The Other Woman’s House

by Sophie Hannah

  Simon nodded. Properly worried about her. As opposed to pretending to worry about her? Was that what Bowskill was doing this time round?

  ‘Mum and Dad made it clear I could expect no help from them.’

  ‘Did you ask for their help?’

  ‘Oh, yes. There was nothing ambiguous about it. I asked, they said no.’

  ‘What did you want them to do, exactly?’

  ‘Has Connie told you about her parents?’ Bowskill asked. ‘That they brainwash her and browbeat her, cripple her thought processes so that she can’t think for herself?’

  Simon shook his head. ‘She mentioned them being difficult. About you moving to Cambridge.’

  Bowskill laughed. ‘Understatement isn’t usually Connie’s strong point,’ he said. ‘Nice to know she’s expanding her repertoire.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Simon asked. ‘With your parents?’

  ‘Connie needed to get away from her family, especially her mother. I don’t know why I’m talking in the past tense – she still does. I was hoping Mum would act as a mother figure, just temporarily – you know, boost her confidence, tell her she could have the life she wanted, achieve whatever she set out to achieve. I told her myself until I was sick of the sound of my own voice, but it had no effect. I’m only one person, and I’m not a parent, I’m an equal. No matter what I said, I wasn’t enough to replace Connie’s family, however bad for her they were – and she knew perfectly well the harm they were doing her, it wasn’t as if she couldn’t see it. But…she was scared to go against her mum, who didn’t want her to move to Cambridge. It was hopeless. I knew I’d never lure her away from her family unless I had…well, something more than myself to offer her. She and Mum had always got on well, Mum and Dad claimed to love her like their own daughter, but…when it came to it, when I asked them to rally round and be a family for Connie, they said, “No thanks, we’d rather not get involved.”’

  ‘Do you think they were wary of encouraging her to go against her own parents?’ Simon asked. ‘They didn’t want to interfere?’

  ‘No,’ said Bowskill flatly. ‘Nothing to do with that. They don’t give a shit about Val and Geoff Monk, only about themselves. They didn’t want to put themselves out, simple as that. Started spluttering about the need to stand on one’s own two feet, dependency not being good for people…It was disgusting, frankly – a complete abnegation of responsibility. I’d never do that to my child, if I had one. I looked at them and thought, “Who are you? Why am I bothering with you?” That was it – I haven’t spoken to them since.’

  ‘Sounds rough,’ said Simon. He tried to produce a cheerless expression to match Bowskill’s, hide his satisfaction. He’d had a theory, and although he hadn’t yet been proved right, everything Bowskill had just said indicated that he soon would be.

  17

  Friday 23 July 2010

  ‘Connie.’

  Don’t look pleased to see me. You won’t be, once you’ve heard what I’ve got to say.

  ‘Thanks for coming.’ He’s not your husband. He’s a stranger. This is a business meeting.

  I try to pass Kit a menu but he pushes it away. He smells of beer. We’re in the restaurant at the Doubletree by Hilton Garden House, Selina Gane’s hotel and now mine too. I checked in an hour ago.

  ‘Not hungry?’ I say. ‘I’m not either.’ It seems a shame. The food would probably be good. The lime green and purple velvet upholstery looks expensive. It makes me think of the dead woman’s dress; the colours are the same.

  I put the menus down on the table, pour us both some water.

  ‘Don’t play games,’ Kit says. ‘Why are we here?’ He’s still on his feet, poised for flight, unwilling to commit to a conversation with me without knowing what its subject will be.

  ‘I’m staying here.’ I don’t tell him that Selina Gane is too. Of course, he might know that already.

  ‘You’re…’ His breathing speeds up, like someone running. I wonder if he’s thinking about escape. How hard is it for him to stay where he is? ‘You walk out of your own birthday party without any explanation…’

  ‘The birthday party was the explanation. That and the dress you bought me.’

  ‘I swear to God, Con…’

  ‘Forget it,’ I say. ‘I don’t care. I need to talk to you about something else. Sit down. Sit.’

  Reluctantly, he lowers himself into a chair across the table from me. He looks as unrelaxed as I’ve ever seen a person look – shoulders hunched, jaw rigid, red in the face. ‘We ought to discuss work,’ he says.

  ‘Go ahead.’ This is a business meeting, after all. You can’t invite your husband to a business meeting and then tell him he can’t talk about work.

  ‘You’re Nulli’s business and financial director. All the strategy originates with you, all the planning…You’re the one who makes sure everyone gets paid. I can slog my guts out, my team can do the same, but we’re wasting our time if you’re not doing your bit.’

  ‘Agreed,’ I say.

  ‘If you don’t keep on top of things, Nulli falls apart.’

  ‘And you don’t think I’m keeping on top of things?’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I haven’t been, no,’ I admit. ‘Not since I saw that woman’s body on Roundthehouses. But it’s been less than a week. The company’s not going to crumble to dust because I’ve neglected the paperwork for a week. Anyway, all this is irrelevant. This time next year, Nulli’s unlikely to exist.’

  The colour drains from Kit’s face. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You’re bright, you’re determined,’ I say briskly, deciding I ought to offer him some compensation for losing both his wife and his business. ‘You’ll start another company without me. I’m sure it’ll do very well.’

  Kit’s mouth and eyes start to move – random twitches, uncoordinated. He doesn’t think this can be happening to him. I know how he feels.

  ‘How can you…?’

  I’m sorry. I don’t love you any less than I did before all this happened. I trust you less, like you less, am more willing to cause you pain, but the love hasn’t changed. I wouldn’t have thought that was possible – would you, Kit?

  I resist the urge to explain, knowing it wouldn’t help.

  ‘How can you calmly sit there and announce your intention to destroy everything we’ve got?’ Kit’s voice is hollow, hoarse. ‘Our marriage, our company…’

  ‘I need you to read something.’ I pull the letter out of my bag and pass it across the table to him. ‘I wanted you to see it before Selina Gane does. Once you’ve approved it, I’ll push it under her door. She’s staying here too. Did you know that?’

  Kit shakes his head slowly, his eyes wide, fixed on my handwritten words.

  I expected it to be hard, but it was the easiest letter I’ve ever written. I assumed, for the purposes of the exercise, that Selina Gane was innocent, and I explained everything, or at least as much as I could explain: finding her address in Kit’s SatNav, my suspicions and fears, how they led me to wait outside her house and follow her, how in retrospect I wish I’d been more upfront about it, spoken to her directly. That’s what she’ll want if she’s as frightened and baffled as I am, I thought: a straightforward letter of clarification and apology, one innocent person to another.

  I didn’t waste time worrying about what to include and what to leave out; I was generous with information, telling her far more than she needed to know – even that I was staying at the Garden House, though in a room nowhere near hers. ‘I’m sorry if that makes you feel as if I’m stalking you all over again,’ I wrote. ‘I’m really not. I chose this hotel because its name was in my mind, because I rang you here. In an ideal world, I’d have been tactful and chosen another hotel, but I’m exhausted and my energy levels are well into the red, so I didn’t.’

  Reading snatches of the letter upside down, as Kit reads it, I decide that I did a good job of making myself sound sane. If I were Selina Gane, I would agree to mee
t and talk to me.

  Kit drops the pages on the table. He raises his head slowly, as if he can hardly bear to drag his eyes up to meet mine.

  ‘Well?’ I say.

  ‘You’re offering to buy her house.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you gone mad? Even more mad? You’re offering the asking price – 1.2 million pounds. You can’t afford—’

  ‘Your information’s out of date,’ I tell him. ‘As of today, the asking price is a million. She must be pretty desperate to sell if she’s discounting it after only a week, don’t you think?’

  Kit puts his head in his hands. ‘So you’re offering her more money, when she’s asking for less – all of it money you don’t have and wouldn’t be able to borrow. I don’t understand, Connie. Help me out here.’

  ‘Or you could help me out,’ I say evenly. ‘All I want, now, is to know the truth. I don’t care what it is. I really mean that. However bad it is, even if it’s worse than I can possibly imagine. I don’t care about our marriage…’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ‘…I don’t care if you’ve killed someone – on your own or with Selina Gane’s help. I won’t even go to the police – that’s how much I don’t care. I only care about myself – my need to know what exactly happened to my life.’

  ‘Stop.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I’m upsetting you,’ I say. ‘I just want you to realise that this can be easy: you can just tell me. Tell me what’s going on, Kit. Then I won’t have to shove this letter under Selina Gane’s hotel room door…’

  ‘Connie.’ He grabs my hands across the table.

  ‘Tell me!’

  I see something shift in his eyes: fear, awareness, calculation. Mainly fear, I think. ‘Oh, God, Con…I don’t know how to…’

  I wait, afraid to move a muscle in case he changes his mind. Am I going to hear the truth, finally?

  ‘How can I convince you?’ he says in a harder voice. ‘I don’t know anything. I haven’t done anything.’

  No. You didn’t imagine it. There was a chance, and now it’s gone. He chose not to take it.

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ he says.

  ‘No, I don’t.’ The sinking heaviness inside me is so overpowering that for a few seconds I can’t speak. What did you expect, a full confession? ‘All right, then,’ I say eventually. ‘If you won’t tell me the truth, I’ll have to find it out for myself. Hence this letter.’

  ‘Hence?’ Kit’s laugh shocks me. How can one short sound contain so much rage? ‘Sorry, are you implying a logical connection? How does sharing all the details of our misery with a stranger and offering to buy a house you can’t afford take you closer to the truth?’

  ‘Maybe it won’t.’

  ‘What do you achieve, with this?’ He hits the letter with the back of his hand.

  ‘Probably nothing. I’m not doing it because I think it’s a brilliant idea and bound to work.’ If I wasn’t so exhausted, I would try harder to make him see how far I’ve drifted, in the past six days, from the realm of winning possibilities and positive options. ‘I’m doing it because it’s the only idea I have – the only way I can think of to take things forward, now that the police have said they’re not going to do anything.’

  A waiter approaches. Kit holds out a hand to repel him, like a lollipop man stopping traffic. ‘We don’t want anything apart from to be left alone,’ he snaps. Some businessmen at a nearby table turn to stare at us. One raises his eyebrows.

  ‘I know two things for sure,’ I say calmly, sticking to my planned script. ‘11 Bentley Grove was in your SatNav as “Home”. A woman was murdered there, in the lounge. I can’t explain those two things. You say you can’t either. So. If I want to get to the truth, I need to find out a lot more about that house than I know at the moment.’ I shrug. ‘Buying it’s the only plan I can come up with. Don’t bother to tell me how unlikely it is to work – I know that already. I also know that when you buy a house, you find out all sorts of things about it that you wouldn’t have known otherwise: there’s a musty smell in the airing cupboard, a safe under the bedroom floorboards…’

  ‘Connie, you can’t afford to buy 11 Bentley Grove.’

  ‘Yes, I can. Or, rather, we can. I need your help and you’re going to give it to me. If you don’t, I’ll start divorce proceedings tomorrow. Or Monday – as soon as I can. I’ll also walk away from Nulli without a backward glance, and refuse to sell you my half of the business. I’ll be your worst nightmare: an equal partner who contributes nothing. I know exactly how to make your life hell and run Nulli into the ground. Don’t make the mistake of thinking I wouldn’t do it.’

  I’ve never heard a silence so loud. Other people in the restaurant are talking – I can see their mouths moving – but the sound is drowned out by the vast blackness in my head, Kit’s horrified wordless stare.

  Two or three minutes pass, the two of us frozen in place. Then Kit says, ‘What have you turned into?’

  ‘Someone who fights her corner,’ I tell him. ‘So, are you going to help me?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘All you’ll need to do is sign forms as and when I tell you to.’

  ‘I don’t get to hear the financial master plan?’

  What harm can it do to tell him?

  I take a gulp from my water glass, suddenly nervous, as if my maths teacher is about to mark my homework. ‘As things stand, you’re right – we can’t afford to buy 11 Bentley Grove. We haven’t sold our house – it isn’t even on the market. Even if we put it on tomorrow, it’s unlikely we’d have a firm buyer in time. Now that 11 Bentley Grove’s asking price is down to a million, it’ll be sold within days. It’s being marketed as a bargain – price reduced for a quick sale. And it’s in one of the best parts of Cambridge. If I had to guess, I’d say a deal will have been done by the end of Monday.’

  ‘Can I inject a bit of realism into this fantasy?’ Kit says. ‘Even if we could magic up a buyer, the most we’d get for Mellers is three hundred grand. We still wouldn’t be able to afford it.’

  ‘With our incomes and Nulli’s profits, we could get a mortgage for somewhere between eight hundred and nine hundred thousand, I think. Not from the Halifax or NatWest…’

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘There are plenty of private banks who’d like nothing more than to lend us a shedload of money in exchange for us transferring our business and personal accounts over to them. We’re exactly the sort of clients they’d want to attract. Think of Nulli’s profits in the last two years – they’ve rocketed. I’ll need to beef up projected profits for this year and next by equivalent amounts, so that the bank looks at the figures and thinks, “Great, no risk,” but that’s easy enough to do. The bank’d get Nulli and 11 Bentley Grove as security – I can’t see why they’d turn us down.’

  Kit says nothing. At least he’s listening. I wasn’t sure he would. I thought that by this point I might be talking to an empty lime green chair.

  ‘You’ve read the letter,’ I say steadily, working my way through my prepared speech. ‘You’ve seen that I’m offering Selina Gane 1.2 million, the original asking price. I’ve done that for two reasons. One: she doesn’t want to see or speak to me. An extra two hundred grand that she wasn’t counting on getting might prove to be the incentive she needs. Two: once word gets round that 11 Bentley Grove is now going for a million, it’ll attract so much interest, there’ll probably be people bidding against each other. Once that happens, the price will start to rise again. Unless Selina Gane’s a naïve idiot, she’ll know this. If I want to put in a successful pre-emptive bid, I need to make sure it takes into account that demand might force the price up. Realistically, I reckon the top bid in that situation might be 1.1 million.’

  ‘So why not offer that?’ Kit asks, his voice stony. I tell myself this is progress: he is engaging with the possibility, at least. Asking sensible questions.

  ‘I thought about it,’ I tell him. ‘But the combination of Selina Gane�
�s antipathy towards me and the possibility that she might end up getting 1.1 million anyway might make her more inclined to tell me to get stuffed. 1.2 million is an offer she’d be truly crazy to refuse – I don’t see how she could.’

  And she’ll know things about the house that no one else knows – about what’s hidden there and what’s disappeared, what was there once and has been taken away. A woman’s body, the death button…

  I could ring Lancing Damisz and give a false name, ask Lorraine Turner to show me round 11 Bentley Grove, but what’s the point? Even a well-informed estate agent would only know a fraction of what the owner knows.

  Offering Selina Gane more than a million pounds seems a good way of persuading her to talk to me.

  ‘Are you listening to yourself?’ Kit hisses, leaning across the table as if greater proximity to his hostility is likely to make me change my mind. ‘An offer she’d be truly crazy to refuse? It’s an offer you’d be truly crazy to make! Even if we could borrow nine hundred thousand from some private bank…’

  ‘How would we afford the monthly payments?’ I have anticipated every question he might ask, all possible objections. ‘I’ve done some very rough calculations. Borrowing on an interest-only basis, and if we pour in ninety per cent of our salaries and all our personal savings, we could afford to make the payments for two to three years, depending on certain variables. After that, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll be rich by then from some new business venture, or…’

  No. Stop.

  I promised myself I wouldn’t lie in order to make this easier, for Kit or for me.

  There’s not going to be a new business. There’s no ‘we’, not any more.

  ‘When we can no longer make the payments, 11 Bentley Grove will be repossessed,’ I tell Kit. ‘It’s inevitable, and it doesn’t worry me. If I haven’t found out what I need to know in two years, the chances are I’ll never find out. At that point, I’d have to think about giving up.’

  ‘You’re proposing this plan knowing it’s going to lead to bankruptcy?’