The Other Woman’s House

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘So he’s a nutter, then, Kit Bowskill?’ said Charlie. ‘A fully fledged nutter.’

  ‘That’s one way to look at it,’ Simon said. ‘Another is to see him as practical. Adaptable. Think about it: if he doesn’t divert his obsession at this point and start to obsess about 12 Bentley Grove, what does he do? Buy 18 Pardoner Lane? Connie’s the one he wants to be with, not Jackie. Jackie boosts his ego and works well as a means to an end, but Bowskill knows the difference between a quality product and a piece of shoddy crap – he knows Connie’s the first and Jackie’s the second. If he and Connie buy 18 Pardoner Lane and move in, what does he tell Jackie? “Sorry, thanks for all your help, but my wife will take over now”? Jackie’s not going to sit back and take that, is she? She’s going to tell Connie about the affair, do her best to destroy the marriage.’

  Charlie tried not to mind that Simon had described Connie Bowskill as a quality product.

  ‘So Bowskill transfers his obsession to 12 Bentley Grove…’ Sam began tentatively.

  ‘He persuades Jackie to buy 18 Pardoner Lane,’ said Simon. ‘Tells her it’s a way of them having both houses, tells her to copy the keys for 12 Bentley Grove before she hands them over, and they can start the whole adventure again – invade the Gilpatricks’ new house like they invaded the old one. Jackie does as she’s told, and they get into a new routine – weekday meetings at 12 Bentley Grove, maybe the odd one at 18 Pardoner Lane too, to help Bowskill believe in his Cambridge empire. And a new impossible perfection-centred goal, because he has to maintain the fantasy, always, that he’s working towards the ultimate victory. He asks Jackie if, theoretically, she thinks she could persuade the Gilpatricks to move again. By this point, if she’s got common sense as well as brains, she’ll be starting to doubt him. All the years he’s spent telling her he wants to live with her at 18 Pardoner Lane – he must have said that, to keep her onside – and now he has the chance to do just that and he isn’t taking it. Nor is he leaving Connie, as he no doubt promised he would. Jackie sticks with him, but she’s not happy. Unlike Bowskill, she’s not addicted to the idea of unreachable perfection – she wants the result she wants, as soon as she can get it: her and Bowskill living together in Cambridge. She starts thinking of ways to make that happen.’

  ‘Didn’t he see that there was no way of resolving his dilemma?’ Charlie asked. ‘Even if the Gilpatricks did move again, what’s to stop Bowskill deciding 12 Bentley Grove’s no longer good enough, and fixating on whatever house they’re moving to?’

  ‘That’s exactly what he would have done,’ said Simon. ‘He won’t have allowed himself to dwell on that, though – or on the choice he’ll have to make as soon as he moves to any house in Cambridge: Connie or Jackie. If he chooses Connie, Jackie brings his whole world crashing down. If he chooses Jackie, he’s with the wrong woman – one of his “perfects” is missing. Deep down, he knows he can never square the circle, either of the circles, but he also can’t adopt a more realistic mindset. His whole life’s been a flight from reality. If he allows himself to see things as they truly are, he faces instant annihilation, or at least that’s his fear.’

  ‘So what does he do?’ asked Sam. The stilted chug of traffic had become a flow; they were nearly at the roundabout. Finally, the air-conditioning was doing its stuff.

  ‘He takes it out on Jackie,’ said Simon. ‘Loses his temper with her whenever she tries to point out to him that the Gilpatricks are unlikely to move again any time soon, having found the perfect family home with garden. Bowskill insists that they might decide to sell – that’s what he’s waiting for and it’s what he’s going to be waiting for until it happens. Jackie doesn’t like the sound of this, but what can she do? If she ends the relationship, she doesn’t get what she wants: Bowskill.’

  ‘So she puts up with his lunacy because she loves him?’ said Charlie. Here, at last, was psychology she could understand.

  ‘While she’s putting up with it, the unexpected happens,’ said Simon. ‘Connie Bowskill finds an address she doesn’t recognise, claiming to be “home”. In a pitiful attempt to make his fantasy feel more real, Bowskill’s given 12 Bentley Grove a nickname – one that reminds him of a happier time, when he came within touching distance of his dream. 17 Pardoner Lane, 18 Pardoner Lane – a joke he made years ago, when he still believed perfection was attainable. He’s not convinced any more, but maybe if he repeats the same joke, he’ll get the old feeling back. He programmes 11 Bentley Grove into his SatNav – just to see how it feels, because that’s what he’d do if the house was his.’

  ‘And Connie finds it,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Right. Connie finds it, and doesn’t believe him when he says it’s nothing to do with him. Suddenly Bowskill’s got a new problem to contend with – not only is he struggling to manage Jackie’s expectations and nurture his own fantasy, he’s now also trying to cope with a wife who doesn’t trust him – who doesn’t believe a word he says, no matter how much effort he puts into lying to her.’

  They were on Trumpington Road, minutes away from Bentley Grove.

  ‘Don’t ask me what happened next, because I don’t know.’ Simon sounded dissatisfied. ‘I can speculate, if you want me to.’ Without waiting for encouragement, he went on: ‘With Connie so suspicious, Bowskill and Jackie probably steered clear of 12 Bentley Grove. Or maybe they only met there when they knew Connie was busy, but how could Bowskill have known for sure that she wouldn’t turn up when he least expected her to, to try and catch him out? He can’t have. Jackie will have been piling on the pressure, saying, “Forget Connie, forget 12 Bentley Grove – it’s all getting too difficult. Come and live at 18 Pardoner Lane with me, happily ever after.”’ Simon sighed. ‘At some point, with everything closing in on him, Bowskill reached his limit.’

  ‘And did what?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Went to number 12 and killed the Gilpatricks,’ said Simon. ‘Who else could he blame for the mess he was in? I think we’re about to find their bodies, wrapped in curtain material and plastic.’

  Sam made a strange noise as they turned left onto Bentley Grove.

  ‘What’s up?’ Charlie asked him.

  ‘That’s Connie Bowskill’s Audi,’ he said, pointing. ‘Shit. She’s in there too.’

  Simon was out of the car within seconds, running.

  POLICE EXHIBIT REF: CB13345/432/28IG

  11BG worth 1.2/1.3 million

  Minimum deposit £400,000? (Nulli? C sick leave – stress)

  Borrow 800,000/900,000

  Life insurance for full amount borrowed

  Acc/su – policy pays out full amount

  (Check su clause – may have to be acc)

  1.2 mil house for 400 k

  OR

  1 mil/900k if price reduced?

  As above, but min depos 250 k

  1.2 mil house for 250 k – not bad!

  Same house, but much bigger garden, southfacing – more desirable – OBVIOUS AND UNDENIABLE – MEANT TO BE!!

  (Officially acc – poss su, unprovable. Guilt at 4 murders – obsessed with Gils since Pardoner 2003. Wanted 11 for view of 12, to watch them? PARANOID AND DELUSIONAL SINCE JAN, WHEN PUT ADDRESS IN SATNAV!! 11BG, 12BG – say her joke all along.)

  Viewing (Frenches? Talbots?) Find SG in – stalker has gone step further, put house up for sale Woman who met and gave keys – describe C

  Letters, stuff through letterbox?

  Nitromose car?

  LANCING DAMISZ, UNIT 3 WELLINGTON COURT CAMBRIDGE CB5 6EX, 01223-313300

  Virtual tour – Gil bodies? Something else?

  Advise 1 mil/900 v quick sale

  Need C passport for buy/sell

  C DNA AT 12

  Police – C access 12 using key found at 11 – easy

  HOW GOT KEY TO 11? Important?

  Suicide understandable – avoid punishment?

  Rent out 11, live at Pardoner – 11 rent 2500 pcm

  27

  Saturday 24 July 2010

  I can’t
move or speak. There’s parcel tape wrapped round my head, sealing my mouth shut. Once he’d done that, Kit taped my wrists together behind my back and forced me down on the floor. There might have been a chance for me to get away, but I didn’t take it, if there was, and now I’m going to die. When Kit’s ready. And if not being dead gets any worse than it is now, I know how to speed up the process – all I have to do is let myself cry. I’d be unable to breathe within minutes, and I’d suffocate.

  ‘I didn’t want to kill them, Con.’ He has to raise his voice to make himself heard over the noise of the flies. ‘Four lives, two of them kids. It wasn’t an easy decision, not until I thought about us. Our future children. This is the home our children deserve.’

  I don’t want to listen, but I force myself. I wanted to share Kit’s reality. This is Kit’s reality. This man, this monster, is my husband. I loved him. I married him.

  ‘I didn’t want to kill Jackie either,’ he says. ‘She wasn’t judgemental when I told her what I’d done. She didn’t panic like I did. The wrapping was her idea, to keep the smell to a minimum. Airtight, she said.’ He stops, looks over at the bed. ‘I don’t know why the flies came,’ he says vaguely. ‘Do you think maybe they’re not airtight?’

  Looking at me, he remembers the tape that’s preventing me from answering him. Remembers that he was in the middle of telling me a story, about Jackie not panicking. ‘She went into their emails,’ he says. ‘Contacted their works saying there was a family emergency, that they wouldn’t be in for a while. And the school. She kept their mobiles charged, monitored them – when texts arrived from friends and family, she’d text back, pretending to be…’ His body judders, as if a current’s running through it. ‘Pretending to be Elise Gilpatrick,’ he says eventually. The name of the woman he killed for no reason.

  ‘I was falling apart, Con. It was Jackie who kept me in one piece, Jackie who had a plan. I went along with it because I was a coward, and because…how could I not help her, after everything she’d done for me?’

  I flinch as he lunges at me, starts scratching at the tape on my mouth. ‘Why don’t you say something?’ he hisses in my face. His fingernails dig into my skin. Apart from hurting me, it has no effect. Kit picks up the knife, looks at it, then puts it down again and leaves the room. I count. Seven seconds later, he’s back with a pair of nail scissors. I keep as still as I can as he hacks at the tape, but he’s shaking too hard and ends up cutting my mouth. ‘Sorry,’ he breathes, sweat running down his face and neck.

  A few more seconds and he’s cut all the way through the tape – I can speak again, if I want to. Blood trickles down my chin. My new cuts start to throb, gathering more pain with each beat.

  Kit stands back and stares at me. ‘Say something,’ he orders.

  I shouldn’t allow myself to hope, but the hope is there, allowed or not. He taped my mouth shut, then cut the tape away. It’s a clear reversal, one that allows me to believe that he might put his intention to kill me into reverse as well. ‘What did Jackie want to do to me?’ I ask. ‘Did she want you to kill me too?’

  ‘No. She’d have done it herself. She knew I’d never be able to do it.’

  I’d never be able to do it. I’d never be able to do it. I cling to those words.

  ‘A lot had to happen before she could kill you,’ Kit says. ‘She had to set it all up first, so that you’d be blamed for the…’ He glances over at the bed. ‘The others, you know,’ he says. ‘I don’t know how she could think clearly, but she did. Do you want to see?’

  ‘See?’ I repeat blankly.

  Kit smiles, and for a moment I’m dropped back into our old life together, our normal life. I’ve seen this smile many times before: when Kit makes a joke that he’s pleased with, when I say something that impresses him. ‘I’m offering you proof,’ he says. His smile has vanished. His voice is harsh.

  ‘Show me,’ I say.

  Kit nods, turns his back on me. I hear him run downstairs. When he comes back, he’s holding a battered sheet of white A4 paper. There’s spidery handwriting on it. Jackie’s handwriting. Kit holds it in front of my face. I read it three or four times. I shouldn’t be able to understand. I try pretending I don’t, but it doesn’t work. I know immediately what Jackie meant when she wrote these words.

  I feel defiled, claustrophobic, as if I’m trapped inside her warped mind, unable to escape the tainted swirl of her thoughts. I have no choice but to admit that this is real, since it’s here in front of me. All the same, I can’t believe it. Until four days ago, I had no idea Jackie Napier existed.

  I’m glad she’s dead.

  ‘None of it was my idea,’ says Kit.

  ‘You killed the Gilpatricks.’

  He cranes his head away from me, as if I’ve tried to hit him. ‘That wasn’t an idea. It wasn’t planned, it…Jackie was the planner, not me.’ He lets go of the paper. It falls to the floor. ‘She seemed to be able to anticipate everything, and I couldn’t even see the next step.’

  Did she anticipate you strangling her?

  ‘She predicted that you wouldn’t be able to stay away from Cambridge, after you found the address in the SatNav,’ Kit goes on. ‘I didn’t believe her – I thought there was no way you’d travel all that way in the hope of catching me out. Jackie laughed when I said that. Called me a naïve idiot. She said she’d prove it to me: she took two weeks off work and staked out Bentley Grove. Soon as the Gilpatricks left in the morning, in she’d go to number 12, to wait for you. She knew what you looked like – she must have spent hours on Nulli’s website, staring at your photograph. She envied you like crazy.’

  Envied me. Who wouldn’t want to be married to a deranged killer?

  ‘Two Fridays running, she saw you. Then we knew – even I worked it out. Friday was the day you’d go, if you went at all. Mondays and Wednesdays there was a chance I’d be at home, Tuesdays and Thursdays you were at Monk & Sons. Friday was your only free day when I was in London for sure.’

  I nod, trying to ignore the sick feeling spreading through me. How does Kit expect me to respond?

  ‘Sometimes Jackie followed you,’ he says. ‘To Addenbrooke’s, or into town. I told her she shouldn’t take the risk – I couldn’t stand the thought of you noticing her and confronting her in case she gave something away, but she just laughed at me. “I only get noticed when I want to,” she said.’

  ‘She was wrong,’ I say, shocked by the hoarse sound of my own voice. ‘I knew someone was following me.’

  I mentioned it to Alice when I first went to see her – that once or twice, in Cambridge, I’d heard footsteps behind me. She prescribed me a remedy for that precise delusion: Crotalus Cascavella.

  Wrong.

  I didn’t need a brown bottle full of something dissolved in water. I needed Jackie Napier to die.

  Obsessed with Gils since Pardoner 2003. There’s only one thing that can mean.

  ‘The Gilpatricks bought 18 Pardoner Lane, didn’t they?’ I say. ‘When you…when we wanted it.’

  I don’t need an answer – I can see it in Kit’s face.

  ‘You pretended you didn’t want it any more, blamed it on my…problems. You must have loathed the Gilpatricks. And then…what, they moved? They bought 12 Bentley Grove, and…’

  Rent out 11, live at Pardoner.

  ‘Jackie. Jackie bought 18 Pardoner Lane.’ I’m still working it out as I say it. ‘You probably gave her some of the money.’

  ‘How could I do that?’ Kit says angrily. ‘I don’t have any money that you don’t know about.’

  ‘I was too much of a mess to move away from my family, but that wasn’t a problem for you,’ I say, thinking aloud. ‘You could live in Cambridge with Jackie. The two of you had been waiting for 18 Pardoner Lane to come up for sale again, but when it did, you didn’t want it any more – Jackie did, enough to buy it, but you…’ Yes. It has to be. ‘You wanted whatever house the Gilpatricks wanted, and that wasn’t 18 Pardoner Lane any more – it was 12 Bentley Grove.�
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  Disjointed ideas clash in my mind. What did Kit say about Jackie waiting in number 12, watching for me, knowing I would come looking? Soon as the Gilpatricks left in the morning…So they weren’t dead at that point. And if Kit hadn’t killed them yet…‘How did Jackie get the keys to this house?’ I ask. ‘Was she…?’ Her pink denim jacket, a Lancing Damisz key-ring in the pocket. Her black spider handwriting, on Lancing Damisz paper. ‘She was an estate agent, wasn’t she? Did you meet her in 2003? Did she sell this house to the Gilpatricks?’

  Kit doesn’t answer. He looks away.

  ‘She did, didn’t she? And she kept a copy of the front door key.’

  ‘We used to meet here, when they were out,’ Kit mutters, eyes down. ‘It was a stupid game we played, but it was better than the real life she wanted us to have together. I couldn’t bring myself to set foot in the Pardoner Lane house, not once she’d bought it. She wanted me to move in there with her, but how could I? I lived in Little Holling, with you – at Melrose Cottage.’ He says it as if I don’t know already – as if I’m a stranger he’s introducing himself to. Telling me about his life. ‘I never loved Jackie. The one thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to live with you, wherever I lived but…the game had gone too far by then. And…it was more than a game. I wanted…’ He clears his throat. ‘I didn’t see why the Gilpatricks should have what I wanted. That was when it all started to go wrong, when they bought our house.’

  I wait.

  ‘Jackie and I had terrible rows,’ Kit goes on eventually, so quietly I can barely hear him. ‘I didn’t really want this place…’ he gestures around him ‘…but it was easier to pretend I did than admit the truth. Jackie knew it was bullshit – she went on and on at me, telling me the Gilpatricks wouldn’t be selling anytime soon, that this was their forever home, trying to get me to admit that I’d stop wanting it anyway as soon as I could have it, even if they did decide to move again. She was furious with me – how could I have let her buy 18 Pardoner Lane if I wasn’t planning to live there with her? The rows got worse and worse, and then…’ He shakes his head.