The Other Woman’s House

by Sophie Hannah

  Fran and Anton live in a cottage called Thatchers that’s smaller than my house, and closer to my parents – almost directly opposite Thorrold House, across the green. Like Melrose Cottage, Thatchers is a two-up two-down, but the kitchen is no more than a tiny strip at one end of the lounge, and the bedrooms are in the thatched roof and therefore triangular, difficult to stand up in. As it happens, Anton and Fran suffer hardly at all from a lack of space – effectively, they have lived with Mum and Dad since Benji was born. Thatchers, which they persist in referring to as ‘home’, is empty almost all the time.

  Why does nobody ever point out how crazy it is to have an empty house just standing there? Crazier than looking at houses in Cambridge on the internet. Crazier than considering moving to one of England’s most beautiful, vibrant cities instead of spending the rest of your life in Little Holling, Silsford, with its one pub and its population of fewer than a thousand people.

  ‘Ignore Connie, Anton,’ Mum says. ‘She’s clearly taken leave of her senses.’

  ‘She can make it up to me.’ Anton winks at me. ‘Extra babysitting, Con, yeah?’

  I try to smile, though the prospect of any more babysitting makes me swell with resentment. I already babysit for Benji every Tuesday night. In my family, if something happens once and goes well, it’s only a matter of time before someone suggests that it ought to become a tradition.

  ‘One choccie finger, two choccie fingers, three choccie fingers!’ Fran is hamming up her dealings with Benji now, to demonstrate her support for Anton and his silly voices. She’s on his side, Dad and Mum are on each other’s, and nobody’s on mine. Suits me fine; anything that makes me feel less like one of the Little Holling Monks has to be a good thing.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my senses,’ I tell Mum. ‘I know what I saw. I saw a dead woman in that room, lying in a pool of her own blood. The detective I spoke to this morning is taking it seriously. If you don’t want to, that’s up to you.’

  ‘Oh, Connie, listen to yourself!’ Mum says sorrowfully.

  ‘Don’t waste your breath, Val,’ Dad mutters. ‘When does she ever pay attention to what we say?’ He lifts his right arm and studies the table beneath as if he expects to find something there. ‘What happened to that cuppa you were making?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but it makes no sense, love,’ Mum says to me in a hushed voice as she refills the kettle, shooting guilty glances in Dad’s direction, hoping he won’t notice her continued willingness to engage with the daughter he just dismissed as not worth bothering with. ‘I mean, you only have to think about it for two seconds to realise it’s a non-starter, don’t you? Why would anyone put a murdered woman’s body on a property website? A murderer wouldn’t do it, would he, because he’d want to hide what he’d done. An estate agent wouldn’t do it because he’d want to sell the house, and no one’s going to buy a—’

  ‘Except my eldest daughter,’ Dad announces loudly. ‘Not only my daughter – also my book-keeper, which is even more worrying. Oh, she’s more than happy to mortgage herself into penury to buy the gruesome death house for 1.2 million pounds!’ I don’t know why he’s glaring at Benji as he says this, as if it’s his fault.

  ‘Dad, I don’t want to buy 11 Bentley Grove. I can’t afford to buy it. You’re not listening to me.’ As usual. What did he mean by the book-keeper comment? That he’s afraid I might steal from Monk & Sons? That my profligate tendencies are likely to bankrupt the family business? I’ve never done anything but a brilliant job for him, and it counts for nothing. I needn’t have bothered.

  And now I’m thinking like a martyr. Don’t they say all women turn into their mothers?

  Tell them all you’re leaving Monk & Sons. Resigning. Work full-time for Nulli – that’s what you want to do, isn’t it? What is it about these people that makes it impossible to say what you mean and do what you want?

  ‘You’re contradicting yourself,’ I say to Dad. ‘If I imagined the body, then it’s not a gruesome death house, is it?’

  ‘So you do want to buy it. I knew it!’ He thumps his fist down on the table, making it rock.

  ‘The vendor wouldn’t do it,’ Mum burbles to herself, wrapping her burned hand in a piece of kitchen roll while she waits for the kettle to boil. ‘Presumably he or she wants the house to sell as much as the estate agent does.’

  ‘Please stop cataloguing everyone who wouldn’t put a dead body up on a website, Mum,’ Fran groans. ‘You’ve made your point: no one would do it.’

  ‘Well, if no one would do it, Connie can’t have seen it, can she?’ Mum nods triumphantly at me, as if that ought to be the end of the matter.

  Why do my family always make me feel like this? Whenever I talk to them for any length of time, I end up wriggling in discomfort, desperately searching for a pocket of air as the oxygen is slowly squeezed from the conversation.

  I can’t bear to be around them any longer. Nor can I stand the thought of going home to Kit, who will ask me how it went, and laugh as though at a sitcom when I bring it to life for him, as he will expect me to, as if I am a comedian and my family entertaining and harmless, joke-fodder. There’s only one person I want to talk to at the moment, and although it’s a Saturday, it’s also an emergency.

  Is it? Are you sure?

  When was I last sure of anything?

  I pull my mobile phone out of my bag and leave the room. Mum shouts after me, ‘You don’t have to go into another room. We won’t listen.’

  ‘And the ridiculous thing was, I nearly didn’t do it. I found myself thinking, “But it’s not a real emergency – you’re not bleeding to death, or hanging from a cliff by your fingernails. Save your permission to ring in an emergency for a life-or-death situation, don’t squander it on this.’ But why not? I mean, it is a life-and-death situation: the woman I saw had been murdered – she must have been. And why did I decide it was a once-only thing and that after I’d used up my ringing-in-an-emergency allowance, it would be gone for ever? Would you be angry if I rang you outside working hours in a few months, or even years, if I was unlucky enough to feel as bad as this again?’

  ‘Are you noticing the words you’re choosing?’ Alice asks. ‘“Saving”, “squandering”?’

  No, I didn’t notice. Admitting as much would be too depressing, so I say nothing. When I first started to see Alice, the long silences unsettled me. Now I’m used to them. I’ve grown to like them. Sometimes I count how long they last: one elephant, two elephants, three elephants. Sometimes I go into a kind of trance, staring at the clear glass beads that run along the bottom of the cream silk blind, or at the pink butterflies chandelier.

  ‘Why did you tell your family about seeing the woman and the blood?’ Alice says eventually.

  ‘Kit asked me the same thing. “Why tell them?” he said. “They’ll give you a hard time and make you feel a hundred times worse.” I knew he was right, but I still went round and put myself in the firing line.’

  ‘You often describe your parents as suffocating.’ Alice remembers every word I have uttered in her presence since we first met, without the help of notes. Maybe the pink butterflies are hiding some kind of recording device. ‘Why did you go round to be suffocated, on no sleep and after the worst shock of your life?’

  ‘I had to tell them. A detective came to interview me. It was…too big to keep from them, too important. I can’t be involved with the police and hide it from my family.’

  ‘Can’t?’

  No secrets between people who love each other. I’ve had it drummed into me all my life. I’m not sure it’s possible to explain that sort of programming to someone who hasn’t experienced it.

  ‘Yet you’ve kept quiet about the other big, important thing in your life at the moment,’ says Alice. ‘The problem that’s been preoccupying you since January.’

  I laugh, though I feel like crying. ‘It’s not the same. That might be nothing. It probably is.’

  ‘The dead woman you saw might be nothing, if you imagined h
er.’

  ‘I didn’t. I know I didn’t.’

  Alice takes off her glasses, drops them in her lap. ‘You didn’t imagine what happened in January, either,’ she says. ‘You don’t know what it means, but you didn’t imagine it.’

  ‘I can’t tell Mum and Dad that I’m afraid Kit might have a whole other life that I don’t know about,’ I say, loathing the sound of the words. ‘It’s just not an option. You don’t understand. I might have changed my surname, but I’m still a Monk. Everything in the Monk family is nice and normal and happy. That’s not a coincidence, it’s a rule. There are no problems, ever, apart from Benji not eating his sodding broccoli – that’s the worst thing that’s allowed to happen. It’s out of the question, absolutely forbidden, for there to be anything weird going on – really bad weird, I mean. Weird funny is okay, as long as it makes a good anecdote.’

  I wipe my face, try to compose myself. ‘The only thing worse than bad-weird is uncertain. My parents don’t accept ambiguity of any kind – literally, as soon as it dares to make an appearance, they show it the door in no uncertain terms. And, yes, I said that deliberately. Everything Mum and Dad do, they do in no uncertain terms. Uncertainty is the enemy. One of the enemies,’ I correct myself. ‘Change is the other. And sponta-neity, and risk; there’s a whole gang of them.’

  ‘No wonder your parents are scared,’ says Alice. ‘You said it yourself: they’re being persecuted by a gang.’

  Is she going to give me the same remedy she gave me last time? Kali Phos, it was called. For people who have an aversion to their own relatives. Kit threatened to steal the bottle for himself when I told him that.

  ‘Kit’s so unhappy,’ I tell Alice. ‘I’ve made him unhappy. He can’t understand why I don’t believe him. Neither can I. Why can’t I accept that strange things happen sometimes, and put it behind me? I know Kit loves me, I know he’s desperate for things to go back to normal. I’m all he’s got, and…I love him. It’ll sound crazy, but I love him more than ever – I feel outraged on his behalf.’

  ‘Because he’s probably innocent, and his own wife doesn’t believe in him?’ Alice guesses.

  I nod. ‘How can I tell Mum and Dad, and Fran, and make them suspect him too, when there’s no way to end that suspicion, ever? Haven’t I made him miserable enough already?’

  ‘So it’s for Kit’s sake that you’re keeping it from your family?’

  ‘His and theirs. Mum and Dad couldn’t live with it – I know they couldn’t. They’d try not to allow me to live with it. They’d hire a private detective…No, that would mean admitting they were mixed up in something unsavoury, if they did that. I know what they’d do.’ It feels like a revelation, though on one level I know I’m making it up. ‘They’d put pressure on me to leave him and move back to Thorrold House. Just in case. They’d say, “If you’re not a hundred per cent sure he’s trustworthy, you can’t stay with him.”’

  ‘Is that such a stupid thing to say?’

  ‘Yes. I’d rather have the rest of my life ruined by suspicions that achieve nothing than leave a man I love who’s very probably done nothing wrong.’

  Alice puts her glasses back on and leans forward. Her leather swivel chair creaks. ‘Explain something to me,’ she says. ‘You say there’s no way for the suspicion to end, ever, but in the next breath you mention the possibility of hiring a private detective. You might not want to do that, and I’d understand if you didn’t, but wouldn’t that be one way to find out for sure if Kit’s lying?’

  ‘Are you saying you think I should hire a detective?’ If she says yes, I’m never coming back here. ‘Wouldn’t it be dangerous for someone as paranoid as me to imagine that I can pay for certainty whenever I need it? Wouldn’t I be better off trying to cultivate trust? What if the detective followed Kit for a month and found nothing? Would I finally accept that nothing’s going on, or would I worry that the detective had been slapdash and missed something?’

  Alice smiles. ‘And yet only this morning, you told a detective all about seeing a dead woman on the internet. He might be slapdash – he might miss something.’

  ‘Then I’ll go to Cambridge and find a conscientious detective, and make him listen to me,’ I say fiercely.

  ‘Because you want to find out the truth.’

  ‘It’s not about me, it’s about the woman I saw, whoever she is. Someone murdered her. I can’t just—’

  ‘You want to find out the truth,’ Alice says again.

  ‘All right, then, yes! I saw a dead woman on the floor in that house. Wouldn’t you want the truth, in my position?’

  ‘Connie, can I speak frankly? When it comes to the dead woman, your truth-seeking energy is really strong. I can feel it – it’s tangible in this room. Normally, that would help to attract the truth to you. When we focus on something we want with all our energy, believe we’re going to get it one day and pursue it with great determination, resolved that we will never give up, usually what we’re seeking comes to us – it’s just a matter of how long it takes to reach us. In your case, there’s a complication: in another area of your life, you’re terrified of finding out the truth, and you’re transmitting an equally strong truth-repelling energy.’ She folds her arms, waits for my reaction.

  ‘Kit, you mean? That’s not fair. You know how hard I’ve tried.’

  ‘You haven’t,’ says Alice gently. ‘You’re lying to yourself if you think you have.’

  I must be quite exceptionally convincing, in that case. ‘What, so you’re saying that the contradictory energies are getting mixed up and sending out a muddled signal? That my fear of finding out the truth about Kit is repelling all truth?’

  Alice says nothing.

  ‘So, whoever’s in charge of all this energy and attraction stuff, up there in the cockpit of the universe – God, or Fate, or whatever you want to call him – he’s short-sighted, is he?’ I say irritably. ‘He can’t quite read the shopping list – item one: truth about dead woman; item two: no truth about possibly treacherous husband. They blur together, do they, so that he doesn’t know what exactly he’s supposed to deliver? Can’t he focus really hard and attract a decent pair of reading glasses? As the all-powerful controller of the universe, that shouldn’t be beyond him.’

  ‘Nothing has blurred together,’ says Alice. ‘The two items were never separate. They’re linked by an address: 11 Bentley Grove, Cambridge.’

  I feel as if I’m going to throw up.

  Kit didn’t kill her. He can’t have. He’s not a killer. I wouldn’t love a killer.

  ‘Do you want only part of the truth, or do you want all of it?’ Alice asks. ‘What if it was all or nothing? Which would you choose?’

  ‘All,’ I whisper. My stomach twists.

  ‘Good. Your phone’s ringing.’

  I didn’t hear it.

  ‘Nothing like an immediate result to convince a hardened sceptic,’ Alice says.

  ‘Do you mind if I…? Hello?’

  ‘Is that Connie Bowskill?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘Sam Kombothekra.’

  ‘Oh.’ My heart jolts. Kombothekra, Kombothekra. I try to remember the name.

  ‘Can you get to Spilling police station by nine thirty, Monday morning?’

  ‘I…Has something happened? Have you spoken to Cambridge police?’

  ‘I’d like to speak to you face to face,’ he says. ‘Monday morning, nine thirty?’

  ‘All right. Can’t you even—?’

  ‘I’ll see you then.’

  He’s gone.

  Alice raises her water glass in what looks like a toast. ‘Well done,’ she says, beaming at me. I have no idea what she’s congratulating me for.

  POLICE EXHIBIT REF: CB13345/432/21IG

  D,

  Don’t forget to nip to supermarket and buy:

  Pitta breads, passata, bag of salad, lamb mince, feta cheese, cinnamon, chargrilled artichokes (in oil in jar, from deli section – NOT a tin of artichokes from canned veg s
ection) new pencil case for Riordan, something for Tilly so she doesn’t feel left out – Barbie mag or something. Ta!

  E xx

  6

  19/07/2010

  ‘Okay. You’ve put your house up for sale…’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ said Gibbs.

  ‘Suppose you have. You want to move, and you’ve put your house on the market,’ said Sam. ‘Why might you go and stay in a hotel?’ For the past ten minutes, he’d been orbiting Gibbs’ desk – glancing at him occasionally, then looking away, as if he had something on his mind but wasn’t sure how to broach it.

  Gibbs had been waiting for him to spit it out, whatever it was. ‘If I fancied a holiday, and self-catering felt like too much effort…’

  ‘No, not a holiday. You wouldn’t choose a hotel within walking distance of your house, would you? Sorry, I’m not explaining myself very well.’

  You’re not explaining yourself at all.

  ‘Why would you decide to go and stay in a hotel while you waited for your house to sell? However long that took.’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ said Gibbs, annoyed that Stepford was his skipper and therefore couldn’t be told to piss off and stop wasting his time. ‘I’d stay in my house until it sold, and then I’d move to my new house. Isn’t that what most people do?’

  ‘It is. Exactly.’

  ‘Even if you were lucky and your house sold quickly, you’d be looking at minimum six weeks, I reckon. Six weeks in a hotel’d be unaffordable for most people – it would for me, anyway.’

  ‘Let’s say you could afford it – you’re a high earner, or you’ve got private wealth.’

  ‘I still wouldn’t do it. No one would. Why not just stay in your house?’

  ‘What about if you couldn’t stand the thought of prospective buyers and surveyors getting under your feet all the time, traipsing in and out while you were trying to entertain friends, ringing the doorbell at 9 a.m. on a Saturday when you were hoping for a lie-in? Mightn’t it be more convenient to shift to a hotel?’