by Tina Seskis
When the phone cuts through the televisual dinner party hubbub, I answer it on the third ring, in case it’s news of Jamie. It is, but it’s soon apparent it’s not remotely the kind I was hoping for. Chrissy’s on the other end of the line, and I don’t know how she got Dad’s number. She’s in snotty tears, and I take a while to realize what she’s saying. And then, when I understand, I just can’t believe it, and I have to make her repeat it. I’m silent as I haul myself up from the couch, walk across to the fireplace, stare at myself in the polished overmantel mirror. All the while, Chrissy continues sobbing down the phone, but I can’t compute how to manage her distress. I don’t recognize myself, the expression on my face, the person it seems I’ve become. Does this make me officially a widow? I find myself wondering what Chrissy looks like right now, what clothes she’s wearing in the depths of this English winter – I’ve only ever seen her do skimpy. I imagine tight leggings, Ugg boots, a big sweatshirt. My eyes fill, without warning, for Jamie.
‘Hello? Jemma?’ Chrissy says, for the umpteenth time.
At last I force myself back to what she’s told me, and try to find the right words for both our situations, but really, what can I say? How on earth am I supposed to respond to Chrissy’s anguished revelation that Kenny, her Kenny, has been arrested, on suspicion of the murder of my husband? It is devastating news, yet at the same time feels like some kind of sick prank. When I finally put down the receiver I’m almost as stunned as on the morning I admitted to myself that Jamie was missing. His disappearance had been merely a concept before then, a possibility, as I’d gazed out at the sea for long, wasteful hours, as I’d cycled around the island calling his name. It had only seemed real once Chrissy and I had told beautiful, smiley Leena on Reception, and the rescue boat had been launched, and it had become official.
But now it seems Jamie’s official disappearance is even more than that. Now it’s an official murder investigation, even though there is still no body. (I notice that I too think in terms of bodies now, like the police do, and it saddens me. It seems Jamie, the person, has already slipped beyond the horizon of my memories.) I go back to the couch, grab Alfie and squeeze him to me, but I must have done it too hard, as he hisses and struggles away. I find I miss the contact of having someone to cuddle. I know I should tell Dad, so we can update the lawyer he’s hired, just in case, but I can’t bear for the world to know yet. I need time to process what Chrissy has told me. I also need to try to work out what she’s likely to divulge about me and Jamie now. Her call was a warning, I know that much.
I think I must be in shock. As I venture into the kitchen to make myself a mug of tea, my whole body is shaking. While I wait for the gleaming kettle to boil, I stare out of the window into the garden. Although it’s still winter-worn and desolate-looking, it’s a relief after the vibrant jungle growth of the Maldives, and I swear I will never go to a tropical island again, as long as I live. Heaven has officially turned to hell.
A bird hops across the lawn, looking fearful. I do my best to refocus. From what I could make out from Chrissy’s quasi-hysterical phone call, it seems the key fact in all this is that Kenny was heavily involved in spread-betting – and although I have heard of that, I have no idea what it is, or how it actually works. I want to Google it, but I can’t face going upstairs to get my iPad, which is on charge next to my single bed – that’s how spacey and wiped out I’m feeling. But somehow it seems spread-betting has something to do with Kenny’s job, and indirectly Jamie’s too, as well as with money laundering, and I really am so confused I don’t know what to think. Chrissy told me through her sobs that one of the police’s theories is that Kenny drowned Jamie and he floated out to sea, and that’s why there’s no body, but I just can’t believe it. Why would Kenny need to do that? He and Jamie didn’t even know each other. And Kenny was in bed, in his bungalow all night, Chrissy swears he was. Their butler took him there in a golf buggy. He’d had a bite taken out of his leg by a vicious territorial fish. He could barely walk.
But what about later, after Chrissy and I had gone to bed? Had Chrissy been as comatose as I was? If so, where was Kenny then? Where was Jamie? I don’t want to remember any part of that evening, my hysterics on the beach, the ugliness of my scene with my husband just before he stormed out of the restaurant. Is that any way to behave on honeymoon, drunkenly yelling that I wish I’d married his brother? Had either of us realized it in that moment, that that was our swansong? And, more to the point, who’d heard?
The sun leaks into the garden for a second, and then the clouds crowd around it again and it is gone. The kettle boils at last and I fill up my mug. Totteridge is a long way from the Maldives. Jamie is a long way from me. But is he dead? Who knows?
I go to the fridge and get out the milk, which Kay always decants into a blue-and-white stripy jug. The words are sinking in now, and they make me want to weep. It was easier thinking that perhaps Jamie had done it deliberately, and that he was a bastard – but an alive one. Even the prospect of him drowning had been better than this. But the thought that he might have been murdered is too hard to digest. Poor Jamie. He hadn’t deserved that.
As I squeeze the life out of the teabag and slop in too much milk, I remember how unfriendly Kenny had seemed by the pool, that first morning after Jamie had vanished. How weird and aloof he’d been since. Maybe he does have a dark side after all. Perhaps he really is capable of murdering someone. Something else occurs to me as I take my first sip of the strong, hot tea, although I’m not at all proud of it. My thought is this: perhaps the latest development in this unfathomable mystery is not entirely unwelcome, as at last it takes the focus of suspicion off me.
74
The international media go mad at the news of Kenny’s arrest, as predicted, and the missing groom story soon returns to all the front pages. But in a way my apparent innocence seems to be a disappointment to everyone. Instead of it being a bitter, years-long fraternal love triangle with a fire-haired harlot at the centre of it, now it seems it’s just a common-or-garden story of City corruption and greed. That’s fine with me, though, as long as I’m off the hook. It’s a relief. I’ve got a baby to think about.
Life – at least this dysfunctional, in-between version of it – carries on. After a while, the media begin to disperse again. Sasha visits regularly. Work sends flowers. Even Donna and Greg call round, which is nice of them. Dan doesn’t phone me, and I’m glad. I see Kay’s GP and she sends me to the hospital for a scan and they tell me I’m eleven weeks pregnant and that everything’s fine, despite how much I drank on my honeymoon, before I suspected. It’s only when I see the heartbeat that it hits me. My baby’s heart is beating. It seems its father’s is not. I miss him.
So here I am. I’m married. I’m pregnant. I don’t know where my husband is. I feel sick all the time and I don’t know if it’s the pregnancy hormones, or the ominous feeling I have, that is still growing and growing, like my baby. I feel such ambivalence, and this isn’t how it was meant to be. I’d been so keen to get on with getting pregnant as soon as we were married – nagging Jamie that I was thirty-four now, that it might take some time. A honeymoon baby had felt like the best-case scenario to me once. Now it feels like the cruellest of ironies. And yet, in another way, it’s my saviour. I have to keep going, for my baby, if nothing else.
The phone rings early one morning, and I am in bed, my head swimming, and even the noise scares the life out of me – but it’s just my boss, who asks me how I am, and when I want to come back, and I daren’t tell him yet that I’m having a baby. He’s so nice, and he doesn’t seem to believe any of the crap that has been written about me in the press, although I can tell that he’s secretly excited by his proximity to such drama, such infamy. He tells me there’s an amazing project coming up in Manchester, and it’s as if he’s realized that the thought of going overseas right now is beyond me. I’m grateful to him. I tell him that I’ll think about it, and that I’ll call him in a few days, and when I hang up, I feel
a semblance of normality at last, as if perhaps there is a route back to real life, after all. And then I go downstairs and watch five episodes of Come Dine With Me in a row, and one of the hosts makes a marvellous Maldivian curry, which wins him the show, and soon I’ll have watched all the episodes available on catch-up. Just as I’m wondering apathetically what series I should get into next, the phone rings again, and it is my taciturn policeman friend Bob, and he wants me to come in to see him, immediately.
75
For my first police interview back in England, I have my solicitor with me, who is a nice enough woman but the type who makes it clear that her time is both valuable and expensive, so I really shouldn’t waste it. Bob is with someone different today, too – Lara – and Lara doesn’t sound like a police officer’s name to me, but I assume she must be one. It’s weird to see Bob here, in the dull grey interview room, wearing long trousers. He gets straight to the point. Apparently Kenny has told them that not only did his wife witness an ugly argument between me and Jamie at the restaurant (which is OK, Bob and Neil and I went through a version of that in the Maldives), but that later, on the beach, I told her that I wished Jamie would ‘just fuck off, disappear’. Those were the exact words he quoted. And then, Bob says, to top all that, at around twelve forty-five on the morning of Jamie’s disappearance, Kenny claims he heard a commotion outside his bungalow, and when he got up to look out from the terrace, he saw me and Jamie fighting in the sea.
‘Oh,’ I say.
Bob doesn’t say anything. My solicitor is furious, I can tell. She doesn’t like to be wrong-footed.
‘Do you have anything to say?’ Lara says.
‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?’ I’m aware that someone famous said that once, and I sound impertinent, although I don’t mean to be.
‘Mrs Armstrong,’ says Bob. First name terms are well and truly over. ‘This is not a joke.’
‘Can we take five minutes?’ asks Jennifer, my solicitor.
‘Sure,’ says Bob. He and Lara get up and wait outside the door. I can’t think what to say to Jennifer, compromised as I am in this horrible little room. I don’t know why I didn’t tell her. But I honestly hadn’t remembered the fight with my husband, at first. I’d been so out of it on the night Jamie went missing, and I dread to think what pills Chrissy had given me. I honestly thought to begin with that the bed was damp and covered in sand because I’d been swimming with Chrissy. I’d only remembered the rest as the result of a nightmare a couple of nights before I left the island – and I still genuinely hadn’t been sure if it had truly happened. And even when the memories had gradually started to come back, they’d been hazy still and poorly defined, like an old, smudged pencil sketch, so it hadn’t seemed worth mentioning to the police, not at such a late stage – especially as it seemed no-one had witnessed it.
I certainly recall that night well enough now, though – maybe it was the way Bob was glaring at me. Jamie meeting me as I came in from the beach. Words exchanged about where the hell I’d been, what the fuck I’d been doing. Me racing across the sand, into the ocean. Jamie coming after me, catching me. Us fighting in the sea. Me being under the surface, my lungs bursting, my eyes bulging in horror … And then Jamie stopping suddenly, storming out of the water and away along the beach, into the darkness. That’s how I remember it, anyway.
Kenny’s story, of course, is different from that. In Kenny’s version of that dastardly night, it is I who comes out of the sea, who rises victorious, leaving Jamie alone and dead in the ocean, never to be seen again. That’s what Kenny claims he saw. And now I don’t know, I honestly don’t know, if Jamie came out, or if he didn’t. No wonder Kenny seemed so hostile towards me the next morning, when I’d seen him and Chrissy by the pool. Maybe he truly thinks I did it.
I long to ask Kenny what he saw, but he wouldn’t tell the truth anyway, not now his own neck’s on the line. But what I can’t understand is why he didn’t tell the police any of this before. Had he been trying to protect me? Or had he just not wanted to get involved? I assume it’s the latter, now it seems clear that he had something else rather damning to hide. I still haven’t a clue what spread-betting is, but money laundering is fairly self-explanatory, and from what I’ve gathered, it seems that Kenny is pretty adept at it.
Oh shit shit shit. I don’t know how much Dad’s paying Jennifer, with her smart Jaeger suits and school-prefect ways, but she’d better be good. Right now, she’s dealing with a mysteriously vanished husband, a wife who, it transpires, has been inexcusably economical with the truth, and a crooked witness to a watery fight between the pair of them, which coincidentally was the last time the husband was seen.
I have no idea how this will pan out. There are no other witnesses. Chrissy had passed out. The Muslim couple in the next bungalow along were asleep with the doors shut and the air conditioning on full blast. The fourth bungalow in the cluster was empty. The rest of the island was sleeping, too far away to hear anyway. But without a body, or a verified sighting, somewhere in South America perhaps, how does anyone know whether or not a crime has even been committed? And if it ever came down to it – which, alarmingly, seems more and more likely, given the way Jennifer’s glowering right now – how on earth would a jury decide whether it’s me, or Kenny, who is telling the truth?
76
Two further weeks pass before the unthinkable happens and I’m arrested. I know as soon as they call me, to ask me to come in again. When I return to the same interview room, in a police station in Colindale, even Bob has a defeated air about him, as though he’s disappointed in me, which isn’t helping anything. The first thing I worry about is my baby. What will happen to my baby? My second thought is, why the hell did I admit to the police that Jamie and I had a fight in the sea? If I hadn’t confessed to it, it would have been Kenny’s word against mine. And if truth be told, I’m still not one hundred per cent sure what the outcome of the fight was anyway. All I’m completely certain of is that I woke up in bed alone – sandy and salty and feeling like death. Perhaps I just imagined Jamie walking out of the sea, in a case of wishful thinking. Maybe he really did drown, there in the still black water outside our bungalow. But if so, did I do it? I know I was a better swimmer than him, but surely I couldn’t have been strong enough to drown him, even if I’d wanted to. It would have been an accident – it couldn’t possibly have been murder. I am lost for words. Thank God for Jennifer, who has recovered her poise, and at least has her wits about her once more. She interjects now, in her cut-glass tones.
‘Well, how would that explain the flippers?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ says Bob. He’s wearing a jumper today, over a checked blue shirt. I’m in all grey.
‘If Mr Copthorn says that Jamie chased Jemma down into the sea, then how would Jamie have been wearing his snorkel and flippers? His flippers were missing, weren’t they?’
I look at Jennifer, dumbfounded. I hadn’t even thought of that. I wonder if the police have.
Bob is too experienced to be caught out in such an obvious way. ‘Yes, well, we’ve had to conclude that the mask may have been planted.’
‘Planted?’ I say. ‘Who would do that?’
Jennifer looks at me witheringly, and I realize they mean me. This is getting beyond ridiculous. I find myself longing for Jamie, for him to knock some sense into them, and the realization jolts me. I miss him, properly miss him now I’m away from that hideous island, and it’s heartbreaking. I’m having his baby – and I find I’m glad that there will be a piece of Jamie left, whatever may transpire in the future.
The rest of the interview passes in a blur of incomprehension, but at least at the end Bob says I can go, and it seems Jennifer has had the wherewithal to get me bail. I think being pregnant may have helped, so I suppose that’s one thing to be thankful for. No-one’s told me exactly why Kenny wasn’t ever charged with anything to do with my husband, but from what I can gather the long tentacles of the money-laundering scandal in which he i
s mired are sadly not long enough to reach across and tie him in any provable way to Jamie, or his firm, after all. Obviously I don’t want Jamie to be dead, and I don’t want an innocent man to go to jail for murder, but, and feel free to call me callous, I’d much rather Kenny went than me.
There’s been no further news on the police’s absconding theory either. Pascal hasn’t been arrested, but he has a clear link to Jamie. And Jamie was always down at the dive centre – perhaps they were plotting something together. Pascal has no alibi, after all – he could have done it. Why can’t they investigate that potential avenue further, I think, before they jump to conclusions? A further possibility flickers into my strung-out mind, and it’s that there’s been a shed-load of media coverage, and the public are baying, and the police need a resolution, and I am the most credible suspect they have left. Accidental drowning is surely far too prosaic an outcome to the case after all this. Perhaps it’s no wonder they’ve arrested me.
When I’m finally released, Dad’s waiting to take me home, and I sit in the car and say nothing. I feel too numb. It’s almost as if the story has become so nonsensical my mind is shutting down from it, refusing to absorb any more. All I know is that I can’t think of the future right now. Its possibilities are too hellish. When we arrive back at Dad’s, I go straight upstairs, take off my interview clothes, put on the tracksuit I’ve lived in for days, go down into the lounge and slouch on the sofa with Alfie. I know I look awful.