by Hazel Osmond
Her thoughts came back to Jack and where he was now. If he was with that judge woman, had he completely wiped her from his mind? Detached Jack, moving through the female population without a second thought. One woman had completely screwed him up and so the rest of them had to pay.
Tomorrow he would be in New York. She closed her eyes and concentrated on trying to commit his face to memory.
When Ellie opened her eyes and swivelled back round to face the room, Mrs MacEndry was standing there.
‘I never had a chance to thank you for my beautiful flowers, Ellie,’ she said in answer to Ellie’s quizzical look. ‘Peonies, my absolute favourites. And so thoughtful to have them delivered to my home.’
‘You didn’t need to come all the way back in to thank me, Mrs MacEndry.’
Mrs MacEndry smiled. ‘You can call me Lydia, you know, and I didn’t just come back in about the flowers.’ She pulled a chair up to the desk. ‘I also wanted to say goodbye to you properly. I was so sorry you weren’t well enough to come to the leaving party.’ Mrs MacEndry sat down. ‘Are you feeling better now?’
Ellie was about to make her usual bland reply when something about Mrs MacEndry’s body language stopped her.
‘You knew about Jack and me, didn’t you?’ she said.
Mrs MacEndry nodded. ‘Yes, although not definitely, not until you left that meeting abruptly the other day. But I suspected before that.’ She laughed. ‘Sometimes I feel like one of those old ladies in an Agatha Christie novel, picking up little snippets of information here and there, piecing together clues, building the full picture.’
Ellie started to sniff. ‘What gave it away?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, lots of little things. You going a shade of beetroot anytime you were close to Jack. Him strutting about losing his temper with you like a rutting stag. That day he looked so strange when I went into his office after that meeting with the scalpel man.’ She stopped, reached down for her handbag, extracted a handkerchief and handed it to Ellie with a smile. ‘Oh, and the mystery of why he should return from lunch with a carrier bag containing a brand-new dress that was exactly the same as one you already had.’
‘You’re good,’ Ellie said, dabbing at her eyes.
Mrs MacEndry made a little dipping motion with her head. ‘Thank you.’
‘You must think I’m a complete idiot. I mean, me and Jack, what was I thinking?’
‘You’re not an idiot at all, Ellie,’ Mrs MacEndry said, shaking her head. ‘You wear your heart on your sleeve, and you’re a bit too trusting, but neither of those things are faults. And you are most definitely not the idiot in this case.’
‘Thanks, I think, Mrs Mac—Sorry, Lydia.’
Mrs MacEndry leaned forward and lowered her voice. ‘I would never do anything to hurt Jack, you know, Ellie. He has been more than a boss to me.’
Ellie’s skin goose-bumped all over. Not Mrs MacEndry too?
Mrs MacEndry caught Ellie’s expression and quickly said, ‘No, no, not in that way. I meant he has been a good friend to me, a person I could really depend on.’
Ellie felt a rush of love for Jack that necessitated some serious handkerchief work again.
‘Jack took me under his wing when my husband died. You know he died quite young, don’t you?’
Ellie did.
‘Well, I felt like giving up totally … work, eating, life, everything. I was working for Jack at the time in Manchester. He was so kind, and when he decided to head south, he said I should come too. I thought he was mad, but in the end he persuaded me.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘As you know, he can be very persuasive. He said if I stayed in Manchester, I would never be able to move forward. Horrible expression, but I knew what he meant. There were too many reminders of happier times up there. Jack understood it all perfectly. I came south and made a new life. Everything was so different here I had to get on with living.’
Mrs MacEndry came to a stop, but Ellie got the distinct impression there was more to come and that Mrs MacEndry was having some kind of internal tussle with herself. She sat very quietly until Mrs MacEndry was ready to start again.
‘I am not sure whether I am doing the correct thing here, Ellie, talking to you like this, but … but I think that you need to find out some things about Jack that he would never tell you.’ Mrs MacEndry had said the last part of her speech very quickly, as if she were getting something out into the open before she had the chance to reconsider and perhaps stop herself.
‘What kind of things?’ Ellie was clutching at the hope that whatever they were, they might bring Jack back to her.
Mrs MacEndry’s smile returned. ‘Well, I think it best if you find them out for yourself. That way, when Jack tortures me, I will be able to say with a clear conscience that I didn’t actually tell you anything.’
Both women laughed, but Ellie could see that Mrs MacEndry was concerned that somehow Jack would be angry with her. It was obviously a big secret.
‘What you need to do, Ellie dear, is go back up to Scarsdove,’ Mrs MacEndry said.
‘Back?’ Ellie was confused and then decided that perhaps Mrs MacEndry was not aware that she had already found out that Jack was married. ‘I don’t think there’s any need for me to go back, Lydia. If the big secret you’re talking about is that Jack had a wife who cheated on him, I’ve already found that out.’
Ellie expected Mrs MacEndry’s face to register surprise, but instead she kept smiling that calm smile of hers.
‘There’s a man called Bryan North you need to talk to, editor of the local paper. He was Jack’s first boss. I believe he doesn’t work Thursdays, but any other day you should be able to find him.’
CHAPTER 34
Ellie waited for someone, anyone, to come and open up the Scarsdove & District Advertiser offices. What time did these people start working? It was ten o’clock already. Ellie watched a Land Rover reverse into a parking space not far from the seat on which she was sitting. A solitary jogger skirted round the square and disappeared up a side street.
Ellie supposed this was what constituted the rush-hour. Still, she was here and it was warm and all she had to do was wait.
But that was the hardest part, waiting. She took a look at her hands. She was still chewing the skin down the side of her thumbnail and now she had also started on her nails. They’d been lovely and long, even after Jack had dumped her, but since Mrs MacEndry had hinted at there being something else she ought to know about Jack, Ellie had decimated them. She didn’t need to revisit her psychology A-level notes to know what that meant. She was afraid she’d got something very wrong somewhere.
A bird started to peck at a discarded pie not far from her feet and Ellie wondered if she looked like that: gobbling up anything she could find out about Jack. Pray God Ian never found out the real reason he was funding another trip north. He’d assumed she was being her usual diligent self when it came to researching the client.
Unlike Lesley. She hadn’t seen the point of Ellie’s return visit. The people from the council were due at the agency soon; they could get all the background information they needed then. Ellie had tried to change the subject, but Lesley had definitely been suspicious. There’d been a bit of an atmosphere between them since then. Which was another reason why her nails were bitten to nothing.
Ellie had another look at the newspaper office. Bingo. The lights were on.
‘Oh, yes, she was a researcher at the BBC in Leeds. Lovely girl. Great sense of humour. Fantastic legs.’ Bryan North sucked the end of his pencil as he remembered Helen, Jack’s wife.
Ellie sipped her coffee and tried not to fall to her knees and beg Bryan to get to the end of the story.
‘They met at university. Here, I’ve got a picture of her and Jack somewhere. I’ll go and find it.’ Brian disappeared ‘out the back’, as he called it, and Ellie looked around at the clutter in his office and thought it highly unlikely that Bryan could ever find anything. She and Lesley were mere amateurs at being messy compared
with Bryan. The room was large, but they were sitting in the only tiny space left uncluttered. On every available surface were piles of old newspapers, many yellowing and torn, and an assortment of boxes labelled with dates stretching back to the 1970s. The floor, which Ellie guessed had not been cleaned for a long time, was also covered in random piles of paper.
Most impressive, though, was the large stuffed rat on a plinth that for some reason was sitting right in the middle of the floor. Ellie found it hard to take her eyes off it and wondered if it was Bryan’s lunch.
Still, Bryan was a fund of information – about the area, about the council and now, hopefully, about Jack. She had supposed he would think it strange that she had turned up out of the blue with so many questions, but he gave every appearance of being happy to oblige. Perhaps it got lonely with only the piles of paper and the stuffed rat for company.
Brian bustled back into the room. ‘Here you go,’ he said, handing her a framed photograph, and Ellie was looking at a younger version of Jack with his arm around a girl.
‘That was taken at our Christmas do. Made a handsome couple, didn’t they?’
Ellie nodded. The girl was very pretty, with shoulder-length dark hair, delicate features and a big smile. From what Ellie could see of her figure, it was voluptuous. To Ellie, she looked friendly and open – not at all the sophisticated, cool woman Ellie had steeled herself to see on Jack’s arm. But then Jack didn’t look like Jack either. It wasn’t simply that he was younger; it was something about the way he was smiling, like he hadn’t a care in the world. It wasn’t a smile Ellie had ever seen on his face. She handed the photograph back to Bryan, unable to look at it any longer.
Surely now Bryan would notice her hyperventilating and wonder what the hell she was up to. But Bryan wasn’t looking at her. He stared down at the photograph and whistled softly. ‘Jack and Helen … haven’t thought about them for a while. Mind you, all credit to him – he still sends me a card at Christmas.’ Bryan put the photograph down on his desk. ‘He was only here for about two and a half years in all. Plus a couple of summer holidays when he was still at school. ’Course, we were a bigger set-up then. Everything was done from here. Now there’s me and a couple of part-timers. Technology, see. All our sales and admin staff are on an industrial estate on the Leeds ring road.’
‘So you were Jack’s first boss?’
‘Yes, for my sins, of which there are many. He was a good lad, quick learner, but I knew he wouldn’t stay long. Bigger fish to fry. I could see that it was the advertising side of it that fascinated him. He got more interested in the ads in the paper than the articles. This place was never big enough for him.’
‘Well, he’s in New York now.’
Bryan’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Is he? Is he really? Well … it doesn’t surprise me. He was always ambitious, driven.’
Ellie waited for Bryan to go on, but he was staring at one of the piles of paper. She gave a little cough to bring him back. ‘So, Helen and Jack met at university …’
Bryan gave a start and focused on her again. ‘Yeah, first day if you can believe it. After university they had a year off travelling. Extended honeymoon, I think. Then he came to work here and she got a job in Leeds.’ Bryan laughed. ‘God, he was a soppy bugger about her. Mind you, she wasn’t much better. Bit of a mutual-admiration society going on there. She used to write little notes and leave them in his wallet. And he could have had his pick of women any day of the week. They were throwing themselves at him, but he just laughed and went home to Helen.’
Ellie digested the information that Jack hadn’t always been a serial womaniser and then simultaneously felt happy for Helen and jealous of her.
She waited for Bryan to resume, but he had drifted off again. This drip, drip, drip of information was torture. She couldn’t take much more of it. She had hoped that Bryan would come out with everything she was desperate to know, but it looked as if she was going to have to ask him straight out. She juggled the question around in her mind until it sounded as sympathetic as possible.
‘Poor Jack,’ she said, ‘he must have taken it badly when she cheated on him …’
Bryan stared at her and seemed offended, as if she had affronted him.
‘Where did you hear that?’
‘I stumbled on the court report of the disturbance outside Wilkinson’s house.’
Bryan continued to stare at her until he said, in an annoyed tone, ‘Yeah, well, I wouldn’t have written it up in such detail, but our tight-arsed owner said we had to be impartial. Couldn’t pussy-foot around because Jack was one of our own.’ Bryan snorted. ‘I buried it on page eight, though. You did well to find it.’
All of a sudden Ellie didn’t feel so proud of her investigative skills.
‘How Jack didn’t kill that little shit Wilkinson I don’t know,’ Bryan said. ‘He’d been after Helen for ages, slimy git. Told people who didn’t know him that he was a producer, but he was really a cameraman. Helen couldn’t stand the sight of him. Not when she was well.’
The tiniest snake of unease began to uncurl in Ellie’s stomach. ‘When she was well?’
Bryan picked up his pencil and stared at it as if he had never seen one before. There was a pained look on his face. ‘Of course, she was already quite ill when she went back to Wilkinson’s house that night. Jack didn’t know it, though. Nobody did. Not even Helen. It didn’t come to light until a week or two later.’ Bryan added gloomily, ‘The mackerel incident.’
The snake of unease was steadily uncoiling in Ellie’s stomach.
‘Mackerel incident?’
‘Yeah, Jack got a call saying that Helen had been caught shoplifting in Morrisons. He got down the police station to find her sitting with fifteen cans of mackerel in front of her. She’d put them in her bag and walked out of the store. Hadn’t even tried to hide them and had chatted happily with the store detective when she’d stopped her. He knew then that something was badly wrong.’ Bryan rolled his eyes. ‘I mean, Helen didn’t even like mackerel.’
Ellie knew what was coming next, from the tone of Bryan’s voice, from the way he was sitting, from the expression in his eyes. Everything told her how this story was going to end, but she had to push on and hear it for herself. She had to hear those words that would make that snake in her stomach turn round and bite her for the stupid woman she was.
‘What was wrong with her, Bryan?’
‘Brain tumour. Made her act erratically. She got forgetful too, even a bit aggressive, which wasn’t like Helen at all. That incident with Wilkinson was part of it. I was convinced she didn’t even know where she was that night.’
‘And …?’ Ellie held her breath.
‘Died. Four months start to finish. Aggressive type, you see. Advanced already and beyond surgery. We gave Jack all the time off he wanted to … well … to get her through it. He came back for a few weeks afterwards, but it was too hard for him being back here. So he buggered off to Manchester, then took off south.’ Bryan sighed. ‘Poor Jack. Not got married again. Or what is it nowadays? A partner?’
Ellie shook her head. For the first time in her life she hated herself. Every spiteful, petty, self-absorbed bit. All this time she had been convinced that this was her love story when really there had been a bigger, more heartbreaking tale underneath.
And now she knew what had put that big plate of glass between Jack and any normal emotions.
She tried to get on to her feet but couldn’t. So she sat there opposite Bryan in silence, thinking of the last time she had seen Jack and wishing that she could unsay all those terrible things she had said to him about Helen and hold him in her arms.
CHAPTER 35
Ellie stood in the queue for a cab and swallowed over and over again, trying to get rid of the pain in her ears. The queue shuffled forward and the man behind her rammed the back of her legs with his luggage trolley. She was going to turn round and give him her best disapproving face when it occurred to her that he might be armed. Everyone in New Y
ork was armed, weren’t they?
She went back to trying to unblock her ears. Still, at least she was on solid ground at last, not circling above JFK Airport for twenty ear-popping minutes waiting for a landing slot. And she hadn’t had to stand in the huge queue to retrieve her luggage. She didn’t have any – just a handbag crammed with a clean pair of knickers, some paracetamol and a toothbrush.
One ear cleared, the queue moved forward, and the late-summer heat wrapped itself around her. She was weary from the journey, but most of all she was exhausted from thinking about what she would say to Jack when she found him. It had been madness to come here, but adrenalin had got her this far. Now, standing amid the mayhem and building work that was JFK Airport, she was beginning to lose heart.
A cab drew up and the big, sweating man organising the taxis bellowed at two Japanese people to get a move on.
Jack was out there somewhere, perhaps standing on a sidewalk feeling the same heat. All she had to do was find him. Not that difficult, then. Simply hunt him down in a city of nearly eight and a half million people and then apologise for calling his dead wife a slut and try to win him back. Easy-peasy. She closed her eyes and tried to go back over the haphazard plan she had been brewing in her head ever since Bryan North had dropped that bombshell about Helen.
Get a taxi to Bar Bootle, talk her way in, find Jack, get down on her knees and apologise. Happy ending.
The person in front of her was suddenly whisked off into a cab and the big, sweating guy was bellowing at her, ‘You wanna ride or what? Come on. Where you goin’?’
‘Roosevelt Hotel,’ Ellie shouted back.
‘OK, then,’ he said, and shouted her destination at the driver.
Ellie pulled open the door of the cab and a smell of exotic spices hit her, swiftly followed by the pulse of Arabic music.
‘Hello,’ she said, but the driver didn’t even turn his head.
