by Jane Fallon
I wake up at around three in the morning. Eyes wide open.
Someone gave Al that book. Someone wrote the inscription. She’s the other woman. She’s the one Stella should be upset about, not me.
If I can show Stella proof of who he’s really seeing, then not only will she know it’s not me, but she can confront Al all she likes about her without him thinking I’ve betrayed him. It’s win–win.
I just need to find out who she is.
9
Of course, this is easier said than done. I am not a private detective. I can’t dedicate my life to following Al around, even if I knew how to do so discreetly. I can’t break into their house and poke through his things to see what I can find. I can’t even get myself invited round there legitimately.
I do, however, have access to his office.
In the middle of the night this seems like a genius idea. I play out fantasies in my head, of me thrusting some damning piece of evidence in front of Stella’s shocked face. See! I am innocent! I cry, and she has to admit how wrong she’s been, what a bully. How could she have misunderstood me so badly? She insists that she will clear my name with Eva and Katya and anyone else she’s bad-mouthed me to, and I am celebrated in The Close like a Death Row prisoner, hours from execution, who is finally able to prove her alibi. There are tears and hugs and apologies, and a party is held in my honour.
The night-time does strange things to my rationality.
Once I wake up in the morning, having slipped into a deep sleep on a wave of misplaced euphoria, the first thought I have is: This is the worst plan I have ever had. It is, however, all I’ve got.
I wish I had someone to talk it over with. This is definitely a step too far for Gail, sympathetic as she is. I’m her tenant; Stella is her friend. I don’t think it would be fair to her to tell her what I’m thinking of doing. She’d just worry she’d invited some crazy loose cannon to live in her annexe. Someone who was going to cause a shitload of trouble and then move on, leaving her to deal with the fallout. I think about trying to explain the situation to one of my former ‘close’ friends, but first I’d have to get past the ‘where have you been since David and I separated?’ conversation I have in my head on repeat. Air those thoughts that keep me awake at night sometimes about the way they all sided with their husbands, David’s friends. No, not sided with. That’s unfair. But they chose the path of least resistance. I still get texts asking how I am, Facebook messages with pictures of their kids or cheesy memes of kittens, but I’ve given up asking if any of them are free for a coffee.
I’m going to have to do this on my own. Although quite what I’m going to do, I’m still not sure.
As a first port of call, and because I have nothing better to do, it feels foolish not to drop into AJT Music and at least get a sense of where Al’s office is. I let myself into the foyer. I can hear someone moving around in the accounts offices at the back. Angie is on tonight, as always, along with Tomas and Catriona, so I assume it’s one of them, although occasionally a keen young researcher toils into the late evening and, on a handful of nights over the years, one of my staff has stumbled across a pair of star-crossed lovers banging away in an after-hours office. Cleaners are treated as invisible for the most part. I remember once listening to some very heated phone sex while I washed a floor. On speakerphone. I always wondered what the woman on the other end thought the noise of the damp mop squeaking across the wood was. It doesn’t bear thinking about. I wonder now if Al’s bit on the side is someone who works with him. If I might have seen her when I’ve dropped off supplies during the day.
I bypass the first floor and make my way up to the second, where the smart offices are. There’s nothing I can really do while my staff are here, and I can’t risk one of them finding me poking about, so, when I get to the top of the stairs I call out ‘Hello’, and Angie appears from the Ladies, a bright scarf holding her hair back from her face.
‘Back so soon?’ she says with a smile.
‘I just dropped Betsy off,’ I say, as if that’s an explanation. I’m lying, of course, but I feel as if I need to justify myself. Angie’s smile drops as quickly as it appeared.
‘Oh yes. That’s tough.’
I feel bad using Betsy as an excuse, but it’s also true that I don’t really want to go back to an empty flat. Any distraction is good.
‘I could do with a tea break,’ she says, and I follow her through to the tiny kitchen, where she busies herself putting the kettle on and hunting out tea bags.
We chat about nothing much for a while. She asks me how I’m getting on in my new place and I tell her the Stella story without letting on that the boyfriend works a few feet away.
‘Jesus,’ she says, when I get to the bit about Stella’s girls telling Betsy her mother is a slut. ‘What a bitch.’
‘It’d almost be funny if it weren’t for Betsy.’
Angie huffs. ‘I love the way people think single mums have the time or the energy to even think about seducing anyone …’
Of course, I’m a single mum now. Although one whose child, thankfully, also has a supportive single dad to help out. Angie wasn’t so lucky. She was widowed when her youngest was just a few months old. Car accident. She’s been bringing them up on her own ever since. As far as I know she’s never even dated. Don’t get me wrong, she’s had the odd hook-up, but nothing more. She couldn’t be bothered, she’d said to me once. It all felt too much like hard work, on top of bringing up her boys and cleaning every night. I once asked why she didn’t try Tinder and she’d laughed and said, ‘Ah yes, cos that’s working out so well for you,’ which shut me up.
I lean back against the counter. ‘And even if I did have – which I don’t, or the inclination, just to be clear – I wouldn’t do it by writing something soppy in French in a book.’
‘Maybe she is French.’
For some reason this hasn’t even occurred to me. Maybe she is. I surreptitiously flick a look around the kitchen, hoping for … what? A sign on the wall announcing ‘Brigitte works here’ or ‘J’aime Paris’. Angie catches me looking, so I snap my attention back to her.
‘That would make sense.’
She takes a sip of her tea. ‘Why you, do you think?’
I let out a sigh. ‘I don’t …’ I start to say, and then I think, sod it. I’ve known Angie for five years. She’s my most trusted employee. And she’s a friend. Just because we don’t go out to lunch together very often doesn’t mean we’re not friends. I don’t know why I didn’t think of confiding in her before. I’ve asked her advice on a million different things over the years. In fact, she was the first person I told when David announced he was leaving. I was still trying to process it, to understand why.
‘Don’t go thinking this has anything to do with you,’ was the first thing she said. ‘This is his midlife crisis, not your failure.’ It was exactly what I needed to hear.
‘He works here. Al,’ I say, now.
Her pencil-thin eyebrows shoot upwards. She’s been trying to grow them thicker ever since I’ve known her, and they stubbornly refuse. Too many years of teenage over-plucking. Who knew the fashion would suddenly change and everyone would be sporting caterpillars? ‘Really? That’s a coincidence.’
The more I think about this, the more convinced I am. ‘I don’t think it is. I think that’s why he thought he could get away with involving me, because I stupidly told him I’d seen him at work, and now he thinks I’ll be scared I’ll lose the contract if I don’t go along with him …’
‘He sounds nice.’ She rinses her mug under the tap and holds her hand out for mine. ‘Is he in a position to do that?’
I shrug. ‘He owns the company. I doubt he even knows what cleaning firm they use, but I’m sure he could insist they got a new one.’ It occurs to me that I might have made Angie worry about her own livelihood. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t let that happen. I’ll just have to ride it out and maybe see if I can drum up some more work somewhere else meanwhile, just in c
ase.’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘I have total faith. Shall we have a poke round his office? See if the book’s in there? You never know. You could at least see what it says.’
I think about feigning shock. Pretending that I’m horrified she would suggest such a thing. But who am I kidding? ‘That’s what I was thinking of doing. Come on, then. Don’t tell the others, will you?’
She gives me an ‘as if’ look. ‘What’s his name? Al what?’
‘I don’t know. Do they have nameplates? I can’t remember.’ I follow her back into the main area, stopping on the stairs to check neither of the others is on the way up.
‘It’s not that kind of office. This one’s all wearing jeans and expressing your creativity.’
‘Well, hopefully he’s the only Al. There’ll be something with his name on. Let’s start with the biggest first.’
‘Don’t move stuff around!’ she says as I head for one of the three large glass-fronted rooms at the end. Now it’s my turn to give her an ‘as if’ look. We start in the one on the right. There are framed tour posters of bands I’ve heard of on the walls. A bookcase full of DVDs. ‘I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a woman in here,’ Angie says.
‘Was she French?’
I look behind the door and there’s a telltale women’s coat. Chic black soft wool. Fitted. Angie is flicking through a pile of papers in a tray on the desk. ‘Judith O’Brien.’
I hear a noise – a clattering – and we both freeze. We look towards the door to the stairs. Nothing. ‘It’ll be Tomas thumping around with the Hoover,’ Angie says finally. ‘It’s like a combat sport. I’m sure we’re going to get a bill for repainting their skirting boards one of these days.’ Still, we wait until we hear it again, fainter this time.
‘Let’s try the next one,’ I say in a whisper, and then I have to say it again more loudly because she didn’t hear me. ‘Keep an ear out.’
In the middle office I go straight to the coat hook behind the door, and Angie once again heads for the desk. There’s no coat, but there’s a masculine scarf and a big black umbrella. ‘Anything?’
She looks up. ‘Hold on.’ I look round the walls. More band posters. I notice a couple of framed gold and silver discs. One huge album I remember from the nineties and the others more recent. All with signatures scrawled across them. There’s a small bronze plaque. ‘Presented to Alec Thornbury’.
‘Look! Alec. I was thinking he was an Alan.’ I check the second one. Check again. ‘This is him. Alec Thornbury.’
Angie heads over and has a look. ‘Perfect. What were we going to look for again?’
‘The book. The inscription.’
She looks at the overstuffed bookcase along one wall. ‘Ah, yes. Good luck with that. I’m just going to have a look at the other office, in case …’
She goes off and I start half-heartedly pulling books from the shelves. I can’t imagine someone gave him Bear Grylls’ memoirs as a romantic gift, or a paperback of Spanish Made Simple, but I check them anyway. This is hopeless. And pointless.
‘Mark Freeborn,’ Angie says, coming back in. She pulls her phone out of her pocket and checks it. ‘We’re going to need to be out of here soon. The others’ll be finished …’
‘You carry on and get done. Just give me a shout if you hear either of them coming up.’
‘We need a code word,’ she says, with a laugh.
‘How about “pointless”,’ I say. ‘Or “hopeless”.’
‘How about I just shout your name?’
‘Good one. Very imaginative.’ She leaves me to it and I work my way through the top shelf, being careful to put everything back exactly where I found it. None of the books has an inscription, let alone one in French. I’m about to embark on shelf two when I hear Angie call me.
‘What?’ I say, and then I remember and scrabble to my feet. I’m back in the main office, apparently in conversation with Angie, when Catriona appears from the corridor.
‘I didn’t know you were here,’ she says, giving me a smile. Catriona has the world’s quietest voice, and I usually have to guess the last few words in any sentence.
‘Just catching up. How are you doing?’
‘Oh, you know,’ she says. ‘Knackered. We’re finished by the way.’ This to Angie.
‘Who’s babysitting tonight?’
‘Sharon,’ both Angie and Catriona say at once.
Angie collects a dirty mug from a desk, wipes down underneath it. ‘Two minutes. I got behind.’
‘I waylaid her,’ I say, feeling guilty.
Catriona takes the mug from her. ‘I’ll wash this. Anything else?’ Angie shakes her head. ‘Thanks.’ I love my team and how supportive they are of each other.
Angie waits until Catriona is out of hearing. ‘You could stay.’ I know I could, in theory. I have the keys to lock up after me, and there’s – in so far as I know – no overnight security beyond the alarm, the code to which I have in my phone.
‘I don’t know. It doesn’t seem right …’ Poking around while I’m there legitimately is one thing, but what if some overzealous person looks at the CCTV and sees me leaving way out of hours? What if there’s something on the front door that sends a notification if it’s opened at unusual times? ‘I can’t risk it.’
‘I can have another go tomorrow –’ she starts to say, but I interrupt. I don’t want Angie putting herself in a risky situation for me.
‘No! I’ll come back when I can. Thanks, though.’
‘Well, warn me,’ she says, lowering her voice as the sound of Catriona’s footsteps comes back along the hall. ‘I can at least make sure I’m the one doing up here.’
As I wave the three off them off, watching them trudge up the road to begin another couple of hours’ work at the financiers’ around the corner, I can’t help but glance up at the CCTV. I feel a rush of something like excitement. Nerves, probably. But at least I feel as if I’m doing something. I’m taking back control.
10
I don’t go back until after the weekend. It rains solidly for the whole two days, which means there’s no question of Betsy wanting to go and track down Cocoa on his walk, but it also means we feel trapped in the tiny studio, tripping over each other, me trying to find things for her to do to stop her from getting bored. Everything she thinks will keep her amused, every book she thinks she might like to read, is in her bedroom at her dad’s flat. She thinks she might like to paint, but I don’t have any paints here. There are a few crayons in her schoolbag, but then I can’t find any paper. I feel as if I’m stifling her spontaneity, offering her the same three Wii games over and over again. I don’t even have an iPad. She plays Candy Crush on my phone for a while, until she puts it aside, bored. She doesn’t complain, but I can tell she’s going stir crazy, as am I. I catch her gazing out of the window, and when I look at what she’s watching I see Taylor and Amber, Stella’s Mini Mes, getting into the back of a 4x4 in their ballet gear, Pilar holding a huge umbrella over their high-ponytailed heads, while her own hair clings soggily to her cheeks like an amorous octopus.
I’m concerned that Betsy might just sit there for hours watching for them to be dropped off again, so in the end we make a run for the car – both soaked before I even get the doors open – and head for Brent Cross, where we stock up on art supplies and baking materials (including a muffin tin and mixing bowl) so that we can make cupcakes in the afternoon. I’m going to need to get a bigger flat at this rate. Or at least, bigger cupboards. Maybe I can box up some more of my things and add them to the furniture that’s in storage, I wonder. David and I divided everything scrupulously fairly, of course.
We get through the rest of the weekend snuggled up watching films on Netflix, and eating misshapen chocolate peanut-butter cupcakes. We might both end up obese, but at least I’ve taken her mind off the mean girls. Until, that is, they are unpacking yet more bags from their car at the same time as we are getting into ours to take Betsy back to David’s. I keep my head down, ignore Stell
a before she can ignore me. I hear the girls laughing loudly. Betsy looks over.
‘Let’s go, Bets,’ I say quickly. She’s looking unbearably cute in her shiny yellow rain mac with red leggings and little DMs. I usher her into the car.
‘What is she wearing?’ I hear Taylor say loudly. Amber giggles theatrically. They want to make sure Betsy hears them. I turn the radio on and whack the volume up high.
On Monday afternoon, after I’ve been given a guided tour of a telecommunications company’s two floors near Regent’s Park, a client of the letting department at Rahina’s company – she’s always passing on tips, something that elevates her above the average estate agent in my eyes – and prepared a detailed quote for them, I send Angie a text – Might come by tonight – and I get a thumbs-up in return. I seem to spend half my life preparing pointless quotes. People underestimate how much effort you have to put in just to pitch for a job. You can’t simply pluck a figure out of nowhere.
I go out of boredom more than a genuine hope, or even desire, that I might discover Al’s secret. My days feel long now, but my evenings even longer. I never realized how much time I used to devote to thinking about what we were all going to have for dinner, experimenting with dishes that were both tasty for us grown-ups and appealing to my daughter. Because I work for myself, I was the one who cooked every night, who shopped for the ingredients. Preparing a meal only for myself just feels like a chore. It’s just food. Fuel. It’s not an event. Consequently, I’m spending most evenings stuffing in whatever random leftovers I have from Betsy’s previous visit, then flopping around unable to settle to anything apart from regularly checking the property listings for my preferred area with an almost religious zeal. I know every property that’s available by heart. I could lead tours around them without having to refer to notes. I could point out every ‘potential wet room’ (toilet) and ‘cosy chill-out space’ (no windows) from memory. At this point, I’d take any kind of distraction.