He’d never be able to do that. Helen might see.
Twenty-Five
The day after the strange incident at my flat, I had the locks changed, just to be sure.
I didn’t tell the locksmith very much, just yes, it was absolutely an emergency job. I thought I’d had an intruder at the property. And yes, I’d pay the higher call-out charge to get it done straightaway.
The man they sent round was a young, thick-set lad, Eastern European probably. He was efficient as he worked, minding his own business, and silent.
I told him anyway – well, part of the truth. I told him I was worried because I’d given an old boyfriend a set of keys and things had ended badly between us and now I was frightened. I didn’t mention that things had only ended for good because I’d killed him.
He didn’t answer. He opened up his metal box of tools and rummaged through it, choosing what he needed. His hands were roughened along the backs of the knuckles. A wedding ring was embedded in the pouched skin of one finger.
He worked quickly. He detached the old locks with a flurry of cascading plaster, then tore glistening new ones out of their plastic wrappers and started to fit them with an electric screwdriver.
He looked like the sort of man who would never be afraid, who would get things done, however dirty the job. While he was standing there, sorting out my locks, I felt cared for. I felt safe again.
Afterwards, he handed me two sets of keys, then tore off a receipt from a pad of white and yellow pages. I paid with cash and rounded it up for a tip.
He started to pack away his tools.
I ran my fingers over the shiny locks.
‘They’re strong, are they?’
He gave me a sideways look. ‘Of course.’
I realised I didn’t want him to go and leave me on my own again.
‘I mean, a burglar would struggle to get through these, wouldn’t he?’
He closed up his toolbox and spoke without looking me in the face. ‘You frightened of boyfriend, you tell police.’
I didn’t answer.
His feet thumped off down the stairs, heavy and fast, off to change the locks of the next frightened woman.
I went inside and closed the front door behind me, then stood in the hall and spent time double-locking with each key in turn, practising being safe. The door still smelled faintly of the locksmith, the dark grease on his fingers and stale coffee. I liked that.
I wondered why he’d told me to call the police. Did he have faith in our police force, in law and order? Or was he just trying to fob me off?
You’re not my problem, lady. I just fit the locks. If you’re being stalked by a crazy guy, call the authorities and report him. And good luck with that call, by the way.
I went through to the kitchen. Silence. Emptiness.
I made a cup of tea and sat for a long time at the kitchen table, considering the two sets of newly cut keys.
That was the trouble, I thought. Whatever happened now, however frightened I felt, how could I ever call the police again?
My ex-boyfriend might be stalking me, officer. The one I killed, then helped his wife to dump at sea.
From now on, whatever happened, I was utterly on my own.
When I entered the staffroom a few days later, Hilary and El
aine were discussing whether it was appropriate to buy a card. ‘Appropriate’ was one of Elaine’s favourite words.
‘I just feel we should say something. It’s awkward.’ Hilary was vigorously buttering cheese biscuits, one of her new ideas for a healthy lunch. ‘Maybe it would be better coming from you, Elaine. Or from John.’
Elaine pulled a face. Her range of dismissive expressions was the nearest she ever came to criticising the Lower School headteacher.
‘A card would be easier,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some blank ones in my desk.’
‘But what do we put?’ Hilary unwrapped a chunk of yellow cheese and started to cut it into pieces and then arranged the pieces on the biscuits. She seemed determined to leave no space without cheese. ‘I mean, I don’t want to be crass, but is he even officially dead yet?’
Elaine opened up her own sandwiches, ham and pickle. ‘We don’t need to be specific. We can just say “welcome back”, can’t we? No harm in that.’
Hilary bit into a biscuit, spraying crumbs. ‘It’s a bit, well, cheerful.’
‘Not necessarily. Depends how you say it. It’s all about tone.’
I settled beside them.
Elaine turned to include me. ‘We’re just talking about poor Mrs Wilson. Anna’s mother. She’s coming in again this afternoon to read with the children. First time back since…’
I knew perfectly well what it was since.
‘I wonder how she’ll feel,’ I said. ‘Being here again.’
Hilary said, ‘Well, she comes to the school gates every day, anyway. And at least Anna’s still in the Lower School. She doesn’t need to venture to the Upper School just yet.’
In my mind, I walked down an Upper School corridor and into a classroom where Ralph was sitting, perched on the front corner of a desk, a book open in his hand, reading to the class. That voice. Melted honey.