Except I can’t.
I pick up the skull and go to drop it in the bin. I don’t want it in the house and have no idea why Scott bothered to bring it back.
‘Don’t,’ he says, grabbing my wrist. ‘Kieran might like to see it.’
‘Doubtful,’ I reply, pulling away from him.
‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure there’s a story or two about it that he might like to hear. You know. Boys’ stuff.’
I stare at Scott, trying to fathom what he’s talking about, trying to gauge and read the look in his eyes, where his mind is going. I swallow, maintaining a neutral expression. I can’t afford to let emotions get the better of me. ‘He’s not a little kid, you know,’ I say, turning my back on him and heading for the sitting room.
Kieran is upstairs licking his wounds, even though I’d restrained myself from yelling at him when we found him. I was just relieved he was unharmed and, whatever reasons he had for taking the car, they didn’t matter any more. Besides, I didn’t want to embarrass him too much in front of Caitlin down by the reservoir, nor on the way home, with Caitlin’s bike slung in the rear of my four-wheel drive and the pair of them sitting sheepishly in the back – well, not before I’d got to the bottom of what the hell he was thinking.
‘Kieran?’ I’d called out earlier, running down towards the water. We’d spotted the Mercedes as soon as I’d swung my vehicle into the reservoir car park. It’s was tucked out of sight of the lane and the only car there, given that it had been dark for a while and all the walkers had gone home.
I’d followed the path down to the water, immediately spotting two familiar figures hunched together on the bench, looking out across the black, moonlit ripples of Bowman’s Pool. Scott had gone straight over to his car to check it out, but I became aware of footsteps behind me as he followed on.
‘Kieran, are you OK? What’s going on?’ I’d skidded to a stop on the shingled area beside the bench. ‘Why did you take Scott’s car?’ There was a small cluster of picnic tables, along with some swings and a wooden climbing frame a few metres away. In the summer, it’s a favourite haunt for the teenagers from the village to hang out, going up there on their bikes and mopeds, smoking weed, having a few beers and annoying those who’ve come for a quiet walk. Along with the ghosts of the past – the terrible thing that happened to Lenny Taylor years ago – the place has an eerie feel, as though the quarried land is somehow whispering its secrets.
‘Kieran…?’ I’d said again, watching as my son slowly turned his head towards me. Caitlin had hung hers, briefly covering her face. ‘Does your mum know you’re here?’ I’d asked her, doubting that very much. Caitlin confirmed my fears by giving her head a brief shake. Then I saw her bike lying on the ground beside the bench.
Kieran shrugged. ‘Let it go, Mum,’ he’d said. I barely recognised him in that moment, especially when I saw the stump of a gone-out cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. The only positive was that it was from a packet and not a roll-up, indicating it wasn’t weed. Then I spotted the glowing tip of a cigarette between Caitlin’s fingers, too.
‘Let it go?’ I shoved my hands on my hips, trying to contain my anger. ‘You stole Scott’s car. You could have killed yourself, or someone else.’ I took his hand, trying to make him stand up, but it was useless. My son felt heavier than ever – weighed down with grief, I’d thought, as the moon flashed out from behind a cloud briefly, lighting up his teary eyes. ‘OK,’ I’d said, releasing him and pacing about. ‘Let’s just get home. We can discuss it later. Caitlin, I’ll give you a lift home too. Your bike will fit in the back. You can’t be cycling alone in the dark.’
‘Sorry, Dr Miller,’ she’d said, reverting to the formal when usually she’d call me Jen.
Both kids were mute on the journey home, with Scott merely uttering a ‘No harm done’ to Kieran and patting him on the back when I ushered them into my car. No harm done? I wanted to yell at the top of my voice into someone’s face – I just wasn’t sure whose. I got in the driver’s seat and ferried us all home.
‘So… so you’re definitely not going to report him?’ I ask Scott when he sits down beside me in the living room. Arrests, a criminal record, community service, missing his exams and failed university applications all flash through my mind. I need to protect my son.
‘No point,’ he says, sounding far more reasonable than is warranted. A ploy by him, no doubt. Increasing the debt – real or imagined – that he seems to think I owe him. ‘There’s not a mark on my car. Your boy clearly knows how to drive.’
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘It’s been tough for him lately, losing his dad. And things aren’t great at school.’ The pang of guilt deep inside me doesn’t go unnoticed. I’ve not been the mother Kieran has needed these last few weeks, wrapped up in my own grief, not there to help him unravel his. I vow to change.
Scott makes a kind of rumbling in the back of his throat, but says nothing. We sit in silence for a while, listening to the sound of the fire crackling in the wood burner. Scott had stoked the embers when we got back with the logs he’d previously brought in – usually Jeremy’s job. It barely seems possible that only two months ago my husband was here, working in his study, planning his trip to Switzerland, reading beside the fire, destroying me at chess, doing jobs out in the garden and paddock with Kieran, or sinking a few pints down at the local with Chris.
And now Scott is sitting beside me in his place – a stranger I met in a bar – his feet slipping so far under my lonely table that I don’t ever see him leaving. With those photographs, he can do whatever he likes – only made worse by Kieran’s behaviour tonight. I’ve gone over the newspaper headlines a hundred times already…
Respected GP shamed in sordid affair while husband plunges to his death…
Whichever way I look at it, the incriminating photographs would end my career. I’d be struck off without a backward glance, never practise again. But worse would be what Kieran would think of me, that any shred of respect he may have left for me would be gone. I know that deep down there’s a simmering resentment – that if I’d worked harder at my marriage then his dad wouldn’t have had to have an affair, that we’d have all gone away as a family at New Year, or stayed home together, and in some miraculous sliding-doors moment, his dad wouldn’t be dead.
‘Are you close to your parents?’ A ridiculous question to ask Scott under the circumstances, but I need to break the silence. It’s becoming bigger than the space in my head. Plus, I want to find out more about him, who this man in my house really is. What I might have on him to prise him out of my life.
‘No,’ he answers without looking at me. ‘They’re both dead. We weren’t close.’ His tone makes it sound rehearsed, as though it’s a stock reply.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I say. ‘Kieran is so much like his dad. It almost hurts to look at him. They were very close.’
‘Tell me about your husband, Jennifer,’ he says. His arm is draped along the back of the sofa, his fingers toying with my hair. Something tells me not to move, to let him do it. I don’t want to admit it’s because I have to keep him onside.
‘He was a good man,’ I say, realising it sounds exactly the same as Scott’s stock reply about his parents. ‘Creative, loving, a good father, loyal…’ I swallow the lump in my throat when I say loyal. ‘Sometimes he was difficult to live with, but he was the love of my life. I miss him terribly.’
‘I see,’ Scott says flatly.
‘Jeremy was a rich, deeply intelligent, complicated, ever-changing man, as though…’ I pause, thinking, testing… praying that the memories of my husband aren’t fading. ‘As though—’
‘As though there’d been a whole lot of bad in his life?’ Scott finishes for me, one eyebrow raised.
I stare at him. ‘No, that wasn’t what I was going to say.’
‘As though he was waiting for the past to catch up with him?’
I shake my head, wondering why Scott is suggesting these things. ‘No. It wa
s as though his body wasn’t a big enough place for his mind to live, as though he felt trapped, frustrated, unfulfilled.’ As though he felt trapped, frustrated and unfulfilled with me, I’ve thought a thousand times since his death.
‘Well, he doesn’t have to worry about that any more, does he?’ Scott adds with an infuriating smile.
Twenty-Nine
Rhonda
Kieran’s arrived safely, Rhonda texts to Jen, knowing this will give her friend some peace of mind. She’s dished out her own kind of fury in Caitlin’s direction after her and Kieran’s little escapade the other night, not quite getting to the bottom of which of them thought it was a smart idea to meet after dark at the reservoir. Caitlin knew it was out of bounds at night, and Kieran, quite frankly, should have known better. And stealing a car, for heaven’s sake. Poor Jen, she thinks. She has enough to deal with as it is.
When Kieran had turned up on his bike for a half-term study session with Caitlin, she’d thought he looked pale as he sheepishly came into the kitchen. Rhonda had resisted making a wisecrack about what flash car he’d nicked to get there, and Jen had begged her not to mention the incident to Chris, who might be duty-bound to report it. She’d agreed, knowing there were some things best left under a cop’s radar, even off duty.
Rhonda stares at the thick wodge of Jeremy’s manuscript sitting on the bed in front of her. She doesn’t feel inclined to carry on reading it, and certainly not after what she discovered within its pages in her office at school the other day – the words branded in her mind forever.
Since Jeremy had given her the three hundred or so pages at the end of last year, she’d barely got round to reading even a chapter before he’d died. It wasn’t that she wasn’t interested, rather that work and life and then Christmas had taken over, and she’d found herself losing track of the story and had had to start again a couple of times.
She didn’t tell Jeremy this, of course, but to her the book had seemed like a self-indulgent, semi-autobiographical mash-up, verging on, or pretending to be, literary, with a dash of random intrigue thrown in. It wasn’t something Rhonda imagined would set the publishing world on fire – not that she knew much about that sort of thing. Jeremy had only given it to her to read because she was an English teacher… because he trusted me, she thinks, balling up her fists.
But then everything had changed since she’d stumbled across those words in her office at school the other day when she’d decided to have another read – a single page that had slipped out of the book leaving her with a sick feeling. And how awful that Jen had knocked on her office door only a few minutes after she’d set eyes on it. The irony of the timing hadn’t evaded her. How could such a betrayal have happened right under her friend’s nose? Poor Jen – while she was out working hard, earning a living to support her family, keeping everything going, giving Jeremy the opportunity to live out his dream – he was undeniably having an affair behind her back.
But where did that leave Rhonda now?
‘In a moral bloody mess, that’s where,’ she mutters to herself, tapping the top of the manuscript, wondering how on earth the letter had even ended up between the pages. Had Jeremy wanted her find it? Is that why he’d given her his book to read? But why? It made no sense. Or maybe it ended up there accidentally. All she knows is that she doesn’t know what to do. Tell Jen about it, or do nothing?
Rhonda picks up the letter again – a love letter from someone signing themselves off as ‘M’.
It’s written on A4 paper – thicker than the rest of the manuscript and a good-quality stock with a pale-blue tint and gold edging. Expensive paper that was once folded into thirds, most likely to fit into an envelope, with the words printed rather than handwritten.
She hears Caitlin and Kieran mumbling to each other in low voices from across the landing, hopefully discussing the essay question Rhonda has set them for the morning, before turning back to the letter.
Dearest Jeremy, it begins. Rhonda’s hand shakes as she reads it again, almost knowing the words verbatim now.
You’ll never know how much I cherish the rare moments we spend together. Being with you feels as natural as breathing. It’s only when we’re apart that I feel as though I’m suffocating, choking, that there’s no oxygen in my blood. I live for the times I know I’ll get to see you, especially when we can be completely alone. As rare as an eclypse. But cherished by me.
So that’s why I’m writing to you again (did you get my other letter? – you didn’t reply), because I want you to know how much you mean to me and how much I love you. I’ve loved you for so long, I can’t even remember a time when I didn’t. Not loving you doesn’t even seem possible to me any more. I can’t imagine it. And I know you love me too. I’ve seen it in your eyes, the way you look at me, even though you find it hard to admit it your feelings to me. When you kissed me that time when we were last away together – those beautiful few days that I’ll cherish for the rest of my life – nothing else in the whole world mattered apart from your lips on mine. You make me feel special like no one else can.
I can’t wait until I can see you again. I’m literally counting down the days until we go away. Are you? Do you wonder how it will feel to spend some proper time together? I only hope that one day we can be together always, shout out about how we feel and not care what anyone else thinks. We’re just two people in love.
Until then and until we see each other again, my darling Jeremy, please know that I think about you every minute of every day.
* * *
All my love, M xxx
Rhonda leans back against her pillows, feeling nauseous. Self-indulgent drivel, she thinks. Almost as bad as the pages it’s stuffed between. Not only would it utterly destroy Jen to know someone wrote this to her husband, but they can’t even spell properly. ‘Eclypse’ jarred with Rhonda the first time she read it, and now the error adds an almost comical feel to the clichéd words – words that she can’t help thinking were written by someone whose first language wasn’t English.
‘Burn it,’ Rhonda says to herself. ‘That’s what I should do.’ But she can’t, not until she finds out who wrote it. Or, she thinks, not until I prove that it was Madeleine.
Rhonda rereads it, but with a French accent in her head, before putting it back between the pages of the manuscript. She wonders where the other letter that’s mentioned has got to – if it’s in Jeremy’s study, perhaps, hidden away somewhere. It occurs to her she should find it, get rid of it in case Jen stumbles across it. The poor woman doesn’t need any more pain.
Rhonda shoves the manuscript back in the carrier bag and slides it under the bed. Jeremy’s book wasn’t what she came up here to deal with – she’d merely been distracted by that, especially with Madeleine’s Instagram account still playing on her mind. She’s starting to get a handle on the woman – the woman who had seen fit to ruin her best friend’s life.
Rhonda drags the cardboard boxes she’d brought back from school over to the bed. It’s as she’s reaching into one to take out a load of photos that there’s a tap at her door, followed by a head peeking round.
‘Hey, Mum,’ Caitlin says. Her eyes flick to Rhonda’s hands. ‘Is it OK if we have some of that leftover curry for lunch?’
Rhonda smiles, rolling her eyes. ‘Well, sure, you could if it was actually lunchtime.’ She glances at her watch, tilting the photos away from her daughter. ‘It’s only half past ten. Have you written any of that essay yet?’
Caitlin makes a face. Rhonda notices that she’s put on a bit more make-up than usual today, and she can’t help noticing that her hair’s done differently, too, how it suits her face pinned up like that.
‘Some of it,’ she says. ‘I think Kier is struggling a bit. He seems… distracted. I’ve left him having a read of what I’ve written of my essay so far in case it helps him.’
‘How about you both have a cuppa and some of those mini chocolate muffins? Maybe the sugar will give your brains a boost.’ Rhonda grins but it’s clear
something has caught Caitlin’s eye. She comes over to the bed, her head turned sideways as she stares at the pictures and other bits of paper Rhonda is clutching.
‘What’s all this?’ she says, sitting down and reaching inside the box. She pulls out a couple of old newspaper clippings that Rhonda hasn’t got round to looking at yet.
‘Just some old stuff from school to sort through,’ Rhonda says. ‘It was going to get chucked out, but you know what I’m like with old photos and memorabilia.’
‘From before St Quentin’s was private?’
‘Uh-huh.’
Rhonda isn’t sure she wants Caitlin looking at the clippings, not with what she knows is in some of the newspaper reports about the toddler’s murder.
‘C’mon, you,’ Rhonda says, giving Caitlin a playful tap. ‘Stop procrastinating and get on with your work. I’ll take you out for pizza later if you crack on.’
Caitlin’s face lights up. ‘And Kieran?’
Rhonda nods. ‘I’ll ask Jen along too.’
‘Deal,’ Caitlin says, leaving Rhonda to peruse the contents of the boxes.
It’s moments later that her heart skips at the sight of the head and shoulders mugshot of the child killer – a pale-faced kid of around twelve or thirteen, though he barely looks it – squarely facing the camera. He has a vacant and remorseless look in his eyes, as though he doesn’t give a jot that he murdered an innocent toddler. Rhonda knows the grandmother still lives in the village, and word is that she’s lived her entire life alone in the shadow of her guilt.
Her eyes skim the details. Toddler beaten and bruised… naked… strangulation… drowned… She can’t stand to read on. Another piece, written after the boy’s sentencing, details how he bragged to the court about his crime, that he saw himself as a hero and the murder of the toddler as vengeance for his mother’s subsequent death.
The Trapped Wife: An absolutely gripping psychological thriller with a mind-blowing twist Page 19
