The First Wife: An unputdownable page turner with a twist

by Jill Childs

  After Lucy’s bath, I curled beside her on her tiny bed and stroked her to sleep, often falling asleep myself and waking later, stiff-necked and dry-mouthed. It was poor sleep training. I knew that. But it was such a joy to feel her warm weight snuggled against me, to listen to the rhythm of her breathing as it softened and deepened into sleep, to inhale her clean smells – of shampoo and soap and freshly-laundered pyjamas. And besides, there seemed no better way of spending my time than with her.

  * * *

  It was on the third or fourth of these nights that I woke late in my own bed with a start and sat up, listening in the darkness, not sure if the noises which had startled me were part of a dream.

  A car engine, close to the house. A slamming car door. Footsteps on the gravel.

  I swung my feet out of bed and reached for a dressing gown, then padded towards the alcove at the far end of the room and lifted the curtain to see out. Cold air hit me at once. Outside, the shadows were deep. The trees formed a solid black mass over to the right, protruding branches stroking the sky here and there, buffeted by the wind. Below, in front of the house, the gravel gleamed where streaks of natural light caught the stones.

  I narrowed my eyes. I couldn’t make out anything distinct, but I sensed that someone was down there, someone hidden in the darkness, looking up at me. I let the curtain fall and stood there for a moment, trembling.

  I thought of Lucy, up in her room. If someone were here, prowling round the house, I needed to do something. I needed to protect her.

  I pulled on jeans and a sweater and crept downstairs, my heart pounding. The torch on my phone gave a narrow beam of light as I found boots and my thick, woollen Hong Kong coat.

  When I opened the front door and stepped outside, the chill cut through my clothes at once. I closed the door behind me and stood for a while with my back against the wood, listening.

  The wind howled through the trees, bringing with it the low moan of creaking wood. Otherwise, there was silence. Had I heard anything? I felt foolish and horribly exposed out here, alone. Maybe I’d imagined it. Maybe I should just turn around and go quickly back to bed…

  A sharp crack. I jumped. The sound of a foot snapping a stick. Off to the left. I headed towards it, feeling my way forward with one hand tracing the wall of the house. When I reached the corner, the wind, blowing in from the sea, took my breath and made my eyes sting. I blinked, trying to make out shapes in the blackness. A noise hit me. Running feet.

  I switched on my phone torch and broke into a run. The weak beam barely cut through the darkness, lighting little more than the ground just in front of my feet. As I approached the far corner of the house, fully exposed now to the sea, I switched it off, frightened of giving myself away, and strained to see and listen.

  That smell. Here, in the final stretch, shielded by bushes, a scent lingered. A spicy cinnamon scent. She was here. Fi. She must be just ahead of me.

  Something outside me seemed to take over. Suddenly, boosted by adrenalin, I steeled myself and ran, low to the ground, out into the wind. The force almost knocked me to the ground. The narrow grassy strip between the back of the house and the edge of the cliff shone in the low moonlight. No-one.

  There seemed only one direction someone could have taken to disappear from view so quickly. I took the steep path down towards the beach house, hurrying as fast as I dared, feet planted sideways, scattering stones. I wanted to catch her. I wanted to force her to quicken her pace and give her position away. I wanted to confront her and show her that I wasn’t afraid. I wouldn’t let her win.

  The beach house shone like a jewel in the half-light. I rounded the corner and stared at the large glass picture window, shimmering as if it were alight. Blood pulsed loudly in my ears. Something dark was dripping on the pane. I stepped forward to see. Wet streaks, slowly descending in the wind. Viscous and slow-moving. I fumbled for my phone and switched the torch back on. It was blood red.

  A sudden movement made me turn. A slim figure, a woman, bolted from the far side of the beach house and into the bushes to its side, towards the edge of the cliff. Her head was covered, her face turned away from me, her dark clothes covered with a white coat which gleamed as she ran.

  I dropped my phone at the sight of her, too startled even to scream. Once I’d groped for it, I set off after her, picking my way with care into the bushes, a narrow line of cover before the cliff gave way to the sea.

  I ran my torch over everything. There were few places to hide. The bushes. Patches of coarse, wild grass which gave way to crumbling rock. Nothing. I crept forward until I was almost at the edge, then lowered myself to my stomach and crawled until my face poked out over the drop.

  The tide was in. Beneath, far below, the water surged. My senses were battered by the wind, the smell of the gorse, of the briny sea. My torch was useless at this distance. But when the clouds shifted and streaks of moonlight hit the water, I caught a glimpse of something far below. A glistening white coat, arms spread, moving in the water, swollen with wind and the high tide, rising and falling with the swell.

  * * *

  By the time the police arrived, I was back in the sitting room, still wrapped up in my coat, with my feet tucked under its flaps. I was so tired. All I wanted was to be allowed to crawl back into bed, to sleep.

  It was over, at least. I didn’t know why Fi had come here in the dark to frighten me, whether Dominic knew or whether she’d acted alone. But, however she’d come to misjudge the edge, to stumble to her death over the cliff, I was sorry. I was glad she’d lost in her battle to take what was mine. But she’d paid a heavy price.

  The police officer, a thin-faced man who looked close to retirement, made no effort to disguise his disgust at being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night.

  He refused tea, trampled across the carpet without removing his boots, opened his notebook and started firing questions at me about what had happened.

  ‘You say a noise woke you? What sort of noise? You were asleep in bed? Are you usually a light sleeper?’

  I did my best not to let his tone irritate me. He seemed mired in detail, trying to trip me up when there was much more at stake than the ragged nature of my sleep.

  I did my best to answer, then said, ‘Have they found her?’

  He looked weary. ‘The coastguard dispatched a boat when your call came in. Standard procedure in the event of a possible casualty.’ He tapped his police radio. ‘We’ll know if there’s news.’

  Later, he asked permission to go upstairs. He walked round my bedroom, saying nothing. His eyes were everywhere. On the position of my bed. The view from the window where, as I showed him, I’d lifted the curtain. As we turned to leave, he said, ‘Did you take medication last night, Mrs North?’

  I started, then remembered the tub of prescription painkillers by my bed. I had taken a couple as I settled to sleep.

  ‘I had a bad headache.’ I wasn’t going to tell him my health history. ‘I took something for it. That’s all.’

  His radio spat static. He inclined his head, listened, turned away from me to respond. He needn’t have bothered. I couldn’t make out a thing.

  When he turned back, his eyes were stern. ‘They’ve located the coat.’

  ‘They’ve found her? Is she—'

  He narrowed his eyes. ‘It’s just an old coat, Mrs North. On the rocks. Looks as if it’s been there for some time.’

  He watched me in the silence that followed.

  Finally, I shook my head. ‘But I saw her. I heard her.’

  ‘In that wind?’

  ‘And the blood. On the window.’

  ‘We’ve already checked that out. Paint. You use the premises as an art studio, I believe?’

  I frowned, made anxious now by the fact his tone had become so hostile. ‘And her perfume. I smelled it. She was there.’

  He closed his notebook with an air of finality and led me downstairs.

  In the hall, I said, ‘I’m sorry. But I know what happen
ed. There’s a woman – Fi Hawker. She’s stalking my husband. Trying to break up my marriage. It was her, I’m sure.’

  On the doorstep, he turned back. ‘There is such a thing, Mrs North, as wasting police time. Do you know how much it costs to deploy a coastal emergency vessel in the middle of the night? How many families have their sleep disturbed tonight?’

  He got brusquely into the car, slammed the door and drove away, spitting gravel.

  * * *

  I sat in silence. My head ached. I wanted to go back to bed, to curl up there and hide under the covers but I felt too wretched and too utterly weary.

  In the end, I checked on Lucy, sleeping soundly at the top of the house, then wrapped myself again in my coat and walked out round the side of the house and towards the cliff. It was deserted. Whichever emergency workers had had their nights ruined because of me, they were gone now, pulling off their jackets, filing their reports and heading back home. Cursing me.

  Did you take medication? He’d asked. I knew what that meant. Hysterical woman. Unreliable witness. Fantasist.

  The wind had dropped slightly. I found a place close to the cliff edge and crawled out on the wet grass until my head protruded over the rock. The booming heartbeat of the sea rose to greet me.

  The water below was so black it was invisible. A void. An eternal nothingness. Just the occasional glimmer of moonlight flashing on the waves. It was like death itself. I knew it was there, waiting. But my body, my soul, couldn’t truly believe it.

  I didn’t understand what had happened. But I knew what I’d heard. She had lured me to the beach house, then to the cliff. She was either trying to kill me or to make me doubt my own mind, to drive me into madness.

  Fi. She wasn’t dead then. She was very much alive. She wanted my husband, my life. She wanted to steal everything I had. She wanted me out of the way and I was too debilitated to fight her, to fight them both.

  I opened my mouth and screamed into the wind, a mad woman, wracked with rage and despair. The sound dispersed at once to nothingness. I seized fistfuls of grass and tore blades from their roots, cutting my palms.

  I came close to throwing myself over the edge that night, hurtling down to the rocks below, just as I’d thought she had done. It seemed an easy solution. A way of taking back control. Of escaping my body, my pain, tormenting me more each day. I came so close.

  But there was Lucy, you see. Always Lucy. If I gave up, what would happen to her?

  Fi wanted my place in Dominic’s bed and I knew she’d do anything – even hurt my precious daughter – to get it. I could never let that happen. I couldn’t leave Lucy at the mercy of that selfish, scheming woman.

  I buried my face in the wet grass and breathed in the scent of the earth and screamed into the ground and wept until my strength was spent and my body could do nothing but shiver. That was the moment I decided what to do. The whole plan came to me in a rush.

  First, I would email you, Sophie, my friend, and beg you to come, as soon as you could.

  Then I would contact a solicitor and make arrangements to draw up papers.

  Sophie, are you there now?

  Did you find these pages?

  Are you reading them?

  * * *

  Sophie, I’m frightened.

  There are words I was too afraid to put in an email. He watches me, you see. I can’t trust him. That’s why I’ve gone to such lengths to install a safe secretly in the beach house. It’s one of the few places he rarely comes.

  Sophie, listen to me. I think they want to get rid of me, Dominic and Fi. They want to be together, but he needs my money – the flat, this house, the income from my investments which keeps his failing business afloat.

  And he wants Lucy. He adores her. Have you seen them together? How can anyone see him playing with Lucy, hugging her, how can anyone see the love in his face, and think him capable of hurting her mother? And yet he is.

  Sophie, they’re clever and manipulative. I can only guess what they might do. A car crash, perhaps. A freak accident. A stumble over the edge of the cliff. A boat capsizing at sea.

  If they kill me, that woman, Fi, could simply take my place. We’re similar enough – maybe they’d get away with it. As long as no-one finds my body, why need anyone know?

  No-one here really knows me. The only people I’ve met since I moved here are tradesmen and childminders and the agency sends a different nanny every time.

  My mother doesn’t really care. We barely speak nowadays. She lost interest in me once she re-married. She was always obsessed with herself.

  Even Lucy, the only person who would know, who would miss me, is so young. A three-year-old isn’t hard to bully. And, if they distort her mind with their lies, it won’t be long before she forgets me. She may start to believe that dreadful woman really is her mother. I’m not sure I could bear to die, imagining that.

  I don’t know what lies Dominic will tell you, Sophie. He may say I was paranoid when I wrote this. That I was clearly ill. That my memory is, as Dr Braithwaite will agree, shot to pieces.

  I am ill, Sophie. That’s true. But I am not mad. You must believe me. I am not deluded.

  Sophie, my old, dear friend, hear me from beyond the grave. If you’re reading this, it is already too late.

  You are one of the few people in my life who has kept close to me all these years.

  You are, I believe, the only person left in this world who might fight for me and bring me justice.

  Do it for me.

  Do it for Lucy.

  Eleven

  Sophie

  When I’d opened the safe, I took Caroline’s notebook into the tiny bathroom and locked the door. I sat hunched on the floor, hiding away, as a child might, my back leaning against the wall, my knees drawn up. This was private. Whatever it was, she’d entrusted it to me alone. That much was clear.

  When I opened it, I almost cried. Her spidery handwriting, crammed into all those pages, was so familiar. It really was hers. This was the same writing as the inscriptions on the flyleaves of her Agatha Christie novels, the same as the cards she sent me once in a while all those years ago.

  She started in the middle of her story, pitching in with the high point of the drama, as she always did when she sat down, breathless, beside me and told me stories about her day. Funny, rude, tragic. Never dull.

  I fell in love with Dominic the moment I saw him. He was that kind of man.

  It wasn’t just her writing, it was her voice. I could hear it as I read. Telling me everything.

  I settled as well as I could and lost myself as I began to read.

  By the time I finished, I was sobbing. I let the notebook slip to one side and hunched forward, sank my face into my hands and wept. It was too much. Why hadn’t she cried for help while she still could?

  I’m frightened.

  I could barely breathe, gulping, my hands streaked with tears and mucus, my face hot.

  Why hadn’t she phoned me? I thought about all the emails she’d written to me from Singapore, New York and Hong Kong. Amusing, vivid, sometimes boastful. The descriptions of the parties and concerts. The view from their Manhattan apartment and from the Peak. The hawkers in the side-streets and the slipperiness of the cobbles after the weekly street market, slimy with entrails and fish guts and mouldering fruit. The cockroaches scuttling along the gutters and the rats, as big as kittens, twitching at the mouths of drains.

  How I’d envied her. I’d lived through her. How petty and dull my own life had seemed compared with hers. She’d transported me and shared her glamorous life with me, inviting me in, her loyal old friend, Sophie.

  And now, this.

  I reached for a tissue and miserably blew my nose. I’d felt such elation when I suddenly unravelled the secret hidden in the picture and then rushed out and found the buried scrap of paper with the clue to the safe. I’d been thrilled when I discovered the notebook, so clearly meant for me to read, and shut myself away in here to devour it.

&n
bsp; Now I felt desolate and sick to my stomach.

  Could it be true? Had her marriage become such a battleground? Could Dominic, the man I had thought so handsome and devoted, be everything she described: a manipulative adulterer?

  If you’re reading this, it is already too late.

  But a murderer? How was it possible even to think such a thing?

  ‘Sophie!’

  A voice, outside, calling me. I stiffened. Her voice. The woman I’d thought to be Caroline.

  ‘Are you there? Sophie?’

  I stiffened, wrapped my arms round my folded knees and closed my eyes as if that might help to make me invisible. My temples throbbed with blood.

  Heavy footsteps thudded close to the wall of the beach house, then strode round it. Silence. I imagined her standing against the glass, shielding her eyes with her hand, peering it. I strained to remember how I’d left the studio. Had I closed the safe and covered it by replacing the floorboard? I thought so. Hadn’t I?

  And the main door. Was it locked? I held my breath. I imagined it so clearly that I could almost hear her footsteps coming across the flooring, her hand reaching for the toilet door, pulling so hard with those strong, toned arms that she strained the flimsy bolt.

  Rapping. Knuckles on glass.

  ‘Sophie?’

  Thank God. She was still outside. The door was locked then. I was safe, at least for now. At least until she found a second key.

  ‘Are you in there?’ Closer now but still outside. Her voice dispersed at once on the breeze.

  After a while, a final shout. ‘If you can hear me, just to say we’re home. Lucy’s watching TV and then she’s going to bed. You can read her a story, if you like?’

  I didn’t move.

  ‘Dominic’s back tonight. I’m cooking a chicken. Welcome to join us.’

  I sat rigidly, feet rammed against the far wall, straining to hear, waiting for her to go.

  Slowly, when the silence stretched, I pulled myself upright, as quietly as I could. My buttocks and thighs were numb. I pummelled the muscles, trying to bring my body back to life, trying to think what to do.