by John Marrs
The traffic lights turned to green, and as January’s night began to fall I drove past Becket’s Park, just about making out the colourful moored canal boats in the marina. I couldn’t stop myself from grinning when I passed the Barratt maternity unit building, because in a little over two months, Charlotte and I would be waiting for a bed there. It hadn’t been easy: a combination of her polycystic ovaries and my low sperm count meant we’d had to rely on NHS-funded IVF to conceive. But on our second cycle, bingo! We were expectant parents.
I couldn’t wait to be in that hospital to meet my kid for the first time. And to be honest, I was even a little bit envious of Charlotte and what her body was able to achieve, while mine couldn’t even finish its part without my helping hand and a fertility expert’s syringe.
I soon changed my mind. Some women take to pregnancy like a duck to water, but after the first month, Charlotte really struggled. Morning, afternoon and evening sickness sapped all her energy levels and she was constantly feeling crappy. It became so bad that she was forced to take a leave of absence from the job she enjoyed. She spent much of her day mooching around the flat, and never too far away from a toilet bowl. But as we approached the final part of our third trimester, she turned a corner.
I glanced at the time as I continued on my way home – I reckoned I’d have half an hour to shower and spruce myself up before we headed to her favourite Thai restaurant to celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary. And it was there that I planned to give her the surprise of her life. I patted my jacket pocket just to reassure myself that the gift-wrapped box was still inside. I couldn’t wait to see the look on her face when she opened it.
Charlotte’s car wasn’t in its space in front of the flat when I drove in through the gates and pulled up onto the driveway, so I called her mobile to see where she was. It went straight to voicemail. I’d spoken to her at lunchtime while she was running errands, and hearing her voice sounding so chirpy had given me butterflies. ‘I love you, Ry,’ she’d said before she hung up, the first time I’d heard her say that in weeks. It felt like the tightest and warmest of hugs.
I climbed two flights of stairs and opened our front door to the overpowering scent of cinnamon and spices. She’d always been fond of air-freshener plug-ins, but now that she was pregnant our home smelled like Christmas all year round. She’d also had a thorough tidy-up. There were no dishes draining by the sink; tea towels were neatly folded on the worktop; the bathroom reeked of bleach; dried toothpaste had been rinsed from the electric toothbrushes and magazines were neatly arranged on the coffee table. She’s nesting, I thought, and smiled.
I phoned her again when I climbed out of the shower, but when she didn’t answer I began to feel a little uneasy. If she’d gone into an early labour, I was sure I’d have been told by now. I checked my phone again after drying my hair and trimming my stubble and then, just to be on the safe side, I called the maternity unit. I also called her friends, but when they hadn’t heard from her either, something inside me tightened and turned, like the wringing of a wet dishcloth.
Suddenly the front door buzzed.
Thank Christ for that, I thought, and hurried to it.
‘Have you forgotten your keys?’ I began as I opened it, only to be confronted by a stony-faced man and woman.
‘Mr Smith?’ he began.
‘Yes. And you are . . . ?’
‘My name is DS Mortimer and this is my colleague, PC Coghill. May we come in, please?’
CHAPTER TWO
ONE DAY AFTER CHARLOTTE
My distraught parents sat either side of me, asking the questions I couldn’t bring myself to.
They’d rushed to the flat with my brother Johnny within half an hour of the police turning up at my door. It was uncharted territory for everyone in the room. Mum and Dad had no idea what to say to me to soften the blow. The best the police could do was offer me their condolences and reassurances that an investigation had already begun to find out what had happened to my wife.
All they could tell me was that Charlotte’s body had been found at the foot of some cliffs in East Sussex. A witness had spotted her in the company of someone else and they’d fallen together. They’d yet to identify the other body, as it had been swept away by the sea. Charlotte had landed on rocks.
‘Why would someone want to murder my wife?’ I eventually asked.
The officers glanced at each other, and DS Mortimer looked like he wanted to say something, then thought better of it.
‘I really don’t know. I’m sorry, Mr Smith.’
Before leaving us to grieve alone, they explained that their colleagues investigating the case would visit the following day.
The case. Charlotte had gone from being my wife and the mother of my unborn child to the case in under an hour.
The trauma of losing Charlotte overpowered everything. It was too much for me to take in all at once. For the rest of the night and the early hours of the next morning, the four of us concentrated on trying to comprehend that we’d never see her again, while aching at the loss of my baby.
Two fresh police officers appeared the next day to learn more about Charlotte. DS O’Connor was a chubby man, forty-something, with broken red capillaries across his nose and cheeks, and awkward body language that suggested he’d rather be anywhere than in my company. I shared his sentiment. DS Carmichael was considerably younger, with a sympathetic smile and red hair scraped up into a tight bun. I imagined that in an interrogation scenario, she’d be the good cop.
They suggested it would not be in my best interests to identify Charlotte’s body, based on the height from which she’d fallen and the position in which she’d landed. I took that to mean head first. She’d been airlifted by helicopter back up to the clifftops, but it was clear she was long dead. I felt selfish for being relieved that I didn’t have to see her in that state.
‘Do you know why my wife died yet?’ I asked.
‘We don’t know the exact circumstances of what happened yesterday,’ said DS Carmichael. ‘So we’re working from eyewitness accounts.’
‘Who was the person who abducted her?’
DS O’Connor shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Again, we can’t answer that yet until his body is washed up or retrieved from the sea. We’re hoping it’ll turn up soon.’
‘So it was a man?’
‘We believe so.’
‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ I continued. ‘Why would he kidnap Charlotte and drive all the way down there to kill her? Surely it must be someone we know, or she’d never have got in her car with him. And why isn’t this flat being treated as a crime scene? Shouldn’t you be looking for evidence?’
Mum clasped my arm tightly. Johnny, two years younger than my thirty-one years but always the more pragmatic of us, looked like he wanted me to guess what he was thinking. DS O’Connor glanced at all of them and then at me, but nobody said a word.
‘What am I missing here?’ I asked.
‘This isn’t going to be easy for you to hear, Ryan, but from our initial investigation, it appears Charlotte was a willing participant in what happened yesterday.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ I replied. ‘Of course she wasn’t. She was taken against her will, or that man coerced her into going there for some reason—’
DS Carmichael interrupted. ‘Ryan, two separate eyewitnesses saw them walking towards the edge of the cliff together. Neither Charlotte nor the man appeared distressed. They were both holding mobile phones to their ears when they climbed over a fence and then stepped off the edge. Unfortunately, the car park CCTV cameras weren’t in operation, so we can’t back their statements up yet.’
‘Then the witnesses are wrong,’ I replied adamantly. ‘Charlotte had been a little down lately, I admit that, but she was getting better and she wouldn’t just kill herself. We tried so hard for a baby and we only had a couple of months left to go. She wouldn’t end her life, or our child’s. She had no reason to.’
‘They were walking hand
in hand,’ said DS Carmichael softly.
‘What?’
‘The witnesses say Charlotte and the man were holding hands when they died.’
My world suddenly ground to a very sharp halt. I opened my mouth to argue with her, but by the look of everyone else in the room, they believed her. I couldn’t lift my hand up to my eyes quickly enough to quell my tears. Dad pulled me into his shoulder and I sensed he was trying to stop himself from crying, too.
‘What do you think the relationship was between this man and Charlotte?’ Johnny asked.
‘It’s another question we can’t yet answer,’ DS O’Connor replied. ‘Our investigation is still in its early days.’
‘So you do think they were in some kind of relationship?’
‘Only because something brought them to that place at the same time, for what we believe was the same purpose.’
‘To die,’ I said. It wasn’t a question. They nodded their heads while I shook mine.
‘No, I’m not buying it. Charlotte wouldn’t do this to herself or to us. It makes no sense to me, but you believe it because you don’t know her. Mum, do you think she was having an affair or suicidal?’
‘I don’t know what to think anymore.’ She looked down at the table.
‘The evidence so far seems to point to the fact her death was voluntary, Ryan,’ my dad added. ‘But let’s not worry about that for the moment.’
‘Then what should I be worrying about?’ I asked with a raised voice. No one could answer.
I couldn’t listen to the police or my family any longer. I stormed out of the living room and into our bedroom, slamming the door behind me so hard that I heard the wedding photos hanging in the hallway juddering.
I wanted so badly to call Charlotte and have her answer, telling me it’d been some huge fuck-up and that she was fine. How could I even start to get my head around not hearing her voice again?
CHAPTER THREE
THREE DAYS AFTER CHARLOTTE
So much of what you believe – or what you have convinced yourself to be true – can be flipped on its head quicker than you can ever imagine.
I was desperate to believe that what had happened to Charlotte had been the result of foul play, that she’d been murdered by this unidentified stranger – not that she’d willingly gone with him and jumped to her death.
After another restless night, I turned on my iPad and went online to look up the location where she’d died. Birling Gap, in East Sussex, was part of the Seven Sisters coastline, with panoramic views of the English Channel. Charlotte had been found at the base of a five-hundred-foot cliff drop that was notorious for its erosion.
That makes much more sense! She and this man didn’t take their own lives; the ground simply gave way beneath their feet.
Surely if they’d travelled that far to die, they’d have driven a few miles further down the coast to Beachy Head. That was a suicide spot, not Birling Gap.
‘Dad, I think I know what happened to Charlotte . . .’ I began hurriedly as I marched towards the kitchen. My parents, Johnny and DS Carmichael were sitting around the table with an open laptop in front of them. I was surprised to see the police there on a Sunday morning.
‘Sit down, Ry,’ urged Johnny, and I obliged.
‘The cliffs, they’ve been known to collapse,’ I continued. ‘What happened to Charlotte was an accident.’
‘I have something to show you and it won’t be easy to watch,’ DS Carmichael began gingerly.
‘Please, Ryan, sit down, just for a minute,’ Mum urged.
DS Carmichael pressed play. Footage had been retrieved from a dashboard camera a driver had failed to turn off when he’d parked for a clifftop dog walk. He’d returned to find his bumper scratched. It was only when he reviewed the recording that he noticed what else it had taped.
I held my breath as I watched Charlotte leave her car. Compared to a lot of expectant mums, her baby belly was relatively small, and she was disguising it that day with an overcoat. Her phone was clasped to her ear as she walked across the car park. A male figure came into view. He had his hand to his ear, too, like he was also on the phone. I recoiled as they embraced. I wanted to shut my eyes, but I couldn’t tear them away from the screen. Then they held hands and walked slowly but deliberately across the car park and towards the safety railings that prevented visitors from going too close to the edge.
He was the first to climb over them, before holding his hand out to help her until they were side by side. Then, with their phones still clutched to their ears, they began their walk towards the horizon. My stomach sank when they suddenly fell over the edge and out of view. Mum’s hand covered her mouth and Dad looked away from the screen.
It was absolute proof that Charlotte hadn’t been abducted, she hadn’t slipped in an awful accident and the ground beneath her feet hadn’t crumbled. No longer could I tell myself the eyewitness statements were mistaken.
We all remained in silence for I don’t know how long. I could feel everyone’s eyes drilling through me, waiting for a reaction, for me to say something, anything. But I didn’t have a reaction to give.
Instead, I tried to imagine what had been going through Charlotte’s head in her final moments. Was she scared? Did she die straight away or was she in pain? Was she thinking about me, or had she put me out of her mind? Why did she do it? Had she learned there was something medically wrong with the baby and felt she had no choice but to end both their lives? Had this man, this unidentified stranger, been a part of her life for a long time, skulking about in the shadows, hiding behind my back? Had he made her pregnant? Who was on the other end of the phone as they walked to their deaths? Just how shit must our life together have been for her to take herself away from it in such a brutal, catastrophic way?
Among all the confusion there was only one thing I was certain of: I didn’t know my wife as well as I thought. I grabbed my jacket and keys and left the flat without saying a word.
I made my way by foot towards Becket’s Park, where I’d spent many a school holiday and weekend as a kid playing football and cricket with my mates. More recently, it had become a place where Charlotte and I took long Saturday-afternoon strolls, throwing bread to the ducks and geese in the lakes and buying Gallone’s ice cream from the van near the children’s play park.
I used to think one day it would be me there, catching my kid at the bottom of the slide, or hovering under the metal rungs of the climbing frame in case they got scared. Not now though.
I sat on a bench, staring at a Sunday-league football match being played on one of the pitches, but I wasn’t taking in much around me. I absent-mindedly turned my wedding ring around my finger in a clockwise motion until I became aware of a lump in my jacket pocket. I remembered what it was and removed the small box that I’d gift-wrapped with a bow. I’d been going to give it to Charlotte the night of our anniversary. Inside was the key to a house she had no idea I’d bought.
That morning before work I’d exchanged contracts and picked up the keys to a house she’d fallen in love with. It was in Kenton, a village on the outskirts of town, and the house had been empty for years. She’d seen it many times when we’d borrowed Oscar, my parents’ dog, and taken him for walks around villages as we considered where we’d like to move to when we outgrew the flat.
I vaguely remembered visiting the house a few times as a kid. And although it was now a bit rundown, Charlotte had seen its potential and fallen in love with it.
Keeping its purchase a secret from my wife had been as hard as hell, and I’d had to sneak around behind her back to deal with conveyancers, my estate agent, the mortgage broker and bank. I’d even had legal letters sent to my parents’ house. God knows how people having an affair manage to keep secrets.
I held the key so tightly in my palm that it made a deep impression in my skin. And I wondered if I’d told Charlotte a day earlier we were set to complete on our forever home, might it have saved her? I’d never know.
CHAPTER
FOUR
SIX DAYS AFTER CHARLOTTE
My love for Charlotte was fast being swallowed by hate.
Days ago, I’d wanted to lock myself in our bedroom and never leave. Everything about the room was her, from the Laura Ashley floral wallpaper to the scent of her perfumes that lingered on the matching curtains and pillows. I knew those smells would eventually fade, so I’d immersed myself in them while I could. But now they only made me feel sick.
I needed an explanation as to why she’d do this to me, so I ransacked the flat, searching everywhere to see if she’d left a suicide note. The police had taken her electronic devices, so I searched notebooks, bins, coat pockets, and inside books, cupboards and drawers, but I drew a blank.
I needed to be in a safe place, far away from the woman who, with one selfish act, had destroyed me. So I went back to the house where I was raised. Being at Mum and Dad’s brought it home how much I’d taken for granted as a kid. My only worries then were fitting in homework around playing FIFA ’99 on the Nintendo 64, and how long Johnny and I could stay out before Mum called us in for our tea. I longed for those days again. I no longer liked being an adult. This adult, anyway.
Mum and Dad were handling me with kid gloves. They never accused me of neglecting my wife or asked how I could have let her slip through my fingers. They left that to my own conscience and to Charlotte’s parents, Barbara and Patrick. They’d taken early retirement and moved to a large white villa on the slopes of Alicante’s hillsides, but were away on a Mediterranean cruise when the police tracked them down. They’d flown home from Turkey on the next available flight.
Instantly – and understandably, I guess – once we came face-to-face in my parents’ living room, they needed someone to direct their frustration at. I became their whipping boy.
