The Other Woman’s House

by Sophie Hannah

  Guess who’s been a complete and utter slapper? Me!

  Some gossip was so momentous that it demolished all considerations of honeymoon privacy that stood in its path; by pure chance, this was exactly such an instance. Olivia knew she would enjoy gossiping about herself as much as she enjoyed gossiping about other people. More, even. She so rarely did anything that would shock anyone. How refreshing, to be a scandal-maker at her age – to do something indescribably stupid when, in forty-one years, no one had ever feared she might.

  Could she ask Charlie not to tell Simon? Some people kept no secrets from their spouses. Would her sister become fanatical about sharing everything, now that she was married? Simon would disapprove, in the way that people who lacked life experience always disapproved of others having adventures they had so far missed out on. He would feel that in some obscure way, his and Charlie’s wedding day had been ruined, degraded, by their two witnesses ending up in bed together.

  Olivia sighed as she realised the implications. For Simon’s sake, Charlie would have to be livid and wounded. She wouldn’t see Olivia’s one-night stand with Gibbs as something that had happened to Olivia, but as something bad that had happened to her all-important husband. Perhaps she would also object on her own account, and accuse Olivia of trespassing; Gibbs was police, and therefore belonged to Charlie and Simon, and not to Olivia, who’d had no right to barge in to a world that wasn’t hers, into which she was only invited from time to time, at Charlie’s discretion.

  Had she hijacked the most important day of her sister’s life? Was it unforgivable to cast oneself as a rival leading lady without consulting anybody, when one was supposed to be playing a supporting role? Olivia couldn’t decide whether she’d done a terrible thing to Charlie, or nothing at all. She would never know, unless she told Charlie what had happened; she couldn’t work it out on her own, not without knowing what the reaction would be.

  I ought to be feeling guilty about Dom, she thought, and about Debbie Gibbs. They’re the wronged parties here.

  Gibbs was dressed. ‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘You can start thinking.’

  ‘So can you,’ said Olivia, wanting a way of attaching him to her, now that he was going. ‘Think about me, I mean.’

  ‘To the exclusion of all else,’ he said. ‘For the foreseeable future.’

  It sounded like a quote. Because it was, Olivia realised. He was quoting her.

  Sam Kombothekra wasn’t used to feeling guilty, but that was how he felt as he sat at a window table in Chompers café bar, waiting for Alice Bean. This was – or would be, assuming she turned up – an entirely unnecessary meeting, yet Sam had chosen it in preference to an afternoon at home with his family. He already knew the answers Alice would give to the questions he planned to ask her. He could have asked them over the phone, but he’d been keen to see her in the flesh, keener than he cared to admit even to himself. Few women were more legendary than Alice in the small world that was Spilling nick. Sam had heard from at least ten different sources that Simon Waterhouse had been romantically fixated on her several years ago. She’d been Alice Fancourt then.

  Sam knew that her involvement with Simon (which, according to Colin Sellers, had been ‘a shagless waste of time’) had ended badly, that the two of them no longer spoke to one another. How much of the story would Alice tell him today? On the phone this morning, she had asked within seconds of Sam introducing himself if he worked with Simon. She’d suggested Chompers as the venue for this afternoon’s meeting, saying, ‘That’s where Simon and I always met.’ Sam felt guilty about that too: not only was he abandoning his family on one of his days off, he would also very probably be stirring up painful memories for a stranger, for no more noble reason than to satisfy his unwholesome curiosity.

  He looked at his watch. She was ten minutes late. Should he ring her? No, he’d leave it until quarter past. Maybe he’d ask one of the waiters to turn down the music. Presumably it was intended to cover the noise from the corner of the room, where there was a fenced-off play area full of howling soggy-faced toddlers, a handful of mothers whose stiff smiles sizzled with repressed fury, tables and chairs in the shape of toadstools, and an assortment of unrecognisable plastic objects in primary colours. Sam didn’t blame the children for wailing; he might soon be doing the same if he had to sit through many more Def Leppard hits from the 1980s.

  He stared out of the window at the car park. Any second now, Alice would pull into one of the empty spaces. This might be her, slamming shut the boot of a red Renault Clio. Sunglasses, strappy sandals…No. Simon would never fall for a face like that. Sam wondered if Alice looked anything like Charlie. So what if she does? And so what if she doesn’t? Why did he find everything to do with Simon so compelling? He wouldn’t have put himself out to meet a woman Chris Gibbs used to be in love with, or Colin Sellers. Come to think of it, he would probably travel a reasonable distance to see the rare woman that didn’t inspire longing in Colin, assuming such a person existed.

  Ashamed of his own prurience, Sam tried to focus instead on Connie Bowskill. He soon found himself thinking about Simon Waterhouse again. Nothing wrong with that, he decided, not in this context. Simon was the best detective Sam knew; he was the best detective anyone knew, though most people were reluctant to admit it, and preferred to dismiss him as a rude, unpredictable troublemaker. On the first of January this year, at five past midnight, Sam had made a resolution: instead of constantly feeling inferior to Simon, and allowing more and more resentment to build, he would try to learn from him, to put aside his ego and see if he could acquire by imitation – by studying Simon’s behaviour and attitudes as if he might one day be examined on both – a small fraction of that brilliance.

  Simon would not have dismissed Connie Bowskill in a hurry, Sam was certain of that. Would he have believed her, though? In Sam’s position, having met Connie and heard what she had to say, would Simon be leaning more towards thinking she was suffering from stress and seeing things that weren’t there, or would he be convinced she was lying? Maybe he’d think her story’s implausibility made it likely to be true, because few people would have the confidence to tell so outrageous a lie.

  You’re not Simon – that’s the whole problem. You’ve no idea what he’d think.

  No, that wasn’t true. You couldn’t work closely with someone for years and not have an inkling as to how their mind worked. Simon would think there was at least a chance that a crime had been committed. If he’d gone with Sam to talk to the Bowskills this morning, he’d have come away certain that there was something badly wrong in that house – Melrose Cottage, not 11 Bentley Grove, Cambridge. Sam agreed, in so far as one can agree with one’s imaginary projection of an absent person. Something was going on: Connie and Kit Bowskill hadn’t told him everything, not by a long way. He’d overheard enough of the conversation he wasn’t supposed to hear to be sure that they were conspiring to hide something from him.

  The idea of somebody putting an image of a dead body on an estate agent’s website was laughable. Beyond crazy. In his mind, Sam heard Simon say, ‘Crazy doesn’t have to mean made up. Insanity’s as real as sanity. It doesn’t need our understanding in order to fuck up and end lives – it only needs to understand itself. Sometimes it doesn’t even need that.’ Immediately, Sam wished he hadn’t remembered the comment; with it came the memory of yet another instance of Simon being proved right and him wrong, despite his more sensible belief in what had seemed so much more likely.

  He sighed. As Simon’s temporary stand-in, he would do everything he could to find a dead woman that he didn’t believe in – a woman in a green and lilac dress. He’d already put in a call to Cambridge police and made it clear to them that he expected them to take action, once they’d stopped laughing.

  ‘Sam?’

  He looked up and saw a woman with cropped peroxide blonde hair, maroon plastic-framed glasses and shiny London-bus-red lipstick. She was wearing a long pink sleeveless dress and flat gold sandals, carrying a
bag with holes in it that looked as if it was made from lots of offcuts of rope knotted together; the holes were a design feature, not the result of wear and tear, and enabled Sam to see some of the bag’s contents: a red wallet, an envelope, some keys.

  ‘Alice Bean.’ She smiled and held out her hand. ‘You have no idea how weird this is for me. I haven’t set foot in this place for nearly seven years. If I have a funny turn, you’ll know why.’

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’ Sam asked, shaking her hand.

  ‘Lime cordial and lemonade would be lovely. Lots of ice. I know it’s a kid’s drink, but in this heat, nothing else will do. I must have sweated at least a pint in the car on the way here.’

  Sam watched her out of the corner of his eye as he queued at the bar. She was undeniably pretty, but the hair had surprised him – its shortness and its colour. And the maroon glasses, and the lipstick most of all. He wouldn’t have thought Simon would…But that was assuming she’d looked the same seven years ago, and that Simon’s taste in women would be easy to predict. Why should it be, when nothing else about him was? He’d proposed marriage to Charlie when she wasn’t even his girlfriend.

  ‘So Connie gave you my number?’ Alice said as Sam put her drink down on the table in front of her.

  ‘She didn’t. I didn’t ask her for it. I looked you up in the Yellow Pages, under “Alternative Health – Homeopaths”. There were no Alice Fancourts, but I figured Alice Bean might work, and it did.’

  ‘Bean’s my maiden name. I haven’t been Fancourt for years.’

  ‘Do you normally work Saturdays?’

  ‘No. I wasn’t working today. I popped into the centre to pick up a remedy for my daughter, Florence, who’s got a tummy bug. You were lucky to catch me. And I hope you don’t catch the bug, but you might, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. I had it before Florence and everyone at work had it before me. It’s a spreader, that’s for sure. Passes out of your system quickly, though, on the plus side. Twenty-four hours of vomiting and diarrhoea and then it moves on to the next poor sucker.’

  Great. Something to look forward to.

  ‘I won’t keep you long,’ Sam told her. ‘If your daughter’s ill.’

  ‘She’ll be fine. She’s with my friend Briony, who’s like a second mum to her. Keep me as long as you like. I promise not to make it hard for you by asking awkward questions.’

  Sam tried not to look surprised. Wasn’t he supposed to be the one with the questions? ‘Like what?’ he said.

  ‘About Simon. He wouldn’t want you to talk about him to me – I know he wouldn’t.’ Alice reached into her bag, pulled out the envelope Sam had seen through the holes, and held it out for him to take. He saw Simon’s name on the front in blue handwriting, underlined. ‘Could you give him this?’

  Sam was aware of not wanting to take it from her, but couldn’t think why at first. Then his brain caught up with his gut. No thanks. Whatever the drama was, he didn’t want even a minor role. His hands stayed where they were, wrapped round his coffee mug. Eventually Alice put the envelope back in her bag, and he felt petty and self-important, knowing that he’d turned the focus from her and Simon to himself and his scruples; he wished he’d taken the damn thing. Ought he to tell her Simon got married yesterday, that he was on his honeymoon? Did it make it worse that it had happened only yesterday? Sam didn’t think it should make a difference, but felt that it did, somehow.

  He opened his mouth to try and explain why he didn’t think it was a good idea for him to act as go-between, but Alice talked over him, smiling to show she wasn’t offended. ‘What did you want to ask me about Connie? Is she okay?’

  ‘When did you last speak to her?’

  ‘I see her once a fortnight. The last time was…Hang on, I can tell you exactly.’ She pulled a small pink diary out of her miniature fisherman’s net. ‘Last Monday, four o’clock.’

  ‘As in the one just gone? Monday 12 July?’

  Alice nodded.

  ‘Since then, have you spoken to her on the phone? Emailed or texted her?’

  ‘No. Nothing.’

  ‘And she didn’t ring you in the early hours of this morning?’

  Alice looked worried. She leaned forward. ‘No. Why? Has something happened?’

  ‘She’s fine, as far as I can tell,’ said Sam. He wasn’t prepared to say more than that.

  ‘Why the early hours of this morning?’ Alice persisted. ‘Why did you ask that?’

  Because that was when a dead woman appeared on her computer screen, and then disappeared. And she told me you’d recommended she contact Simon Waterhouse, who would believe the unbelievable, if it were true. Except that you couldn’t have recommended him at two this morning, because Alice didn’t ring you then. She hasn’t spoken to you since seeing the woman’s body. Unless she lied about when she saw it.

  ‘Did you advise Connie to speak to Simon?’ Sam asked.

  ‘I can’t really discuss what I say to my patients or what they say to me. Sorry.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to tell me anything Connie hasn’t told me herself. She said you recommended Simon as being unlike any other detective, willing to believe what most people would find implausible.’

  Alice nodded. ‘That’s right. That’s what I said, almost word for word.’

  ‘Would I be right in thinking, then – and I’m not asking for details – that Connie was in some kind of…situation, or had a problem, and was worried that no one would believe her?’

  ‘I really can’t go into the specifics, but…Connie came to see me initially because she’d had a shock – she didn’t want to believe that something was the case, and yet she feared it was.’

  ‘When was this?’ Sam asked.

  ‘January, so…six months ago.’

  ‘And you told her to go to Simon? Was there a criminal angle, then?’

  Alice frowned as she considered it. ‘There was no evidence of anything illegal, but…Connie thought there might have been a crime involved, yes. But at the same time, she feared she was mad for thinking it.’

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘I honestly had no idea. All I knew was that being psychologically and emotionally split in two was doing her no good whatsoever. I thought that if she spoke to Simon, he could find out for her one way or the other.’

  ‘Whether a crime had been committed?’

  Alice smiled. ‘I realise there’s no great master list headed “All the crimes that have been committed ever”, but this particular crime would have been documented. Simon could have tracked down the evidence of it in a way that Connie couldn’t.’

  ‘Do you remember when you first mentioned his name to her?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Oh, not straight away. About a month ago, six weeks maybe. I tried to help her myself first, obviously, as I do with all my patients, but nothing I said or did seemed to work with Connie. If anything, she started to feel worse as time went on. That was when I realised she might need more than Anacardium or Medorrhinum. Sorry, they’re homeopathic remedies – I forget sometimes that not everyone’s as familiar with them as I am.’

  ‘Did Connie take your advice?’ Sam asked. ‘Did she share her problem with Simon?’ Was that why he took two days off a couple of weeks ago? He’d mumbled something vague about ‘wedding preparations’, not making eye-contact. At the time, Sam had put it down to embarrassment; Simon was undoubtedly, if inexplicably, mortified to be in a relationship, and avoided referring to his attached status.

  Alice looked apologetic. ‘Ask Connie,’ she said. ‘I’m sure she’ll tell you the whole story, if you’re willing to listen sympathetically.’

  ‘Did her unlikely-sounding and possibly criminal problem involve a virtual tour of a house on a property website?’ Sam asked. Alice’s facial expression was the only answer he needed: she didn’t know what he was talking about.

  So Connie Bowskill had two impossible-to-believe problems, one since January and one since thirteen hours ago. Interesting.

  Imp
ossible to believe.

  ‘Did you advise Connie to talk to Simon because you genuinely believed she needed police help, or because you hoped he would contact you to ask about her?’ As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Sam knew he’d overstepped the mark. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, holding up his hands. ‘That’s a question I have no right to ask. Ignore it.’

  ‘Why, when it’s one I can answer freely?’ said Alice. ‘I genuinely believed Simon ought to hear about Connie’s problem, because…well, because it was so odd, so unusual. It was either something truly horrible or nothing at all. I…’ She stopped, stared down at the table. Sam was starting to wonder if he ought to prompt her when she said, ‘I’ve only just this second realised it, but I told her to speak to Simon because that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to talk to him about it. He and I haven’t spoken since 2003, and – this, Connie’s…issue that she had, made me want to be in touch with him again more than anything else ever has. It made me miss him, though I never really knew him in the first place. Oh, it’s crazy! The funny thing is, I’ve always known absolutely for sure that one day he’d reappear in my life. And when you rang this morning…’ She shook her head, looking past Sam out of the window.

  He could guess what was coming next. When he’d rung this morning and asked her to meet him, she’d given her sick daughter to a friend and devoted the next two hours to writing the letter she’d wanted to write for the last seven years, the one Sam had refused to deliver.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry about—’

  ‘Don’t be,’ said Alice. ‘I shouldn’t have tried to turn you into the very-likely-to-get-shot messenger. It was unethical. And unnecessary – I don’t need you. I know where Simon works – I could post the letter to him. I won’t, though.’ She nodded, as if to formalise the decision. ‘I’m a firm believer in fate, and today fate’s made it clear to me that now’s not the right time. I bet you’re not used to thinking of yourself as an agent of fate, are you?’ She grinned.