by Paula Daly
Walking now, I carry only my wallet. I left my Fendi tote in the kitchen cupboard, hiding my dad’s cannabis paraphernalia inside the washing machine before stealing out the back door, exiting via the gate at the end of the yard.
If I were looking for me – someone like me, I mean – the handbag would be a dead giveaway. So I try to blend in because you don’t get many women like me walking these streets. We tend to stay inside our 4×4s. Inside, with our handbags on the passenger seats, our golfing umbrellas in the boot, our D&G sunglasses in the glove compartment, ready to pop on top of our heads should there be a brief respite from the rain.
I remember picking up Felicity once from her friend’s house on the next street over, and my dad, in the passenger seat, thought it was hysterical I should text Felicity from outside the row of terraced houses. ‘Why don’t you go and ring the doorbell?’ he asked, and I didn’t really have an answer for him, other than this was just how we did it. He’d chuckled, saying, ‘Bet you’d get out if it was a big posh detached,’ and of course I protested vehemently. Though, to be honest, there was probably some truth to his words.
At the T-junction at the top of the hill I take a right, then dip immediate left on to the public footpath beside the beck. This area is not visible from the road. I used to run through here as a kid.
Remember when you were convinced that any deviation, any detour from the usual route was a short cut? Making sure you ran twice as fast just to prove the point to your friends? I’d emerge from here, shoes thick with dog shit, triumphant, and spend the next hour arguing with some kid about who was the faster.
Now I check over my shoulder to make sure I’m not being followed and rest for a moment to allow my breathing to return to normal. It’s not that I’m unfit. More the act of giving DC Aspinall the slip has flooded my blood with adrenalin and I’m feeling kind of buzzed and heady. So I pull out my mobile and call Eve’s business line. After letting it ring and ring, it dawns on me that of course there will be no one at her office at this hour – when an answer machine kicks in. ‘You have reached Nordstrom Seattle. Opening hours for this store can be found on our website . . .’ My throat goes tight. I hang up and stare at my phone. This was definitely the number Eve gave me. Could I have entered it incorrectly?
I blow out my breath and drop my shoulders, do the yoga breathing that’s supposed to lower your blood pressure. Closing my eyes, I’m momentarily startled by the alarm call of a vexed-looking mistle thrush resting in the leaves beside my feet. He’s clearly perturbed by my being here, so I move on.
Because now I have a plan.
It’s not a particularly sophisticated plan, but it’s a start: If I stay out of plain sight, using the streets and cut-throughs of my childhood, I can get to Windermere Library unseen. And it’s not far. Only a ten-minute walk.
Once there, I can hide for as long as necessary while I do some research. Because Mad Jackie is right: Why blindly accept everything Eve has told me? She’s demonstrated pretty clearly she’s not who I thought she was, so perhaps there is more. Perhaps I can find some dirt on her, something that happened over in America.
Outside the library there are two cars with disabled badges in the window and a beat-up old Bedford Rascal van – the type with the small, comical wheels. I don’t recognize any of the vehicles so I go on in, keeping my head low. At the desk is a tradesman in blue overalls unenthusiastically telling the librarian that he’s, ‘All finished . . . and if you’ve got a dustpan and brush then I’ll tidy up.’
The librarian scoots out from behind the desk to go and find him one. I resist telling her that this is an empty phrase uttered by tradesmen. You’re supposed to reply, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that! I’ll clear up the wood shavings.’
They don’t actually expect you to go and find a dustpan and brush.
Minutes later, she’s back, victorious. ‘I didn’t even know we had one!’ she says, jubilantly, and he takes her offering without a word, trudging across the hallway.
I move forward. ‘Yes?’ she asks.
‘Can I have an hour on the internet, please?’
‘Have you got your library card?’
My heart sinks. ‘No,’ I say, wincing. Bloody hell, my plan is thwarted before it even got going.
‘Are you a member of Windermere library?’ she asks, and I begin searching back through the far corners of my mind. Way, way back to when the girls were small and—
‘Yes!’ I exclaim. ‘I’m sure I used to be. Yes, definitely. I am.’
The librarian casts me an uneasy glance before tapping the keyboard.
‘Can I have your name?’ she asks.
‘Natasha Wainwright.’
It takes her a few seconds before she looks up and smiles. ‘Found you,’ she says. ‘Would you like to apply for another card? I can get it processed while you use the computer . . . if that suits?’
‘Perfect,’ I reply, and she tells me she’s put me on number four.
I peer to the right, to the computer area, and see only two seats are occupied.
‘Number four’s opposite,’ she tells me, helpfully. Which means I’ll be visible from the front desk. I almost ask for an alternative – one with more privacy – but I decide against it. Causing a fuss over this will only attract more attention than if I simply duck behind the monitor should I see anyone I know.
Suddenly it strikes me that perhaps I am being over-cautious. What if I were to see someone I knew? What am I worried about? That when the story of my avoiding apprehension hits the papers, someone will say, ‘And there she was, brazenly typing away in Windermere library . . .’
I settle myself into the seat and tap in the code the librarian gave me to log on. I’m a little uneasy. Not because I have a detective following me. But because, you know on TV when they tell you about computer keypads, about remote controls carrying more bacteria, more microbial faeces, than, say, a public toilet? And some pleased-with-himself doctor asks, ‘How many people actually clean those things?’
Well, I do.
I’m the person who cleans those things every day. Sometimes twice. So I’m rather edgy touching this keypad with its bits of food lodged around the space bar. And before you ask, it’s not OCD. OCD is purposeless cleaning and repeated checking. My cleaning is not without purpose. If I don’t remove traces of the person who used these things before me (perhaps a sweaty guy picking his nose), then who knows what I might catch? Norovirus? Impetigo? I dread to think.
I look around, a little helpless. I could do with some hand sanitizer.
To my right is a woman in her early twenties, hammering away. She has long black hair down to her waist and a diamante nose piercing. Its setting has tarnished to a greeny-grey and stained the skin around the stud to the same colour.
She stops typing and peers my way. ‘You need help?’ she asks in accented English.
‘Sorry?’ I reply.
‘You need help . . . with computer?’
‘Yes, actually I do,’ I say, fixing a smile. ‘Do you have any wipes?’
She knits her brow, confused.
‘Wipes?’ I repeat, and make as if I’m removing my mascara. ‘Wipes . . . for make-up?’
‘Aah,’ she says, grasping what I’m on about. ‘One moment,’ and she leans to her right and begins searching through her handbag.
She hands me a travel pack of Wet Ones, and I thank her. Then she watches with a bemused expression as I withdraw a couple and set about sterilizing the keyboard. Not forgetting the mouse.
When I’m done, I sense she wants to say something. ‘Neurótico,’ she whispers, shaking her head.
I resolve to let her think what she wants. I have other things on my mind.
I type ‘Eve Dalladay’ into Google and sit back in my seat, hoping something magical will appear. Something to call into question Eve’s motive for screwing up my life.
But nothing. I get the usual: Did you mean Eve Halliday? Eve Holliday?
Thank you, no. I meant Eve
Dalladay.
I scroll down. There’s a Facebook entry for a couple of different Dalladays, but no news items. So I try searching with Bing instead – but just get the same search results.
After a couple of fruitless variations I go back to Google and try ‘Dr Dalladay’ this time, expecting to at least find the wrong Dr Dalladay on LinkedIn.com. But no, again, there is nothing.
I’m confused. It’s as if she never existed.
I try Dalladay + Washington, adding in Seattle, psychologist – to no avail.
Then I have a brainwave.
‘Brett Dalladay,’ I type. There has to be something on Eve’s husband. I hit Enter with a flourish and put my hands behind my head, waiting to be rewarded for my quick thinking.
Then I slump back, because the screen clears and again it displays: ‘No results found.’
21
EVE DALLADAY SITS at Natty’s dressing table viewing her face from different angles in the three-section mirror. She likes what she sees. Just enough bruising to make a person gasp, but not so much as to cause any real, lasting damage.
Every time Sean looks at her, his expression collapses into wretched remorse. He couldn’t be any sorrier for what he thinks Natty did to her.
Stupid Natty.
Of course Eve would capitalize on her recklessness. She’d have to be a fool not to.
Eve had actually given Natty more credit than she deserved. She thought it was going to be significantly harder to get sympathy from Natty’s girls, thought she’d have to manipulate their minds more deeply before she gained any kind of approval from them. But Natty was just making it all so easy.
As long as she keeps digging her own grave, Eve thinks now, as she dabs concealer beneath her lower lashes, I won’t have to do a thing.
Eve opens the top drawer of the dressing table and gives a spiteful laugh at what she finds there. She’d always known Natty was a control freak. It’s always easier to step inside the shoes of a woman who’s concentrated on the irrelevances of life. Always easier to disarm a woman who’s so busy making sure everything is perfect she fails to see the threat right in front of her. And this type of woman is more common than ever before. Eve puts it down to insecurity – this quest for perfection. The fact that they need to do more, be more. Once they’ve had the children, remodelled the house, returned their figure to its former glory, they set about proving they’re much more than just a wife and mother – studying, starting a business, finding their calling, moving up to the next level. They become so focused on this goal that Eve can spot them a mile off, and it is always surprisingly easy to instigate an affair with the neglected spouse.
Eve has managed to accrue cars, clothes, cash, a mews cottage in London and an apartment in Seattle, to date. Sadly, the properties had to be sold a few years ago when she ran short of funds and had to flee after a particularly nasty confrontation with a wife holding a grudge. Eve does regret the way she left that woman. No child wants to find their mother’s body, after all – she knows that; she’s not totally heartless. But you turn up shouting your mouth off when Eve is dining with a prospective client and, needless to say, there will be consequences.
Natty has all her cosmetics in neat tidy rows with the aid of drawer dividers. Eve picks up a barely used tube of Retinol night cream which Natty must have shipped from the States, Retinol not being available in the UK without prescription, and squeezes the entire contents on to a tissue. She’s never fully understood why these small acts of mischief bring her such pleasure, but they do.
After the Retinol she scoops out the Crème de la Mer face cream in one big handful; rubs it into the skin on her shins, her feet. Then she sets to stabbing a cotton bud into Natty’s various lipsticks – the Chanel Rouge Coco, the Dior Diorific. Each is rendered a sticky mess.
When she’s finished with the top drawer, she moves on to the one below. She takes Natty’s birth-control pills and ejects them one by one from their foil wrapper and begins mashing them with the back of a hairbrush.
She’s reminded of the act of crushing coriander seeds in a pestle and mortar, and thinks how nice an aromatic curry would be this evening. Sean’s mentioned more than once that Natty won’t allow curry in the house – the smell lingers, she says, and the turmeric stains her granite worktops.
Eve applies some more Touche Éclat to the bruising beneath her eyes, then looks past the mirror, through the window to the lake beyond.
The rain of earlier has cleared. Sunlight breaks through the clouds and glances off the lake. Perhaps she’ll take a walk down to the lakeshore. Hop on a passenger ferry and do the tourist thing. Sean was saying you can buy a day pass now, take in Ambleside, Newby Bridge, Fell Foot Park – perhaps stop for a bite to eat at the visitor centre at Brockhole.
Eve’s not been to Brockhole since she was eleven and came to the Lakes on a school trip. She remembers learning how to build a dry-stone wall, seeing her first monkey puzzle tree, which she’s told is now gone. Mostly she remembers standing on a jetty, smiling at the thought of her friend, Andrea, crying in the gift shop minus her cherished five-pound note.
Eve recalls the sweet thrill that came over her as she fingered the money inside the front pocket of her shorts. She’d been sent on the trip without any cash of her own but had no intention of spending Andrea’s.
What did Eve want with a pen with a fluffy creature on its end? Or a scented eraser? Pointless.
That’s not why she took the money.
She wanted to enjoy the crestfallen look on Andrea’s face. To enjoy Andrea’s tears when she sobbed that she’d been unable to buy anything in the gift shop. She took it to upset the teachers, to ‘Take the shine off a perfectly good day,’ as they would later tell the class with stern disappointment.
When she let the money fall into the water, the note dropping cleanly between the slats of the wooden jetty, the sensation she got from this small disruptive act was like a shot of pleasure. An energy-charged jolt she felt from the back of her knees all the way up to the top of her scalp.
The teachers subsequently blamed Karen Wilcox for the lost money. Karen was a smelly girl, one of seven kids, who wore the same clothes day after day and had to wear her knickers and vest during swimming lessons as she didn’t own a swimsuit.
Eve never bothered to tell the teacher otherwise.
She studies her face in the mirror now, watching for any sign of emotion to surface as she thinks about Karen being unjustly accused.
Nothing.
22
HOW CAN EVE not exist? How is that even possible? There must be some trail of Eve Dalladay, surely. Anyone running a business has to be listed somewhere.
Feverishly, I type in anything I can think of to find some kind of link. I go way back through Eve’s history – type in her maiden name, searching for Eve Boydell from Cheshire. Eve Boydell at Manchester University, Eve Boydell at—
‘Natty?’ comes a voice. ‘Natty, is that you? Good Lord, it is you!’
I look up. Sean’s mother is striding my way. She’s clutching two audio books to her chest. The pink Radley handbag I bought her last Mother’s Day is swinging from the crook of her arm.
‘Hello, Penny,’ I say. ‘What are you doing here?’
Her mouth gapes open, her face displaying both confusion and contempt, as though she’s come upon a trusted member of staff, their fingers inside the till.
‘W–what . . .’ she stutters, ‘. . . what am I doing here?’
I nod.
‘I’m collecting these for Valerie Warburton,’ she says, frowning, and holds out the audio books. The top one is a Barbara Taylor Bradford. I can’t see the one beneath.
She waits for me to respond, she’s expecting an explanation for my being here, and I find myself glancing around the room – as if something might rescue me from this discussion.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be with the police?’ she hisses. ‘Sean told me the police have been at the house and—’ All at once, she notices the girl sitt
ing next to me is watching her. Penny drops her voice to a forced whisper, a look of distaste coming over her as she notices the girl’s nose ring. ‘Sean says the police are looking for you, Natty.’ The ferocity of her glare makes her chin shoot forward. ‘He told me you got yourself into an altercation with Eve.’
‘That’s right, Penny, I did.’ She flinches at my honesty.
‘Well,’ Penny continues, ‘Alice and Felicity are terribly upset about the whole thing, terribly upset. I plan on seeing them this evening when I’ve fulfilled my obligations with Valerie. The WI has a rota in place . . .’ Her accent becomes prim and dictatorial at the mention of the Women’s Institute. She lifts her chin a little as she speaks. ‘In fact,’ she adds, ‘I must remember to pick up the prawn salad when I . . .’
Her voice trails off as she thinks through the logistics of what she needs to do.
Incidentally, I have no idea who Valerie Warburton is. I assume I am supposed to know. She’s probably a woman of great standing in the community, probably a formidable woman who is now incapacitated – thus sending each member of the Windermere WI into a frenzy of usefulness and duty.
‘So,’ Penny says, snapping her attention back to the here and now, ‘I’ll take the girls out for an early-bird dinner, see if I can’t take their minds off all this nonsense. Is it Alice who likes Italian, or Felicity? Perhaps I’ll just take them for a roast. I imagine it’s been an age since they had anything decent to eat.’ Then she pauses.
‘Natty,’ she says, her tone questioning, serious. ‘Natty, Sean says you rammed Eve’s car.’
She says this as if to suggest it can’t possibly be right, can it?
And before I can answer the girl next to me snorts, flicks her head around.
‘Whose car you hit?’ she asks me.
‘My husband’s lover’s.’
The girls eyes widen. ‘Bravo.’
‘Thank you,’ I tell her, and glance up at Penny. ‘I did hit Eve’s car, but there’s more to it than you’ve been told, and—’