The Women: A gripping psychological thriller

by S. E. Lynes

  I’m sorry.

  ‘Oh God,’ she says. Blasphemes, there in the church.

  Thirty-Eight

  One year later

  The dinner is rowdy. Samantha can’t hear herself think, can’t think for laughing, and the food is delicious. A huge pot of veggie chilli, baked potatoes, sour cream and soft, warm tortillas.

  ‘Sam, this chilli is the best.’ Aisha raises her glass and takes a swig of the cheap Pinot Noir – on offer in the supermarket: buy six, get twenty-five per cent off. They will get through all six bottles tonight, Samantha is sure.

  ‘Peter never let me make chilli,’ she replies above the din. ‘Said it was for plebs.’

  Aisha rolls her eyes. ‘Don’t speak ill of the dead.’

  ‘I’m not speaking ill, just saying, that’s all.’

  They exchange a look, the kind that only close friends can. In moments such as this, Samantha feels she is both here and not here, within herself and without, living her life now and contemplating the life she might still be living had she remained stuck in it. Her life now is as familiar as it is unrecognisable. But the persistent feeling of unease has gone. It began to fade the moment Peter breathed his last.

  The decision to ask Jenny and Aisha to move in was easy compared to other, bigger decisions she has had to make. Peter’s house is enormous; their flat was tiny. Samantha was lonely, the idea of a new partner not something she could face for the foreseeable future. They insist on paying rent, but she charges them much less than they paid for the tiny one-bedroom flat, and of course they have their own rooms. Samantha gets to share her home with two funny, generous women, women who were always on her side, even if she didn’t see it at first. Her judgement of character has been ropy; she gets that now.

  Her mother came to stay immediately after the honeymoon, to support Samantha in her grief and through the police investigation. It felt natural that she should stay on, and the rent on her little flat gives her a little income. Right now, Mum is wearing a wig that Jenny bought for a fancy-dress party they went to recently at another ex-UCL student’s house – another of Peter’s women, as it turned out. The wig is platinum blonde, and with Mum’s dark eyebrows she looks like old pictures of Andy Warhol, or a puppet, or a politician. Whatever, she looks hilarious, her eyelids are heavy with wine, and she is telling the rest of them that when Samantha was little, she would sleepwalk into her parents’ room and scare them both half to death.

  ‘You’d open your eyes and she’d be standing right there, pale as a ghost, with her dandelion hair flying about. All she’d be wanting was a glass of water, but honest to God, she used to frighten the living daylights out of us.’ Her mother pulls off the wig and smiles at her daughter. She looks happier than Samantha has seen her in years. She is studying jewellery design and elementary guitar at Richmond College, where Samantha now teaches English to foreign students and basic literacy to people who, for whatever reason, left school without learning to read and write. The work is emotional and hard and utterly without status, but she loves it. It’s poorly paid too, but money is not an issue. On her days off, she writes when she can. Short stories now, not poetry. Recent experience has made her a better writer; it has given her an edge.

  They are all really quite drunk. Aisha is regaling the table with her latest attempt at internet dating, or rather, pre-dating: a Tinder exchange with a bloke who, she tells them, fancies himself as a twenty-first-century gigolo.

  ‘“I’m looking for a woman who isn’t afraid to be dominant”,’ she reads from her phone, and already the women are giggling like schoolgirls. Aisha holds up her forefinger and waits for them to settle down before continuing. ‘“I like the fact that you’re in running kit; it shows you’re not scared of strength. I can help you with that.”’ She looks up, her eyes wide. ‘Like, what does that even mean? But, wait for it, how ridiculous is this? He says, “I also like BDSM and would be delighted with a threesome if you have any attractive friends.”’

  An outraged burst of laughter echoes around the table.

  ‘So,’ Jenny says, her head cocked at a coy angle. ‘When are we meeting him?’

  Another laugh.

  ‘Friday,’ Aisha bats back. ‘Eight o’clock.’

  Hysteria.

  Samantha stands up, which silences them. A little shy all of a sudden, she eyes the group around the table. Her mother. A woman called Debs, who Jenny has brought along and who seems all right. Aisha and Jenny, and Marcia, who has brought chocolate eclairs from Iceland, where she is doing two shifts a week to help pay off her overdraft. Samantha told her she could come and live in the house, of course, but Marcia has moved in with Jacob and they are, as she puts it, skint but happy as pigs.

  ‘OK,’ she begins. ‘I’m going to propose a toast.’ She raises her glass, then, realising that what she has to say might take some time, places it back on the table. ‘As most of you know, a year ago, almost to the day, my husband, Peter, collapsed while we were on honeymoon and died of a heart attack.’

  Debs gasps. The others nod gravely.

  ‘Sorry, Debs,’ Samantha says. ‘But it’s fine, don’t worry. We’re coping well. And I have this lovely lot to keep me cheery. Like any crisis, it wasn’t caused by one single thing. And it wasn’t as straightforward as a simple tragedy.’ She glances at Aisha, who smiles. What Samantha says next is most of all for Emily, the baby calf she has licked clean and will now raise without help from the bull. Bully. Whatever. The mythology of Peter’s death is part of her protection.

  ‘Turns out that Peter, as most of you know, was addicted to Ecstasy. Addicted, well, maybe not, but he was a functioning user as well as a functioning alcoholic. I didn’t realise. I just thought he liked red wine.’ She pauses. ‘A lot.’

  Jenny laughs, apologises.

  ‘That’s OK, Jen,’ Samantha says, not far from laughing herself. ‘He never taught a class while inebriated, never drove inebriated, so far as I know, but there was always something in his system, often more than one substance. Funny how you can live with someone and have their child and think you know them.’ She meets her mum’s sad eyes for a second.

  ‘But you don’t – not always. I fell in love with someone whose past, as it turned out, was much more difficult to accept than I thought it would be. In more ways than one. Speaking of which, I got a card from Lottie yesterday. She’s doing much better and is hoping to get back to work later this year.’

  The women give a collective mutter, the gist of which is that they’re all really pleased. In her card, Lottie thanked Samantha yet again for paying for counselling, and for the cheque, which she has used to pay off the mortgage on her flat. Samantha will write back by hand and continue to do so until Lottie feels up to using email again.

  ‘Peter,’ she begins again, since they are supposed to be remembering him in as positive a light as they can, ‘I found out after his death, was also taking Viagra.’

  A gasp.

  She holds up her hand. ‘I haven’t told any of you this before – it seemed disrespectful – but I’m telling you now. I had no idea, but the results of the autopsy showed that it was likely the combination of drugs and alcohol, stress and heat, put too much strain on his heart. I should have noticed. But then I had no idea he was fifty, not forty, so you might argue I’m not very observant.

  ‘So it wasn’t just the drugs,’ Aisha says.

  Samantha permits herself a wry private smile. No. The realisation that his new wife wasn’t going to be taking any more shit might have had something to do with it too.

  When the police accompanied her back to the hotel, they found a bag of coloured pills and a small vial of blue ones in his case. Samantha didn’t have to feign surprise. She really had no idea they were there. It was only later that she put two and two together and realised that the blue pills were the reason he had run back to his office the day she intended to play his sexy PhD student. Finding her already there, he couldn’t take one, of course, and things had gone a bit limp from th
ere.

  In his office, the police found more drugs, only some of which Samantha had planted, plus the five bottles of red in the filing compartment. Professor Sally Bailey confirmed that, sadly, Peter was a bit of a boozer who liked his women young, joking with a wry smile that he’d been known to dabble in Mandy from time to time, as well as Sheila from records and Anne from accounts. She was sorry to be disrespectful, but really, what was there to say?

  The police never found the vial of soap powder under the bathroom floor, but they did find two more baggies of pills in his sock drawer. His fingerprints, his habit, nothing to do with Samantha, the naïve wife, so much younger, broken by shock and grief.

  Grief softened by a substantial fortune, she has found.

  She picks up her glass. ‘I want to make a toast not to Peter, but to friends. To the women around this table. Without you lot, I wouldn’t have had the courage to face … a lot of things. So, yes, to friends. Trust each other, support each other, look out for each other.’ She smiles. ‘It’s not rocket science.’

  Thirty-Nine

  Samantha had not anticipated how she would feel a year on from her husband’s death. There has been, after all, a loneliness to it, despite surrounding herself with the people she loves most. And it is this loneliness that wakes her at four in the morning and sends her wandering like a ghost into Peter’s study to sit for a moment at the desk where he worked when he was at home. The others are asleep, as far as she knows. This big, beautiful house hums only with the faint sound of the fridge.

  She has not felt able to come in here until now, but tonight, she realises, has brought her a kind of closure. She thinks of her father, who she eventually went to see after Peter’s funeral, along with his partner and the new baby. They speak once a week on the phone now, and while she will never be close to him like she was as a child, she can live without the need to punish him for all eternity – a decision that has brought her as much peace as it has brought him, she suspects.

  People make mistakes.

  She switches on Peter’s anglepoise lamp, which throws a warm white light over the artfully mottled leather surface. In the left-hand drawer, she discovers a spare computer mouse, some old receipts and some theatre tickets that were never used – for him and his new girlfriend, no doubt; his PhD student, as it turned out (what a surprise), who thought herself that little bit more sophisticated, who lusted for culture and civilised seduction. Poor cow, Samantha thinks, before correcting the thought – that woman has had a lucky escape. She’ll be better off with the inexpert advances of someone her own age, someone she can grow with, find sophistication by degrees, if that’s what she wants.

  In the right-hand drawer are some A4 batteries, a stapler and spare staples. Scintillating. In the middle drawer, printing paper and a lined notepad. She pulls the notepad from under the ream of paper. In the lamplight, she can see the pressure print of scribblings, and somewhere in her gut, a dark one per cent tingles.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  She startles, turns. Aisha is standing at the door. She has on her fleece tartan pyjamas and she is as cute and puffed up with sleep as a child. Aisha, whom Samantha loves and trusts … ninety-nine per cent. And it is this last per cent, this last drop of resistance, that drains away in the dark of the house they have both found themselves in at different times, lost in the labyrinth of Peter’s so-called love, only to find themselves living here together now. How good it would be to trust someone one hundred per cent.

  ‘Come into the living room,’ she says. ‘I have something to tell you.’

  In the hearth, the embers have all but died out. Samantha throws a few balls of newspaper onto them, pushes them down with the fire iron, adds some twigs when the flames come. Not the way Peter would want her to light a fire, but Peter is not here, is he? She puts a small log on, then another. When the fire is going again, she sits top to tail on the sofa with Aisha and tells her about her last day with Professor Bridges.

  She reiterates what Aisha and the others already know. She tells Aisha that she knew he was in trouble when he complained of terrible thirst on the way to the Mouth of Truth. She tells Aisha that this was because he’d drunk an entire litre of red wine at lunch.

  ‘But it’s also because …’ She sits up a little, coughs into her hand. ‘It’s because when he went to the loo in the restaurant, I emptied a large dose of Ecstasy powder into the carafe.’

  Aisha’s brown eyes widen. ‘What? How?

  ‘In the hustle and bustle,’ Samantha tells her. ‘I mean, it was so noisy in there. I had the powder in this miniature shampoo bottle, a travel one, you know? And what with the waiters shouting to each other, the door to the restaurant kitchen being open, the chefs swearing and the pans clanging and God knows what … There was some crappy music playing through the speakers, the other diners were looking out onto the Piazza della Verità, or into each other’s eyes, or discussing the next sight on their agenda or whatever, so yeah, I just poured it in. I even had time to pick up the decanter and give the wine a good swill.’

  ‘You drugged him?’ Aisha’s eyes are round with what looks like wonder.

  ‘I’d been drugging him pretty much since I found out he was drugging me. Well, us.’

  ‘What?’ The incredulity on Aisha’s face is gratifying. It makes up for that awful moment when Samantha watched her run away down the riverbank, believing their friendship over.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘The day you and Jenny told me, I thought, me too. I knew he was spiking my wine and that he had been all along. I wasn’t even surprised, just kind of depressed. And so I thought, if he could drug women to make them more affectionate, compliant, whatever, it was only fair to do the same to him. Marcia scored me some pills; I ground them up. It was easy. And he really was much more pleasant, for much more of the time.’ She smiles.

  ‘Oh my God. You never said.’

  ‘Well, no. And don’t you say anything either … ever.’

  Aisha shakes her head. ‘Of course I won’t.’ She bites her lip, meets Samantha’s eye. ‘So … so did he really die of a heart attack?’

  The subtext is deafening.

  ‘Yes,’ Samantha replies.

  Aisha presses her mouth tight. When she speaks, it is a reverent whisper. ‘No, I know, but, you know, why marry him? Why organise a big secret surprise honeymoon?’

  ‘Did I kill him? Is that what you’re saying?’ Samantha shrugs. ‘Marcia told me some Ecstasy users take four or five pills a night. I wasn’t sure about the dosage. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I wanted to keep him pleasant, but yes, I admit that when I tipped that powder into his wine, I wanted him to suffer. I saw the damage he’d done to all the women in his life. And I wanted to do him damage right back. I wanted to freak him out. I wanted to look into his eyes and see fear, make him understand how it felt to be powerless. I wanted to take the power back. And when I got home, I was going to file for divorce on the grounds of adultery and mental cruelty. I wasn’t about to leave Emily destitute, Aisha. I needed the paperwork. So I needed him to believe in my warped truth for a change. I kept thinking about Lottie and others like her and thinking that men like him do this stuff all the time and that it’s the women who go underground, the women who hide away and become lonely and poor, and it’s the women who are silenced by shame. And I thought, what the hell, you know? That’s why I took him to the Mouth of Truth. I wanted him to know that I was on to him.’

  Aisha nods.

  ‘But I didn’t know he was taking Viagra,’ Samantha adds.

  ‘But did you … want him dead?’

  A different question. Samantha shakes her head. ‘He was a monster, a beautiful monster. He was ugly on the inside. He raped a child, ruined her physical and mental health and walked away without a care. The burden of shame was all hers, poor girl. He made you have a termination when you thought you were about to start a family. He was cheating on you with Jenny, and when you both dumped him, he panicked and took advantage of my naïve
ty and weakness to tie me down because, finally, he realised he needed security. He was cheating on me out of nothing more than habit, must have controlled and abused God only knows how many women over the years, all the while proclaiming his feminist credentials, his refusal to objectify, when in fact that was all he did. That was all he ever did, wasn’t it?’

  Aisha nods but says nothing. She doesn’t need to.

  ‘So, to answer your question,’ Samantha says, ‘I spiked his wine. I threw the little plastic bottle into the Tiber when we walked over the bridge to the church, told him it was a message, a secret wish for our marriage. I knew I’d committed a crime against him. I didn’t intend to kill him but yes, maybe I’m glad he’s dead. I’m glad that I looked into his eyes and saw fear – that was what I wanted. I like to think he took a good look into my eyes, saw his hideous reflection and it killed him.’ She exhales heavily. The words are shaping her thoughts as they fall. ‘Look, I’ve never done anything big in my life. It was about taking back power, not just for me but for you and Jenny and Lottie – for all of us. It wasn’t about him, Aish. It was about us.’

  ‘Yes.’ Aisha is looking at her intently. Telling her all this tonight could be a mistake, but not telling her means living with this loneliness for ever. And she has been so lonely, in her subterfuge and secrets. They all have. They have been behind a wall. And why should women, why should anyone, live behind walls?

  ‘I tell you what pissed me off more than anything else,’ she says as they begin to make a move back to bed. ‘What really did it for me in the end.’

  Aisha leans in, the firelight flickering in her huge brown eyes. ‘What?’

  ‘The bloody hair dye.’

  Forty

  After Aisha has gone back to bed, Samantha returns to Peter’s study to turn off the lamp. The notepad is where she left it, the faint marking of words scrawled across the page. The glimmer of unease returns. She checks that Aisha has gone up, then takes a pencil from the pot – everything in its place and a place for everything – and sits down. Her heart is beating with a strange familiar presentiment, a one per cent of feeling she will from now on know better than to ignore. She runs the pencil lightly over the scribbles, the lead flat on its side. There are crossings-out … there are a lot of crossings-out, but what emerges is a draft of a pastiche of a poem she has seen before, in a hand she recognises absolutely. A familiar unfamiliar villanelle. She rubs the blunt edge across the looping indentations, her throat closing.