The Other Woman’s House

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘Ah.’ The professor held aloft the index finger of his right hand. ‘I’ve remembered a name. Isn’t it peculiar that one minute you’re completely unaware of something, and the next it’s as if a screen has been drawn back and there it is: information that must have been there all along?’

  ‘A name?’ Simon prompted.

  ‘Yes. Day Woman is called Catriona. Though she told me nobody calls her that, which is rather a shame. The abbreviation of Christian names is a form of vandalism, don’t you think?’

  Simon knew, with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, what was coming. He also knew someone whose name was Catriona.

  ‘Everyone she knows calls her Connie,’ said the old man.

  19

  Saturday 24 July 2010

  Selina Gane is standing outside her front door when I pull up in my car. A set of keys dangles from her right hand. In her black trousers and blue linen shirt, she could be an estate agent, ready for her meeting with a prospective buyer.

  Isn’t that what I am?

  Her blonde hair is tied back from her face, which is serious. I wonder if she wears the same expression when she has to give bad news to patients. Or maybe she’s not that sort of doctor; maybe she spends her days in a lab examining tissue samples, never coming into contact with their owners.

  From her posture, I can see that she’s tense. She’s not looking forward to this.

  Of course she isn’t looking forward to it. Why would she be?

  I wipe the sweat from my upper lip and get out of the car, remind myself that there’s no reason to be nervous. I’ve already told her everything, in my letter. Today it’s her turn to tell me what she knows. I can’t believe she knows nothing at all. 11 Bentley Grove is her home.

  Except that’s not how it feels, as I walk up the lavender-bordered path towards her. Her isolated body language suggests she’s found herself standing here, outside a house that has nothing to do with her, and she’s not sure why. ‘I didn’t want to go inside alone,’ she says, and I hear how much she wishes 11 Bentley Grove didn’t belong to her.

  ‘Thanks for agreeing to meet me,’ I say.

  She unlocks the front door. Eyes down, she indicates that I should go first. She would rather stay outside in the sun and fresh air, delay the moment of entry for as long as she can. That’s when I know for sure: she’s going to accept my offer.

  She wants nothing to do with 11 Bentley Grove, and it’s a violent want, not a mild preference. As we walk in together, she must feel as if she’s breaking into a cordoned-off part of her past.

  I’m stepping into my future, with no idea what it might contain.

  I expected a bad atmosphere, but there’s nothing. The inside of 11 Bentley Grove is light and airy. Harmless. But then it isn’t houses that do harm, it’s the people who live in them. I look around, aware of Selina Gane’s presence behind me. I smell lavender. She hasn’t closed the front door. I expect she will leave it open for as long as we’re inside, not wanting to be shut in here.

  Without waiting to be asked, I move in the direction of the lounge. I can’t remember ever looking at the floorplan on Roundthehouses, but I must have, because I can see it in my mind, and I know where everything is. I know that the room where the dead woman lay is through this door to my right.

  I don’t need to go in. One glance tells me there’s no blood, no body.

  Were you really expecting it to be there? Waiting for you?

  I see an expanse of unspoilt beige carpet, the edge of the coffee table, the one with the flowers trapped under its glass. The fireplace, the map above it…I knew all these things were real, but it’s still strange to see them in front of me: like falling into a dream.

  ‘I don’t know your husband,’ Selina Gane says. ‘I’ve never known him, and I’m not having an affair with him.’

  My letter can’t have made much sense to her, then.

  The stairs. I should have looked at the stairs first, and it worries me that I didn’t. My mind is not working as it should; I’m too overwhelmed by being here. For six months I have thought about this house almost constantly. I have spent whole days standing outside it. Now that both its owner and the police have abandoned it, I’ve set myself the task of unearthing its hidden story.

  No one cares about 11 Bentley Grove as much as I do. Is that why I feel as if it’s already mine?

  Selina Gane fills the silence by saying, ‘I’m a doctor. I spend most of my waking hours trying to save lives. I’ve never killed anyone, and if I was going to, I wouldn’t do it in my living room.’

  I nod.

  ‘Did your husband really have this address programmed into his SatNav as his home address?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes.’ I run my hand along the banister. The top of the newel post is dark wood – a curved-edged cube of varnished brown.

  ‘I need to ask you something,’ I say. I need to ask you about the death button. ‘In the picture of…’

  Start again.

  ‘Something about this staircase is different.’ That’s better – keep it vague. Don’t tell her; let her tell you. ‘It hasn’t always looked like this, has it?’ I pat the flat top of the wooden cube.

  She looks confused. ‘Yes. It’s always looked exactly like that. What do you mean?’

  ‘At one time it had a decorative bit on top that was white. Sort of round, like…like a thick disc. Attached to the top here, but not as wide.’ I pat the flat surface again.

  ‘No.’ She’s shaking her head.

  Yes. I saw it.

  I try again. ‘Like a big button. In the middle, here. White, or cream, maybe.’

  ‘A button?’ I watch as she makes a connection. She knows what I’m talking about. For a fraction of a second, when she opens her mouth, I imagine she will smile and say, ‘Welcome to the Death Button Centre’. My heart stumbles, its rhythm changing with every beat – drawing out, then slamming in. I might run, if I knew who or what I was running from. What I told Alice once to make her feel sorry for me is true now, even if it wasn’t then: I envy all those who know what threatens them, and can name it even if they can’t escape it. Fear with nothing concrete to attach itself to is a hundred times worse than fear with a solid cause.

  ‘Why are you asking about my staircase?’ The flare of hostility in Selina Gane’s voice is unmistakeable. It reminds me that she isn’t obliged to tell me anything, and has every reason not to trust me.

  ‘I’m sorry. I should have explained,’ I say. ‘The last thing either of us needs is more unanswered questions.’

  ‘I won’t argue with that,’ she says.

  ‘I saw it in the photograph, the same one that had the dead woman in it. On the virtual tour, when the lounge started to rotate…’

  ‘Rotate?’

  ‘The pictures on the virtual tour aren’t stills,’ I tell her. ‘For each room, someone must have done a 360-degree turn with a camera in their hand, filming.’

  Whoever filmed the lounge must have stood on the edge of the blood, just past where it stopped. He or she must have walked around it, holding the camera, careful not to tread in the wet redness…

  I push the thought out of my mind.

  ‘When the picture turned, the hall and the bottom of the stairs were visible through the open lounge door. This was visible.’ I grip the newel post’s curved cube head with both hands. ‘It had a white section on the top – round and flat, not spherical. I definitely saw it. I didn’t remember it at first, but I knew there was something missing, something else I’d seen apart from the woman and the blood. And then yesterday, I…I was talking to someone, and I said the word “button”, and suddenly the image was absolutely clear in my mind.’

  ‘That staircase has always looked the way it looks now,’ Selina Gane insists.

  She’s lying.

  ‘When I woke Kit up and he looked at the tour, the woman’s body had disappeared and so had the white thing from here,’ I say, still clinging on to the post, as if by touching it I can som
ehow enlist its physicality on my side of the argument. ‘I spent the rest of the night opening the virtual tour, watching it again, closing it, opening it again. I must have done it two hundred times – open, look at the lounge, close – but I didn’t see the woman’s body or the blood again.’ Feeling light-headed, I order myself to slow down, breathe. At first the air resists my effort and won’t go into my lungs. I stop trying and exhale instead, to the pit of my stomach. Empty. Then I inhale slowly, steadily, and feel the oxygen rushing in – an emergency service to the rescue.

  ‘I didn’t see the white disc thing again either,’ I say. ‘It was in the picture of the dead woman, but not the other photo – not the one I’ve seen every time I’ve looked since that first time.’

  Another memory rushes back to me: Mum, Fran, Benji and me at Bella Italia in Silsford. We went there for lunch last year, to celebrate the arrival of Benji’s first grown-up tooth. The waitress gave Benji the activity pack they must give to all children: crayons, dot-to-dots, word searches, various games to keep him amused. There was a game that involved looking at two nearly identical pictures of a dog sitting under a tree, and trying to find the seven differences between them. The first three or four were pretty obvious, even to Benji. Between us, Fran, Mum and I identified the fifth and sixth differences, but none of us could spot the seventh. After nearly half an hour of tormenting ourselves, peering at the piece of paper endlessly, we admitted defeat and looked at the answers which were upside down at the bottom of the page. The seventh difference was so tiny that we would never have spotted it, no matter how many hours we’d wasted looking: one extra line on the tree’s lowest leaf in picture two.

  ‘There’s a name for what you’re describing,’ Selina Gane says. ‘It’s called a mortgage button.’

  ‘A what?’

  She sighs. ‘I need a drink. Come on.’

  I follow her through to the kitchen I’ve seen so many times on the screen of my laptop. She pulls a tall stool away from the island at the centre of the room – the obligatory island, Kit called it – and indicates that I should sit there. ‘Tea or whisky?’ she asks.

  ‘Tea, please.’

  ‘I think I’m going to need both,’ she says.

  I wait in silence while she sorts out the drinks. The words ‘mortgage button’ turn around slowly in my mind. I examine them from every angle, but still don’t understand them. How can something called a mortgage button exist? It sounds too unlikely.

  Selina puts milk in my tea, no sugar. It’s what I would have told her to do, if she’d asked me.

  She doesn’t sit, but leans against the sink with her back to the window, holding her whisky with both hands. ‘It’s an American tradition,’ she says eventually. ‘When you’ve paid off your mortgage and you own your house outright, you buy a mortgage button and fix it to the top of the newel post, dead centre – exactly where you said you saw it. You can get cheap plastic ones, wooden ones, engraved ones – even ones made of ivory, for those who want to broadcast their affluence and success to all visitors.’ Her tone suggests a low opinion of such people. ‘They look a bit like white draughts – you know, as in the game. In America it’s called checkers.’

  Mum and Dad used to play draughts when I was little, before they finally gave in to Fran’s and my protests and bought a television – something every normal person in the country had done several years earlier. ‘That’s exactly what it looked like: an oversized draught.’

  ‘Then I’m right,’ says Selina. ‘What you saw was a mortgage button. But there’s never been one in this house.’

  I can’t hear even the faintest trace of an American accent. ‘But you know what they are,’ I say, hoping it doesn’t sound too much like an accusation.

  ‘My friend has one.’ Selina’s eyes slide away from me. ‘She’s from New England.’ I feel as if a spotlight that was trained on me has been switched off; I’m no longer the focus of her thoughts. She chews the inside of her lip, staring at the shelf next to her – at a white mug that looks like bone china, with a design of red feathers. She reaches to pick it up, looks inside, then puts it back on the shelf. I hear a clinking sound. Whatever’s in there, she wanted to check it was still there.

  The white button? Having denied its existence, would she be so obvious?

  ‘What aren’t you telling me?’ I ask. The same question I asked Sam Kombothekra a few days ago, the question I’ve asked Kit more than a thousand times since January. I ought to have a T-shirt made with those words printed on it.

  ‘Nothing. Sorry,’ she says, still looking worried. ‘I was just thinking that I’ve been neglecting my friend recently – all my friends. Too busy with work.’

  I nod, pretend I’m satisfied.

  ‘Talking of mortgages, will you need one, to buy? Assuming I agree to sell you the house.’

  I tell her I will, that I can sort it out quickly. I hope it’s true. ‘You won’t get a better offer than mine,’ I say.

  ‘You’re serious about this?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘I won’t ask why you want to,’ she says. ‘If you really saw what you say you saw…’ She stops, shakes her head. ‘I said I won’t ask, so I won’t. If you want the house, if this isn’t the sickest of sick jokes, you can have it. The sooner I’m rid of it and it’s nothing to do with me, the better.’

  I can’t help smiling. ‘An unconventional sales pitch,’ I say. ‘When you say I can have it…’

  ‘For 1.2 million,’ she says quickly. ‘That’s what you offered.’

  ‘Just checking you weren’t proposing to give it to me for free.’

  ‘I’ll give you my solicitor’s details – ask yours to make the offer official, as soon as possible.’ She drains her glass, puts it down on the worktop. ‘Would you like me to show you round? Or is that a waste of time? You don’t care what the rooms look like, presumably. You want to buy the house because you think someone might have been murdered here – the same reason I want to sell it.’

  I can’t be bothered to defend myself. If she wants to think I’m doing this for ghoulish reasons, let her. ‘I’d like to look round,’ I say.

  ‘Let’s get it over with, then,’ she says brusquely. ‘I need to get out of here.’

  As we go from room to room on the ground floor, she says nothing. Not a word. She hesitates for a few seconds by each door, as if afraid to open it and walk in. There’s a conservatory that wasn’t in the pictures on the website – plastic, not wood. Kit would hate it.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Selina says, ‘If you’ve got any questions, ask.’

  ‘I already have,’ I tell her.

  ‘I mean about the house – the central heating, the burglar alarm…’

  ‘I’m not interested in anything like that.’

  I follow her upstairs. Standing in one room after another, I look around, pretending to pay attention, not really seeing what’s in front of me. I’m still thinking about the china mug with the red feathers on it, the hard thing inside it that made a clinking noise.

  As Selina leads the way into the bathroom, I say, ‘Oh – hang on. I think I can hear my phone ringing in my bag – I’ll just go and grab it.’ Without waiting for her reaction, I turn and run down the stairs.

  On the threshold of the kitchen, I freeze. Did I mention my mobile phone being broken, in the letter? No, I don’t think I did. I told her to ring me in my hotel room, but I said nothing about having no mobile.

  I move towards the red feather mug. My hand shakes as I lift it off the shelf and look inside. There’s no white button or disc in there, only a set of keys attached to a yellow plastic fob. The hammering of my heart throbs in my ears. There’s a label on the fob, words written in small handwriting. I pull it out very slowly, so that the keys don’t knock against the side of the mug, and take a closer look.

  I read it again and again, my eyes racing over the small print. It can’t mean what I think it means. It must. Why else would Selina have looked at the mug when she did
, picked it up to check the key was there? A loud roaring fills my head. My breathing speeds up. I can’t control it; it’s running away from me.

  Oh, my God.

  How could I not have known, all this time?

  I think of what I told Alice, what Kit said about naming our Cambridge house: It’s growing on me the more I think about it – the Death Button Centre. We could get a plaque made for the front door. No, I know, even better – let’s call it 17 Pardoner Lane.

  How could I have told Alice that he said that, and still not realised?

  ‘Connie?’ I hear Selina’s footsteps above me.

  ‘Coming,’ I shout. I stuff the keys into my pocket, replace the empty mug on the shelf, and run back upstairs. ‘I’ve got to go,’ I say. ‘I just…’ No convenient lie springs to mind. ‘Something’s come up.’ It’s the best I can do. I have to get out of here before Selina realises I’ve taken the keys.

  Why did you take them? What are you planning to do?

  She frowns. ‘You’re still buying though, right?’

  For a second, I’m afraid I’ll laugh in her face. What would she say if I told her I don’t need to pay over the odds for her house any more? I’m so sorry, but I’m going to have to pass – I’ve managed to work out what’s going on without bankrupting myself. Aren’t you pleased for me, Doctor?

  Everything has changed. I no longer need to buy 11 Bentley Grove.

  But I still want to. Why? asks my internal Alice. Because it’s in Cambridge, I tell her, and Cambridge is where I want to live. It’s where I’ve wanted to live since 2003. And this house is for sale, and I’ve already offered to buy it, and no one was killed here – I was wrong about that. And…when I pressed ‘Home’ on the SatNav, this was the address that came up: 11 Bentley Grove.

  I can’t work out whether my reasons are understandable or insane, and I don’t much care.

  ‘I’m still buying,’ I tell Selina Gane. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t let you down.’ And then I run.

  20

  24/7/2010