The Man I Married

by Elena Wilkes

  ‘You’ve been asking about your husband?’ I started in alarm as Clare put her head around the door.

  ‘He says he’s been trying to get through to you but you’re not answering. He wanted me to tell you he can’t make it today. He’ll be here tomorrow when you’re discharged.’

  I nodded, wide-eyed, as she disappeared away up the corridor. How I longed to just get dressed and run away, somewhere where they’d never find me. But I wasn’t free to do that, was I? I’d got McAndrew and Diane and the weight of case notes on my shoulders weighing me down.

  I closed my eyes. Free. I remembered what that was like. Living in my apartment with the windows wide open, a glass of wine in my hand, listening to the birds in the gardens outside.

  A tray crashed somewhere and my eyes snapped open.

  Caitlin was standing on the other side of the window staring straight in. Her eyes bored steadily into mine. She looked quickly to her right and left and then back at me. She raised a finger to her lips.

  I couldn’t move. I was aware of the jag of tension in my neck but I couldn’t take my eyes from her. She moved quickly, slipping through the door and closing it softly behind her.

  ‘Hello, Lucy.’

  It was barely a whisper. I found I was pinned to the pillow. I tried to shift myself back but my arms shook like a frightened kitten.

  ‘Please don’t be scared. I only want to talk, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m not scared.’ My own voice boomed into the quiet.

  She looked back at the door as she pulled a chair closer. ‘Do you mind?’

  I couldn’t speak.

  ‘There are things you need to know.’

  She was more beautiful than I’d realised: the paleness of her skin, the intensity of her green eyes. She blinked and the dark lashes fanned delicately against her cheek.

  ‘I can guess what those things are.’ My voice was a little shaky but it was a direct challenge.

  Her eyes widened. ‘Can you?’ I heard the soft lilt of her accent.

  ‘Yes, yes, it’s okay. Don’t worry, I already know,’ I said stonily. ‘I’ve spared myself that humiliation.’

  She frowned. ‘What’s he told you?’

  ‘He hasn’t told me anything. I found out.’

  ‘And you confronted him with it?’ She sounded breathless. ‘Is that why—’ Her hand fluttered. ‘Is that how you’ve ended up here?’ She snatched a glance at the door again.

  ‘Well it all makes life simpler for you, doesn’t it?’ I let my anger rise; it felt so good to let it go. ‘You’ve got what you wanted. Well done, you.’ My mouth worked horribly and I hoped I wasn’t going to cry. I swallowed and refused to let my eyelids release their tears.

  ‘I’ve got nothing I want.’

  I nearly choked on the bitter laugh. ‘Really? Well, you’ve got Paul. I hope he makes you very happy. I have to say, you deserve each other.’ I shook my head. ‘Those poor little kids.’

  She gasped as though I’d physically struck her. I stared at her face. I couldn’t decipher what I saw there: pain, puzzlement, anger, defeat. She didn’t speak for a moment. The silence ticked for seconds.

  ‘I don’t know what he’s told you. I don’t know what you think…’ Her mouth trembled.

  ‘I think you’re shagging my husband.’ I felt bold. I was outraged that she’d come here – For what? To explain? To gloat? I leaned painfully forward. ‘But think about this, Caitlin: there were reasons why you dumped him in the first place. Think about those.’

  She made a small strangled sound as though she was laughing. I glared at her. She only shook her head over and over. ‘No, no, no, no,’ she kept repeating.

  ‘I don’t know why you’ve bothered,’ I said. ‘I really can’t be—’

  ‘I’m not Caitlin, Lucy. I’m Moire, her sister.’

  My arms wouldn’t hold me. The pillows caught me as my eyes dragged in the sight of her. I couldn’t bring the photographs to mind; I couldn’t see them. I found I was holding my breath so no sound could come out.

  ‘He hasn’t told you, has he?’

  My head wouldn’t stop shaking.

  ‘About my sister and the babies…’ Her eyes blinked away the pain.

  ‘What about them? Where are they?’

  ‘That’s why I won’t leave him alone, you see.’ She gazed blankly at a place on the bedcovers and then looked at me sharply. ‘He thinks I’ll let go but I won’t. I’m the thing that haunts him. I want him to pay. I want him to suffer for what he did.’ She leaned forward and I saw the ferocity of hatred in her face. ‘I know what he’s doing to you; I’ve seen it before… This is just the start. I’m not going to stand by and watch him do it all again.’

  Her words tumbled in the air. They made no sense.

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying. You’re talking as though I know stuff. What do you mean, “before”? What did he do?’

  She looked at me. I saw Caitlin and yet not Caitlin. I saw the photographs all come to life; the children’s faces dancing and cartwheeling in front of me. I saw their smiles. I heard their laughter.

  ‘Paul did it.’

  ‘Did what?’ What was she saying? What did she mean?

  ‘He killed them. All of them. Caitlin and the children are dead.’

  Chapter Twelve

  I listened to the creak of the floorboards across our bedroom and the squeal of a drawer shunting closed. I’d had three days. Three days of his endless oppressive kindness, his gentleness – his never leaving me alone for more than a minute, three days of me replaying and replaying what she had told me.

  My fingers fumbled and stalled stupidly over the keyboard, my brain willing them to work faster as my eyes tracked the ceiling listening for his movements, making sure he wasn’t on his way down. Why was I doing this? What was I thinking? None of it was right. She’d made it all up.

  ‘Get out of here. Get out of here now!’ I’d stared at her in horror. ‘Or I’ll call someone… Security… Someone…’ My hand reached for the assistance button.

  ‘You know you don’t want to do that. All those questions you must have been asking yourself – I can give you the answers.’

  ‘But murder? You’re mad. You’re talking gibberish… Murder? Seriously? Are you out of your mind?’

  ‘She threatened to leave him. She was going to take the girls. He couldn’t let that happen. He would rather kill them all than let them go—’ Her words peppered the air. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. ‘He attacked her, physically… more than once… Then told her it hadn’t happened, that she’d fallen… that she’d slipped somehow… that she was overreacting and had made it up. She began to question her own version of events. He was intelligent. He was highly educated. He was a psychiatrist for God’s sake! Totally plausible. Who would’ve believed her? Where could she go?’

  ‘Stop!’ My hand came up, warning. I groped for the call button again but my fingers clutched at nothing. ‘You know Paul could be here any minute, don’t you?’

  ‘But we both know he won’t,’ she smiled and looked at her watch. ‘I’ve arranged to meet him in a pub, only I won’t be there.’ She smiled. ‘I click my fingers and he has to come running. He daren’t not.’

  ‘So you’re blackmailing him?’

  ‘If you want to call it that.’ She settled herself in the chair next to the bed and studied me for a few moments. ‘I make sure he can never forget. You know he’s spiralling again, don’t you? I think it’s because you remind him of her.’

  I felt instantly queasy.

  ‘I hadn’t fully realised before, but now I see you up close—’ she recoiled a little. ‘You do.’ A glimmer of grief flinched around her eyes. ‘He can’t forget, no matter how he tries. That’s what this is about. Deep down inside I know he feels guilty.’ She looked at me steadily. ‘It will happen again, because you’ve triggered something—’

  ‘I’m going to call one of the nurses—’

  She didn’t appear concerne
d. ‘He’ll have to control you. He’s lovely and kind and then suddenly cruel. He switches from being completely reasonable to utterly bizarre. He’s unpredictable. He got Cait to a point where she didn’t know left from right. He’d argue black was white and then argue that it was black again.’ Her hooded eyes were clear and passionate. ‘You know what I’m saying is true. I can see it in your face.’

  A warning creak overhead paused my fingers on the keyboard.

  You should stop.

  But you know you won’t.

  You won’t stop because you know there’s something in what she told you.

  The page loaded in front of me and I compulsively scrolled down. I even tried different spellings of the name – Caitlin – Catelyn – Kaitlyn – but I couldn’t find anything. She was lying. She had to be lying.

  ‘You need me, Lucy. You need me more than you’ve ever needed anyone in your life.’

  She dipped and reached into her bag. In her hand was a small mobile phone. ‘This is the only phone you have that’s safe. I’ve stored my contact on there already, but you’ll need to keep it somewhere very, very secure. Memorise the number, yes? Just in case. You can ring me or text me whenever you like. But hide it, Lucy. Hide it really well.’

  A strange wave of calm went through me and I stared down at her hand. ‘You don’t really expect me to take that, do you?’

  She didn’t answer the question. ‘He won’t let you leave and you definitely can’t stay. The net’s closing in. You know, you can feel it.’

  ‘No!’ Something furious rose up in me. ‘Stop this.’ I heard my own voice come out in a fierce whisper. ‘Stop this – Stop telling me these things! None of what you’ve said can be true – he would have a criminal record wouldn’t he?… Paul is a highly regarded psychiatrist – He’s well thought of – People would know… You can’t cover up stuff like that!’

  ‘Agree to meet me and I’ll tell you everything.’

  ‘What?… No! I’m not meeting you! I’m—’

  ‘That’s your fear talking Lucy. I can prove all of it.’

  ‘Get out!’ My voice was shrill and trembling. ‘Get out! I don’t want you here and I don’t want to hear it!’

  She stood, a towering figure, her maddened eyes never leaving mine.

  ‘I’ll go, but I’ll say one thing before I leave,’ she said quietly. ‘I will always believe you, and I will always be there when you need me.’ She walked swiftly to the door and opened it, but then paused ‘Remember, I’m always watching.’ And with that, she was gone.

  I stared at the empty space that she’d left behind and I realised my palm had reached out and touched the small black rectangle of the phone. The danger of possessing that was more than I could even contemplate.

  ‘You alright down there?’

  Paul’s voice shocked me back to the screen.

  ‘I’ll be there in a sec, just sorting out the washing!’ He called down cheerfully.

  My fingers flew to the browsing history and I immediately deleted it.

  ‘See if you can find us a decent drama to watch, nothing too taxing or gruesome. We see enough of that in real life. Let’s have a bit of escapism—’

  ‘Sure! Yep!’ I called back. ‘I’ll have a look and see what’s on!’

  My hands shook wildly as I closed everything down as the tread of his feet came slowly down the stairs.

  * * *

  We sat watching the television in our living room. Our living room. Everything was as it was before: sofa, table, chair, cushions. There was nothing abnormal about it or out of the ordinary. Horror happens in TV dramas, not in real life, my head told me. No death, no murder. That hadn’t happened.

  I had found an episode of Maigret to watch. A young woman had gone missing. All the signs pointed to it being the boyfriend or the father or the husband. It was always the boyfriend or the father or the husband, or the man next door, or the school caretaker: the one who should be taking care but does the very opposite.

  Paul wasn’t that kind of man. He was a lot of things but he wasn’t that. How could I have sat and listened to that? Why didn’t I call someone? Because part of you wanted to hear it.

  ‘Look at what he did to you.’ Moire’s tortured face came back to me. ‘Look at where you are. The net is closing in. You know. You can feel it.’

  Dr McAndrew had turned up the morning of my discharge. I looked for Diane, but she was nowhere to be seen. I carried on packing my things as he sat on the edge of the bed, hooking one knee up and clasping it between linked fingers. The knuckles went white.

  ‘So. You’re leaving us today then Lucy! Congratulations! You’ve come a long way, haven’t you?’

  All the time I was folding and smoothing, my mind kept thinking exactly that: I had come a long way… And a long way away was precisely where I was going. Once I was out of here, I’d be free of it: the madness, the chaos, the lies…

  ‘So we need to keep up that momentum.’ McAndrew moved his arm like the piston on a train. ‘We don’t want you slipping back. So I’m discharging you on the condition that you’ll stay under Paul’s professional care. How about that for a bit of brilliant news?’ he chuckled. ‘Let’s see if we can keep you out of hospitals from now on…’ He smiled broadly. ‘Of all kinds.’

  The true impact of his words kept me dumbly standing there. It wasn’t until he left that the absolute meaning sank in. Something like an earthquake shuddered through my arms and legs but I carried on mindlessly packing.

  Moire’s words came back to me over and over as my hands folded and refolded. My mind was on fire: I combed through every incident with Paul, all the accusations and threats. I thought about that moment in the shower, the pure and blinding fear of that snatched sudden memory. The pounding of water, his hands, the feel, the smell of his proximity – the fear, the revulsion, and now I was being handed to him like a piece of meat.

  I pointlessly smoothed a T-shirt over and over. I wasn’t going anywhere. The images formed again but I refused to let them grow. The word ‘rape’ hung nonsensically in my head alongside the word ‘murder’. Despite everything that had happened, my brain wrestled and fought at the very idea. I couldn’t put the man and those images together. They kept splicing off like reels of broken film. It had happened, it had happened to me, hadn’t it? I tried to drag the images back and make proper sense of them, but they slipped through my fingers like grains of sand.

  Is this how it started with Caitlin?

  Is this how it started with Caitlin?

  He’s totally plausible, so who would ever believe her story?

  Moire’s words kept coming back to me. I’d been locked down, silenced, and out-manoeuvered. The truth was, whichever way I looked at it, I knew no one would believe me.

  * * *

  I became really good at being someone else.

  Diane accepted the new version of me quite easily. By the second week we had a little pattern developing.

  ‘Tell me about your week,’ she’d ask, smiling. ‘Anything. What you’ve done, or thought, or felt.’ And I would dutifully oblige, never forgetting to mention Paul: how we’d laughed at something on TV or something we’d read and found interesting. I gave her some niggles too, some minor irritations, just to show that everything in my life was now on a perfectly even keel.

  She nodded and made encouraging noises with her head tipped on one side. She was quite easy to con. But she wasn’t the one who really knew me.

  It was Emma who posed the real test. She was the one I had to convince.

  ‘How do you like your new car?’ She gazed out of the window at the gleaming thing on the drive.

  ‘Oh I love it! What an amazing present! I’m dead lucky.’

  ‘And you’re sure you’ll be okay?’

  She meant driving, I knew.

  ‘Absolutely fine. I’ve got Paul, how could I not be?’ I laughed. It sounded false even to me. ‘He’s said he’ll come with me the first few times and hold my hand.’

&nb
sp; ‘So you’re really feeling much better?’ She sounded dubious.

  ‘More than. Few aches and pains, but everything else is getting there… Can’t you tell?’ I grinned. I watched to gauge her reaction.

  ‘It’s just that I was supposed to be going to France for a couple of weeks, and I said—’ she wrinkled her nose.

  ‘You said you couldn’t, because of me.’ I looked at her levelly. ‘Don’t be daft. You can see I’m fine, can’t you?’ I held out my hands. ‘Look, go on holiday Emma. Enjoy yourself. By the time you get back I’ll be a whole new woman.’

  * * *

  ‘Louise says she hopes you’re feeling better.’ Paul walked into the kitchen and flicked the toaster on at the wall.

  The name didn’t compute for a second.

  ‘Louise?’ he tried again. ‘Your sister Louise?’ He glanced at me over his shoulder.

  ‘I’ve left messages for her. I was waiting for her to ring me back,’ I trailed off. ‘Why was she phoning you?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t she phone me?’ his shoulder blade twitched and my stomach jumped. ‘I kept in contact with her all the time you were in hospital. Someone had to,’ he said petulantly ‘She was worried. Anyway,’ he glanced round. ‘You said you weren’t interested in talking to her.’

  I knew it was best to say nothing.

  ‘Yeah. Don’t you remember? You said she had enough on her plate with your mum… Mam…’ he grinned. ‘I’ve been giving her some advice about support services she can hook into if she needs them. She said she couldn’t thank me enough. Nice woman. You must invite her down.’

  He busied himself slicing the bread and slotting it into the toaster. A tiny piece of me went very still as though I’d heard another key turn in a lock.

  ‘Did you see the weather forecast by the way?’

  ‘No I didn’t.’