I need to keep them safe, I type. My daughter, and my wife. You understand?
Your wife doesn’t need keeping safe. The reply is vicious in its swiftness. I frown, trying to understand. I see the dots rolling across the bottom of the screen again for more than half a minute, then freeze, as if she’s reading back what she’s written. A few seconds later the message appears.
I need to speak to you, she’s written. I don’t know how much you know, or what she’s told you. It may not be accurate. I know how strange this must seem to you, but it’s important that you hear what I have to say. Tell me where you are, and I’ll come and meet you right now.
Who are you?? I drain my drink in a fierce gulp that makes my eyes smart, realizing that I’m angry. On and off, this woman has been in my life for well over a year.
Just tell me where you are, she replies.
I think about arguing, but I know I run the risk of scaring her off. And in any case, I can’t see any other way forward now. I’m in the Golden Bell, I type. Leonard Street, just up from the seafront. Do you know it?
The answer comes back quick and sure. I’ll find you.
Time passes and although I look up sharply every time anyone enters the bar, no one seems to even glance in my direction. I go to the bar and ask for a pint of water, then drain it back at my seat. I don’t want to feel drunk for this, but my head still swims lightly. I realize that I haven’t eaten anything all day and think about ordering some food, but just as I’m reaching for the menu I happen to glance up again, and I see her.
She’s standing in the doorway, scanning the opposite side of the bar. It’s probably only a few seconds before she turns, but each one feels stretched and liquefied, turning these brief moments into a strange elongated limbo. I recognize her instantly, from the photograph that’s still in my coat pocket.
Her cheekbones are a little softer than Natalie’s, her eyes slightly more slanted. She’s wearing a pale pink lipstick that I can’t imagine Natalie choosing and her hair is pinned up on top of her head instead of flowing loose over her shoulders. But there’s something in the curve of her lips and the tilt of her nose, something in the way she moves her hand to her face and brushes a falling tendril of hair back behind her ear. The two of them are cut from the same cloth.
She turns her head and her eyes meet mine. She blinks once, twice, seeing the shock in my gaze. Then she gathers herself together and walks slowly over to the table, slipping into the seat opposite mine.
‘Hello,’ she says. Her voice is softer than I’d imagined, a little more cultured and smooth.
‘Hello,’ I echo. For an insane moment, I find the corners of my mouth twitching; I want to burst into laughter. One of our early interchanges swims into my head – when she told me that she’d always fantasized about a stranger taking her hand on the street and pulling her aside, hustling her down a dark passageway and fucking her up against a wall, his hand over her mouth, without a word exchanged. I had been that man, for a few minutes. I’ve never told anyone that, she had typed afterwards, and I had believed her.
‘You’re her sister,’ I say, needing it to be said aloud, and she nods.
‘Yes.’ We stare at each other, for longer than would feel natural under other circumstances. ‘Do I look like her?’ she asks at last. ‘I haven’t seen her for so long, you know.’
‘In a way,’ I say truthfully. ‘Not completely. But there’s something there.’
She nods, looking neutral. I don’t know what answer she wanted. She glances away for a moment, then returns her gaze to mine. There’s something unsettlingly intense about her dark-lashed eyes and their scrutiny. ‘I should apologize,’ she says. ‘I know that what I’ve done to you is wrong.’
‘You mean …’ I begin carefully. The sphere of what she might be referring to is so wide that I wouldn’t like to second-guess.
‘Approaching you in the first place,’ she says, ‘on the website. It wasn’t particularly hard to do, but that doesn’t mean it was right.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘How did you even know I was on the site? How did you know my username?’ With a pinch of embarrassment, I think of my profile on secretroom; the unashamed arrogance of the name I’d chosen, Alpha1. That was the kind of thing women wanted there.
‘I knew where you worked,’ she says, ‘where you lived. These things are easy to find out. A couple of times I – engineered things so that I was where you were likely to be, at the same sort of time. It wasn’t stalking. I was curious, that’s all. And one time – this was a long time ago now – you were in a café, and you went to the toilet, and you left—…’
‘My laptop on the table,’ I finish, unable to keep the incredulity from my tone. I’d assumed that the laptop had been taken by a teenage chancer.
‘That’s right,’ she says, eyes downcast. ‘I’m sorry. It’s not hard to get past security settings, you know, not if you know what you’re doing, or know someone who does. And the site was there, in your history. The laptop was still logged in to your email, so I did a search for the site and I found your username. It seemed like the best way of – connecting with you, anonymously.’ She looks at me for a brief instant, then away. There’s something intensely awkward in her tone. The woman I’ve been talking to on secretroom is shameless, brazen even, but that doesn’t fit at all with the person sitting opposite me. In fact, it doesn’t fit with the picture Natalie has painted of Sadie, either – but this picture is almost two decades out of date. Something’s changed her, radically. Just like my wife, she’s become someone else.
‘But why did you do it?’ I ask. ‘Why “connect with me”, as you put it, at all?’
She draws in a long breath, leaning back in her seat. The candlelight radiating from the little glass jar on the table between us flickers up and flows in shadows round the mouldings of her face, and I see that similarity leaping to life again. ‘I had to see if you were happy with her,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t think how else to test it. And after we started … Well, I didn’t think you were. Or you wouldn’t have – continued to engage with me.’
‘I stopped it,’ I say uncomfortably. ‘In the end. It didn’t mean anything.’ These are not words you would normally say to a woman so bluntly, with no explanation or apology, but I can see she doesn’t mind. I realize something as I look at her, something which floods me with guilty relief. This woman is attractive – striking, even. When I think of the things we’ve talked about and match them up with the face and body in front of me, I do feel an automatic twinge of desire. But the sight of her doesn’t captivate me the way that first sight of Natalie did. If I met the two of them together as strangers, it’s my wife that I would want to talk to; she’s the one that I would want to take home.
‘Yes,’ she nods. ‘And I’d accepted that. Started to think that I’d been wrong, and that perhaps you and her were happy. I stepped back. But then I found out about the fire. I contacted you again, because it – it worried me.’
There’s something strange in the words she’s chosen; they’re understated, and yet I can’t understand exactly what it is that might have worried her. ‘Do you know who was responsible?’ I ask carefully. Long overdue, I realize who it is I’m talking to here: not just Natalie’s sister, but a woman who was involved with a dangerous man, involved in murder.
‘I have a good idea,’ she says, ‘but I’m not sure why.’
We could go on like this all night, I think, circling each other delicately, testing the ground. I need to cut to the chase. ‘Look,’ I say, ‘I never would have agreed to meet up with you under normal circumstances, but things are getting out of hand. If you’re trying to sabotage our lives, I need to know about it and I need to understand why.’
‘Sabotage,’ she repeats. ‘I wouldn’t put it like that.’ Incredibly, she sounds faintly offended. ‘Like I said, I just needed to know that you were happy. If I’d thought you were, I would have left you alone. I did leave you alone, when you stopped messaging me
.’
‘We are happy,’ I say firmly. For some reason, saying this out loud gives me an odd sensation, as if I’m swaying on the edge of a dark cliff, not quite knowing when or if I’ll fall.
‘I believe that now, more than I did before,’ she says. ‘If she’s told you about the past, and you still want to be with her, then you must love her.’
‘She can’t help what happened to her,’ I say sharply. ‘She was forced into a situation which was hardly her fault.’ I see her opening her mouth to contradict me, but I plough on. ‘And besides,’ I continue, ‘I’m not sure what our relationship has to do with you in any case.’
She shrugs miserably. ‘Nothing, of course. But all the same, it felt wrong not to check.’
Impatience flares up inside me; I don’t understand this conversation. I reach for my glass, but it’s empty. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I find myself saying, louder than I had intended. ‘What is this? Why the hell would you think we needed checking up on?’
‘Just the habit of a lifetime, I suppose,’ she fires back, ‘and by the sound of what you told me earlier you’re well aware that something isn’t right. Why else would you have gone to see Kas?’ Her voice drops on the last word, and I notice the way her eyes flick quickly, reflexively, around the room, as if she’s checking that no one has heard.
‘Because this situation is fucking frightening,’ I say. ‘Because someone set our house on fire. And if what my wife thinks is right, then you know all of this already, you’re involved in the whole damn thing.’
She stares at me, her pink lips slightly parted, a frown creasing her brows. Either she is a brilliant actress, or she is genuinely confused. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ she says. ‘Why would I be involved?’
‘You’re lying to me,’ I snap. But even as I speak I realize that I’m not sure. There’s something so straightforward about her gaze, and that frightens me. ‘I’m not here to play games,’ I say. ‘I love Natalie, and I want to protect her. That’s all.’
There is a pause, and a sad little smile appears at the corners of her lips. ‘It sounds so odd,’ she says, ‘you calling her that.’
‘I can’t think of her as anything else.’ I don’t want to get derailed, but it’s something that’s played on my mind too, ever since she first sat huddled on those rocks by the seafront and told me that other name. ‘Rachel doesn’t suit her.’
At first I don’t understand what I’ve said, or why it provokes the reaction that it does. She draws in her breath sharply. I see her eyes move from side to side, as if she’s weighing things up, fitting together the pieces of a mental jigsaw. ‘I see,’ she says at last.
‘What?’ I ask roughly. I don’t like the tone of her voice, or the sudden paleness of her face, the gravity of her expression.
She leans forward, and with a shock I realize that she’s reaching for my hand across the table. She takes it in her own cool fingers, the tips pressing insistently into my palm. ‘You don’t understand,’ she says. ‘She’s lying to you. She’s not who you think she is. The person you’re talking about is me. I’m Rachel.’
Part Six
* * *
Sadie
September 2017
AFTER ALEX HAS left to meet Gavin, I can’t settle. I prowl back and forth in the tiny hotel room, trying to get rid of this restlessness. I go to the bathroom and stare at myself in the little strip-lit mirror above the basin. That’s one habit I’ve hung on to. I still like losing myself in the depths of my own eyes, still find it calming and serene. But this time it doesn’t quite do the trick. I try a little longer, and then I give up, pulling on my coat and hurrying down to the hotel lobby. Nervous energy is fizzing through me like sherbet. I can already see a taxi lingering on the road outside. It’s time.
I can’t stop thinking about that little moment in the hospital earlier with Jade, when I said all that stuff about the fire and how it should have bonded us, brought us together. I’m not even sure why it came out, but I do know that in that moment I really wanted her to agree, maybe to squeeze my hand or even to throw her arms around my neck, saying that she understood what I meant and that things would be different between us from now on. That we’d be closer, tighter. That she valued me, loved me, never wanted to let me go. Stupid. After all, it’s not like I feel that way about her. But if she’d said it, and if I’d really believed it, it would have made things so much easier. I wouldn’t need to do what I have to do now. I could kick back, relax and enjoy my life. I’ve waited years to be where I want to be: free, stable and secure, with a man who loves me and who’ll never leave me. I’m so nearly there, but not quite. The frustration is tangible, prickling on my skin.
For the past few days, I haven’t felt like myself, whoever that is. The fire dulled my senses a little, maybe. It was easier not to think too much about the future, or the past come to that, and to just exist. It’s not sustainable, though, and now that I’m here in the taxi, cold air rushing in through the window and blowing through my hair, it feels like I’m slowly returning to my own body. My thoughts are sharper, clearer. I can’t block out the memories that are flooding me, kick-started perhaps by what Alex told me. I still can’t get my head around him and Kas together; talking to each other, looking into each other’s eyes. I feel about it the way you’d feel about walking into a room and finding someone there who you’d only ever seen in a dream. There’s something nightmarish about it – the slip between reality and fantasy, between the present and the past.
I still find Kas in my head sometimes, and I haven’t tried too hard to get him out, because he lives there. He isn’t going away. There are time-slips even now when I wake up half dreaming and humming with desire, half of me completely lost in those early days when I first knew him. That very first time I saw him striding down the street from the club. I’d never been in love before, and it hit me so hard I could barely breathe. I’ve never forgotten how it felt – falling into his world, falling into him. The way the slightest look or touch could electrify me, the kick I got from those brief moments of connection that was better than any drug I’d ever taken. An obsession, an addiction. Nothing else mattered. I knew from the start that he could pull me under and I wanted to go with him.
I haven’t forgotten the fear that went along with that desire either. I was confused and overwhelmed and terrified – yes, of him sometimes, as well as of the situation I was in. But somehow it wasn’t enough to make me get out. I wondered for a long time if there was something wrong with me. It isn’t natural not to mind about whether people live or die. Life is precious, and everyone has the right to exist. I can believe that, on a conceptual level, but I always struggled to feel it. George Hart, Felix Santos. They were nothing to me, not part of my life. Not everyone could say the same, of course. I remember seeing Felix’s wife in the courtroom, her face pale and haggard, her eyes like black holes. It triggered something in me, the sight of her; the start of a remorse, a guilt that felt like it was so deep and fathomless that I couldn’t let myself fall into it. I had to drag myself out in order to survive. And once you’ve managed to do that, there isn’t really any going back.
It was easier with Melanie. The adrenaline and the alcohol and the conviction that she was wrong for Kas and that she was the only thing standing in our way. Trailing her through the streets and stepping out on to that platform, watching the way her forehead creased as she took me in, the little lines at the corners of her eyes. I remember her lipstick had smudged slightly, making a little dark red stain at the edge of her mouth. I was nineteen and I felt invincible, and in the end it just happened. It only took a second, that push. Everyone’s done things they don’t think through. You don’t think it through, you just do it, and then suddenly you’ve killed someone. You’re a murderer.
I was terrified in those first few minutes after it happened, so terrified that I lost sight of everything. It was like being shut in a long, dark tunnel, zooming down towards some point I couldn’t even see, like I w
as suffocating and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. When you feel like that, you do and say things that you’re likely to regret, and I made a big mistake. I opened my mouth and those weak little words spilled out, and my sister gathered them up eagerly and deposited them at the feet of the police like they were a load of the gold medals she used to win at school sports day. It’s hard to imagine, but I’m not sure I ever really understood who she was. For years she’d made out that she only cared about other people and that she martyred herself for them – for me, in particular. But when it came down to it, there were other things she cared about more. She cared more about some abstract idea of ‘justice’, more about principles than people. It makes no sense to me. If you love someone, surely you’d do anything for them. Lie for them, kill for them, step outside your whole belief system for them. That’s the way it was for me, and the way it’s always been.
I stayed true to that, with Kas. I showed him my loyalty. I stuck to my guns and I lied my arse off for him, all through the trial, even though I soon knew that it wouldn’t work and there was no way we were going to get off. Especially then; there was nothing to lose, and everything to prove. And in the end I used up so much emotion on him – missing him, wanting him, convincing myself that one day we’d be together – that there was nothing left over. I was empty inside, scraped out. When I woke up doubled over in pain and knowing that I’d lost the baby, less than a week before the trial started, I felt nothing. When I walked into the courtroom and saw Rachel standing there at the witness box, her shiny blonde hair tied up all nicely and her pretty, soft lips uttering her traitorous words, I felt nothing. When the judge finally read the sentence and I heard that I’d been given fifteen years and that I was going to spend my twenties inside the locked walls of a prison, I felt nothing. I felt nothing. I felt nothing.
The Second Wife Page 24