The Wife: An unputdownable psychological thriller with a breathtaking twist

by Shalini Boland

  THE DAY OF THE WEDDING

  It’s hopeless. Toby isn’t listening to me. His hands are still locked around my sister’s neck, choking her. Killing her. I’m screaming for help, so caught up in this nightmare that I barely register someone banging on the door.

  When I finally hear it, it feels as if I’m moving in slow motion as I turn and run to the door, almost losing my footing on the wet floorboards. But I manage to fling it wide open, and Celia and Nick tumble into the room.

  ‘Stop him!’ I cry. ‘My sister! He’s hurting her!’

  ‘Close the door!’ Celia snaps at her eldest son.

  He does as she asks. ‘What’s going on? We heard yelling.’ Nick’s gaze lands on his brother. On Dina as she sinks to the floor, limp as a ragdoll. ‘Toby! Who’s that? What are you…?’

  My fiancé stands above Dina, panting, his eyes glazed.

  I look at him, but he doesn’t return my gaze, just stares down at Dina’s crumpled form. ‘What have you done?’ I hurry to my sister’s side, crouch down and turn her face to mine. Her eyes are staring, unseeing. My whole body begins to shake uncontrollably. ‘Celia! Celia, I need you to help my sister. Can you save her?’ But even as I say the words, I know it’s useless. It’s too late. Dina is dead.

  My mother-in-law comes over and crouches by my side, but she shakes her head.

  ‘Take her pulse!’ I demand. ‘Give her mouth to mouth! Do something!’

  Celia takes Dina’s limp wrist and feels for the pulse she already knows will be absent. ‘I’m sorry, Zoe. She’s gone.’ She looks up at her son. ‘What happened? Who is this?’

  ‘They’ve been having an affair!’ I blurt out. ‘My sister and my fiancé. Your son! They’ve been seeing each other behind my back. And now he’s killed her! We need to call the police.’ I glance around and spy the hotel phone on the desk by the bay window. I walk towards it, scared about what will happen once I’ve made the call.

  ‘Zoe, wait.’ Celia comes after me.

  ‘For what?’ I snap. ‘My sister is dead, there’s nothing left to wait for. Toby is a murderer. An adulterous murderer. He needs to pay for what he’s done.’ I pick up the phone and dial 999. Celia tries to whip the phone out of my grasp, but I duck out of the way, moving further from the window.

  ‘Let’s just talk about this calmly.’ She advances on me again.

  ‘I know he’s your son, but you can’t protect him from this. That’s my sister!’

  ‘Just give me the phone, Zoe.’ Celia’s voice is steely, her eyes like two chips of flint. This is a side of her I’ve never seen before.

  Nick is questioning Toby, who’s standing in the middle of the room, his head in his hands. I think he’s crying.

  Before my call has a chance to connect, Celia snatches the phone from me and hangs up.

  ‘Give me that back!’ I try to pry her fingers off the phone, but she has too tight a hold. In a moment of desperation, I bite down on her bony knuckles.

  ‘Hey, stop it!’ Nick cries. But he doesn’t try to intervene, just takes a step uselessly towards us.

  ‘Zoe, what do you think you’re doing?’ Celia shoots me a venomous glare, wrenches her hands away from my mouth and gives me a vicious shove. My dress is so tight and my heels so high that I can’t keep my balance. I can feel myself toppling backwards. My hands flail out to the side to try to grab hold of anything to steady my fall. But they find nothing but air.

  Thirty-Two

  NOW

  The absolute shock of remembering makes me briefly forget my current situation. I stare at Celia in horror. She pushed me! She knocked me out cold on my wedding day.

  I feel sick to my stomach.

  If all of that is true, then what happens now? I literally cannot move, and Celia and Malcolm keep darting glances over towards me. I think whatever it was that Celia injected me with is not a mild sedative. It’s something far worse. My insides turn to water as I realise that Celia is not in fact my friend. She’s not the wonderful mother-in-law I made her out to be. She’s not on my side at all and never has been. I think she’s been keeping me close all these years so she could keep an eye on me after what happened with Toby and Dina. I can’t stop thinking about the look she gave me when she tried to stop me calling the police all those years ago. When she shoved me backwards. It was vicious and triumphant.

  Does Toby know his mother is here? Has he given her his blessing for whatever is going on right now? Oh, dear Lord, what if Celia plans to do away with me? What if I never see Alice and Jamie again and they’re left to be raised by their murdering father and psychopathic grandparents? I have to get out of this. I have to save my children.

  A knock at the door brings me back to my present surroundings. Please let it be someone good. Someone I can trust to help me.

  ‘Zoe! You in there?’

  Thank goodness! It’s my dad! He goes quiet for a moment, no doubt waiting for my reply. I pray for him not to leave, to somehow open the door and rescue me. If only I could call out to him. I’m sending messages from my brain to my vocal chords, but nothing’s happening. I can’t so much as force out a whisper.

  Celia looks at Malcolm and puts a finger to her lips. He nods. Their actions confirm that I’m in terrible danger.

  Dad calls out once more, and I cling on to the sound of his voice. ‘I tried to find the others but they’re not in their rooms. I’m worried about you, love. If you can hear me, open the door!’ He knocks harder this time and tries the handle. I hear it clicking up and down. But of course the door is locked. No one is going to be able to open it.

  If only he’d come by earlier, before Celia had injected me with whatever it was. Please find a way to open the door. Kick it down. Yell! Call for help. Please.

  ‘Zoe?’ Silence. ‘Ah, all right. You sleep well. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  No, please, no. Come back!

  Celia and Malcolm remain still and quiet until Dad’s footsteps have receded. They’re hunched together on the bed with Malcolm’s rucksack between them, like a couple of huge spiders crouched over their prey.

  After a while, Celia takes a breath. She looks at me and purses her lips. ‘You’ve probably realised by now that what I gave you wasn’t simply a sedative.’

  I try to glare at her, but I can’t even do that. My eyes remain open, but I can’t move them at all – not to close them, or even blink. They’re dry and uncomfortable, unlike my mouth, which is now filling with saliva that’s dribbling down my chin.

  ‘It’s a shame it’s come to this, Zoe, but if you really are starting to get your memory back, then you haven’t left us with much of a choice.’ Celia tilts her head as though commiserating with me.

  Malcolm is removing a pack of blue silicone gloves from his bag, similar to the pair that Celia is wearing. He opens the plastic packaging and pulls them on one finger at a time. The sight of them makes me want to cry with fear.

  ‘I’ve enjoyed having you as a daughter-in-law,’ she continues, ‘and you’ve given us two beautiful grandchildren. So for that, we’re grateful. But right now, I have to consider the safety and wellbeing of my sons.’

  Celia gets to her feet.

  ‘I gave you some sleeping tablets earlier to keep you in your room, which is why you’ve been feeling so woozy. And I think they might have brought on a bit of a panic attack. I’ve also injected you with a neuromuscular blocking agent,’ she explains impassively. ‘Right now, it’s in the process of paralysing your limbs and vocal chords. Unfortunately I’m not an anaesthetist so I may not have got the dosage exactly right. Naturally, I did my research, but it’s not the same as having done it on a live patient. Ordinarily, you’d have been intubated with oxygen to help you breathe, in case you have a reaction to it, but obviously that’s impossible here, so I’ve just had to make do and hope for the best. Sorry about that.’ She pauses. ‘Just be aware, there’s a chance you may stop breathing.’

  If I could sob or beg for mercy, I’d be doing it right now. I’d be
pleading and crying. Appealing to her conscience, even though I now realise she hasn’t got one.

  While Celia’s talking, Malcolm extracts a blue nylon rope from his bag. I wonder if they’re going to use it to tie me to the chair. Although I don’t know why they would need to do that after Celia has already incapacitated me.

  ‘In any case,’ Celia continues, ‘I hope you don’t stop breathing before we’ve finished here, because it would rather spoil our plans. We’ve come up with a good solution to the problem of what to do with you.’ She pauses. ‘We’re going to have you commit suicide… because you couldn’t live with the guilt of having killed your sister.’

  It takes me a moment to process her words. Suicide. I guessed they were planning something horrific, but to hear her spell it out so baldly turns my skin to ice. All the while, as she’s telling me these terrifying plans, the memories of what happened ten years ago keep hitting me like pieces of jagged shrapnel. Tearing chunks out of my heart.

  Celia stands and takes the rope from Malcolm while he manoeuvres a dining chair into position next to me. She holds the rope in two hands, running her thumb back and forth along its surface, stroking it as she continues talking.

  ‘We’re using a blocking agent because if I’d simply tied you up, you’d have got rope burns and the authorities might have suspected foul play. But this way, unless they do a specific test during the post-mortem – which is highly unlikely – they’ll simply believe that it was a tragic suicide. The downside, of course, is that it probably doesn’t feel very pleasant for you, sitting there paralysed while all this is going on. But it won’t be for too much longer.’

  Malcolm steps up onto the chair with a grunt, and I notice that he’s wearing clear plastic bags over his shoes. Celia hands him the rope and it’s then that I see it has a loop at one end – a noose.

  The sight of it makes me feel faint, and I will myself to pass out so that I don’t have to live through the horror of them doing this to me. But although I’m light-headed, I remain stubbornly conscious. And it’s terrifying.

  How has my world managed to change so much in the course of a day? Yesterday, I thought my sister was back in Shaftesbury, I was celebrating ten years of marriage to the man I loved, and I believed my in-laws were the wonderful family I had always longed for. Today, I’m processing the fact that my sister was murdered by my husband and has been dead for a decade, and the people I love the most are the ones who betrayed me, lied to me and are now about to kill me.

  I’m unable to look up, so all I can see are Malcolm’s legs as he balances on the dining chair. I’m guessing he’s fixing the rope to one of the heavy wooden beams that run across the ceiling.

  ‘We’d better hope Guy doesn’t come back to check on her,’ he mutters.

  ‘You heard him before,’ Celia replies. ‘He said he’d see her tomorrow. Anyway, the man is so emotionally retarded he’s probably gone back to the bar to get drunk.’

  ‘But what if he does come back?’ Malcolm presses.

  ‘Then we’d better hurry up and get this done,’ Celia snaps. ‘We have to do this quickly anyway; the blocker only works for around six minutes and I really don’t want to have to give her another dose.’ She turns back to me. ‘Toby and the others think Malcolm and I have gone to our room for the evening. While I came here to keep an eye on you, Malcolm waited in for room service and rented a movie on demand, so everyone will think we’re spending the evening in our room. Which is where we’ll be heading right after we’ve finished up here.’

  ‘There we go.’ Malcolm sounds pleased with himself. ‘I think that’s the right height.’

  Celia looks up. ‘I think you need to make it a bit longer. Zoe’s shorter than you. Otherwise it’s going to be tricky to get her up there.’ She scratches the side of her mouth with a gloved forefinger.

  ‘Hm, I think you’re right,’ he replies. ‘Maybe another couple of inches.’

  Although my body is paralysed and my vocal chords are silent, inside I’m screaming. How can they discuss this so calmly, as though they’re talking about some innocuous DIY project? Neither of them seems remotely distressed by the fact they’re about to commit a murder. My murder.

  Celia bends down a little to look me in the eye. She wipes some of the drool from my chin with the finger of her glove. ‘There was no need for Toby and Nick to know what we’re doing here. I’m not certain they’d approve. Toby does still love you and he’ll be quite upset that you decided to end things. But I’m sure you must realise that, as a parent, you’ll do anything to protect your children.’

  ‘Okay,’ Malcolm says. ‘I think that should do it.’

  Celia gazes up at the ceiling critically. ‘Yes. Good.’ Malcolm huffs his way down off the chair as his wife resumes talking to me. I don’t know why she’s bothering. She’s about to kill me, so why take the time to explain all this? Maybe she finds it cathartic. Or maybe she’s proud of her plan and wants to show it off. Or perhaps she’s simply a sadistic bitch who wants to terrify me.

  Regardless of her reasons, Celia’s monologue continues, ignorant of my silent, raging curses. ‘It was such a shame that Nick couldn’t handle the pressure – he’s always been less robust than his brother. The whole thing was making him physically ill. Nick was about to tell you the truth, so Toby had to do some quick thinking. But unfortunately Toby was silly enough to bring up the past, telling you an altered version of events – yes, Toby came and told me everything that happened last night. Poor boy was in quite a state. He could have told you any number of lies, but instead he had to mention Dina showing up. That’s probably what triggered your memories.’ She puts her hands on her hips and shakes her head. ‘Never mind. What’s done is done. Such a pity that my lovely Toby is going to become a widower. He’ll be quite devastated.’ She pauses. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll make sure he’s okay and that my grandchildren are well looked after, of course. In time, I’ll help him find a new mother for our angels.’

  Icy anger is gradually replacing the wrenching terror in my gut. I’m hit by a raw animal need to attack this woman who’s decided to end my life to save her son’s skin. To ruin my children’s lives by taking away their mother. I don’t want Alice and Jamie to go through what I did. To experience that pain of losing a parent so young. If only I could move or speak right now. If only I could claw the smug smile from Celia’s face.

  A phone starts to ring, shrill and loud. It doesn’t sound like a mobile. I think it must be the hotel phone. Both Malcolm and Celia freeze where they stand. After a moment, Celia’s shoulders relax. ‘Don’t worry, Malcolm. They’ll soon ring off if we don’t answer.’

  I pray she’s wrong. But I count only nine rings before a hollow silence descends on the room once more. She turns back to me to continue her explanation. Part of me doesn’t want to hear it. Each sentence she utters is painful to hear. Yet, as she speaks, I find myself greedily taking in all the details of this newly revealed past that’s been hidden from me for so many years, even though each word wounds me.

  ‘I think Toby already told you your troublesome sister is buried by the woods at the back of the hotel. She’s in the same piece of land that’s being developed, which is unfortunate. We found out yesterday that we lost our appeal, and so of course we can’t take the chance that Dina’s remains could be exposed and an investigation opened up. So this way we can pin the murder on you. It actually works out perfectly.’

  Malcolm takes an envelope out of his rucksack and brings it over to where I’m slumped in the armchair. ‘Fingerprints,’ he grunts without looking me in the eye. He takes my hand and presses my fingers down on the envelope in several places before trudging back and placing it on the end of the bed.

  ‘That’s your suicide note,’ Celia explains. ‘It’s all typed out, very simple and to the point, saying how you can’t live with the guilt any longer and that you never meant to kill your sister, it was an accident etcetera. I’ve had this plan in place since the redevelopment was announced,
but I hoped we’d never have to carry it out. Unfortunately, with the building going ahead and your memories returning, here we are.’ She holds her hands out apologetically.

  ‘I got you to sign a blank piece of paper a while ago when I asked for your signature for the petition. Thankfully you were busy at work and you weren’t paying much attention. I used that sheet of paper for your suicide note. It’s already got your fingerprints on it, and I was wearing gloves that day.’

  A wave of nausea sweeps over my whole body and my stomach begins to cramp.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Celia says, squinting down at me. ‘Your facial muscles are really twitching now. I imagine you must feel quite wretched. There are a few side effects to that blocker. Don’t worry, we’re almost done here. Not too much longer until it’s all over.’

  The fury I felt moments ago is quickly replaced by the darkest fear I’ve ever experienced. My mind rebels and judders in terror as Celia and Malcolm position themselves on dining chairs either side of me and together begin to manhandle me up onto the chair… towards the rope.

  Thirty-Three

  THE DAY OF THE WEDDING

  I feel like I’m falling into an infinite black space. Down, down, down into the darkness. Until… BAM! I open my eyes and find myself staring into my fiancé’s worried face.

  ‘Toby,’ I croak.

  He crouches and takes my hand and I realise he’s trembling. ‘Are… are you okay? You really gave us a scare.’ His face is chalk white, his neck red and mottled. ‘We were so worried.’

  ‘Where…?’ I try to sit up, but my brain feels as though it’s floating loose in my skull, so I give up and sink back down. It’s then that I realise I’m lying on the floor, my head on a cushion. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ he asks.

  I try to think, but my mind is fuzzy. ‘What’s going on? Why do I feel weird?’

  ‘You fainted, love.’ Toby’s mum Celia kneels by my side, one hand on my forehead, the other on my wrist. She looks different somehow. Maybe it’s her hair – she’s had it cut or styled or something. It looks straighter than usual, and browner. She must have had the grey coloured. ‘Looks like you came down a real cropper.’