Your Closest Friend

by Karen Perry

  I get a sinking feeling inside.

  ‘You can imagine my surprise when he answered.’

  ‘What did you say to him?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he says, and there’s something quiet – almost sheepish – about the way he admits it. ‘I recognized his voice straight away, and the suspicion just reared up, so I put the phone down.’

  I’m trying to take all this in while at the same time processing the information about the phone number. Did I write down his number? Did I slip it into a pocket? For the life of me, I cannot remember.

  ‘I had noticed an oddness in your behaviour – a kind of withdrawal – ever since the night of the attack. But I was putting it down to some kind of shock, an unresolved trauma of some sort. But when I heard his voice, I began to wonder.’

  I sit still and listen as he continues:

  ‘All the time I was in Berlin, my mind kept coming back to that phone number. I kept telling myself that it was some sort of misunderstanding. I was driving myself crazy thinking about it, so I booked myself an early flight home one Thursday morning. I called to your office, hopeful of surprising you, but you weren’t there. Some young guy you work with – David?’

  ‘Derek.’

  ‘He told me you regularly disappeared on a Thursday at lunchtime.’

  I feel a push of anger at this – the thought of Derek deliberately stirring things up – but I don’t say anything.

  ‘No one there knew where you went,’ Jeff continues. ‘I knew you didn’t come home – Amy told me as much. It wasn’t hard to guess the rest.’

  ‘Did you follow me?’ I ask. ‘Did you go to his house?’

  I’m looking him in the face as I say this and I swear I see a flash of something cross his eyes.

  ‘No, of course not,’ he answers. ‘I was humiliated enough without adding that to it.’

  He looks away.

  All the years I have known him, I have always relied upon his honesty. I have trusted him implicitly, taken him at his word without question. Now, for the first time, doubt creeps in. That look in his eyes, his denial. I realize I don’t believe him.

  ‘You say it was over between you,’ he says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So why were you at his house yesterday?’

  ‘I needed to speak to him.’

  ‘In person? Couldn’t you ring him?’

  ‘It was delicate.’

  His eyes narrow, and a new tension comes into his shoulders. ‘I’m almost afraid to ask,’ he says, and there’s weariness in his voice, and the faintest hint of malice.

  But all of this changes when I tell him, ‘It was about Mabel.’

  His anger momentarily falls away, replaced by a look of surprise and naked fear. And it is this obvious fear, so quickly aroused by the mention of his little girl, that causes the first real surge of regret to go through me. Regret that I have brought this upon us, all this unhappiness. What kind of person am I that I would risk it all – my marriage, my home, our happiness – in this game of chance? All along, I have been telling myself that it’s because I was unhappy, because I had made a mistake in marrying Jeff, like I was trying to convince myself that the real infidelity was giving up on Finn in the first place. I know that what I am about to tell him will break his heart, and I know too that it will break us apart. Tear our marriage asunder. Whatever happened over the past few weeks, it is nothing to the betrayal caused by that lapse in judgement on a night in August six years ago. There will be no going back, no forgiveness for what I have done. I just can’t quite believe that I have been so stupid, so reckless, so blind as not to foresee the consequences.

  After I have told him about the solicitor’s letter, about Finn’s assertion that she is his daughter, he asks in a voice barely above a whisper, ‘Is she?’

  ‘No,’ I reply. But my voice is not strong, made even weaker by my next statement, ‘I don’t believe so.’

  ‘You don’t believe so.’ He shakes his head, genuinely baffled. ‘Does that mean there’s a possibility she could be?’

  He knows the answer already, but I nod wearily. There’s no point in fighting it. No point struggling. I’m tired of all the lies, the deceit, and so I tell him in a quiet voice about my infidelity.

  He is sitting on the edge of his chair, his head in his hands, taking all this in wordlessly. His glass, not quite empty, sits abandoned on the floor by his feet. From where I am sitting, I see the slump in his body, the hair thinning on the top of his head, the quietness of his hurt, and for the first time in months, I feel a wave of tender love for him, so surprising, it causes a lump to rise in my throat and I have to stop for a moment.

  Jeff rises from his chair and walks past me out into the hall. He can’t take any more. I understand that. I’ve been keeping all this unwanted information succinct and to the point, but I know that his mind must be filling in the details, all sorts of unwelcome images conjured by his imagination. I hear him clattering about in the kitchen, opening cupboards, taking things down, his anger manifesting itself in the sharpness of contact between glass and wood.

  When he returns, he has the bottle of whiskey in one hand and a spare glass for me. I watch as he fills it, moved by this small gesture of compassion. It gives me hope.

  He splashes whiskey into his own glass, but doesn’t sit down. Instead, he walks to the window, peers out at the night sky, at the lights coming on in the apartments opposite.

  ‘I suppose I should have a paternity test done,’ he says quietly, but before I can protest, he adds, ‘but I’m not going to. Mabel is mine, and I won’t allow that to be corrupted by the ravings of some creep who is now, thankfully, deceased.’

  His words, while softly spoken, are shot through with venom. He has every right to be resentful. Still, it sends a chill through me, the way he says it. Makes me look at him anew. How long has he been harbouring these dark feelings? Since yesterday when I phoned to tell him Finn was dead? Or did it go further back, to when he first suspected my affair?

  Turning away from the window, he stands four-square on the carpet, one hand holding his drink, the other tucked into his pocket.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ he asks. ‘Anything else you haven’t told me?’

  His shoulders are rounded and tense – I know he can’t take much more of this. He is weary and heartsore and he – like me – just wants it all to be over. But when I tell him about the texts, about the solicitor’s letter and audio, a change comes over him. He paces from one side of the room to the other, starts switching on lamps and drawing the curtains, a pantomime of busy domesticity that serves to highlight his pent-up vexation and rage.

  ‘Jeff …’ I say.

  How rare it is that I address him by his Christian name. It’s a match to tinder, and he swings around, gives a gesture of frustration.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about all this? I don’t understand it! You’re being harassed by this prick and you don’t think to tell me?’

  His voice breaks a little, and I realize that his anger is powered by hurt. He slumps down on the sofa, shakes his head from side to side, finally defeated.

  ‘I don’t feel that I know you any more,’ he confesses. ‘You’re like a stranger to me. Your behaviour, the things you’ve done … it’s like you’ve had some kind of a breakdown.’

  The word hits me with force, and I feel ashamed all of a sudden.

  ‘Ever since that night of the terror attack, you’ve been acting differently. You’ve become secretive and closed off. And now I find out this has been going on, that you’ve been put in this situation – that you’ve been intimidated and frightened. I mean, am I so terrible that you felt you couldn’t tell me? Are things really that bad between us?’

  I bring my eyes up to meet his, feel my heart constrict at the open hurt on his face.

  ‘I don’t know what’s happened to me,’ I answer, and it feels like the truth. Ever since that night, my life has changed. That night was the start of it: when I took that tentative
first step towards an affair with Finn. The same night I first met Amy. ‘I can’t explain it.’

  He leans forward, his arms resting on his knees, and his voice when he speaks is softer, more forgiving.

  ‘What happened that night was distressing. Is this some kind of post-traumatic stress?’ He shakes his head, bewildered.

  We both feel the flimsiness of his thesis. Neither of us speaks for a while.

  Outside, I can hear the rumble of an aeroplane passing low overhead. I look past Jeff to the window and see lights blinking in the darkness, and judge the plane to be heading west. For a moment, I have the purest longing to be up there on that plane, to fly far from here and the troubles that have come over me of late, like a sickness.

  ‘We were alright before that night,’ he says quietly. ‘We could have told each other anything then.’

  Does he really think that? The words jar with me, for I know that the sarcoma that has formed over our marriage has deeper roots than that, ones pre-dating the night of the attack. But I’m too tired to raise the matter, shying away from the inevitable argument it will bring. And from the sense of deflation emanating from him as he sits on the couch staring into the middle-distance, I know he’s not capable of it either.

  Instead, I ask, because I need to know, ‘Are you going to leave me?’

  His eyes flick in my direction, alert now.

  ‘It would be understandable if you did,’ I say.

  Quickly, he sits forward, his anger renewed, his voice shaking with indignation and hostility as he says, ‘Sometimes I think you want me to. That you are pushing me to leave you. Christ!’

  I am shocked by the words, even more shocked when he gets to his feet and flings his glass across the room where it clips off the marble fireplace and shatters in the hearth. For a moment, he stares at it with widened eyes, as if he can’t believe he’s just done that. It lasts but a moment, and then he recovers himself sufficiently to cast a look of such hostility in my direction, it makes me draw back.

  ‘I could almost imagine,’ he says in a voice so low and deadly it is nearly a snarl, ‘that you’d orchestrated this whole bloody nightmare just to force me into it.’

  He leaves the room, and a few seconds later the front door slams, the air still quivering with the remnants of his rage. With a shaking hand, I raise my untouched glass to my lips, but the smell of the whiskey curdles my stomach. Instead, I put it down, and then slowly cross to the fireplace where I crouch down and carefully begin picking up the pieces of shattered glass.

  Helen rings two days later with an update. The police have come up with another lead – a couple of witnesses have reported seeing someone calling at Finn’s house the evening before his death, and they have yet to identify the person. This should make me feel better but it doesn’t. I can’t help thinking that whoever hated Finn so viciously that they would kill him, might somehow be aware of my entanglement with him. She tells me that there will be a short segment about the incident on the local news next Monday. My heart constricts when she says this, fearing that they’ll do a reconstruction and I’ll have to sit back helplessly and watch an actress made up to look like me re-enacting my shameful actions in front of the whole nation.

  It’s a relief when she clarifies that it’s just an appeal for information – a police officer will give the particulars, describe the event, but that’s all.

  For the rest of the week, I’m like a prisoner in my own home. I cannot go to work, and apart from my trips to the nursery with Mabel, I daren’t leave the apartment. Jeff has taken to going out in the evenings alone, to concerts, to meet with friends, sometimes to sit in the pub alone with the paper and a pint. It’s clear to both of us that he’s avoiding me but I don’t confront him about it. We barely speak beyond the necessary communications of everyday family life. He’s tired and drawn, the pressures of the situation taking their toll, and it pains me to see it, his unspoken dismay. If only there were some way I could reach out to him, make him understand how badly I regret my actions and how much I want to find a way back to him. But part of me understands that he needs time to think this thing through for himself, resolve his own feelings before opening up to the possibility of forgiving me.

  I don’t tell him about the television appeal, and as it happens he is out the night it airs.

  Once Mabel’s asleep, I put on my pyjamas, slosh some Riesling into a large glass and park myself on the sofa with the TV on.

  The presenter announces the segment, and then there is DC Lewis with his hair neatly combed, an eager but serious look on his face. He’s wearing his biscuit-coloured suit and he looks handsome for a cop, the camera likes him. I’ll bet his mother is beaming with pride, on the phone to all the relations. I drink from my glass and watch through narrowed eyes as he runs through the details I know already.

  My phone buzzes. It’s on the floor by my feet; glancing down, I see the screen light up with an incoming text.

  DC Lewis has finished his appeal, and the presenter is announcing the number to call with information. The details appear in white text at the bottom of the screen. I picture a bank of telephonists in police uniform, headsets on, feverishly fielding calls while DC Kirkby struts up and down with a severe look on her face like some second-rate fascist commander in a B-movie.

  My wine glass is empty. I get to my feet, retrieving my phone as I do, and I’m heading across to the fridge for a refill when I check my messages and stop.

  I stare at the screen. My hand starts to shake.

  No. It can’t be.

  My mind whirls with confusion.

  I look at it again, but this is no trick of the mind. No mistake.

  Happy now? YCF x

  23.

  Cara

  The waiting room is cold. There’s a sour smell, dampness in the air, and I shiver while I wait. Perhaps it’s the memory of the last time I was in this police station, or maybe it’s exhaustion. I haven’t slept. All night, I lay awake, thinking of that text message, turning it over in my head, lining up possible suspects. A colleague I’ve alienated. A friend I’ve pissed off. Briefly, I think of Amy, her parting words to me: I’m going to make you see. I’ll show you how much I love you. My mind flits over my work colleagues and lands on Derek. Heather’s comment: He’s been snapping at your heels for long enough. The sly look of satisfaction on his face when I was floored by that picture. There is always the possibility that it’s some random nutter completely unconnected to me. But then, for some reason, the thought flits through my head that when it comes to murder, the initial suspect is always the spouse. The person closest to you.

  My name is called and I look up and see DC Kirkby. She nods to me as I get up and fix the strap of my bag over my shoulder, nerves announcing themselves as she holds the door open for me. As she leads me at a clip down the corridor to the interview room, fear stirs inside me. I’ve come here to seek her help, but I can’t escape the thought that somehow I’m walking into a trap.

  It’s just the two of us this time, no sign of DC Lewis. She seems put out this morning, grim-faced as I explain what happened, hand her my phone and watch as she reads the text. I wonder if she’s pissed off he got the TV gig – another example of male favouritism in the workplace?

  ‘Okay,’ she says slowly, putting down the phone. ‘So, why are you showing me this?’

  ‘Why? Because I’d told you before about the texts and you didn’t believe me.’

  ‘There was no evidence of them because you’d deleted them –’

  ‘Exactly! But now this new one has come through so you can see – I wasn’t lying.’

  She looks at me, perplexed.

  ‘You claimed that Mr. Doherty was the sender of these messages.’

  I nod, leaning forward. ‘Look, I was wrong, okay? But I’m showing you this to prove I wasn’t lying, and also to ask for your help.’

  Her face flattens in understanding.

  ‘You want me to find out who’s sending this stuff to you.’ />
  ‘Yes. My feeling is that they are somehow related.’

  ‘That whoever is harassing you is responsible for the death?’

  ‘That message was sent to me just after the piece on Finn’s death aired. That can’t be a coincidence, surely?’

  Kirkby thinks about this for a moment, then gets to her feet.

  ‘Back in a sec,’ she tells me, taking the phone with her.

  A sec turns out to be twenty minutes. I’m jiggling my crossed legs against the cold that’s taken over my body. I’m uneasy, left alone in this room. When the door opens and she walks back in, I nearly jump up with gratitude.

  She puts the phone on the table and slides it over to me.

  ‘It’s unlisted,’ she announces in her deadpan tone. ‘A pay-as-you-go number.’

  ‘So, you don’t know who it is?’

  ‘Afraid not.’

  Despite myself, I feel the bitter taste of disappointment. I had come here hoping for answers, and instead cold water has been poured upon my hopes.

  DC Kirkby sits down again. She’s looking at me carefully, as if waiting.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ she asks, and there’s a softness to her tone that’s unexpected.

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Anything else that’s come to mind since you were last here, about Mr Doherty, about what you saw?’

  I shake my head. ‘No. Nothing.’

  She sighs. I can feel the push of frustration behind it. I notice, now, that she’s brought a brown paper folder with her, and she opens it, leafing through the gathered documents until she finds what she’s looking for and pushes it forward for my attention.

  ‘Ring any bells?’ she asks.

  I look at the picture. It’s a still from CCTV footage, grainy and distant, showing a slight figure, half-turned away from the camera. A young woman or a teenage boy – it’s hard to tell, as they have a hood pulled up to cover their head, and it’s too far away anyway.