by Alison James
He comes back with a padded envelope containing the largest model of iPad and a compliment slip from the Novotel in West Kensington, signed by someone called Anya Wojcik, Deputy Manager.
‘Could we take this with us?’ Jim asks. ‘It will only be for a few hours, then we’ll return it.’
‘No worries,’ Audrey nods. ‘It’s not like it’s doing us any good lying around here.’
* * *
We find an internet café in the nearby community of Warana, and the manager helpfully finds us a charger for the iPad. While it’s charging, we sit at a table outside with a bottle of beer and an iced tea, surrounded by surfers and backpackers. Jim punches the phone number on the compliment slip into his mobile and walks a few metres away to a quieter spot so that he can hear better.
‘Well, that was interesting,’ he says, returning to the table and wiping the sweat from his forehead with a paper napkin. ‘I spoke to Anya Wojcik. She’s still working at the Novotel.’
‘And?’
‘She remembers Holly well, because of the press stories when her body was found. She says that the day before she vanished, Holly came to her with her iPad and asked if the printers in the business centre were Wi-Fi enabled because she needed to print something from her tablet. After she’d used the printer, she gave the iPad to Anya and said there wasn’t space for it in her room safe and would she keep it behind the front desk until she checked out. Anya locked it in the reception staff’s own safe. Then, when she first went missing, the assumption was that she’d buggered off without paying her bill. That happens quite a lot, apparently. The police didn’t get involved until Russell and Audrey made a formal missing person’s report some days later. So Anya mailed the iPad back to 43 Calandra Gardens, which was the contact address Holly had given when she checked in. Months later, when Holly’s body was found, Anya wondered about the iPad, and whether it should be with the police, but she felt so badly for the Galeas that she didn’t like to ask for it back.’
I take a long sip of my iced tea. ‘Interesting. Did she say what Holly was printing?’
‘She didn’t know, but she checked the business centre receipts and she was charged 45p, which means it was just one page,’ he drains the contents of his beer bottle in one go, ‘which hopefully we might be about to see.’
When we go back inside, Holly’s tablet has sufficient battery life for it to be switched on. Jim swipes through the screens, looking through the assorted apps. He opens Files, but the browser is empty.
‘Try Notes,’ I suggest.
He opens the application and starts reading. I watch the expression on his face change. ‘Oh my God,’ he breathes. ‘This is it.’
‘What?’ I demand, reaching for the iPad. ‘Let me see it.’
‘Alice, I’m not sure it’s a good idea. Let’s just take a minute and—’
But I’ve already taken the iPad from him and started to read the typed page.
30 March 2018
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
For the record, I want you to know that today I’m meeting with the wife of a man called Greg Henderson, in London, UK.
I first met Greg in July 2015, on a dating site where he called himself ‘Ben’. I was working as an escort at the time, and he tried to forcibly have sex with me without paying. I later found him using the same pseudonym on other websites, but I didn’t know his true identity. Then I saw an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about a man wanted in connection with the killing of a waitress called Pearl Liu. The photo was of ‘Ben’. That’s when I learned his real name and that he had worked at a company called Spectrum Financial.
A couple of years later, completely by chance, I saw a photo of Henderson online, only now he was in the UK and he was calling himself Dominic Gill. But I knew it was him, and when I contacted him by email, he confirmed it. He started paying me money to stop me telling anyone. Since I’d had a car accident and was unable to work, it’s my intention to negotiate a one-off sum from Greg to keep me quiet about his true identity. I have travelled to London to try and finalise this arrangement with him.
One thing I am sure of is that I don’t trust him. So if you’re reading this now, then something has happened to me.
Forty-Two
Alice
Now
‘Are you okay, Alice?’
Jim’s sitting across the aisle from me on our return flight from the Sunshine Coast to Sydney later that afternoon.
I nod at him, but I’m not okay, not at all. I can feel something rising in me, like tears and yet not tears. A hundred different emotions and thoughts are swirling around inside me, fighting to find a way out. I can feel my heart hammering in my chest and blood singing in my ears. I take a sip of my mineral water and press my knuckles against my mouth. I have an overwhelming desire to scream.
Jim is still looking at me, his expression concerned. ‘You sure you’re okay?’
I manage a slight shrug, the racing in my chest speeding up so much that I’m now having to concentrate just to breathe.
As we walk down the steps of the plane, a tight band constricts my chest so much that I feel as though I’m suffocating. I can’t speak but look around wildly, trying to catch someone’s eye, pointing to my chest to let them know I’m having a heart attack. I make it to the bottom of the steps before my knees buckle under me and I tip forward onto the tarmac as I black out.
* * *
When I come to, I’m lying in a hospital bed, with a drip in my arm and a collection of heart monitor pads stuck to my chest beneath a surgical gown. Jim’s face swims into focus beside me. Outside, it’s dark.
‘What’s going on?’ I croak. My throat hurts.
‘You’re in the King George V Memorial – it’s a maternity hospital.’
I glance down at my abdomen, alarmed, but he holds up a large hand.
‘And don’t worry – they checked on the baby and he or she is absolutely fine.’
I let out a whimper of relief.
‘I’m really sorry.’ Jim wipes his palm down the side of his face; a weary gesture that makes me wonder how long he’s been sitting there. He has caught the sun during our brief trip to the Sunshine Coast, and it looks well on him. It makes his deep-set eyes stand out more. ‘I should have thought more about how this was going to affect you. Holly’s letter pretty much confirmed what we already suspected, but I realise now that it was a lot to deal with. Seeing it there in black and white.’
‘It was the realisation that this was who I was married to,’ I say quietly. ‘I’m a serial killer’s widow. It’s too much to process.’
A nurse sticks her head round the curtains of the cubicle. ‘How are we feeling?’
Before I can answer, she clamps a blood pressure cuff to my arm and starts to inflate it using a piece of handheld equipment.
‘Good – that’s coming down a bit.’ She smiles at me as she pulls off the cuff. ‘Doctor will come and speak to you in a bit, but we think what you experienced was probably a panic attack. Have you been under any abnormal stress lately?’
Jim and I exchange a Where do I start? look.
‘Yes, I say bleakly. ‘My husband was killed in a car crash.’
‘Ah.’ The nurse nods sagely. ‘This panic attack was your body’s way of telling you you need to take some time out. Time to process what’s been happening to you.’ She consults the ECG monitor next to the bed. ‘Your heart rate’s still a bit faster than we’d like, so we’re giving you some beta blockers and we’ll monitor you for a little bit.’
‘So I have to stay here?’
‘For a little bit longer, yes.’
* * *
After a couple of hours, I persuade the medical staff to release me, assuring them that I feel fine and will go straight to bed, and we take a cab back to the hotel.
‘Rest!’ Jim tells me firmly as I get out of the lift on my floor. ‘It’s the middle of the night. You need to get some sleep.’
For once I don’t argue, but jet lag
is messing with my body clock and I can’t fall asleep straight away. Instead, I prop myself up on the cushions with an old episode of Game of Thrones on my iPad. Eventually I doze for a several hours, only to be woken by a short, sharp rap on the door of my room, just as the sky outside is growing pale with dawn. And that’s when I find the ring.
Forty-Three
Alice
Now
The next few seconds are a blank.
All I do remember is hurtling down the corridor in a bathrobe, my feet bare, and jabbing wildly at the elevator call button until it arrives to take me to the floor where Jim’s room is. Then hammering hard on his door, shouting his name.
The door is snatched open and Jim stands there, eyes wide in alarm.
‘He’s alive!’ I hiss.
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Dominic! The body in the coffin… it can’t have been him.’
Jim leads me into the room and pushes me down into an armchair.
‘Slow down, slow down… are you all right? Is the baby all right? No one’s tried to hurt you?’
I shake my head, then hold out my wedding ring with trembling fingers. Jim takes it from me.
‘I took this off and put it in the coffin, that day I visited the funeral home. And someone just left it outside my room. He can’t be dead; he must have got away from the crash somehow and flown out here to Australia. And now he’s trying to mess with my head. He probably still wants to kill me.’
‘Whoa, whoa, slow down…’ Jim stands up and pours me a glass of water. ‘The brother who did the identification confirmed it wasn’t the real Dominic Gill, but you also said the dead body was definitely the man you married.’
‘I know but—’
‘You saw him in the mortuary too. You had no doubts then. The police pulled that body from your husband’s car.’ Jim’s tone is even, but I can see a glimmer of alarm in his eyes.
‘But I was in shock; I wasn’t thinking straight. Did I only see what I was told I was seeing?’ My heart is lurching in my chest, and the baby squirms inside me, sensing my panic. ‘There were injuries to his face, remember? Maybe I got it wrong. I went to the funeral home to make sure it was him, but maybe the delayed shock was making my mind play tricks on me. Maybe that body belonged to someone else and he was alive all along. How else could my wedding ring be here?’
Jim paces the room, rubbing his chin with his left hand, the wedding ring still in his right. ‘Okay, okay… this is what I’m going to do. I’ll check with the staff downstairs at reception, and then I’ll go and see the police. It’s time to share what we know with them.’
‘But they won’t know either way. They won’t know if Dominic – or Gregory, or whatever he’s calling himself – is still alive or not.’
‘Even so, telling them has got to be our starting point. In case he is.’
I sigh. ‘Okay. Just give me five minutes to get dressed.’
Jim is shaking his head. ‘No way. You’re not coming with me. You promised the hospital staff you’d rest.’
‘But I can’t stay here.’ I stare up at him, shaking my head. ‘Not now he’s found me. He might come back.’
‘You can stay in my room,’ Jim says firmly. ‘Keep the door locked and the chain on and don’t let anyone in. I’ll be back as quickly as I can.’
I reach over to his desk and pick up Holly’s iPad, which the Galeas allowed us to take away with us. ‘You’d better show them this.’
* * *
Every minute of the ninety minutes Jim is gone feels like an hour. I pace restlessly around his hotel room, picking up his clothes and folding them just for something to do, burying my face in them to inhale the reassuring scent of him. I have to keep moving, because if I’m still, the pounding of my heart becomes overwhelming.
A tap on the door makes me jump out of my skin. Someone tries to open the door, prevented from doing so by the chain. But then a female voice says, ‘Housekeeping’. I ignore it and eventually she goes away.
When Jim returns, I can tell straight away that he has news, simply from the set of his mouth.
‘What is it?’ I ask, lowering myself onto the edge of the bed. ‘You may as well tell me. It’s not like there can be any more shocks in store. Not now.’
Jim takes a whisky miniature from the minibar and opens a packet of crisps. I realise it has been many hours since either of us has had a meal. ‘Okay… four things.’ He holds up four fingers as he tips a handful of crisps into his mouth. ‘First, I spoke to a Detective Kelly from the International Ops team at the Australian Federal Police. They’re a bit like the NCA in the UK, I suppose, and they work directly with Interpol. Anyway, he said that after Pearl Liu’s death back in 2015, Greg Henderson took off – abandoned his job and disappeared. They tracked him on a flight to Berlin in Germany, and a team of officers headed out there, but the trail had gone cold, and they couldn’t find him anywhere in Germany. Using the information from Holly Galea’s note, they just ran a check with the UK border agency and, sure enough, a Ben MacAlister arrived in the UK at around that time. He had what appeared to be a legit UK passport and so didn’t attract any attention at customs. And, of course, soon after that…’
‘He became Dominic Gill.’ I say flatly.
‘Exactly.’
‘Anyway, they’re now going to liaise with the Met in London about Holly’s murder, to try and tie the whole thing together. So…’ He moves on from the crisps to the grapes in the fruit basket, offering them to me first. I shake my head. There’s no way I could eat now: my mouth feels as though it’s lined with cotton wool. ‘That’s the first thing. How are you doing? Ticker okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ I say. ‘Go on.’
‘Okay, after I’d been to the AFP and given them the iPad, I went back to the New South Wales Registry. The family historian had indeed found a birth record for Ellen Henderson, dated 11 May 1981. Her only child, born when she was forty: a son called Gregory Douglas Henderson.’
I shrug again. ‘We’d more or less figured that out, thanks to Holly.’
‘I know. That was the second thing. Now the third.’ He pauses a beat. ‘The staff at the hotel front desk went through their security camera footage, and they found this. I downloaded a copy.’
I feel a sickening lurch rise up in my core. ‘Was it him?’ I manage to whisper.
Jim reaches forward with his phone. He’s shaking his head. ‘Take a look.’
The grainy black-and-white footage shows a figure approaching the door of my hotel room and stopping to prop the envelope against it. A woman my height and build, with similar hair.
Reading my mind, Jim says, ‘I thought at first it was you, and that you’d been sleepwalking or something. But I don’t remember ever seeing you in a dress like that. And, if you watch as she walks away, you see she’s not pregnant.’
‘But where on earth did she get my wedding ring from? Who is she?’
‘I’m coming to that. That’s number four. When I saw the registrar, she gave me another certificate too. A marriage certificate.’
It takes me a few seconds to articulate my jaw and my tongue into speech. ‘Show me,’ I croak.
Jim reaches into his jacket pocket and hands me a slip of paper and I scan it. Gregory Douglas Henderson and Zoey Ann Daley married on 29 October 2011.
‘So he’d been married before,’ I say, glancing up at Jim. ‘That’s not a necessarily a surprise, given his age.’
Jim gives me a strange look, before reaching into his pocket again. ‘Which brings me to this…’ He hands me my ring. ‘Take a closer look. Look at the inscription.’
I do as I’m told, and a cold shiver of shock runs down the length of my spine.
‘To the love of my life’, the writing inside the ring reads. Followed by a heart, then ‘29 October, 2011’.
There’s a tiny metallic clatter as it drops to the ground and rolls away. ‘It’s not—’
‘Exactly. It’s another woman’s weddin
g ring.’
Forty-Four
Alice
Now
The door is opened and she stands there, the woman who looks so like me. She introduces herself and indicates that we should come in.
‘How did you find me?’ I demand as I cross the threshold.
She looks back at me for a few seconds, her gaze steady.
I press on, desperate to allay my confusion. ‘How did you even know who I was?’
* * *
Two days after the wedding ring was left at my door, Jim and I draw up in a taxi outside a house in a nondescript street, in the eastern suburb of Parramatta. Older brick homes stand back from the dusty street behind grass verges, sheltered by mature eucalyptus trees. There’s an integral double garage and a wide, screened porch, but nothing at all to save it from utter ordinariness. I try – and fail – to imagine Dom living in a place like this. Except, of course, that he’s not Dom. He’s Greg.
I stop, stock-still, at the foot of the steps that lead to the porch, feeling the touch of Jim’s fingers on my hand.
‘Alice, are you sure you want to do this? I can go in on my own.’
‘No,’ I manage to keep my voice firm. ‘I need to do this. But…’ I hesitate, a sudden thought occurring to me. ‘She does know that he’s dead, right?’
Jim nods. ‘Detective Kelly’s been round to speak to her, about the car crash and about Holly’s death.’ He rings the bell.
When the door is opened, I see that she’s probably a little younger than me. She’s wearing a simple T-shirt and jeans, feet bare.
