‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe they weren’t even love notes. They were probably – I don’t know … a figment of my imagination.’ Not to mention all the other weird stuff I thought I saw.
She looks at me, shakes her head. ‘Helen, I can’t believe you are still letting him do this.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Daniel! He was always encouraging you to think you were stupid, or that you were losing it. You weren’t. You lost your parents and had four miscarriages. You were very, very sad, as anyone would be. You were not crazy.’
This is her latest theme – that I’m a victim, just like Rachel. Except Rachel is the one who was raped, robbed of justice, and who ended up dead. Not me.
‘I’m just saying. If you saw those things, you saw them.’
I sigh, put my hand on hers. The hand that was bandaged for months, after that day. Sometimes I struggle to believe it really all happened. To think about her, clinging to the drain hooks. To think about what might have been, if DCI Carter hadn’t worked out that Katie would head to Daniel’s house. If he hadn’t got in his car, turned up there when he did. Got his police contacts to find him the address as he drove. Found Katie’s car outside. Rung once, then again. Then smashed our door down.
‘But the thing is, I really wasn’t thinking straight, back then. I see that now. I mean, I think I knew something was going on. But I didn’t know what. So I came up with these mad theories.’
‘I still think there’s stuff that doesn’t add up. So does Mark. I know you won’t hear a word against Serena. But he says there’s no way that Daniel could have –’
‘Oh, Katie, I know that DCI Carter means well. But please. Enough.’
She sighs, folds her arms. I gaze past her, out of the window. The rain is easing off, a cool sunlight reappearing behind the trees.
‘Look,’ I say, giving her hand a squeeze, ‘it’s all over now. Why dwell on the past?’
I step behind her and throw the doors open, let the smell of the rain pour in. I’ll cut the garden back tomorrow, I think. Maybe I’ll plant some flowers, water them with Leo, like Mummy and I used to do.
And then I take Daniel’s letter, tear it up and throw it into the recycling.
SERENA
‘Careful, darling,’ I call to Sienna. She is striding straight into the water. Walking, at less than ten months. And utterly fearless. Just like me. Her nanny hovers next to her, in case she falls. I watch them both in the shallow turquoise water, the strands of light playing on the backs of their bare legs.
I lean back on my lounger, sip my White Russian. I should leave soon, really. Start making plans. But every time I think about it, I feel the fine pale sand between the creases of my toes, the stars overhead, the swaying palm trees. I can stay here a little longer, I think.
‘Is this yours?’
I’d hardly noticed the man standing by my sunlounger, holding out a stuffed bear. Sienna must have dropped it on the sand.
‘Thanks.’ He’s older, but not bad. I think I’ve seen him before. Maybe in one of the harbour bars. There’s a lot of his type around. Salt-and-pepper hair, twinkling blue eyes.
‘No problem.’ He smiles. ‘Have I seen you before? In Bojangles, maybe? Or Coconut Shack?’
I make a face. ‘Bojangles, maybe,’ I reply. ‘Not Coconut Shack.’
He laughs, looks away.
‘Well. Maybe I’ll see you there later.’
‘Maybe.’
I watch as he walks away. When he is out of sight, I reach into my bag and pull out the thin pale blue paper. A copy, he said, word for word, of what he sent to Helen. I read it over and over, considering each part carefully. I imagine I’m Helen. How much would I believe?
What about the notes? I’d said to Daniel, when we’d spoken the last time. Didn’t he tell me that he’d found one of them one night, tucked into her book? Won’t she wonder what they were all about? He said it didn’t matter, that the notes didn’t prove anything, that she wouldn’t understand them. And I suppose he’s right. After all, Helen has failed to understand rather a lot over the years.
I twist the cocktail stirrer in my glass until it knocks against the ice cubes. The sun disappears behind a cloud and the sand on the beach fades from brilliant white to grey. I thought I’d be gone by now. Hurricane season is coming. It’s not proving as easy as I thought, though. The plan.
My tolerance is lower than I expected for these yacht-owning types, their pot bellies, hairy backs. The look in their eyes, as if everything here is for sale, from the ceiling fans and the white-painted balconies to the rum cocktails and the woman drinking them.
I stare out at the sea, twisting my wedding ring between my fingers. Daniel hated my wedding ring, used to tear it off sometimes, with his teeth. That’s what he meant in that stupid note in the bathroom cabinet, a silver necklace in the envelope. Wear to show me, he said. I knew what he meant. Fuck the ring. You’re mine. So typical of Helen to see it, but fail to understand. She thought the charm on the end was a dog. It was a wolf. From my Wolf. And I was his Red Riding Hood.
All the mistakes were his, all the little slip-ups. I mean for God’s sake – why use notes that can be left lying around? Why give me a damn necklace? But of course, he is paying for it now.
A warm dusting of rain starts to prickle across the surface of the water. People start closing the beach umbrellas, winding in the awnings of the cafes down the shore. Vivienne returns with Sienna, now wrapped in her rainbow-coloured towel. Back at the house, as Vivienne puts Sienna in her high chair, I kiss the top of her head, then skip upstairs for a bath. As I lean back in the steaming water, I pour in a measure of the bath oil I brought from home, watch the little golden drops collect on the surface of the water. I close my eyes, breathe in the woody smell. Rosemary for memory, I read that somewhere, once. The scent fills the room, transporting me back home. To Maze Hill. Our house on the park.
When Rory and I moved there, it just became so easy to start it all again, Daniel and I. I think about the passage in that letter where he said he used to think about me even when he was fucking her. That can’t have been for poor Helen’s benefit. No, that part was just for me.
Of course, it was wrong. And of course, that was the appeal. It has always excited me, the way he craves me, the look in his eyes when I do things to him, things he never even dreamed about before me. And how I make him act in ways he never thought he would, or could. I suppose, in a sense, it’s his innocence that excited me. Although it seems strange to say that. Now he’s the one behind bars.
Daniel felt guilty, made up his mind a thousand times to stop. But he’s so weak. I could do anything, and he’d still keep coming back. It’s tiresome, anyway, all that guilt. He should have married someone like Rory – someone who fucks around too. It wasn’t just Lisa. I’m sure he would have fucked Rachel too, given half a chance. But in fairness to her, Rachel had bigger fish to fry. Women usually do.
It was Richard’s idea all along to get Daniel into Haverstock. The old man had always known Rory didn’t have the talent, or the application. Unfortunately, his mad wife drove him into a motorway reservation at ninety miles an hour before he had a chance to properly sort out the succession planning. But once he was gone, I managed to convince Rory that Daniel being there would work to his advantage, that it would save him doing the grunt work of running the firm.
Rory had the family name, but the talent had skipped his generation. He always needed other people to prop him up, people whose ideas he could steal, whose work he could take credit for. That’s where Daniel came in. I don’t think he even cared that Rory was using him. He just wanted me close. He would have done whatever I said.
When I finish my soak and wrap myself in a towel, the house is silent. Sienna must be asleep. I pad downstairs to her nursery. Vivienne has left the window ajar, the sound of waves crashing outside. There is a smell of fresh linen, of island air. I pull the window open wider until the water fills my ears. I close my eyes, try
to fill my lungs with it, with the wildness of outside. Daniel liked fucking me in the studio, the heater glowing orange in the darkness, the red light from the darkroom. But I always preferred to be outside, in the wild, up against the earth, the damp walls. I never feel the cold. He loved my body, the wet taste of me, the smell of the woods in my hair. We thought we were smarter than other people, never using phones and email – too easy to trace. But then he started leaving those notes for me, in places he thought no one would look. Of course, he wasn’t counting on Helen.
I pull the window to, check Sienna’s cot. Vivienne has changed the bedding, retied the edges of the bumpers into exactly even bows, dressed Sienna in a freshly laundered sleepsuit. I watch my daughter, fast asleep, flat on her back, arms out at her sides. She always sleeps in this star shape, as if she has been struck by lightning. I gently blow over her beautiful face, her nose, her cheeks, her perfect forehead. She stirs, her eyelashes flickering a little, her breathing whistling. I kiss her head, then leave her to sleep, closing the door behind me.
As it went on, I started to tire of Rory, for the first time. I knew that Daniel would never mess around, like Rory was doing with that bloody secretary. I knew Daniel would do anything for me. There is power in that. And when I found out I had his baby growing inside me, I felt more certain than ever. That we should leave them. Rory and Helen. Start again, with our child.
Daniel wanted to, but there were complications. We needed money, of course. He wasn’t blind. He knew who I was. He knew it mattered to me, the life Rory and I had: he knew he had to give me those things. And he couldn’t. Not without Helen. All his money was tied to her, to the house. He couldn’t get at it. Not unless he got Helen to remortgage. She’d never agree to it. But there were ways around that.
It hadn’t been hard to sort out the passport. You just had to find the right places. Places where you could meet people, get things done. I found a guy, who knew a guy. We met him in the tunnel. Three months later it was done. Helen’s details, my face.
There had to be some kind of building work, to give us some sort of cover. Daniel was able to get most of it started on a promise. People trusted the Haverstock name, had never known them not to come through. We’d never need to actually pay for it – that was the plan. Of course the lender we found was dodgy – who spends £3.6 million on building work? But they got their fee, and it seemed to be going through. As soon as the cash landed, we’d get it overseas, plus anything more we could get from Haverstock. Rory was too busy with Lisa to look at the accounts and see that his firm’s cash was draining away, disappearing into thin, Cayman air.
It was starting to come together. We just needed a bit more time. I hadn’t even really worried when Helen announced she was pregnant again, not at first. They’d been through it all so many times. I knew she would lose the baby, just like she had lost all the others. They were doomed, the two of them.
Except that it was different this time. She kept getting bigger and bigger. I thought you said she couldn’t, I kept saying to Daniel. It got so I couldn’t bear it, that fat bump of hers, under my kitchen table, swinging around in my hammock. It was like she was taunting me with it.
There were moments when I was worried. Daniel told me he was all right, that he could do it, he could still leave her. But I saw him wavering, once or twice. Helen told me about the scan, when the little arm flickered blue and black on the screen. How he’d sobbed when the nurse had told him the baby was waving at him. It had felt like a message, he admitted eventually. Like an arm reaching out to him, telling him not to leave. He was starting to love this baby, his son. I was losing control.
Then everything else started going wrong, too. The money for the building work got out of hand. Daniel was having to take more and more from the getaway fund. For fuck’s sake, I kept telling him, we’re not supposed to be actually doing this building work. Can’t you just say it’s stalled? But Helen was asking questions about why nothing ever seemed to progress. And I was impatient, too. I wanted to know when we’d have the three million, when we’d finally be able to leave. Take it out of the company if you need to, I’d said. Rory won’t even notice. Even when he found out all the firm’s cash had moved to the Cayman Islands, Daniel told him it was all just tax planning and he seemed to accept it. But there was only so long you could do stuff like that before it was discovered. I knew the clock was ticking.
Things just went from bad to worse that night in the club, when Rachel came on the scene. We didn’t know her name, then. We just knew it was the girl from the boathouse floor. Daniel and I were only there because Rory had dragged us there to charm some sleazy client. It was the worst luck in the world.
All the blood had drained from Daniel’s face. He looked terrified. I knew what I needed to do. I’m sorry, I said sweetly. You’ve got the wrong person. I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. Excuse me. But Daniel fucked it up. He engaged. And when you engage with someone like that, nine times out of ten, you’ll lose.
I walk back to my bedroom, sit at my dressing table, start on my hair. I can hear Vivienne loading the washing machine, tidying the bathroom up. I take out my dark eyeshadow, my red lipstick. As I pull it across my bottom lip, I am startled by my reflection. By the thought of another pair of red lips and charcoal eyelids, with nothing behind them. I rub the lipstick off.
Daniel told me he’d sorted it. But he hadn’t, of course. Not even close. It was only when she came to my studio that day that I found out he’d lied to me, that she hadn’t gone away. So, I tried to talk to her. But she wouldn’t listen. She wouldn’t even tell me her name. She said I didn’t need to know. You just need to know what I know. About you.
That was when I realised how serious it was. She’d been hanging around outside our houses. Mine and Daniel’s. She’d been tracking all of our social media. That’s how she found out I was booked onto Helen’s antenatal classes: Helen had tagged me in a post about it. And she’d followed us, Daniel and me, one night, in Greenwich Park. The pictures are a bit dark, she said. But let me play you a recording. Halfway through, I told her to switch it off. She knew everything.
All right, I said. How much do you want? But she just laughed. You’re not listening, she said. Either of you. I don’t care about the money, not really. Though it will come in useful. I want justice. I want you to tell the truth.
She sat down in my chair, her hand on that ridiculous bump of hers.
I get it now, she said. Why you never said anything. You didn’t want people knowing you were fucking. Be a bit worse if it came out now, wouldn’t it? That and the fact you’d been at it behind her back. I bet that baby’s his too, isn’t it? I still wasn’t that worried. But then she pulled the documents from her bag.
Even then, I had no idea that she and Rachel, this girl from the antenatal class who had befriended Helen, were the same person. That she had been turning up at Helen’s house, pretending to want to have lunch, or a chat, when in fact she was making excuses to snoop on what we were up to. She’d taken Daniel’s laptop, worked out his password by asking Helen his favourite football team. Men – they are so fucking stupid. And of course, once she had that, she’d found everything. She’d laid it all out for me, there and then, on my studio table. The mortgage. The money transfers. The tickets, the bank account details. She knew everything. She knew where we were going. She knew the whole plan.
I told Daniel all this. He lost it, then. Lost control. Grabbing her round the neck that time, in the tunnel, was a particularly stupid touch. I had to hand it to her, I didn’t expect her to call his bluff like that. Turning up at his house the same day he did it. Knowing that Helen would take her in.
Anyway, that was it. It was obvious to me then. She wasn’t going to stop. That was when I knew we had to do two things. We had to get rid of her. And we had to make it look like someone else had done it.
The second part was easy enough. Daniel always took Rachel’s cash out in Rory’s name anyway, used Rory’s securit
y pass to get on and off the site where he would hand it over to her. Just a basic safety precaution, to distance us from questions about it.
I know all Rory’s passwords – he’s had the same ones since university, never changes them. I gave them to Daniel and let him get on with it. When we realised we needed a fall guy, Rory was the only real choice. It already looked like he’d been taking out vast sums of cash from the company account and making secret trips to deserted sites to bung her the money. Now we just needed to give him a motive. And if we could make it look like Rachel had been blackmailing him over his affair that would be simple enough.
Actually, it was quite fun, waiting in the shadows until he and Lisa emerged from their seedy little hotel and snapping them in the car park. I sent the emails, too, of course, from an email account in Rachel’s name. And I knew Rachel wouldn’t be able to resist wearing that slutty red designer dress I left in her room. That was all she needed to do, to scare the life out of Rory. Convince him she was the one behind the photos, the emails, the threats that she would tell me the truth about Lisa. I only wished I could have seen his face a bit better when he opened the envelope.
I have to admit, that was a masterstroke of mine. Sending them in the envelope Rachel had left on my desk at the studio. A ready-made envelope, with her fingerprints all over it. I’d handled it carefully, using a pair of plastic gloves from the darkroom. Meanwhile, I made sure my electronic traces showed up plenty of evidence that I, the wronged, innocent wife, suspected Rory was having an affair – moronic Google searches, browsing for private detectives and tracker devices.
The last email was the final piece, the demand that he hand over a load of cash, at the bonfire party. Of course, he’d gone and got the cash. Got it ready for her. Taken it to the party, after telling me some stupid lie about why he had his gym bag with him. That would have been a laugh, seeing her face, when he presented her with the fifty grand – fifty grand she’d never asked for. But of course, she never got that far.
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