One in Three

by Tess Stimson

  No. She’d never do anything to hurt those children. Lou is my friend, and I love her. If I raise the alarm now, I could set something in motion that’s impossible to stop. And I might be totally wrong about this. Perhaps it was just a vindictive farmer who killed Bagpuss, as Bella suggested. Or even that jealous woman of Andrew’s. I need to talk to Lou, get a better read of where her head is, before I do or say anything.

  With sudden resolution, I head back up to the promenade. I should have more faith in Lou. If she says that woman poisoned Bagpuss, I should take it on trust that she’s right. We all should. Celia needs to stop playing games with that damned party invitation and make it clear we all stand foursquare behind Lou.

  As I reach the Parade, the sun goes in. I quicken my steps back to the hospital car park as the first fat raindrops splatter the pavement, and then suddenly spot Andrew and Bella coming out of The Ginger Dog about a hundred feet ahead of me. How odd. It’s Friday: Bella should be in school, not having lunch at a pub in Brighton with her father. She’s in uniform, so it’s obviously not a day off, either. I’m still quite a long way off, and they both have their backs towards me, so neither of them notice me as Andrew puts his arm solicitously around his daughter, pulling her against him and stroking her hair.

  There’s something about the scene that strikes me as not quite right. I can’t put my finger on it, but I feel a distinct sense of unease as they disappear around the corner. Something is happening within this family, something dangerous and fracturing. And instinct tells me we’re running out of time to stop it.

  One week before the party

  Chapter 29

  Louise

  Money is missing from my account. I haven’t just made a mistake, or miscalculated how much I’ve spent on petrol and groceries over the last month. Three hundred pounds was withdrawn in cash with my debit card last Thursday, and since the card is safely back in my wallet, the only person who could’ve done it is Bella.

  It’s not the first time she’s ‘borrowed’ money from me. Usually, it’s just five or ten pounds here or there, to buy herself a coffee from Starbucks when she’s out with her friends, or a new – invariably black – T-shirt at Primark. But she’s never taken anything like this much before. She’s put me into overdraft, and precipitated the text alert from my bank; but I’m less concerned with the hole she’s blown in my finances than the reason she needs so much money. I check back through my past transactions on my banking app, consumed with worry. Is it drugs? That would certainly explain her moods. She’s sixteen; I suppose it’s inevitable she’d try them sometime. But three hundred pounds? That’s an awful lot of weed.

  I glance up as my brother, Luke, sticks his head into my parents’ hallway. ‘Are you coming?’ he asks. ‘Lunch is on the table.’

  ‘Sorry. Be right there.’

  I scroll rapidly through the rest of my transactions. No other unexplained withdrawals, so that’s something, I suppose. I know parents are always the last to know about things like this, but I really can’t see Bella doing drugs. She’s fanatical about ‘clean living’ and won’t even take paracetamol if she has a headache. We had hell to pay when she had to have a tetanus booster a few years ago. But if not drugs, why does she need the money?

  ‘Louise!’ my mother calls.

  I hurry into my parents’ dining room just as Dad bears the Sunday roast in from the kitchen with all the pride of a man who hunted and speared it himself. Mum clears a space in the centre of the table as he lays down the platter. ‘Shall I do the honours?’ Dad asks rhetorically, as he always does.

  He carves perfect pink slices of roast pork as Mum passes a steaming tureen of Brussels sprouts around the table. Luke and Min’s two youngest boys, Sidney and Archie, graphically mime vomiting until Min reaches across the table and tartly smacks each of their hands with the back of her fork.

  ‘Is it true your cat died?’ five-year-old Archie asks me suddenly.

  ‘Of course it’s true,’ Sidney says scornfully, with all the authority of his seven years. He lowers his voice dramatically. ‘He was poisoned.’

  Archie tugs my sleeve. ‘Was he poisoned, Lula?’

  I’ve always refused to be called ‘Aunt Louise’: it makes me sound like an Edwardian spinster. ‘I’m afraid so, Archie. He ate something he shouldn’t have.’

  Archie looks at his plate. Min has spooned the despised vegetables onto it while he wasn’t looking. ‘Was it because of sprouts?’ he asks dejectedly.

  After lunch, Dad goes into the sitting room to read his paper, and Luke takes the boys outside to kick a ball around. Min and I shoo Mum out of the kitchen so we can tackle the washing-up, but instead of putting her feet up as we exhort her to do, she goes out to work in the garden. She could no more sit still for five minutes than the sun could choose to rise in the West.

  We watch her walk past the kitchen window with her gardening trug over her arm, heading towards the new tomato beds. ‘You know Andrew put those in for her,’ Min says.

  I know exactly where this is going. ‘Min, please don’t start.’

  It’s like trying to stop a runaway train. ‘This isn’t healthy for anyone,’ she says. ‘You’ve got to talk to Celia, and get her to see sense. She might listen, if it comes from you.’ She scrubs the roasting pan with more vigour than strictly necessary. ‘You and Andrew need to properly separate yourselves. Your lives are way too tangled these days. I’m sure Celia invited him to the party with the best of intentions, but things have changed, even she must see that.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about her intentions,’ I mutter.

  ‘She stirred up a bloody hornet’s nest with that invitation,’ Min says crossly. ‘That’s where all this nonsense started.’

  ‘I’m not arguing.’

  She puts the roasting pan on the drainer, and turns to me, bubbles dripping from her soapy hands onto the floor. ‘Lou, I’m worried about you. This horrid business with Bagpuss—’

  ‘Min, you know how much I value your advice,’ I interrupt.

  She sighs. ‘Yes, but you never take it.’

  She means well, I know that. Whatever concern she has for me, it comes from a place of love. And unlike everyone else, including my mother, she doesn’t have a hidden agenda. I wish I could confide in her, and tell her what I learned from my visit to Caz’s mother. But even admitting I tracked the old woman down and went to see her will just fuel Min’s conviction that I’m obsessed. I know she’s already wondering about Bagpuss. I don’t blame her: with my history, I’d do the same.

  ‘Min, dear,’ my mother says, letting herself in the back door and making us both jump. ‘Would you like to go out and join Luke and the boys? I can help Louise finish up in the kitchen.’

  Min recognises an imperative interrogative when she hears one: it may sound like a question, but it’s actually a command. She mouths a quick ‘Talk to her!’ at me, and disappears outside.

  Mum puts her basket of tomatoes on the counter and snaps on her rubber gloves, groping around in the soapy dishwater. ‘You’re handling Andrew all wrong, Louise,’ she says bluntly, rinsing a serving bowl under the tap. ‘I’ve told you before. Rushing off to London like a lunatic—’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I say testily. ‘I shouldn’t have done that, but I was upset.’

  ‘He needs to be gently reminded what he gave up when he walked away from you, not bludgeoned over the head with it,’ Mum says. ‘You know how much family means to him. He didn’t just walk out on you when he left, he walked out on all of us, and he’s regretted it ever since.’

  I pick up the crockery and start to dry it. I don’t want to have this conversation, but there’s no stopping my mother when she’s got the bit between her teeth. She’s right about one thing: family has always been important to Andrew. His parents both died quite young, when he was in his mid-twenties, and he’s an only child. Until we married, he had no relatives to speak of, other than some distant cousins in Salford where he grew up. He needed my extended family
every bit as much as we needed him to fill the gaping hole left by Nicky.

  ‘Mum, he doesn’t regret leaving me,’ I sigh. ‘He could’ve tried to come back, but in four years he’s never shown the slightest desire to.’

  ‘He loves you, Louise. Yes, perhaps he thinks he loves her, too,’ she adds impatiently, heading off my objections. ‘And I don’t doubt he loves Kit. But marriage is about more than love, and as you get older, you realise that. Andrew needs to be part of something bigger.’ She hands me another serving platter to dry. ‘It’s why people like him go into television. They need the audience, the mass adoration. They need to feel like they belong. I’m trying to help you, Louise, but you’re not making it easy.’

  ‘Help me what?’

  ‘Get what you want.’ She turns to face me, her hands still in the sink. ‘Andrew. He is what you still want, isn’t he?’

  For a brief moment, my foolish heart dares to hope. A sunlit reel plays on romcom fast-forward in my head: Andrew and me waking up in bed together, laughing with the children over the breakfast table, strolling hand in hand on the beach with the wind whipping our hair as seagulls circle overhead …

  My head aches. ‘That’s not an option, Mum.’

  ‘Of course it is.’ She reaches for the gravy boat and empties its sludgy contents into the bin. ‘All he needs is a reason to come back. But you have to stop chasing after him. He has to come to you.’

  ‘I’m not chasing after—’

  ‘Moving into his house?’ Mum cuts across me. ‘Taking a job where his wife works?’

  I flush. ‘I’ve already told Chris I’m quitting Univest and Whitefish. I’m trying to be the adult here.’

  ‘And what about the cat?’

  ‘The police aren’t going to do anything. They say none of it can be proved, so—’

  ‘Caz didn’t poison your cat, and you know it,’ Mum says.

  ‘I know it’s hard to believe, but—’

  ‘Louise Roberts, you can lie to the police, you can lie to Andrew, you can even lie to yourself. But don’t ever think you can lie to me.’

  A beat falls.

  I clear my throat. ‘That was a long time ago, Mum.’

  ‘I’m not blind, Louise. I can see what’s happening. I warned you last time, but you didn’t listen.’ She turns back to the sink, literally washing her hands of me. ‘You’re going to regret this. If you make the same mistake with Andrew as you did with Roger Lewison, it’ll end exactly the same way.’

  It’s not fair for her to throw that back in my face. I was only nineteen, young and in love for the first time. Who doesn’t make mistakes then?

  Roger Lewison was my tutor at Oxford. He was also married; something he neglected to tell me at the time.

  Two months into our affair, his wife found out about us, and Roger was finally forced to come clean. He said she’d threatened to tell the college if he didn’t end our relationship; he’d have lost his job, and I might have been sent down. But I was so in love with him, I simply couldn’t accept it was over. I thought if I could just make his wife realise how much we loved each other, she wouldn’t want to stand in our way. She’d set him free, I reasoned, once she knew it was hopeless. No woman wants a man to stay with her out of pity. It was all terribly sad for her, of course, but Roger and I were meant to be together. We were soulmates.

  So I tried to talk to her, to explain, but she wouldn’t give me a chance. She hung up the phone when I called, and refused to speak to me. I sent one or two handwritten letters, but she ignored them, too. I starting hanging around her office – she was a psychology tutor at another college – but she still wouldn’t see me, and eventually had the college porter ban me from the quad.

  In the end, she didn’t leave me any choice. I just wanted to talk to her. Roger had an evening lecture every Wednesday, so I knew how to time it so he wouldn’t be home. Jennifer let me in; she hadn’t expected me to turn up on her doorstep, and I took advantage of her confusion to talk my way inside. She’d been preparing supper: she was wearing an old-fashioned white-and-navy striped apron, and had a dusting of flour on her cheek. She also had a paring knife in her right hand.

  It was the sight of her in her apron, the domesticity of it: this woman, Roger’s wife, cooking him dinner, waiting for him to come home. My memories from that night are confused, a blur of frightening, violent images. I remember her lunging at me, a sudden, sharp pain in the left of my lower abdomen. Jennifer told the police I grabbed the knife from her hand and deliberately stabbed myself in the stomach. I tried to explain she was the one who’d attacked me, but it was her word against mine, and she was an eminent professor at an Oxford college, and I was an infatuated student who’d been having an affair with her husband and had forced my way into her home. Jennifer Lewison took out a restraining order against me; I was lucky not to be expelled from the university.

  It took me several years of counselling to be able to admit what had really happened. The therapist showed me I’d wanted Roger’s sympathy, for him to see me as a damsel in distress, so that he’d come to my rescue. In my confused, lovesick teenage mind, the counsellor said, I’d sought to make literal my sense of myself as the victim, and show Jennifer as the aggressor I believed her to be. As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t lying; I genuinely believed Jennifer had attacked me.

  But that was nearly twenty-five years ago. I’m forty-three now, a successful journalist, a wife and mother. I know the difference between fantasy and reality. And I’m not making this up.

  ‘I didn’t poison Bagpuss,’ I say firmly. ‘Caz is the one who’s lied. And I can prove it.’

  I wasn’t going to tell Mum I tracked Caz’s mother down, for the same reason I haven’t told Min, but I need her to understand now how dangerous Caz is. ‘She’s lied about everything, Mum,’ I say urgently. ‘Who she is, where she comes from. And that’s not the worst of it. You’ve no idea the kind of person she really is. She’s not who she seems.’

  Mum looks hard at me. ‘Who is?’ she says.

  JENNIFER DAVITT

  PART 1 OF RECORDED INTERVIEW

  Date:- 28/07/2020

  Duration:- 31 Minutes

  Location:- Livingstone College, Oxford

  Conducted by Officers from Devon & Cornwall Police

  (cont.)

  POLICE

  So you and Mr Lewison are divorced, then?

  JD

  He’s Professor Lewison. And yes.

  POLICE

  May I ask why?

  JD

  Is that relevant?

  POLICE

  That’s what we’re trying to establish, Mrs Lewison – or is it Professor?

  JD

  Doctor, actually. And I reverted to my maiden name, Davitt, after the divorce.

  POLICE

  Dr Davitt, your ex-husband formed a sexual relationship somewhere around November 1995 with one of his students, Miss Roberts, is that right?

  JD

  Technically speaking, she wasn’t one of his students. He was her academic advisor. But yes. They were fucking.

  POLICE

  And do you know how long they were – how long the relationship continued?

  JD

  I wouldn’t call it a relationship. It happened maybe three or four times.

  POLICE

  Did you know about it?

  JD

  Not until Roger tried to end it.

  POLICE

  Why did he do that, do you know?

  JD

  I imagine he got bored. Fidelity isn’t his strongest suit. It certainly wasn’t because I’d found out, though I gather that’s what he told his girlfriend.

  POLICE

  Your husband broke it off with Miss Roberts sometime in January 1996?

  JD

  Yes.

  POLICE

  And then what happened?

  JD

  The girl rang me. She told me they were having an affair, she said they were in love, and begged me to, quot
es, let him go. Roger had told her I’d threatened to go to the college and expose him if he didn’t go back to me. [Pause.] He’s not a very nice man.

  POLICE

  This was the first you knew of the affair?

  JD

  I’d suspected Roger had been unfaithful before, but it was the first time I knew for sure.

  POLICE

  So what did you do?

  JD

  I told Roger the affair had to stop, or I’d leave him. It was humiliating. She was one of his students.

  POLICE

  And did he stop it?

  JD

  He said he’d tried, but she wouldn’t listen. She kept ringing the house, though after the first time I didn’t answer her calls. Then she started sending letters. They went on for pages and pages, dozens and dozens of them. She must have been writing two or three a day.

  POLICE

  Did you keep them?

  JD

  No, of course not.

  POLICE

  What did she say in the letters?

  JD

  The usual. [Pause.] She and Roger were soulmates, they were meant to be together, soap-opera stuff. She even turned up at my college rooms, and the porter had to ask her to leave.

  POLICE

  Did you notify the police?

  JD

  At that stage, she hadn’t done anything illegal. She was infatuated with him, obviously, but I didn’t think she was a danger to anyone. I assumed it’d burn itself out, given time. [Pause.] Tell me, how many times have you gone to a bar or a gym because you were mad about a girl who went there? Or joined a club she belonged to so you could chat her up?