‘A mutual colleague was attending the memorial so he gave me the details. I simply wanted to pay my last respects to the man I’d worked with for many years without a fuss, that is all. I had much respect for Jeremy, even if he wasn’t always the easiest person to get along with. But I swear, we were not having an affair. Ever.’ Madeleine mutters something in French then.
Rhonda can’t deny that she seems earnest and plausible. And if she was involved in a disappearing act by Jeremy, then coming here today probably wasn’t a wise move. Unless it’s a double bluff, she thinks.
‘Look, Jeremy used to confide in me when we were away,’ Madeleine continues, her voice calmer. ‘There’s no denying, he was a troubled man. He told me that his wife was convinced we were having an affair. I suggested I meet with her, to give her peace of mind, but he refused.’
‘Go on.’
Madeleine’s glance flicks to the ceiling. ‘And you are correct, I also think he was having an affair. If you can call it that,’ she adds. ‘And if I’m honest, the person looked a lot like…’ she trails off again, her eyes narrowing as she studies Rhonda, ‘…like you.’
‘What? No—’ Rhonda recoils, feeling her cheeks burn scarlet.
Madeleine briefly raises a finger to her lips. ‘He was a complicated soul. Never satisfied, his mind always thinking, planning, wanting some adventure.’ Her hands make an exploding gesture around her head. ‘He told me that he felt wretched about it, that he knew it was wrong but it had happened unexpectedly. He kept saying that he would end it, that it meant nothing to him, that he felt lured into it. I know he loved his wife, but it seemed marriage was never enough for him. I told him it was… so very wrong.’ She turns away for a moment, looking pained.
‘And did he end it?’ Rhonda’s voice is weak.
‘He died, didn’t he?’ Madeleine shrugs.
Rhonda absorbs this, frowning. ‘You mean… suicide?’
Madeleine shakes her head. ‘Non, non. I mean that by dying, the affair came to its own conclusion.’
Rhonda swallows, not knowing what to say. ‘Do you know the woman’s name? Jen was convinced it was you. She discovered texts from someone with the initial “M”. Jeremy was always talking about you, engineering trips away with you. You can see why she was so suspicious.’
Madeleine nods. ‘Indeed I can. But I do not know a name, I am sorry. It is only a coincidence that my name begins with the same initial.’ Madeleine reaches into her bag and pulls out her phone. She taps and scrolls and shows Rhonda the screen. ‘See? This is my husband, Gérard, and our little girl. She’s nearly three. We are happy. I did not do these things you are saying. It was someone else.’
Rhonda’s stomach churns as Madeleine’s eyes bore into her. ‘You have a lovely family. And I’m sorry, too,’ she says. ‘For jumping to conclusions.’ She takes her own phone from her bag and shows Madeleine the photos she took at the memorial service, scrolling through them. She points to the shots of Madeleine. ‘But when I saw you at the service standing away from everyone else, when I knew you hadn’t also died in the accident, and then when I found Jeremy’s pass—’
‘Arrêtez… Wait, look!’ Madeleine says suddenly, staring closely at Rhonda’s phone. ‘This person here…’ She zooms in as far as she can, angling the screen so Rhonda can also see. ‘This is the one Jeremy was involved with. I recognise her. I once saw him on a video call with her. He quickly cut it dead when he knew I was there, but I’d seen and overheard enough. It did not seem right to me. Non, not at all.’ She shakes her head vigorously, scowling. ‘And I told him so.’
Rhonda slowly takes the phone from Madeleine, not taking her eyes off the photo. ‘Her?’ she eventually says, feeling the relief wash through her.
‘Oui… yes. She was the one having the affair with Jeremy for sure.’
And that’s when Rhonda bursts out laughing. ‘Oh, that would be funny if it wasn’t so completely ridiculous.’ She shuts down her phone and puts it away again.
‘You know her?’ Madeleine drains her coffee cup.
‘Yes, yes I do. She’s my daughter.’
‘Hey, love, it’s me,’ Rhonda says down the line later. ‘Can you talk right now? I need a bit of a favour.’
‘Sure,’ Chris says. ‘I’m on a quick break, but then I’ve got someone in custody to interview. What’s up?’
‘Weird question, but is it possible to find out which officers went to break the news to Jen about Jeremy the night she found out he’d died? And more importantly, if it’s possible to get the details of the Swiss authorities who relayed the information?’ When there’s silence, Rhonda thinks quickly. ‘I reckon finding out more details about the accident will help Jen process things. She’s struggling again.’
There’s another pause on the line, then she hears Chris clear his throat. ‘Why do you want to know?’
Rhonda also hesitates, hoping he doesn’t think she’s meddling. ‘Something’s not right, Chris. I found Jeremy’s passport the other day. I don’t see how he can have gone on the skiing trip without it.’
‘Jeremy’s passport?’ he says incredulously. ‘Jesus Christ.’ He breathes out heavily.
‘Can you just find out who broke the news to Jen? I’m concerned that they weren’t really cops.’
Chris pauses again then semi-laughs – but to Rhonda it sounds forced, faked even. ‘I think you’ve been watching too many crime dramas, Ronnie. Anyway, it’s tricky,’ he says. ‘I can’t really go looking up information unless it’s for a case I’m actively working on.’
‘Really?’ Rhonda replies flatly.
‘Not unless you want me to get in a load of trouble,’ he snaps. ‘I’m sorry. Look, the system is heavily monitored. But leave it with me. I can ask around, see if anyone remembers who visited. There might be a way around it.’
‘OK,’ Rhonda says, slightly taken aback by his tone. He’s never usually short with her. ‘I’d appreciate that. For Jen’s sake. The night she found out was such a blur for her,’ she adds, trying to force what Madeleine said about Caitlin from her mind for now. Surely it’s a case of mistaken identity and nothing more. There’s no way Jeremy would have done anything like that – prey upon a young girl, let alone a close family friend. And no way Rhonda wouldn’t have noticed something going on between them. It’s unthinkable.
‘Right, better get on then, love,’ Chris says. ‘I’ll be home a bit after eight.’
‘OK, see you later,’ Rhonda replies. ‘I’ll keep some dinner warm.’
She hangs up, her mind preoccupied with anything but dinner. To distract herself, she digs out the essays Kieran and Caitlin have emailed her to mark. They’ve worked hard, so she owes it to them to give prompt feedback.
It’s after she’s gone through Kieran’s, impressed with what he’s written, that she turns to Caitlin’s essay, hoping he’s not copied from her. But halfway through reading it, she stops, her eyes fixed on the single word. While she knows that spelling isn’t Caitlin’s strong point, that sometimes she forgets to spell-check, it’s an unusual error to make – eclypse… the exact same error made by whoever wrote the letter to Jeremy.
Thirty-Five
Jen
‘Elsie?’ I call out yet again. ‘Are you home?’ She often takes a while to get to the door, but I’ve been knocking for at least ten minutes now. The side gate is padlocked as usual and her front curtains are drawn, which is odd. I glance at my watch. She should be up by now; she’s always been an early riser. ‘Elsie, are you there?’
‘Not seen her in a few days,’ a voice says.
I look up. It’s her neighbour – a man in his sixties wearing a white vest and smoking a cigarette.
I go over to the low fence separating the tiny front gardens. ‘You don’t have a key, I suppose?’
He shakes his head. ‘Who are you?’ He’s not being rude, but comes across that way.
‘I’m her doctor. I often visit and—’
‘Under the mat,’ the neighbour says, glanci
ng down. He gives me a nod and stamps his cigarette butt out, going back into his house.
I check under the doormat and, sure enough, Elsie has put a spare key there. Silly, but not so silly now, I think, pushing it into the lock and turning it. Thankful the security chain isn’t on, I ease the door open a crack. ‘Elsie, are you home?’ I call out again. ‘It’s Dr Miller. Just checking how you are?’
Silence. Not even Minty barking or her claws clacking on the floor as she comes to greet me. There’s a faint smell of dog urine, but this time there’s another smell – something slightly sweet and cloying.
‘It’s only me, Elsie,’ I call out again as I head through to the living room, not wanting to give her a scare if she’s fallen asleep by the gas fire. She always has it turned up too high. But when I go in, the gas fire is off and the room feels unusually cool. Beyond, in the small kitchen, it’s the same – no sign of Elsie and everything feels cold and lifeless.
I go back to the small hallway and head up the stairs, wondering if perhaps she’s taking a bath. ‘Elsie? Are you home?’ Or maybe she’s gone down to the shops. ‘Minty?’ I call out in an encouraging voice, hoping the dog will appear.
Nothing.
There are three doors off the tiny landing area – one is the bathroom, which Elsie is not in. The next is a small room with a single bed and the remainder of the room crammed with boxes and general junk that’s accumulated over the years. The front room is Elsie’s bedroom, and it’s as I draw closer that the sickly, putrid smell gets worse. I try to convince myself I don’t know what it is, but as a doctor, I do.
I don’t bother calling out her name before I push the door open, but I close my eyes instead, only opening them when I’ve taken a step or two inside.
Elsie is lying on top of her bed, clothed, peaceful-looking, despite the early stages of decomposition. I cup my hand over my mouth. It gets me every time.
‘Oh, Elsie,’ I whisper behind my hand, closing my eyes for another few seconds out of respect. I go up to her bed, putting my doctor’s bag on the chair beside it, and pull on some gloves. I don’t need to check for a pulse, listen to her heartbeat – or lack of one – through my stethoscope, or check the dilation of her pupils beneath her rigid eyelids in response to my light – none – but I do. It’s my job. Her skin is cold and a purplish-grey colour, covered in darker blotches, and with a soft sheen sitting on its surface. Her clothes stretch around her already bloated body as putrefaction takes hold. My best guess is three, maybe four days since she died. I fight down another retch at the smell – I’ll never get used to it.
Elsie’s hands lie by her sides, and in her right one, there’s a photograph. I don’t touch it, but can see that it’s a picture of her grandson, Lenny Taylor, looking as though it was taken the same summer he was killed – a happy, bright three-year-old boy standing ankle-deep in a paddling pool in Elsie’s garden. I tilt my head sideways and make out the gap in the hedge behind him – separating the garden from the fields, beyond which is the track that leads to the quarry reservoir half a mile or so away. The hedge through which he was taken.
On Elsie’s bedside table are some empty pill bottles and a glass – also empty. Again, I don’t touch them but from the looks of the dates on the bottles and packets, she’s been saving up the drugs I’ve been prescribing her for a while. Taken in these quantities, warfarin and naproxen are fatal without immediate intervention. Plus the empty half-bottle of whisky lying on the bed beside her would have numbed her passage from life. And then I see the note, just a few words on a scrap of paper, written in shaky handwriting: ‘Minty at the rescue shelter.’
I swallow, fighting down years’ worth of guilt that I wasn’t able to help her. ‘Sleep well, Elsie,’ I whisper.
I’m about to head outside to make all the necessary phone calls, but I stop, my eyes fixed on Elsie’s hand again. On a whim, I pluck the photograph of Lenny – his little face staring up at me – from between Elsie’s fingers and stuff it in my jacket pocket before rushing outside for some fresh air.
‘Some small mercy,’ I mutter to myself as I head down my drive. My fingers grip the wheel tightly, my knuckles white.
Scott’s car isn’t here.
When I go inside, I pray that I’ll find all his belongings gone too – not that he has many things here – but I find that’s not the case. In fact, there are even more of his items strewn about – several pairs of men’s shoes in the hallway, a pile of boxes, a radio I don’t recognise on the kitchen counter, some cookery books beside it, a briefcase on the chair. Yet when I go upstairs and check in the spare room, I find it empty of his belongings.
‘Another small mercy,’ I say, going into my bedroom to shower and change, wondering if he’s been gathering his stuff and is moving out. I need to wash the day off myself. But my heart sinks when I see it – a pile of men’s clothing on my bed, my wardrobe doors open and my clothes all shoved to one side with a few men’s shirts now hanging next to them. In the bathroom, it’s the same – toiletries and other items I don’t recognise sit beside mine.
Fuck.
He’s not moving out – he’s moving in more.
Then I hear a noise – something that sounds like crying – coming from Kieran’s room across the landing. ‘Kier?’ I say, knocking on his door. ‘Can I come in?’
There’s a grunt.
‘I thought you were going to Caitlin’s this evening?’
Kieran shrugs. He’s lying on top of his bed, staring at the ceiling. His eyes are red, his cheeks blotchy, and he has his phone in one hand with what looks like a photograph of a beach on the screen. But it’s hard to tell properly.
I shudder, reminded of Elsie earlier and the photograph she held between her fingers. Once the police and ambulance arrived, I signed off the death and headed into the surgery. But my mind was on the old woman all day – the last thirty years of her life weighed down by guilt. I don’t know why she chose now, after all this time, to take her own life. It’s as though she wanted to give herself as much punishment as possible – a prison sentence.
‘What’s up, love?’ I say, sitting down on the edge of his bed. He shifts his feet over to make room for me.
‘Nothing,’ he says, which I know from the tone means everything.
‘Are you going to Amy’s party with Caitlin? Rhonda said she’d take you. She texted me—’
‘I’m not going, OK?’ Kieran snaps, jerking his head up briefly to look me in the eye. Then he flops it back down onto his pillow.
‘OK,’ I say softly, not wanting to pressure him.
‘Why has everything gone to shit?’ he says, still staring at the ceiling.
I don’t know how to answer that, so I rub his leg instead.
‘This time last year, everything was fine. Now it feels as though there’s… as if there’s no point to anything.’
I force down my motherly knee-jerk reaction of wanting to lock him in his room forever to keep him safe, never let him out into a world that seems filled with pain. Not when he’s saying things like that.
‘I know, it’s so cruel. We’re still adapting, getting used to how things will feel now without your dad.’
Kieran makes a barely perceptible noise with his lips. I can’t tell if it’s a sad sigh or something disdainful.
‘Why is Scott staying with us, Mum? I don’t get it. Is he your new boyfriend?’ Kieran hoists himself up onto his elbows.
‘No… God, no. Just… a… a friend of your dad that I’m helping out. To be honest, I don’t really want him here either. But… it’s complicated.’
‘Is he the baby’s father?’ He glances at my stomach.
‘Nooo…’ I say, far too defensively. I stare out of Kieran’s window, across the fields, with Bowman’s Woods just visible in the distance. ‘Of course not.’ I fight the burn in my cheeks.
‘I’m not stupid, Mum.’
‘I know you’re not.’ I reach out and take his hand and it sits stiffly within my own for a few moments.
I give it a squeeze. ‘Looking at old photos?’ I say, spotting his screen again. I need to change the subject. ‘Was that our holiday last year in Devon?’
‘Yes,’ Kieran says with little emotion. ‘Some holiday that turned out to be.’
‘What do you mean? I thought you had a nice time.’
‘So did I.’
‘Kier… what’s going on?’
‘Doesn’t matter, Mum.’
As every mum knows, that means it matters. So I wait, ask him about his day at school – which turns out not to have been too bad. He got given one of the lead roles in the play and an A in his latest geography assignment.
‘Don’t get too excited,’ he adds in a sour tone after I congratulate him. ‘It was mostly Dad’s work.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That piece in National Geographic that he wrote ages ago, it fitted nicely with the topic at school.’ He shrugs. ‘Easy to chop it about a bit, “in my own words” and all that.’
‘Kier…’ I say slowly, trying not to be too hard on him. ‘Top marks for ingenuity, though.’
He snorts out a laugh.
‘Remember this day?’ he says, holding up his phone and showing me a photograph.
‘Vaguely,’ I say, recalling our time in Devon. The two families together.
‘I asked Caitlin if she had any photos of Dad on her phone as I don’t have many of him.’
It’s not hard to hear the bitterness in his voice, that he wants to vent something. I gently take the phone from him, looking at the picture of the virtually deserted beach.
‘Looks like it was a bit windy,’ I say, noticing a haze of sand blowing across the expanse of surf beach. ‘Is that Dad down by the shore?’ I ask, recognising Jeremy’s build, his shock of curly hair and bright red windcheater.
Kieran nods.
‘With Caitlin,’ he says. ‘I took it.’ He takes back his phone and swipes through some more pictures. ‘Then Caitlin sent me this one of Dad. Nice, huh?’
The Trapped Wife: An absolutely gripping psychological thriller with a mind-blowing twist Page 23
