The Weekend Away

by Sarah Alderson

‘It’ll be OK,’ Rob tells me, trying to sound reassuring. ‘Don’t worry. They probably just want to go over your statement and see if they missed anything.’

  I nod absently, trying to convince myself he’s right, but the cold weight on my shoulders has seeped into my limbs and is weighing me down.

  Rob pulls me in for a hug, whispering in my ear that everything will be OK. I clutch at him, pressing my forehead into his broad chest, trying to fight panic. I want to burrow into him and hide. I wish I’d got on a plane already and headed home. I want to see Marlow, but leaving would only have made me look guiltier.

  Rob kisses the top of my head. ‘It’s going to be OK,’ he says.

  Over Rob’s shoulder I notice Kate’s Birkin handbag sitting on the floor. Out of the fog of my mind an idea starts to emerge.

  ‘Do you think they’ll let me see her?’ I ask, pulling away from Rob.

  Rob stares at me in bewilderment. ‘Kate? You want to see her?’

  He looks horrified by the idea and, honestly, I am too, but I nod all the same. ‘Yes, before they cremate her.’

  Rob shrugs, still looking aghast. ‘Maybe. Ask them. But why?’

  I shrug. I don’t tell Rob what my idea is because I’m not sure if it’s a good one or if it will work. It’s something that might offer a clue to who killed her though, and it’s the only idea I’ve got. I pick up Kate’s bag and root inside it for her phone, sliding it into my own bag.

  When we enter the living room I force another smile. ‘OK, I’m ready.’

  I turn and give Rob a quick, awkward hug, feeling like we’re on display. ‘Kiss Marlow for me,’ I say, fighting back tears.

  He nods, though he can’t disguise the look of worry on his face, or is it suspicion? ‘See you soon,’ he says.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I follow Nunes down the stairs to his waiting car. It’s a proper police car this time and when he opens the back passenger door to let me in, my face starts to burn. I duck my head to avoid the stares of the shopkeeper over the road and the pedestrians who pause to watch. I look like a criminal being arrested.

  ‘Would it be possible to stop first so I can see the body, before they cremate her?’ I ask, once he has started driving.

  Nunes glances at me in the rear-view mirror. I meet his stare, pleading silently with him for this one small favour. He frowns, obviously not wanting to deviate from his orders to bring me in for questioning and probably wondering why on earth I’d want to look at the body, given its state.

  ‘Please,’ I press. ‘I want to say goodbye. She was my best friend.’

  He nods, grudgingly, and twenty minutes later we arrive back at the building we visited last night. In daylight it looks no less blank and horrifying. The smell of the place bombards me as soon as we walk through the door, making my eyes water.

  An orderly in green scrubs meets us, not the doctor from last night, and Nunes speaks to him in Portuguese – I assume explaining to him why we’re there. He disappears for five minutes before coming back and leading me into a large tiled room with a drain set in the centre of the floor. My stomach heaves at the sight of a metal table and a tray of instruments beside it, lying pristine and shiny, ready to work their dark business on a body. It’s so cold I have to wrap my arms around myself.

  The orderly offers me something – a Vaseline-like salve that smells of menthol – and demonstrates to swipe it beneath my nose. I do, then the orderly points over my shoulder and I turn and see behind me there’s another metal table, this one with a body on it, covered by a stiff, green surgical sheet. When I walked in I hadn’t noticed it, my attention drawn immediately to the tools.

  Sweat breaks out all over my body and I think for a second that I might faint. I take a deep breath through my mouth, trying to avoid the smell, which is thickly pungent and stomach-heaving, despite the salve doing its best to block it.

  The orderly walks to the table and stops beside it. I step towards him, aware of Nunes waiting by the door, giving me space to say goodbye, or perhaps he isn’t used to death either and doesn’t want to see the body up close.

  I’m not here to say goodbye. I don’t want to see Kate this way or remember her like this. It’s bad enough I saw the photograph, but I do need to see her in the flesh. My hand slides into my bag and grasps her phone.

  The orderly peels back the sheet from Kate’s face and I gasp, almost gagging. It’s Kate but not Kate. It’s a sick, horrific version of her, more like a special effects latex mask, something used in a horror film. Struggling to hold it together and to keep my stomach from heaving, I turn to the orderly. ‘Could I have a minute alone with her?’ I croak.

  He steps respectfully away and I glance over my shoulder at Nunes, who appears to be fighting his own wave of nausea, swiping another dollop of the menthol salve beneath his nose and looking anywhere but at the body.

  This is my moment. Shaking and fighting back terror I reach for Kate’s hand beneath the sheet. I almost let out a cry at how cold and heavy it feels, like frozen rubber. I fumble a little with the phone, almost dropping it before I manage to align her thumb with the home button. I glance down at the screen, glad that my back is to Nunes and the orderly, which is buying me some extra cover.

  I don’t know if what I’m doing is explicitly wrong, though the fact I’m being so secretive is telling me it probably is. I should hand Kate’s phone over to the police as it might contain important evidence, but I don’t want to do that before I know what the evidence is. What if there’s a clue on the phone that the police won’t understand? Or private photos she wouldn’t want them to see? If they’re looking at me as a suspect it’s important I gather as much information as I can before it’s too late.

  The screen miraculously unlocks. I’m startled, not having fully expected my idea to work. I can’t let it lock again so I frantically access the phone settings, hit the display button and change the auto-lock setting to never. Praying it works, I slip the phone carefully into my pocket. I practised on my own phone on the way here and the key is to make sure I don’t hit any of the buttons that might switch the screen off. I can only circumvent the fingerprint once and I can’t change the passcode as I don’t know it.

  Nunes clears his throat. I spin around. He’s standing with the door open, obviously keen to go.

  I look back at Kate. It doesn’t look like her and it isn’t how I want to remember her, but I can’t stop myself from looking. Oh God, Kate, what happened?

  When we walk out into the hallway I see a sign for a bathroom and point at it. ‘I just need to go the loo,’ I tell Nunes and dart inside before he can say anything. As soon as I’m locked in a cubicle I pull out Kate’s phone, relieved to see it’s still unlocked and the screen is still on. This might be my only chance to check the email and texts on it.

  First things first, I check her call log. The very last call she received was on Friday at ten fifty-six p.m. That was the call when we were at the restaurant. She said it was from Toby but it’s not. The number’s saved as RJ Plumbing. Why was she taking a call from a plumber at that time of night? I hit dial, because it’s the only thing I can think of doing.

  It rings and after ten seconds someone picks up. ‘Hello?’ they ask tremulously.

  The breath catches in my throat like barbed wire. I hang up instantly and almost drop the phone into the open toilet, my hands are shaking so hard from shock. What the hell? Leaning against the cubicle door I press the little ID button beside the plumber’s name and check the number. Then recheck it. And recheck it again, the blood pounding so loudly in my head I think I might go deaf.

  It’s Rob’s number. It was his voice I recognised just now. But why is it saved as RJ Plumbing on Kate’s phone and, more importantly, why the hell was she arguing with him on the phone hours before she died?

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  RJ. Robert John. Rob.

  Feeling faint I flip the toilet seat down and collapse onto it, aware that time is rushing by and I don’t
have long. I scroll to Kate’s texts. There are lots of unread ones, a dozen or more from the last three days, mainly me asking her where she is and begging her to call and some from friends, but I ignore them and scroll down to the ones from RJ Plumbing. With a gnawing sense of horror I open up the text chain. There are hundreds of texts. Words leap out at me.

  Please don’t.

  I’m begging you don’t tell her.

  Kate, stop fucking around.

  You said you’d leave her. You lied!

  Let’s talk.

  I love you.

  The words do what Kate’s corpse could not. I fall off the toilet, scrambling to lift the lid in time to dry-heave into the bowl. My stomach aches from retching earlier but I barely notice because the pain inside my chest is so immense I think I might die from it. My heart, already cracked from grief, breaks clean in two. ‘Rob,’ I whisper to myself, ‘how could you?’

  The phone jerks alive in my hand and I almost drop it. It’s Rob! He’s calling me back. Oh God. He must think he’s getting a call from a dead woman. Though I told him I had Kate’s phone. Maybe he knows it’s me. In a panic I hit the button to cut off the call. I’m not ready to talk to him and I don’t have the time either.

  I force myself to go back and scroll further back through the text chain but there are simply too many to read and I don’t have time to go over them in detail, not with the policeman outside waiting for me. I’ve got a minute or two at most. The messages stretch back over a year. Before Marlow was born. Further. When I was pregnant. Further. Before I got pregnant. Oh my God. They’ve been having an affair for years, right under my nose. There seems to be a period where they don’t talk, of nearly a year. But then a few months ago they start back up again.

  I rock back on my heels.

  Kate … how could you?

  You’re my best friend. You know I love you.

  The bitch! She told me that and the whole time she was lying to me.

  Bitch!

  I jerk around in the stall. I can hear her voice. But now I’m wondering if in fact, it was me, saying it to her? Deep down, did I know about the affair? Did I learn about it on Friday night? Did I black out not just from the drugs, but because psychologically I was trying to blank out what I’d discovered?

  Did Kate tell me on Friday night? Did we fight? Rob was worried I’d find out. Was he begging her not to tell me? Was she planning on it? How does it fit with the rest of the story though, with the escorts and the drugs? If she had told me about it, how would I have reacted? But I already know the answer. I would have killed her.

  I rack my brain, trying to clear the fog, but I can’t figure out what happened. It doesn’t seem possible that she told me. My body has gone into such a state of shock that I don’t think I could have known before now, even subconsciously.

  The door to the bathroom creaks open. ‘Orla?’ Nunes asks. ‘Are you in here?’

  I startle. ‘Um, yes, I just … don’t feel very well,’ I manage to croak. ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’

  The door bangs shut. Damn, pull it together. There’s no time to dwell. I swipe at my eyes and then go through the texts, screenshotting as many as I can, dozens of photos that I then email to myself with a shaking hand.

  Bitch, I think. Bastard. No time to dwell on it now.

  I check her emails too but don’t find anything from Rob’s email address. Perhaps they only used text messaging, thinking it was safer, or perhaps Rob set up a private, dedicated account so I wouldn’t find it on his laptop by accident.

  The bathroom door opens again. ‘Hello?’ Nunes calls, impatiently. I hear his footsteps coming closer, then he raps on the door sharply.

  ‘Coming,’ I stammer, before shoving the phone into my pocket again and unlocking the cubicle door.

  I throw water on my face while Nunes stands behind me watching suspiciously, and I try not to look his way because I know my expression must be a turmoil and I don’t want him knowing why, not until I have my head wrapped around this new information. Let him think I’m just recovering from seeing my friend’s body and saying goodbye. At least the shock and the tears can pass for grief.

  I follow Nunes to the car in a daze. My mind is flitting to times Rob held me in his arms, told me he loved me, kissed me.

  A scream batters against my rib cage, trying to escape. That howl that’s been locked inside me since they told me the news about Kate grows in volume. Somehow, I manage to keep it locked inside, but when I get in the car I have to grip the door handle to steady myself.

  Rob and Kate were having an affair. I cannot process it.

  Toby’s comment about Kate lying to me makes total sense now. Was that the real reason why they broke up? Did she lie to me about Toby sleeping with escorts? Did he in fact find out about Rob and their affair? Is that why he wanted a divorce? Why didn’t Toby tell me, though, if that’s the case? And why did Kate beg me to go on this weekend away with her? Why did she hire those escorts? What was her plan?

  I want nothing more than to dig the phone out and read through the texts and look for emails that might explain it, but I can’t, not here in the back seat of the car, with that nosy, awful Nunes glancing at me in the rear-view mirror.

  Another thing occurs to me then. I remember how I found Rob this morning, bent over Kate’s suitcase crying and holding her clothes in his hands. I thought he was just sad, but now I see he was heartbroken. He must have been grieving her even harder than I was. Another blow comes, swift as it is savage. Did he love her? In the text messages I read it was Kate who said she loved him. But did he love her back?

  My hand starts to cramp as it squeezes the door handle. The howl trapped in my chest grows louder and bats even harder against my ribs to be let out. I have a police interview to give though. I have to keep everything inside me. Or, should I tell them what I’ve found out? Show them the texts?

  Something hits me then, a thought so huge that it quiets the howling inside, makes everything go still. If I tell the police about Rob and Kate having an affair they’ll think for sure that I killed her. It’s a motive isn’t it? A pretty damn good one too.

  If Kate were still alive I might kill her. I certainly want to kill Rob. I want to roar my anger into his face and tear him limb from limb. I want to slap him and punch him and scream at him: Why? How could you do this? What was wrong with me? Was I not enough? Did you love her more than me? Would you have left us for her?

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Dulled by grief and numb with shock, I sit opposite Reza and Nunes. She seems even more severe today. Her hair is scraped harshly back and she’s wearing dark red lipstick that reminds me of dried blood. She’s trying to explain to me why they haven’t been able to pinpoint where Kate fell into the river, saying something about tide times. All they can do is speculate that it was somewhere near where the cruise liners dock, which is not too far from the apartment in Alfama.

  We go through the statement I made two days ago when I first reported Kate missing, and the whole time the knowledge that I’m holding on to about Kate and Rob sits inside me like a caged animal trying to break free. I feel like the lies must be written across my face, and it makes me wonder how the hell Rob deceived me for so long. How could he do it, and so damn easily? I never once suspected a thing. I’m such an idiot.

  My mind wanders to all the times he said he was working late or meeting a client for an after-work drink. Was he lying? And what about his new-found obsession with the gym? Was that real? Or was he not actually going to spin classes but meeting her for a quickie? He did get fitter, showing off a newly toned stomach and biceps. Was he doing it all to impress her? He told me that now he was a dad he wanted to be fitter.

  You bastard, I think again. After everything we went through to have a baby. Did he even want Marlow? I gave birth to our child for Christ’s sake and had stitches in my vagina, not to mention leaking breasts and depression and he was sneaking off to have sex with her …

  Is it my fault? I d
idn’t want sex after Marlow was born. And maybe he was just not that into me given all of the above. No. I refuse to blame myself. The affair started long before we had Marlow, I remind myself, when our sex life was still good. At least, I thought it was good. But the whole time we were having sex, trying for a baby, going through the awful IVF process, he was busy shagging my best friend.

  My face heats up with humiliation. Kate asked me about mine and Rob’s sex life when we were at dinner, probing into how often we were having it, warning me he might have an affair. She was laughing at me, basically taunting me.

  Hate turns every cell in my body incendiary. How could she do this to me? We were sisters. Is that why she stayed away after Marlow was born? Because she couldn’t stand seeing Rob’s child – the evidence of our marriage? Is that why Rob pushed back when I said I wanted Kate to be her godmother?

  ‘We interviewed Joaquim and Emanuel this morning.’

  My head flies up at that. How long have I been sitting here, zoning out?

  ‘You did?’ I ask Reza, leaning forward across the desk. ‘And?’

  ‘They have alibis. We have checked them. The Uber driver who picked them up from your apartment and took them home. He confirmed they were alone. And their flatmate confirmed their arrival and that they stayed in the apartment until eleven o’clock the next morning.’

  I try to switch mental gears and focus on this new piece of information, rather than on the affair between Kate and Rob. My suspicions of Joaquim and Emanuel were already mostly quashed after Konstandin and I confronted them, so the news of their alibis doesn’t do much, except settle it once and for all. They didn’t kill Kate.

  ‘If only we knew why she left the apartment,’ Reza muses.

  I nod.

  ‘The toxicology report came back,’ Nunes says.

  I look at him, trying to keep my face blank. I have nothing to feel guilty about. It’s not like I took any drugs. But they’ll probably assume I did and now it’s too late to prove otherwise. I should have got myself tested after I woke up and thought I’d been assaulted.