The Dead Wife

by Sue Fortin

  Please, God, no. Not again. He wasn’t a man of faith, but if there was ever a time to convert, then it was now. If there was ever a time to believe in some force, some being, some entity that was able to perform miracles and was able to offer some ray of hope, then it was now.

  ‘Faster! Faster!’ urged Wendy, who was kneeling at the front of the boat. ‘We’re nearly there. Steph! Stephanie!’ The desperation and anguish in her voice wrenched at every fibre in Harry’s body. Despite what Steph had thought about her mum, she was wrong. This woman loved her daughter. There was no doubt about that. Whatever had gone on before was irrelevant, as in this moment all Wendy cared about was Steph.

  From the depths of his reserves, Harry found a renewed burst of energy as he powered the rowing boat towards Steph. He guided it alongside her and, as Wendy leaned over to grab her daughter, Harry helped lift Steph up onto the side of the boat.

  He could see Wendy’s police training taking over and she began to perform CPR on Steph’s lifeless body. He needed to get them all back to the shore. He knew his efforts were best used in rowing them back, but the wind had picked up and the current across the water was strong. He hoisted himself back into the boat and immediately took up the oars.

  His arms and legs burned, his back was on fire, but he pushed through the pain, as his sole focus was getting Steph to shore. He watched as Wendy continued to pump at her daughter’s chest and then duck down to give her mouth-to-mouth. Again, he found himself offering up a prayer of mercy, that Steph be spared the same fate as Elizabeth.

  Harry glanced over his shoulder; there was an ambulance by the lake and what looked like a paramedic car. Thank God! A spluttering and vomiting sound snapped his attention back to the boat. Wendy was rolling Steph on her side, who was throwing up lake water. She groaned and vomited some more. Then her eyes opened and she looked up at her mother, taking a moment to understand what was going on.

  Wendy leaned over her daughter, cradling her head in her hands. She was crying. ‘Oh, Steph … oh, thank God,’ she was saying over and over again into her daughter’s wet and matted hair. Wendy held her daughter tightly. ‘It’s OK. You’re going to be OK.’

  Harry didn’t take his eyes off Steph. He could hardly believe Wendy had managed to revive her. Steph’s gaze found its way to Harry and they looked at each other for a long moment, before Wendy was engulfing her daughter again.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Kendalton General Hospital, Campbell Ward,

  Friday, 17 May, 4.30 p.m.

  Steph opened her eyes at the sound of footsteps approaching her bed. She was surprised to see her mother standing there.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ asked Wendy.

  ‘All right, actually. The doctor wants me to stay in overnight just to check I haven’t got concussion and there’s no water lying on my lungs. I’d sooner not be here, though.’

  ‘It’s the best place for you. I’ve had no end of phone calls from the press wanting a story from you.’

  ‘I hope you told them where to go.’

  ‘I most certainly did. Besides, you can’t comment about an ongoing police investigation, which is what this will be now.’

  ‘Sonia will be happy.’

  ‘She is. She phoned me,’ said Wendy. ‘She’ll speak to you herself, she said, but for now just wanted to pass on her utter and complete thanks. She said she can’t put into words how grateful she is to you.’

  Steph gave a small smile. ‘I hope she gets the result she wants.’

  ‘I’m sure she will.’

  Steph fiddled with the edge of the sheet as a small silence fell between them. She knew if she didn’t take the opportunity to say something now, the moment would disappear. She looked up at her mum, whose green eyes seemed a little softer than usual; in fact, Wendy’s face seemed softer. The tight-set jaw was relaxed and there was no furrow in the brow. Wendy sat on the chair next to the bed, her hand in her lap. Steph reached out and Wendy allowed her to hold her hand. ‘Thank you,’ said Steph. ‘Thank you for saving me.’

  ‘It wasn’t just me,’ said Wendy. ‘I’m not sure I could have done it without Harry. You need to thank him too.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he’ll want to see me now,’ said Steph. ‘How’s Pru?’

  Wendy dropped her gaze before looking back at Steph. ‘She’s in a bad way. She suffered a heart attack from the effort of swimming back to shore. She had another in the ambulance. I haven’t heard any more.’

  Steph couldn’t help feeling deflated at the news. Despite the woman trying to kill her, Steph’s empathy was with Harry. His mother had betrayed him on so many levels and now she was critically ill. He probably had so many mixed emotions about her right now, and who could blame him?

  ‘Have the police been to see you?’ asked Wendy.

  ‘Yes, they’ve just gone, actually. They took a preliminary statement.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘Everything I knew. They took my phone.’

  ‘Your phone?’

  ‘When I was in the boat with Pru and I realised I was in danger, I tried to phone you, Harry, anyone, but there was no signal out on the lake. I thought I was going to end up the same way as Elizabeth but I was damned if it was going to be put down to another accident.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I switched on the recording app. It recorded pretty much all of Pru’s confession.’

  ‘Oh, my,’ said Wendy, with a smile. ‘What a clever girl you are.’

  Steph looked up at her mother, whose voice and face were filled with pride and admiration. Steph wasn’t sure she’d ever been the cause of either in Wendy before and her heart swelled with unexpected love.

  Wendy leaned closer to Steph. ‘I’m sorry I’ve let you down.’

  For the first time in her life, Steph could see tears in her mother’s eyes. She squeezed Wendy’s hand. ‘It’s OK, Mum,’ she said. ‘Don’t cry.’

  Wendy wiped at her tears. ‘There’s something you need to know,’ she said evenly. ‘In fact, there’s a lot you need to know.’

  Steph could see the steely look resurface in her mother’s eyes, but she could also see fear and uncertainty. ‘What is it?’

  ‘When you met Rob at the house earlier this week and he told you I was asked to leave the force … he was telling the truth.’

  ‘I don’t care about that any more.’

  ‘But you should, and it’s important that you know the truth. It’s best you hear it from me first, before you read about it in the papers. I’ve never told you any of this because I wanted to protect you. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. I know I’m not very good at showing my emotions, but there was a very good reason. You won’t like what I’m going to tell you and you may need a few days to think it over.’

  Steph sat herself up further in her bed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m likely to be arrested in the next twenty-four hours or so and this is why I need to tell you now.’

  ‘Mum, you’re scaring me.’

  ‘Don’t be scared. Just listen.’ Wendy took a deep breath before speaking. ‘Your father used to drive for Max Sinclair from time to time. You were only young, still at school, and we needed the money. I was a young police officer then and financially we were struggling. Anyway, I’m not really sure how it came about, but one day your dad came home and announced he had an evening driving job for Max Sinclair.’

  ‘I remember him going out driving,’ said Steph.

  ‘He used to drive Max about a lot. Sometimes he’d run errands for the Sinclairs, pick stuff up for them, drop things off. Your dad didn’t know what the packages were, he just did it. He told me not to ask questions. He didn’t ask questions, so I shouldn’t, and besides, the money was good.’ Wendy paused for a moment. ‘And then one day he came home and said he’d been involved in something really bad with the Sinclairs. He’d been stopped for speeding on one of his collections and the police had searched the car. They found the parcel and
it turned out to be amphetamines. Your dad was in line to be charged for supplying. Anyway, Max Sinclair knew someone in the force and they had the charge dropped. Don’t ask me how, but it was dropped. The only trouble was, your dad was now in their debt.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ uttered Steph. She couldn’t believe her father had been involved in criminal activity. He just wasn’t the sort. Not her dad. ‘What happened after that?’

  ‘I had to turn a blind eye to what your dad was doing. I was torn between a sense of duty and not getting your father arrested. I mean, what would I do then? I had you to look after. I couldn’t afford for your dad to be arrested and I didn’t want the disgrace. My career would be picked apart and looked at in minute detail, they would be certain to think I was involved somehow and, to be honest, just knowing would be enough to make me lose my job.’ Wendy looked out into the middle distance. Steph waited silently for her to continue. ‘When Max Sinclair died, I thought that would be the end of it and we would be free of that family. Your father and I argued a lot about it. He said that it was too late, Dominic was already running the show and he was much more conniving than his father. There was no escaping them. Dominic made sure of that.’

  Steph felt her hand tremble. She couldn’t believe the dilemma her mother had been put in. ‘What did Dominic do?’

  ‘He paid money into my account, even though I didn’t want him to. He said it was insurance, to make it look like he was paying me. He said he was going to pay it in every now and then, just enough to make it look suspicious if it was ever investigated.’

  ‘Why didn’t you report it?’

  ‘We were already in too deep, what with your father and Max. And Dominic has a sadistic streak, like his father. He implied that something might happen to you if I didn’t do what he said.’

  ‘He knew about me?’ whispered Steph.

  ‘Yes. He’d seen you out with me one day and then again at your dad’s funeral. And, of course, over the years the Sinclairs had made it their business to know all about us. It’s their way of keeping control.’ Wendy closed her eyes at the memory. She took a moment before continuing. ‘I knew about the drug smuggling but I turned a blind eye.’

  ‘Oh, God, Mum.’ It was getting worse by the minute and Steph knew there was more to come.

  ‘When I told you about being asked to shut down the investigation into Elizabeth’s death, I didn’t tell you quite everything.’ Wendy bowed her head, her shame obvious to Steph.

  ‘What else?’ Steph realised she had always known Wendy was keeping something from her. A little fact that would be the last of the puzzle pieces.

  ‘I wasn’t just put under pressure from my bosses to hush things up, I was put under pressure by the Sinclairs. When Elizabeth died two days after the incident at the lake, Dominic said I was to make sure the investigation found it to be an accident. He said that I was in no way to implicate anyone in her death. I’d been asking questions and, although I couldn’t prove anything, when he came to me and said that, I knew her death couldn’t have been an accident. I mean, how could it if he was telling me to make sure that was what the investigation concluded?’

  ‘He knew it was his mum.’ It was a statement rather than a question.

  ‘He knew all right. Or at the very least, he suspected. So did I, but what could I do? I couldn’t do anything for Elizabeth any more. She was dead, but I had to protect you. He made a barely veiled threat that something nasty could happen to you. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but I wasn’t going to call his bluff. I couldn’t let him do anything to harm you. I needed to keep you safe. You were all I had. You are still all I have.’

  Steph lay back against her pillows. She was having trouble taking all this in. Her dad was a criminal who had basically worked for a drugs gang. Her mum had not necessarily perverted the course of justice, but she hadn’t looked into the death of Elizabeth fully. Wendy had certainly failed to perform her duties diligently. She had covered up the murder of Elizabeth to protect … Steph paused in mid-thought. Wendy hadn’t done any of this for her own gain, she had been caught up in this because she’d wanted to protect Steph.

  Oh, the irony. All this time Wendy had kept Steph at arms’ length because she didn’t want her getting involved. She had pushed her away, both in an emotional sense and in a physical sense to protect her. Even when Steph had thought her dad was so wonderful, so caring and so loving, that her dad was the good guy, Wendy had let her believe that to protect her.

  Tears filled Steph’s eyes and she once again reached out for her mother. ‘Oh, Mum,’ she said, and her face crumpled as the tears spilled over.

  Wendy leaned across the bed and held Steph close to her. Steph couldn’t remember the last time they’d had so much physical contact. Her mother was actually comforting her. Steph could feel the love surging from Wendy like she’d never known before. More sobs came, sobs of joy and relief. Her mother loved her, there was no denying it.

  It was a few minutes before Steph was able to put another coherent thought together. She was acutely aware now of the sacrifice her mother had made, not only in what she’d done in the past, but also in what she’d done today. She wished there were another solution but she knew Wendy had to step forward and be accountable for her actions. Wendy owed it to Elizabeth Sinclair and to Sonia Lomas.

  Steph thought of Harry and what he must be going through right now. Did he know what his mother had done to Elizabeth, or was he just praying she’d pull through and at that moment able to forgive her anything?

  Steph wasn’t sure how she felt about Pru Sinclair herself. The woman had tried to kill her. She shuddered. She didn’t remember much else after going in the water, except Pru slipping in beside her. At first, in her confusion, Steph had thought Pru was going to save her, but then she’d realised she was trying to hold her down. Some primitive instinct in Steph had surfaced and she remembered thrashing around, trying to get away from Pru.

  The last thing Steph could remember was Pru grabbing a handful of Steph’s hair, right at the scalp, and then slamming Steph’s head against the side of the boat.

  Steph touched the gauze dressing on her head. She had a gash but other than that, no real damage. Thankfully.

  And then another memory punched its way through to the fore of her mind. The waxed cotton jacket she’d seen through Wendy’s letterbox.

  ‘Who was at your house yesterday when I came over? There was someone in your kitchen.’ She halted, hardly daring to utter the name on the tip of her tongue. ‘Was it … was it Harry?’

  Wendy shied away, giving Steph an old-fashioned look of disbelief. ‘You think Harry was at my house?’

  ‘I don’t know … whoever it was, they were wearing a waxed cotton jacket. I saw it.’

  Wendy’s face relaxed. ‘I think all the Sinclair family own waxed cotton jackets.’

  ‘It was Pru, wasn’t it?’ asked Steph, suddenly remembering the smell in her mother’s kitchen the day before; it was the perfume that Pru always wore. She scolded herself for not realising this sooner.

  ‘It was Pru,’ confirmed Wendy. ‘She came to threaten me. She said you weren’t listening to any of the warnings.’

  ‘Which is why you phoned me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Wendy. ‘I’m sorry I was never the mother I should have been. It has been my biggest regret, but I didn’t know how else to deal with it. I thought if I could make you hate coming to visit me, then you would stay out of all this. I thought it was the best thing to do but, when your life was in actual danger, I realised it was wrong. It wasn’t your poking around into Elizabeth’s death that led to you nearly coming to the same end, it was me. I am responsible for everything. I should have left your father as soon as I found out what he was doing. I should have left him and taken you with me and that would have broken the cycle, but I stayed and I allowed myself to be used.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Wendy whispered again.

&
nbsp; Kendalton General Hospital, Campbell Ward,

  Friday, 17 May, 6.00 p.m.

  Steph had convinced Wendy to go home and get some rest. The police hadn’t been back since taking their preliminary statements earlier.

  ‘I expect I’ll get a visit from someone higher up sooner or later,’ Wendy had said before leaving.

  She had seemed resigned to the idea, and for the first time Steph felt she was seeing a fragility in her mother she hadn’t seen before. Wendy was tired from the years of turning a blind eye and from the years of being under threat from Dominic Sinclair. Did Wendy think the years of pushing her daughter away, covering for her husband and neglecting her duty as a police officer had been worth it? Steph wasn’t sure. Wendy should have just come clean right from the off and then none of this would have happened. She felt uncharitable thinking like that, but it was the truth.

  Steph was just about to close her eyes and try to get some rest when, to her surprise, she saw an unexpected visitor coming through the doorway.

  ‘Adam! What are you doing here?’

  ‘Come to see you, of course. Now that you’re famous.’ He leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek, his beard tickling her face, and then dropped several newspapers onto her lap.

  Steph looked at them, scanning the headlines of the articles Adam had outlined with red felt-tip pen.

  SINCLAIR CASE TO BE REOPENED

  SINCLAIR DROWNING: LOCAL JOURNALIST FINDS NEW EVIDENCE SUGGESTING MURDER

  UNDERCOVER JOURNALIST FORCES POLICE TO REOPEN CASE

  ‘Wow. I am famous,’ said Steph, without much enthusiasm. It was strange, now she had made both the local newspapers and one national; the excitement she had anticipated just wasn’t there. Instead, all she could think about was Harry and what a bloody tragedy this must be for him, together with Sonia and what a bloody relief it must be for her to finally have some sort of closure.

  ‘So, now we’ve established what a fantastic journalist you are, how about an exclusive?’ said Adam.