The Other Woman’s House

by Sophie Hannah

  Fuck. Talk about ending the day on a high note.

  ‘Look, I didn’t mean…’

  ‘It’s okay. I probably deserved it,’ said Olivia briskly. ‘Typical – the man who doesn’t speak manages to say one thing, and it turns out to be something horrible about me that I’m going to have to carry around with me and feel rubbish about for at least the next year.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it in a bad way,’ said Gibbs. ‘It was just an observation.’

  ‘You want to know where Simon and Charlie are? Fine. I can do better than tell you – I can show you a picture of their villa.’ Olivia pulled her mobile phone out of her handbag and started to press buttons. Was she expecting Gibbs to say, ‘No, forget it, it doesn’t matter’? If so, she’d be disappointed. If he’d wanted to know before, why should that have changed now, just because she was upset and angry with him?

  After a few seconds of finger-jabbing, Olivia thrust her phone in front of his face. ‘There you go. Los Delfines – the honeymoon villa.’

  Gibbs looked at a small photograph of a long, white two-storey building that might have been designed to accommodate twenty people. There were balconies at most of the windows. Landscaped gardens, an outdoor bar and barbecue area, a swimming pool that looked big enough for an Olympic contest, all glowing in bright sunlight.

  ‘Spain?’ Gibbs guessed.

  ‘Puerto Banus. Near Marbella.’

  ‘All that for just the two of them? Not bad.’

  ‘Insurance against unhappiness,’ said Olivia. She still sounded annoyed. ‘Fifteen grand’s worth. No one could possibly be unhappy in a place like that, right?’

  ‘Why would they be unhappy? They’re on their honeymoon.’

  Gibbs didn’t think she was going to answer. Then she said, ‘For years, Charlie’s mobilising grievance has been not having Simon, in any and every sense. Now that they’re married, she’s got him. Sometimes, when you get something, you stop wanting it.’

  ‘Sometimes you stop wanting it before you get it,’ said Gibbs.

  ‘Do you? I don’t.’

  ‘My wife Debbie’s – what did you call it? – mobilising grievance is not being able to have a baby. I’ve stopped wanting one.’

  ‘Has she?’ Olivia asked.

  ‘No.’ If only.

  ‘There you go, then. And you probably didn’t want one all that much in the first place.’

  ‘Come upstairs with me,’ Gibbs said.

  ‘Upstairs?’

  ‘To my room. Or yours.’

  ‘Why?’ Olivia asked.

  ‘Why do you think?’ What are you playing at, dickhead? Don’t you know a bad idea when you have one?

  ‘Why?’ she asked again.

  ‘I could say, “Because for once, just for a change, I’d like to have sex with someone who isn’t obsessed with getting pregnant.” Or I could say, “Because I’m drunk and horny”, or “Today’s a special occasion and tomorrow it’ll be back to normal life for both of us.” How about, “Because you’re the most beautiful, sexy woman I’ve ever met”? Risky – you might not believe me.’

  Olivia frowned. ‘Ideally, you ought to be going through your answer options in silence, in the privacy of your own head. Not out loud to me.’

  In the privacy of your own head. It was because of the things she said. Not that he’d ever tell her that.

  He took her glass from her hand and put it down on the table. ‘Say yes,’ he said. ‘It’s easy.’

  3

  Saturday 17 July 2010

  ‘Why did you want to speak to Simon Waterhouse?’ the detective called Sam asks. His surname is something long and unusual beginning with a K – he spelled it for me when he introduced himself. I didn’t take it in, and didn’t feel I could ask again. He’s tall, good-looking, with black hair and a dark complexion. He’s wearing a black suit and a white shirt with thin lilac stitched stripes, like perforated lines. No tie. I can’t stop looking at his Adam’s apple. It looks sharp enough to break skin. I imagine it slicing through his neck, an arc of blood spurting out. I shake my head to banish the morbid fantasy.

  Does he want me to tell him again? ‘I saw a woman lying face down—’

  ‘You misunderstand me,’ he interrupts, smiling to show that he doesn’t mean to be rude. ‘I meant why Simon Waterhouse in particular?’

  Kit is in the kitchen making tea for us all. I’m glad. I’d find it harder to answer the question with him listening. If I didn’t feel so horrible, this might be funny, like a weird sort of pantomime: The Policeman Who Came to Tea. It’s only half past eight; we ought to be offering him breakfast. It’s good of him to come so early. Maybe Kit will bring some croissants in with the drinks. If he doesn’t, I won’t offer. I can’t think about anything apart from the dead woman. Who is she? Does anybody know or care that she’s been murdered, apart from me?

  ‘I’ve been seeing a homeopath for the past six months. I’ve got a couple of minor health problems, nothing serious.’ Was there any need to tell him that? I stop short of adding that the problems relate to my emotional health, and that my homeopath is also a counsellor. My desire to evade the truth makes me angry – with myself, Kit, Sam K, everyone. There’s nothing shameful about needing to talk to somebody.

  Then why are you ashamed?

  ‘Alice – that’s my homeopath – she suggested I talk to Simon Waterhouse. She said…’ Don’t say it. You’ll prejudice him against you.

  ‘Go on.’ Sam K is doing his very best to look kind and unthreatening.

  I decide to reward his efforts with an honest answer. ‘She said he was like no other policeman. She said he’d believe the unbelievable, if it was true. And it is true. I saw a dead woman in that room. I don’t know why it…why she wasn’t there any more by the time Kit went and looked. I can’t explain it, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an explanation. There must be one.’

  Sam K nods. His face is unreadable. Maybe he makes a point of encouraging mad people. If he thinks I’m mad, I wish he’d say it straight out: You’re a nutter, Mrs Bowskill. I told him to call me Connie, but I don’t think he wants to. Since I said it, he hasn’t called me anything.

  ‘Where is Simon?’ I ask. When I rang his mobile last night, his recorded voice told me that he was unavailable – not for how long, or why – and gave a number to ring in an emergency: Sam K’s number, as it turned out.

  ‘He’s on his honeymoon.’

  ‘Oh.’ He didn’t tell me he was getting married. No reason why he would, I suppose. ‘When will he be back?’

  ‘He’s gone for a fortnight.’

  ‘I’m sorry I rang you at 2 a.m.,’ I say. ‘I should have waited till the morning, but…Kit had gone back to sleep, and I couldn’t just do nothing. I had to tell someone what I’d seen.’

  A fortnight. Of course – that’s how long honeymoons are. Mine and Kit’s was even longer: three weeks in Sri Lanka. I remember Mum asking if the third week was ‘strictly necessary’. Kit told her politely but firmly that it was. He’d made all the arrangements and didn’t appreciate her picking holes in the plan. The hotels he chose were so beautiful, I could hardly believe they were real and not something out of a dream. We stayed a week in each. Kit dubbed the last one ‘the Strictly Necessary Hotel’.

  Simon Waterhouse is entitled to his honeymoon, just as Kit is entitled to his sleep. Just as Sam K is entitled to deal with my concerns quickly and early, so that he can enjoy the rest of his Saturday. It can’t be the case that everyone I come into contact with lets me down; it must be something I’m doing wrong.

  ‘He didn’t mention your name in his voicemail message – only the phone number,’ I say. ‘I thought it might be some kind of out-of-hours service, like doctors have.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. Really. It made a nice change to get an emergency call that wasn’t from Simon’s mother.’

  ‘Is she all right?’ I ask. I sense it’s expected of me.

  ‘That depends on your point of view.’ Sam K smil
es. ‘She’s phoned me twice since Simon set off yesterday, crying and saying she needs to speak to him. He warned her that he and Charlie weren’t going to be taking their mobiles, but I don’t think she believed him. And now she doesn’t believe me when I say I don’t know where he is, which I don’t.’

  I wonder if the Charlie sharing Simon Waterhouse’s honeymoon is a man or a woman. Not that it makes any difference to anything.

  Kit comes in with the tea things and a plate of chocolate biscuits on a wooden tray. ‘Help yourself,’ he says to Sam K. ‘Where are we up to?’ He wants progress, solutions. He wants to hear that this expert has cured his wife of her lunacy during the ten minutes that he was in the kitchen.

  Sam K straightens up. ‘I was waiting for you, and then I was going to explain…’ He turns from Kit to me. ‘I’m happy to help as much as I can, and I can put you in touch with the right person if you decide to take this further, but…it’s not something I can deal with directly. Simon Waterhouse couldn’t deal with it either, even if he wasn’t on his honeymoon, and even if…’ He runs out of words, bites his lip.

  Even if it weren’t the most far-fetched story I’ve ever heard, and bound to be a load of rubbish. That’s what he stopped himself from saying.

  ‘If there’s a woman lying injured or dead in a house in Cambridge, then it’s Cambridgeshire Police you need to speak to,’ he says.

  ‘She wasn’t injured,’ I tell him. ‘She was dead. That amount of blood can’t come out of a person and them not be dead. And I’m willing to speak to whoever I need to – tell me a name and where I can find them, and I will.’

  Did Kit sigh, or did I imagine it?

  ‘All right.’ Having poured himself a cup of tea, Sam K gets out a notebook and a pen. ‘Why don’t we go over a few details? The house in question is 11 Bentley Grove, correct?’

  ‘11 Bentley Grove, Cambridge. CB2 9AW.’ You see, Kit? I even know the postcode by heart.

  ‘Tell me exactly what happened, Connie. In your own words.’

  Who else’s am I likely to use? ‘I was looking on a property website, Roundthehouses.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘Late. Quarter past one.’

  ‘Do you mind if I ask why so late?’

  ‘Sometimes I have difficulty sleeping.’

  A sneer contorts Kit’s face for a second; only I notice its fleeting presence. He’s thinking that, if it’s true, it’s my own fault for giving in to my paranoia: I’ve chosen to torment myself with imaginary problems. He is sane and normal, therefore he sleeps well.

  How can I know him well enough to read his thoughts, and, at the same time, fear that I don’t know him at all? If I looked at an X-ray of his personality, would I see only the bits I know are there – his conviction that tea tastes better from a teapot and if you put the milk into the cup first, his ambition and perfectionism, his surreal sense of humour – or would there be an unfamiliar black mass at the centre, malignant and terrifying?

  ‘Why a property website, and why Cambridge?’ Sam K asks me. ‘Are you thinking of moving there?’

  ‘Definitely not,’ says Kit with feeling. ‘We’ve only just put the finishing touches to this place, six years after buying it. I want to spend at least that long enjoying it. I’ve told Connie: if we have a baby in the next six years, it’ll have to bed down in a filing cabinet drawer.’ He grins and reaches for a biscuit. ‘I didn’t do all that work only to sell up and let someone else get the benefit. Plus we run a business that’s based here, and Connie got a bit carried away with the headed stationery, so we can’t move until we’ve written at least another four thousand letters.’

  I know what’s going to happen before it happens: Sam K is going to ask about Nulli. Kit will answer at length; it’s impossible to explain our work quickly, and my husband is nothing if not a lover of detail. I will have to wait to talk about the dead woman.

  Connie got a bit carried away.

  Did he say that deliberately, to plant the idea in Sam K’s mind that I’m an easily-carried-away sort of person? Someone who orders six times more headed notepaper than she needs might also hallucinate a dead body lying in a pool of blood.

  I listen as Kit describes our work. For the past three years, Nulli’s twenty-odd full-time staff have been working for the London Allied Capital banking group. The US government is in the process of prosecuting the group, which, like many UK banks, has a long history of breaking American rules about dealing with sponsors of terrorism, and unwittingly allowing blacklisted people and companies to carry out wire-transfer transactions in the US in dollars. London Allied Capital is currently bending over backwards to right the wrong, ingratiate itself with OFAC, the American office of foreign asset control, and minimise the eventual damage, which will almost certainly be a multi-million-dollar fine. Nulli was taken on to build data-filtering systems that will enable the bank to unearth all the questionable transactions that lie hidden in its history, so that it can come clean to the US Department of Justice.

  Like everyone Kit tells, Sam K looks impressed and confused in equal parts. ‘So do you have a base in London, then?’ he asks. ‘Or do you commute?’

  ‘Connie’s based here, I’m half and half,’ says Kit. ‘I rent a flat in Limehouse – a box with a bed in it, basically. As far as I’m concerned, I only have one home, and that’s Melrose Cottage.’ He glances at me as he says this. Does he expect a round of applause?

  ‘I can see that a small flat in London would have a job competing with this place.’ Sam K looks around our lounge. ‘It’s got bags of character.’ He turns to study the framed print on the wall behind him – a photograph of King’s College Chapel, with a laughing girl sitting on the steps. Does he know he’s looking at a picture of Cambridge? If he does, he says nothing.

  The print was a present from Kit and I’ve always hated it. On the mount, at the bottom, someone has written ‘4/100’. ‘That’s not a very good mark,’ I said when Kit first gave it to me. ‘Four per cent.’

  He laughed. ‘It’s the fourth in a run of a hundred prints, you fool. There are only a hundred of these in the world. Isn’t it beautiful?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like mass-produced things,’ I said, determinedly ungrateful.

  He was hurt. ‘The handwritten “4/100” makes it unique. That’s why prints are numbered.’ He sighed. ‘You don’t like it, do you?’

  I realised how selfish I was being and pretended that I did.

  ‘My wife calls houses like this “camera-ready”,’ Sam K says. ‘The minute I stepped over your threshold, I felt inferior.’

  ‘You should see the insides of our cars,’ Kit tells him. ‘Or rather, our two dustbin-spillover areas on wheels. I’ve thought about leaving them on the pavement next to the wheelie bin on collection day, doors open – maybe the council’d take pity on us.’

  I stand up. Blood rushes to my head and the room tilts, blurs. I feel as if the different parts of my body are detaching from one another, breaking off and floating away. My head fills with a woolly throbbing. This keeps happening. My GP has no idea what the cause might be. I’ve had blood tests, scans, everything. Alice, my homeopath, thinks it’s a physical manifestation of emotional distress.

  It takes a few seconds for the dizziness to pass. ‘You might as well go,’ I say to Sam K, as soon as I’m able to speak. ‘You obviously don’t believe me, so why should we both waste our time?’

  He looks at me thoughtfully. ‘What makes you think I don’t believe you?’

  ‘I might be delusional but I’m not stupid,’ I snap at him. ‘You’re sitting there eating biscuits, chatting about wheelie bins and interior décor…’

  ‘It helps me to find out a little about you and Kit.’ He’s unruffled by my outburst. ‘I want to know who you are as well as what you saw.’

  The holistic approach. Alice would be on his side.

  ‘I saw nothing.’ Kit shrugs.

  ‘That’s not true,’ I tell him. ‘You didn’t see no
thing – you saw a lounge with no woman’s body in it. That’s not nothing.’

  ‘Why a property website, Connie?’ Sam K asks again. ‘Why Cambridge?’

  ‘A few years ago we thought about moving there,’ I say, unable to look him in the eye. ‘We decided not to, but…sometimes I still think about it, and…I don’t know, it was a spur of the moment thing – there was no particular reason behind it. I look up all sorts of strange things on the internet when I’m restless and can’t sleep.’

  ‘So, last night, you logged onto Roundthehouses and…what? Talk me through it, step by step.’

  ‘I searched for properties for sale in Cambridge, saw 11 Bentley Grove, called up the details…’

  ‘Did you look at any other houses?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? What made you pick 11 Bentley Grove?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was third on the list that came up. I liked the look of it, so I clicked on it.’ I sit down again. ‘First I looked at the photographs of the rooms, and then I saw there was a virtual tour, so I thought I might as well have a look at that too.’

  Kit reaches over and squeezes my hand.

  ‘How much was it on for?’ Sam K asks.

  Why does he want to know that? ‘1.2 million.’

  ‘Would that be affordable for you?’

  ‘No. Not even close,’ I say.

  ‘So you have no plans to move to Cambridge, and 11 Bentley Grove would be out of reach price-wise, but you were still interested enough to take the virtual tour, even after you’d looked at the photographs?’

  ‘You must know what it’s like.’ I try not to sound defensive. ‘You find yourself clicking on one thing after another. Not for any good reason, just…’

  ‘She was wilfing,’ Kit tells Sam K. ‘Wilf as in “What was I Looking For?” – aimless web-surfing. I do it all the time, when I should be working.’ He’s covering for me. Does he expect me to be grateful for his support? It’s his fault that I’ve had to make up a story. I’m not the liar here.

  ‘All right,’ says Sam K. ‘So you took the virtual tour of 11 Bentley Grove.’