by T. M. Logan
I still loved the idea of us, but maybe that was all it was now. An idea. My emotions were all over the place, and any thoughts of forgiveness now seemed a long, long way away. Maybe further than I could reach.
“Mel—”
She put her index finger to my lips. “Actually, you don’t have to tell me. Take your time. I don’t deserve to know either way, not until you want to tell me.” She put her small hand over mine. “I’m going to bed. Are you coming?”
I looked at her then, my wife, my beautiful wife, my heart aching harder than ever. “I’ll be up in a bit.”
I poured myself another whiskey and sat at the kitchen table a while longer, thinking how fast everything in my life had gotten fucked up. Six days. That’s all it had been. Six terrible days.
By the time I went to bed, Mel was already asleep, and I dozed for an hour or so, dreaming about Ben chasing me through an underground parking lot, blood running down the side of his face, jumping out at me, running me down in his big white Porsche. Then I was awake again, staring into the darkness, looking at the cracks of street light filtering through the blinds and listening to Mel’s slow, rhythmic breathing beside me. Larssen had told me that if the police did end up charging me with murder, it was highly likely that I would be remanded in custody rather than being bailed.
So if I’m charged tomorrow, this might be my last night in my own bed for months. Or years. The last night at home. As soon as that thought had taken root, sleep was out of the question. I lay there wondering what Ben would come up with next, what Naylor would throw at me.
Eventually I got up and went downstairs to the kitchen, the clock on the wall glowing red digits. Six minutes past three in the morning. The house was a mess, and in the deep shadows, it looked like a burglary or some kind of domestic disaster had struck the family home. The police had taken clothes, computers, tools from the cellar and spades from the shed, shoes, bags of rubbish from both inside the house and from the wastebin outside. There was stuff strewn everywhere in the aftermath of the police search. I realized absently that I’d forgotten to ask about the shotgun cartridge and the note Ben had left. Presumably they’d been scooped up with everything else. My car was gone. My laptop, iPad, and desktop PC were gone. My cell phone was gone.
They might as well have sent me back in time to 1900.
THURSDAY
60
William kept his distance from me the next morning. He looked at me warily, the way he looked at barky dogs and homeless people at the Tube station. I knew that—for him—the world was a very black-and-white place. You were either a goodie or a baddie. And goodies didn’t get handcuffed and taken away by the police.
I fetched him his cereal and sat with him at the dining table while he ate it, and I drank a strong coffee. Normally he would talk to me, ask me all kinds of questions or tell me about random four-year-old things, like which one of the Angry Birds was his favorite, or how many times he’d peed the day before, or whether Citroëns were better than Fords. But today he ate in silence. He seemed wary of even catching my eye. It broke my heart to see him like that, frightened of talking to me. As soon as he had finished his Cheerios, he shuffled off his chair and carried the bowl into the kitchen without even being asked.
He talked to his mother in the kitchen as she helped him on with his shoes and coat. I loved the sound of his voice; there was none of the sarcasm or smart-aleck sass of half the kids at Haddon Park. No condescension, no deceit. Just straight up.
“Are you taking me to school today, Mummy?”
“Yes, Wills.”
“Why?”
“Because Daddy’s not got his car.”
“Why?”
“The police wanted to borrow it for a few days.”
He thought about this for a moment. I suspected he would know it was another parental lie: he was a smart little guy.
“Why?”
“They sometimes do that when they need an extra car.”
I said, “It’s a Mummy car day today, matey.”
Mel came over and gave me a tentative peck on the cheek, more for William’s benefit than mine, I thought. She had her working-day armor back on: crisp white blouse, killer heels, and perfectly applied makeup that accentuated her beauty.
“You sure you’re OK with me going to work today? I’ve got a personal day to take—I could stay home and we could have a day together, just the two of us.”
“Go on. It’s fine.”
She searched my face. “Really?” She picked up her briefcase. “Listen, I’ve got meetings this morning, but how about I take a half-day’s leave this afternoon? I’ll be back in time to pick William up from school so he doesn’t have to go to after-school club, and then we can have an early tea together. What do you think?”
“OK.”
“Great. So what are you going to do this morning?”
“Sort things out,” I said. “Did the police take your work iPad?”
“No.”
“Can I borrow it?”
She hesitated. “I’ve got meetings and things…”
“Just for today? You’ve got your work iPhone for emails, right?”
“I suppose.” She shrugged and took the iPad out of her briefcase.
“Thanks,” I said. I kissed William and watched them walk down the drive to her car, my son’s small high voice cutting through the crisp autumn air.
“Mummy?”
“Yes?”
“Is Daddy going to prison?” Straight up, no deceit.
“No, of course not, William.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“But if he does go to prison, do we have to go with him?”
“No, William. And Daddy’s not going to prison, so you don’t have to worry about that.”
“Jacob P. says Daddy’s a bad man.”
William climbed up into his car seat in the back of Mel’s VW Golf, and her response was lost to me as she bent to strap him in. I stood on the doorstep for a long moment, arms crossed, watching Mel’s VW pull away. Then staring at the space by the curb where her car had been. Jacob P. says Daddy’s a bad man. So the stories were spreading at William’s school as well. The old-fashioned rumor mill plus Facebook was a deadly combination.
It felt like a disadvantage to be without a cell phone at a time like this. Mel had dug out one of her old handsets from a drawer—a two-year-old iPhone, unused since she had upgraded—and lent it to me while I waited for mine to be returned by the police. I walked around the corner to High Street and paid in cash for a new SIM card from Carphone Warehouse. I put it into the iPhone before leaving the shop and felt like I was back in the twenty-first century, instead of some time traveler from the 1970s.
Sitting on a bench, I texted my new number to Mel, Larssen, Beth, and a few others, downloaded a few apps, and got the hang of the phone’s menus and navigation. I rang the number for VIP Escort Services again hoping the call would be answered this time, but it went to voice mail again. I hung up without leaving a message—again—and checked the phone’s memory. Mel said it had been wiped completely, and she was almost right—the only thing I could find were a dozen funny selfies that William had taken, stashed away in a backup file. I smiled at the blurry series of pictures of our son in his pajamas, who seemed to have snapped them without her knowing. He’d also taken three pictures of his breakfast cereal, one of a spoon, and five of his big toe. But everything else that indicated this phone had once belonged to someone else—numbers, texts, videos, music—Mel seemed to have deleted when she upgraded.
I synced my Hotmail to the new phone and found a second email from bret911.
No text, just a picture attachment. It was a photograph of a letter, just the top half. Formal letterhead addressed to Ben at his home address, from a company I had never heard of. Smith & Rivers.
Dear Mr. Delaney,
Further to our phone conversation today we are pleased to be able to represent you in the matter dis
cussed. Smith & Rivers offers the very best in professional advice and support—our terms are attached. We would seek to meet at your earliest convenience in order to establish the full details of your wife’s unreasonable behavior as grounds to proceed in this matter. With allegations as serious as you have made—
The crop of the picture cut the rest of the letter off. The subject line of this email was the same as the last one.
You next.
The date on the letter was last Monday, October 2. Nine days ago.
You next. Meaning what?
I forwarded the email to Larssen and sent a three-word message in reply to bret911.
Who are you?
According to Google, Smith & Rivers was a legal firm in Hammersmith, near Ben’s office. They specialized in family law. To establish the full details of your wife’s unreasonable behavior as grounds to proceed in this matter. So Ben was happy to destroy the reputation of his child’s mother, just to win. To get what he wanted. Scorched earth: that was the way he operated. Beth should be told what was coming down the tracks at her—it was only fair.
I texted her, asking if she could meet this afternoon.
Think. Perhaps the previous email, the one about the Blaisdale murder, had not been from Ben. Maybe it wasn’t a taunt.
You next.
Maybe it was a warning.
There was no reply from bret911, so I rang Larssen.
“It’s important that you don’t do anything else that could be construed in a negative light by the police, Joe. Do you understand?”
“Such as?”
“Such as rushing around hither and thither trying to find Ben, asking people about him, trying to solve the police’s case all on your own. You need to keep a low profile. Don’t give them any more sticks to beat you with.”
“But if we find him, then there’s no case left to solve.”
“Well, yes. I suppose.” He didn’t sound convinced.
“Have you thought any more about the email I got with that link to the court case in Lincolnshire?”
“The Blaisdale murder? That could have come from anyone who has your email address, Joe. Somebody mischief-making.”
“Today’s message wasn’t. Have you looked at your emails just now? Ben was taking legal advice from a family law firm.”
Larssen said he would take a closer look at the letter and hung up. There was a notification for me on Facebook. Another user had accepted me into his electronic circle of friends, although he’d never met me. Mark Ruddington was Mel’s school friend, who had posted the “twenty years ago” gallery of pictures of their school play. He had also been her boyfriend—one of the first, I assumed—and had posted a cryptic message in the conversation below that gallery. I wondered if he knew more about my wife than I did.
I opened up Messenger and typed a quick message to him.
* * *
Hi, Mark, nice to *meet* you. I know this sounds weird, but could you give me a call? It’s about Mel. I think you two were friends at school. Thanks—hope you can help, Joe Lynch.
* * *
I added my cell phone number and pressed Send.
He seemed to be on Facebook frequently: most recently last night, a sweaty selfie saying he’d run 6.2 miles and the name of the app he used to record time and distance. The day before that was a picture of his kids—three small boys—all wearing Superman outfits, and so it went on. Once again, I was reminded that looking at a stranger’s Facebook timeline gave a warped view of that person’s life.
I decided to ignore Larssen’s advice—showing the police Ben was alive would mean I’d get my life back too, so I texted and emailed Adam again, in case he’d seen or heard anything, or had any ideas on what else I should do. Either way, I could really do with talking to my friend again, to get his view on things. He’d been behaving strangely these last few days—almost as if he was keeping me at arm’s length.
Almost as if he was worried the contagion of my problems would infect his own marriage.
61
My car was gone, taken away by the police. The only alternative was Mel’s old moped, propped in the corner of the garage for a year or so, gathering dust since her short-lived attempt to avoid the Underground on her daily commute. It turned out that riding into central London every day had proved just too hazardous, even for my daredevil wife. I found her old helmet on a shelf and set off, taking it slowly.
Fifteen minutes later, I sat down next to Beth on a bench at Golders Hill Park, halfway between my house and hers. We watched a small boy, perhaps three or four years old, clamber up the steps of the slide and sit down at the top. He didn’t move for a moment, then shuffled forward on his bottom once, twice, three times, until gravity took him and he slid slowly to the bottom, a look of intense concentration on his face.
“I can hardly remember when Alice was that age,” Beth said, wrapped up in a cream cashmere overcoat against the October chill. “It’s all a bit of a blur when they’re young, isn’t it? Up in the morning, breakfast, school run, play, story time, bedtime. Sometimes I wish I’d stopped to appreciate her a bit more when she was small, but at the time you don’t realize it. You just think it will last forever.”
“We all do what we have to do. Alice is a good kid. You should be proud of her.”
“Oh, I am proud. More than I can put into words. I just wish sometimes I could turn the clock back to when she was little. Things seemed so much less complicated then.”
We both watched as the small boy ran around to the steps at the foot of the slide and began climbing again.
“How are you holding up, Beth?” I said.
She shrugged. “Oh, you know. Not terribly well, if I’m honest.”
She listened in silence as I told her about the lawyer’s letter, then about my close encounter with Ben at Kingsway Mall, and my previous night’s interview with the police. There was uncertainty in her eyes. Not fear—I think we were past that—but maybe she was still trying to decide whether I could be completely trusted.
“The police seem to be focusing a lot of their energies on you,” she said.
“Your husband’s got them dancing to his tune.”
“It seems impossible to think that he could carry this on for so long.”
“He’s only ever really cared about himself, though, hasn’t he?”
“That’s not true,” she said, her voice quiet. “Not always. He was very sweet when we first met, when Alice was born.”
“The last few years, though?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she looked away from me and started to cry, helpless tears rolling down her cheeks. She was utterly unguarded about it, and I thought about how far she had fallen and how fast.
“It’s going to be OK, Beth,” I said. “We’ll figure it out. Together.”
She produced a wadded tissue from her sleeve and wiped away her tears.
“It’s stupid,” she sniffed. “My spirituality has always taught me that everything turns out OK in the end, that things work their way back to a kind of equilibrium. Yin and yang. But I don’t know if that’s true anymore. I think sometimes things go wrong and they just stay wrong, and there’s nothing we can do to change it.”
“I don’t believe that, Beth.”
She gave a sad little laugh. “That’s a bit like saying you don’t believe in gravity, Joe—it doesn’t change the fact that it exists.”
“You know, we could be a team, me and you.”
“A team?”
“We need to work together to stop this. To bring Ben to his senses.”
“Makes it sound like it’s us versus him.”
“Well, Beth, I hate to be brutal about this, but that’s the way it is now.”
“Does it have to be? Can’t it just be about bringing him back? Not even back to me—I mean, it doesn’t have to be. Bringing him back so that Alice knows he’s OK, nothing more. There doesn’t have to be anything else. Just that.”
“That’s what I want too.”
>
“Ben will be so angry if he finds out.”
“We have a better chance if we work together.”
She seemed to think for a moment, searching my face. Struggling toward a decision.
“OK,” she said finally in a small voice. “But just until he comes back.”
“Deal,” I said.
We shook hands quickly, awkwardly, her soft hand in mine for just a second before she withdrew it. She seemed to hesitate again, as if mulling something over.
“If we’re a team, then you should probably know about this. It arrived today.”
She put a hand in the pocket of her overcoat and took out an envelope that had been torn open. It was addressed to Ben.
“What is it?” I said.
“Have a look. I’ve been opening all his mail, hoping I might find something. Anything.”
At first I thought it was a credit card. There was a letter with something the size of a credit card attached to it, like you get from the bank. But when I opened the envelope, it was a platinum membership card, from somewhere called the Mirage Casino.
Dear Mr. Delaney,
Thank you for your email of October 4. We are delighted to welcome you back to the exclusive membership of our Platinum Members’ Lounge at the Mirage …
“The Mirage was his favorite casino in Sunderland,” she said as I read. “He used to go there a few years ago to see his old friends from home.”
“And he emailed them to renew his membership last week.” The day before the parking lot.
The letter listed some of the exclusive benefits of platinum membership. Something about the name of the place rang a bell, but I couldn’t remember why.
Beth added, “I don’t really know why I brought it with me. It just seemed really weird—I couldn’t understand why he would have renewed his membership there with everything else that’s going on. Feels like indulging in a bit of hometown nostalgia should be bottom of his priority list at the moment.”
There was a second sheet promoting an upcoming poker game called the “Las Vegas Platinum Tournament”: the buy-in was £1,000 per player, and the minimum guaranteed first prize was £35,000. The sheet showed an attractive young blond dealer in a low-cut top, leaning over a poker table where stacked bundles of ten-pound notes were piled up. She was flanked on either side by hard-eyed bouncers in tuxedos, protecting the money.
