The Perfect Widow

by A. M. Castle

  We are, all three of us, in our own separate bubbles, now. The rest of my life feels strangely unmapped. We are an uneasy bunch, on this mild autumnal day. There are a few leaves swirling on the drive, I notice, as I rake my gaze left and right as usual, just checking. What for? Reporters, maybe. Police? Never again, I hope.

  The kids, they follow like little lambs, not looking up, but not worrying either. Surely this is a success? Something I can congratulate myself on. We are still in our house, we are safe, they are not anxious. Yes, they are sad, and their grieving is a great big thick grey veil across our lives, suffocating the fun, smothering the joy. I’m not sure how long I will let it lie over us, though.

  Don’t get me wrong, I miss him too. As soon as he was gone, I felt his loss. Much more keenly than I’d ever thought might be possible.

  I mourn him. Not surprising, when you consider how much of my life I’ve spent dancing round Patrick. First, trying to get his attention. Then trying to keep it. But of course, the Patrick that I really yearn for was the man I first met, on that first day, in that bright, shiny building, all those years ago. The Patrick I had imagined. Cocky, yes. Glib, yes. Confident, always. A charmer.

  But a liar?

  I suppose if I’d read between the lines, I’d have realised that it’s hard to be all of the above without being a liar too. If you rely on charm to pull you through, why would you stop at that little boundary called the truth? If a word or two more will close the deal, you can bet a charmer will tiptoe over the line. And once you’ve been there a few times, well then, it’s your territory, isn’t it? Part of your bag of tricks.

  There had been a time when I’d thought Patrick saved his spiel just for the others. That I was as close to him as anyone could get; that we were soulmates and that he would be incapable of betraying me. But all it really took, I saw now, was for me to want something a tiny bit different from him. To persuade me to his point of view, he’d do what he always did, and bend the truth as nimbly as one of those entertainers I used to book for the kids’ parties, who’d make hearts and crowns and swords out of balloons, quick as a flash. Patrick would take what I wanted to hear, scrunch it about a bit, and present it back to me with a flourish. Truth? No. Convincing? Up to a point, yes.

  It was always enough to keep me here, anyway. Here, where I belong, in our lovely house, with my children.

  But now, what are we left with? What do I have? I sling my bag down on the kitchen island. Expensive leather meeting polished marble, a conjunction which used to give me so much pleasure. The bag is ludicrously pricey; I’d set my heart on it for almost a month before I took the plunge and splurged on it. Had been expecting Patrick to raise an eyebrow, at least. Even he knew how much this brand cost. But no, nothing. He’d been too deep in the mire by then. What was a bag, against all he’d squandered?

  I sigh, a little more gustily than I’d intended. Both Em and Giles look up. They have their own weight of sorrows, regrets and what-ifs and if-onlys that they drag around with them from morning to night. But they are looking at me to see if they can lighten my load, check whether I need a hug.

  What have I done to deserve such children? Nothing, my head shrieks. Nothing, my heart bleeds. They are my solace.

  I loved Patrick so much, for so long. Not in a healthy way, but as an obsession, even to the edge of doom. It was always bound to end in tears.

  Chapter 57

  Now

  Becca

  Becca let the words flash across her face, the laptop the only point of light in the kitchen. The social workers’ reports all spoke of Louise’s mother, Monica, as deadwood. An alcoholic. An occasional prostitute. A known drug user. And she was accident-prone, as well. Broken arms, front teeth, ankle one time. It didn’t take a genius to see she’d been used as a punchbag, but whether by one particular man or a succession of them – or even, Becca thought, by her daughter – was less clear.

  But Becca looked more closely and shook her head. However much she’d like to pin the blame, all of it, on Louise, she surely hadn’t been old enough to inflict these injuries. They’d started before she was born, and continued haphazardly, until Louise must have been in her teens. And there was nothing in Louise’s own file that suggested that she was interested in random violence. She so wasn’t a random person.

  Finding that Monica had gone through with her pregnancy, kept the child and then somehow brought her up – or at least fed her enough to keep her alive while the child grew without intervention – was surprising reading. No father on record, of course.

  Here, Becca felt a pang. Her dad might be long gone, but the memory of his kindly smile, the loving concern, his certainty that Becca was the most wonderful girl in the world, had done much to help her sail past her mother’s regrets. What must it have been like, growing up without that support? Without someone there who’d always take your side?

  Poor Louise, she caught herself thinking for a second – then brushed that off angrily. What was she thinking? This woman was a killer. There was no excuse for that. And maybe she was tight with her mother instead? In a way that Becca herself had sadly never been.

  Though, looking through the pages, each seeming to be in a different social worker’s hand, it was hard to read a story of maternal devotion or daughterly duty in these sparse lines. ‘Leanne seen today. Clothes not clean. Fridge empty.’ ‘Leanne seen today. Bruises on shin. She refused examination. Fell in playground.’ ‘Monica seen today. Very sleepy. House not clean. Refused leaflet on alcohol abuse.’

  There had been brushes with the authorities on a regular basis, and occasional attempts to take the girl off the mother’s lacklustre hands. But something had always prevented it. It wasn’t the mother pleading not to be parted from her child, that was for sure. But nor was she going the other way, and demanding Louise be put into care. Whether that was because she reaped some small advantage from having the girl around, in the shape of benefits, extra leverage from the council on accommodation, or whether she was too lethargic to try and get shot of her, was hard to ascertain.

  Reading through the case conferences, Becca tutted. It seemed to be the usual. A hand-wringing stance from the powers that be, veiling a central reluctance or inability to act. The situation wasn’t quite bad enough for the social workers to be sure they wouldn’t be making things worse. Becca sympathised, but at the same time, despaired. She was hardly Louise’s biggest fan, but even she could see the evidence was stacking up here.

  Scrolling through the file, Becca noticed that, from the age of 10 onwards, Louise herself played a greater part in the interactions with social workers. ‘Surprisingly articulate’, ‘achieving at school’, ‘wishes to stay with her mother,’ the case file noted. It sounded as though Louise’s own ability to thrive, despite the stony soil in which she’d grown, had in some ways acted against her, lulled the social workers into feeling things couldn’t be so bad if the child was bright. There was so little time, Becca knew, to spend with any one family. So many were at risk, and if there was a home where the child seemed to be doing, not well exactly, but all right, as opposed to being even more obviously maltreated, then the authorities were happy to take the easiest and cheapest course, and let sleeping dogs lie.

  ‘Doing all right’, of course, was open to interpretation. Bruises, hunger, filth and a drunk – at best – for a mum. It didn’t sound good. But would a care home have been better? The stories about such places were rife, and rank. Becca shook her head. Much though she didn’t want to, she felt the ghost of the girl Louise had been pulling at her hem. An unwashed girl in a smelly flat. Who now looked like she bathed her tresses daily in bleach and lived in a show home so clean it squeaked.

  Becca looked up from her reading, feeling grubby herself. The first fingers of dawn were creeping across the dark kitchen window, the glass beaded with condensation. Thank God she wasn’t on duty today. She’d had a hundred things earmarked to sort out – light bulb for the bedside lamp that hadn’t worked for six months,
ordering something online for her mother’s birthday. And ringing her mother, of course, and trying not to take every significant pause and hurried mention of next door’s adorable new granddaughter as further proof that she was squandering the family’s one remaining set of functioning ovaries.

  She ambled to the cupboard, shook a last lonely KitKat free of its multipack shroud and flicked on the kettle again, chucked her untouched herbal tea down the sink, busied herself making coffee. No point now in pretending she wasn’t awake. And chocolate for breakfast? She deserved it, after the night she’d had. She wanted to sluice away everything she’d read, lose that feeling of pity in bright normality, the rich, peaty aroma as the boiling water hit the coffee grounds in the cafetière, the search for her favourite mug.

  She paused, looking blankly out of the window, watching the blackness giving over to grey and the light lending shape to trees and wheelie bins, yet not taking any of the familiar streetscape in. She couldn’t deny it. Despite herself, she did feel a shiver of sympathy for Louise.

  Thanks to the files she’d spent the night poring over, she could picture her life all too well. Grim estate, mother a waste of space, unexplained injuries … on both of them. Though all she had was snatched photos, and now this stuff she’d unearthed, still the stench of that little girl’s life rose up. The piss in the lifts, graffiti and worse in the stairwells, the dingy flat itself, the dirt and chaos of a life of addiction. Monica Butcher’s focus, always on her next drink, next fix, and not on the little girl, skulking in the shadows. The mustiness of an unwashed body. Children didn’t sweat much. To start to get whiffy, they had to wear the same clothes for a very long time.

  Becca cursed her tendency to empathise. But she’d paid enough calls on the estates round here to know, all too well, the sights and smells of deprivation. It seemed the place Louise had come from was different only in that it might have been worse.

  None of it was sounding good. And it was very hard to tie all this in with the overlay of glossy perfection that was now Louise Bridges’ life. Or had been, until her husband had turned up dead as mutton.

  She’d got the woman wrong, she had to admit it. She’d thought Louise was one of those blessed creatures who lorded it over kids like her at school, and went on to gilded lives, but no. Leanne had been far from that. She must have been lower in the pecking order even than chubby young Becca.

  Schoolkids always knew the ones with the troubled backgrounds. Sometimes it was easy to tell, though when you got to the teenage years, grease and zits were suddenly everywhere, dodgy homes or not. In fact, the more adolescent they got, the more difficult it was to spot problems. A gangly, monosyllabic lump was pretty similar, whether from a palace or a pigsty. But even when it wasn’t easy for an adult to spot the difference, children, with that finely honed herd instinct, would still ostracise the runts, the weaklings, the weirdos, those marked as other.

  Taking a sip of her coffee, wishing she’d made it even stronger, Becca realised she was now even feeling a streak of admiration for the Bridges woman. To have created all that, her perfect life, her apparently solid marriage, her two-point-four kids and her 4X4 car, from the shedload of misery that was in her file? It was no mean feat.

  Damn, what was it about the woman? Burke had openly had his tongue lolling out for her. Johno was eager to shut the investigation down and move swiftly on. Anyone looking at her felt either envy or lust. And now even Becca, who’d conceived that intense dislike from the very moment she’d clapped eyes on Louise, when she’d finally deigned to appear in the doorway of her home, was being forced to reassess the woman.

  Had her first visceral reaction to Louise just been that childhood rejection of the outsider, a bit of damaged goods? Everyone else thought it was jealousy, pure and simple. The contrast between the two of them was so glaring. And so, as Becca had thought, unfair. She’d been blaming genetics, background, upbringing. Anything but herself and her addiction to sugary crap, a sedentary lifestyle, an easy acceptance that she’d never be skinny. She put down the KitKat, or the mangled centimetre that remained. Looked into the dregs of her syrupy-sweet coffee, then she hefted herself out of her chair and swilled it out at the sink. She poured in the remainder of the cafetière and nuked it in the microwave for a minute, until she could hear it fizzing. No more sugar for her. Well, not in this cup of coffee, anyway, she thought more honestly.

  It looked as though she’d been wrong. About a lot of things. But she was still willing to bet her initial instinct about Louise Bridges was on the money. Something was off. Something smelt wrong.

  Well, something was off. Louise’s whole life was built on lies. She wasn’t what she seemed at all.

  But hang on, did that mean Becca simply resented the fact that the woman had risen above her pitiful beginnings? If so, what did that make her? Surely she couldn’t begrudge Louise a better life than the one her junkie mother had thrown at her?

  Becca yanked the coffee out of the microwave, drank too quickly and winced as she scalded her mouth. No, it wasn’t the way that Louise had risen like a phoenix above the ashes of her upbringing. She didn’t have a problem with that, ’course not.

  It was the fact that Louise Butcher was exactly what it had said on the original tin, the one she’d tried to chuck away so long ago. Becca must never let herself forget it.

  The woman was a killer.

  Chapter 58

  Now

  Louise

  The horrible truth, the most horrible of all the truths, might well be that we were as bad as each other, Patrick and I. I’d had the honesty knocked out of me at an early age: say a word about this, and you’ll get it. Tell anyone what I did to you, and you’ll be dead, see? And Patrick? Maybe it was his father’s defection that showed him how to lie.

  Sometimes it was my mother doing that breathy rasping whisper thing that goes with threats, sometimes one of my ‘uncles’. Looking back on it, I’m not sure she could have carried out all her evil promises. She was a feeble thing by the end. Shorter than I was, by that point, and endlessly weakened by the fags, the booze, the junk. They do say don’t do drugs. Anyone looking at my mother would say, fair enough, and give up pronto. Aversion therapy didn’t need to look any further for its poster girl.

  I could have taken her, probably from the age of 12 onwards. But you don’t know that as a child, do you? You live in terror. The threats grow to fill the space around you. Even if that space is a box room running with condensation, with walls you could touch from your bed, the threats are bigger than you, that’s for sure. And they could crush you just like that. Sometimes the anticipation of violence and pain is worse than the physical reality itself. That’s something an experienced torturer knows. And any old child abuser, of course.

  I freeze, as I do when remembering that stuff. It’s as insidious as the black mould that coated our flat, memory is. It creeps in under my perfect door, swirls around this bright and beautiful kitchen. On days like today, when we are already sad, I feel even more at its mercy than usual. But I don’t want the flashbacks to start. The kids are already living in past times, thinking about their dad. I have to be here, in the present, doing positive stuff. I start to bang pans around.

  ‘I’m making a lasagne, kids. How about that?’ My tone is so bright that I almost want to don sunglasses. It feels like shouting obscenities in a church. But I want to break the mood – for their sake, more than my own.

  ‘Not hungry,’ Giles mumbles. I suppose I should be grateful he’s spoken at all.

  ‘But, Mum, I keep telling you! I’m vegan,’ Em moans. Aha! Ironically, this is something we can get our teeth into. A familiar wrangle, trotted out every few months, that I traditionally have no truck with. I leap on it and in moments Em and I are bickering gently, Giles looking on. He’s not quite smiling, but I’m glad to see the over-bright sheen has gone from his eyes. Not that I don’t want him to cry for his dad, you understand. But I don’t want him to keep on crying, forever.

  ‘Y
ou can go vegan on your own time, when you’re 18. Until then, it’s my rules.’

  ‘And your rules are death and murder, are they?’ says Em, her cheeks flushed, looking more engaged than she has for weeks now, since that fateful ring on the bell.

  ‘The mince is dead anyway. I didn’t personally chop it into bits,’ I say, as she mimes gagging.

  I don’t add that if I had to, then yes, I would kill that cow for her. Bare hands, if necessary. And the rest of the herd, too.

  Chapter 59

  Now

  Becca

  Becca couldn’t help it. She breezed back into the open-plan office with a bit of a swagger, not even the body armour, truncheon, radio and cuffs getting in her way today. In fact, they sailed in her wake, like tiny tugboats around a cruise ship. She didn’t sidle, she walked four-square and tall – well, as tall as she could at 5ft4in. Plonked herself back at her desk with a satisfied sigh. A few heads lifted from the never-ending paperwork, clocked her ear-to-ear grin. Like meerkats, faces popped up over partitions. She was causing a bit of a buzz, and for once it was for the right reasons. One of her colleagues wandered over from Traffic. Bored stiff by the RTAs and the DUIs, yet unlike Becca, seemingly happy for such mundanities to roll onto her plate forever. Becca felt smug. She’d put all that behind her now. Well, she hoped.

  ‘So what was that with the Sarge, then?’ Abigail asked her, wedging her much-too-small arse on one of Becca’s own drifting mounds of forms, sadly neglected in the past weeks.

  Becca looked up at her from her creaky chair, shifted slightly so that it turned from side to side. She waited a beat. How much did Abigail already know? How much had the rest of the room gleaned? News travelled fast. Ordinary offices were porous enough, a police station was a sieve with information cascading through like water from a tap.