‘He swept me off my feet with a charm offensive. I didn’t have time to breathe, or to think. I was flattered. I didn’t see the rot beneath the gleaming veneer,’ she said. ‘The only reason anyone should marry is for love, but you’d be surprised how many don’t. Now, let’s get you out of this dress. It’s such a perfect fit now, but brides do tend to change shape in the weeks leading up to their wedding.’
As Violet let Freya assist her, Freya’s words played on a recurring loop in her brain.
The only reason anyone should marry is for love, but you’d be surprised how many don’t.
No, Violet wouldn’t be surprised at all.
Chapter 32
After a snooze and flicking through the pictures in a very old Hello! magazine retrieved from the rack in the corner, Bel heard Dan’s car trundle out of sight and she huffed. She was bored rigid, but she couldn’t go back home yet even if she wanted to. No way was it safe to drive with her injury, not for a couple of days;plus, her car still had a flat tyre. She needed something to do that didn’t take up a lot of effort but would pass the time, and she wasn’t in the mood for reading.
She remembered that there was a box of games from her childhood in the cupboard upstairs in Emily. Buckaroo and Ker-Plunk and some packs of cards: Old Maid and Donkey and – ho ho – Happy Families. Faye used to play them with her when they visited but she always let Bel win, which was boring because, even when she was little, Bel was militantly independent. There was no fun in being handed victory on a plate; she wanted to win it for herself. But it wasn’t just that; every time Bel was in danger of enjoying Faye’s company, she felt an overwhelming betrayal to her mother’s memory. It had kept her from ever loving her kind stepmother, and it always would.
But hopefully the big jigsaw was still there too. She smiled at the recollection of her dad hunting for the flat-sided border pieces and passing them to her, while Faye tried to cobble together the hard and boring featureless bits in the middle. The thought of those days was flavoured with toasted buttered muffins and hot chocolate with crushed Flake sprinkled on the top. Such happy times. As a child in that cottage, she never knew that one day she would be an embittered old bag freezing her tits off next door after marrying a bastard with a roving dick. Her eyes prickled with painful tears and she blinked them down again. She needed diversion. She needed that jigsaw.
She could sneak back into the cottage and get it without Dan knowing. Then again, she had given her word. Well, you only promised not to snoop, didn’t you? And you wouldn’t be noseying around, just going in, getting the jigsaw and coming back out again, countered her brain. I think you should go for it. Get the jigsaw, Belinda. It is essential for your mental health.
So, once again she unhooked the keys and sneaked into next door. The quilt she had slept in had been put away and the cushions plumped up on the sofa. She honoured her promise to him and went straight up to the cupboard and got out the jigsaw. The room carried a faint air of his aftershave. It wasn’t as spicy as the one Richard wore, and which she secretly didn’t like all that much.
She looked around at the bedroom. She couldn’t help herself. Another book by John North was splayed open, pages down, on the bedside cabinet. It said along the bottom ‘Proof Copy, Not For Resale’. There was a set of keys next to it. She picked them up to see the large square keyring more closely because there was a picture of a couple inside it: a younger Dan, clean-shaven and thinner and a tall and willowy woman with long blonde hair. They were both smiling for the camera and he had his arm round her slim waist. The woman wasn’t unlike Shaden in her looks, which sent a pain tearing through Bel. She wondered if she would ever again think of her cousin without a wave of hurt engulfing her.
She went downstairs and saw his laptop open on the kitchen table again and there was a stack of books to the side of it. Biographies of Peter Sutcliffe, Fred West, Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy and Harold Shipman – obviously he liked a light witty read. His notepad was closed underneath them. She slid it out and poked her nose inside. It was half full of scribbles now, most of it undecipherable to her because it was written in infamous doctor’s handwriting. The bits she could work out made grim reading:
buried where? strangulation. Bride the murderer, masquerading as the victim?
She slipped it back under the pile of books, but it didn’t quite look the same as before. She chided herself for not remembering to check which way the notebook was facing.
She thought it best to leave sooner rather than later, feeling a tad bad that she had totally reneged on her promise not to snoop. Safely back in Charlotte, she cleared the table and tipped out the jigsaw pieces on to it. They smelled slightly musty, the scent of happy old memories. Then she wondered what exciting concoction she could make for lunch out of Pot Noodle and a ring-pull can of beans.
She heard Dan’s tyres roll up just after she had put the unopened beans back on the worktop. She wasn’t that hungry at the prospect of them. Through the window she saw him ferrying stuffed carrier bags into the house. She poured some hot water over an Oxo cube and took it to the table to hunt out the corner jigsaw pieces first. Her eyes zoomed in on the picture on the box. How could she not have remembered what it was – a wedding scene. The bride was shapely and blonde with an arrogant pout to her lips. The groom was brown-haired and handsome, like Richard. Richard Richard Richard. She remembered how tender and sexy he had been at the family dinner before her wedding. Maybe it had just been a panicky fling between himself and Shaden that he regretted. Maybe he had truly realized what he wanted and ended the affair, hoping she would never find out. Maybe she had missed out on being showered with his love after he realized his mistake. Maybe she had been a total and utter cow and everyone hated her and had made voodoo effigies of her out of wax and were repeatedly stabbing pins into the dolls’ hearts. She shifted her attention back to finding the four corners but her eyes blurred over and then salty tears started dropping on to the table and the jigsaw pieces.
Then Dan Regent stormed in through her unlocked door, without the courtesy of knocking, and started ranting.
‘What is it with you and that tin opener?’ he boomed. ‘I go out for half an hour and you break in and . . . If I don’t get it back, I’ll let the air out of your other front tyre. See how you feel to be stolen from.’
‘I don’t have it,’ Bel replied, weakened, her words scraping on her throat. ‘I never touched the tin opener.’
He saw her face as she lifted it up. The tears twinkling on her lashes. He extinguished the fire inside him immediately.
‘I don’t believe you. Please return it within half an hour or I’ll be back. Thank you.’
And he was gone.
A spiral of anger suddenly pulsed through Bel, flattening her momentary depression. At least the man was good for something – making her rage instead of cry. She looked at the clock. Well, let him come back in half an hour, then; she’d be ready for him. Because she really didn’t have his bloody tin opener. Her bloody tin opener.
The clock hands moved round. After twenty-five minutes she heard the door to Emily open, and after a pause there was a surprisingly gentle knock on her door.
Bel crossed her arms. All she needed was a headful of curlers and a rolling pin to complete the picture of ‘northern woman doing business’.
‘Come in,’ she said, back to being ‘in-control Bel’.
He opened the door slowly, as if he expected a cartoon boxing glove on a cantilever to spring out at him. He smiled, contritely, and held up the tin opener.
‘I am so sorry,’ he said. ‘I really am. I thought you’d been in the cottage while I was out.’
‘Yeah, well, you shouldn’t go around accusing people.’ Then her cockiness level dropped quickly because the moral high ground wasn’t hers. She had been in the cottage – and she had been snooping.
‘Look,’ awkwardly, he raked a hand through the messy waves of his hair. ‘Peace offering. I’m just cooking a casserole. Nothing fancy. There’
s plenty for two. There’s actually plenty for six, portion control was never my strongest point.’
‘Good for you,’ sniffed Bel. ‘Did you come here just to show off your big quantity?’
It came out unintentionally smutty. Her fiercely sparking eyes locked with his and, once again, they both broke into involuntary smiles.
‘I’m asking you to break the bread of peace. Unless you’ve got a date with your Pot Noodle,’ he nodded to one of the plastic cartons on the worktop.
‘I haven’t got a bottle to bring,’ said Bel.
‘I’ll throw one in as part of the peace deal,’ replied Dan with a sloppy grin.
Bel pretended to think it over but her stomach crackled like a wave of thunder across the sky. Dan heard it.
‘I’ll take that as a yes, then, shall I?’
Chapter 33
Stuart felt quite smiley inside as they left the vicarage after being interrogated by the Reverend Folly, even if in a past life the old clergyman must have been a member of the Gestapo. For all his grandfatherly exterior, he subjected them to an interrogation that made Stuart feel soul-ravaged. However, by the end, the old vicar seemed satisfied that Stuart and Max were getting married for all the right reasons.
He and Max had courted for seventeen years and cohabited for ten of those without complication. He blamed his mother for upsetting their happy apple cart and starting off all this wedding bollocks. Well, his mother’s home-made cherry brandy, anyway. Most of a bottle of that while watching the Boxing Day Bridget Jones film and it had seemed like a good idea to propose just after Mark Darcy had. What followed was a few gasps and an ‘Are you serious?’ And though Stuart hadn’t planned to say it or thought it out beforehand, in his inebriated state he thought: why not? He and Max had stayed the course. And the thought of her being Mrs Taylor – of bearing his name – suddenly very much appealed to him.
But, and he spelled this out from the very beginning, this was to be their wedding, not Max’s lone project. For once, he was in charge. He and Max were to be the central players; they weren’t going to get swallowed up and lost in a sea of expensive and unnecessary wedding paraphernalia. Their day would be about sealing their relationship and formalizing their commitment to each other. And for that, they didn’t need flowers or cakes or fancy flouncy clothes.
And as they were leaving, when Max told the vicar that a wedding rehearsal wouldn’t be necessary, he was touched by that rather than suspicious. He really believed that she had accepted his plain and simple plan for their day.
Chapter 34
In the five minutes that elapsed between Dan leaving the cottage and Bel following him, after a quick brush of teeth and checking that her eyes weren’t bloodshot with crying, the sky darkened from light grey to sodding-angry black. Then the rain really started. Again. This had to be the crappiest start to summer on record, on so many levels. Bel was soggy by the time she knocked on the door, although that was partly because she had taken a few steps’ detour to the side of the house to pull off one of the pink roses that grew up the wall. She put it into the empty tonic-water bottle that had been standing on the windowsill.
‘Wow, where did the rain come from?’ said Dan, standing aside to let her into the warmth of the cottage, rich with the smells of chicken and red wine.
‘My guess is up there,’ said Bel, pointing skyward. ‘I brought a bottle – of sorts. It’s rude not to.’
‘Thank you,’ said Dan, taking the impromptu vase from her and setting it in the middle of the kitchen table. ‘A very good year.’
‘Oh yes, the best,’ said Bel, with a lot more bitterness than she intended. Embarrassed, she slapped on a smile and asked if there was anything she could do.
‘Nope,’ said Dan, stirring something that was bubbling away on the stove. ‘I think I have it all under control. It’s nothing fancy.’
‘When you’ve been living on what I’ve been living on recently, trust me – it’s a feast.’
She studied the back of Dan as he tipped the rice into a colander and jiggled it around. He had very broad shoulders and a fabulous bum. She bet that under that blue shirt and jeans he was the right side of muscular. He was taller and chunkier than Richard. Richard. The name needled at something raw and sore inside her and she quickly dabbed at her eyes before Dan turned round and saw her.
‘I don’t even know what’s been going on in the world. I don’t suppose you have a newspaper I could look at, do you?’ she said.
‘No,’ said Dan quickly. ‘I didn’t . . . buy one today. The headlines were all doom and gloom.’ He placed a glass of dark-red wine into her hand. ‘Here you go.’
‘Thank you.’ Bel sipped at it and it slid a warm trail down her throat. It was amazing how good things tasted after a few days’ starvation.
The window rattled with the force of the rain lashing at it.
‘Wouldn’t think it was late May, would you?’ Dan commented, looking out of the back window; it afforded a long view over the moors. ‘It’s more like November.’
Bel didn’t reply. Being cocooned in Emily like this felt as delicious as the wine tasted and the food smelled. Even if it was with a belligerent stranger. At least this stranger knew nothing about her circumstances, why she was here, and felt obliged to pad around her for fear of upsetting her. His grumpiness was quite refreshing, really; it gave her something to kick against.
Dr Dan put two plates on the table. ‘Feel free to admire the fancy presentation.’
‘Aw lovely,’ said Bel, sitting at the table and looking at the plate of chicken, shallots and mushrooms in a thick red-wine sauce, with an accompaniment of mangetout peas, and, at the side, spring onions chopped and tossed in with white and wild rice. There was a sprinkle of paprika over the whole lot – presumably the ‘fancy presentation’ to be admired. Bel stuck in her fork and lifted a big chunk of chicken to her lips; it was hot and delicious. She tried to throttle back on the pace at which she was attacking it. She was scoffing at the speed of a starving shark.
‘This is lovely,’ said Bel. ‘Thank you for inviting me. Sorry I won’t be able to reciprocate. Not unless you want beans on toast. Without the toast.’
‘I didn’t invite you for you to reciprocate,’ said Dan, spearing a clutch of mange tout.
‘Do you know, when I was little, I saw “mange tout” on a label and thought it said “man get out”,’ chuckled Bel.
Dan grinned. His eyes crinkle up when he laughs, thought Bel. Richard didn’t have any crinkles around . . . man get out. Tears blindsided her and spurted out of her eyes. She tried to wipe them away surreptitiously but it wasn’t happening. Aware that Dan was looking at her, she apologized.
‘Sorry,’ she said, trying very unsuccessfully to laugh off her embarrassment. She wafted her hands at her eyes and addressed them, like a mad woman: ‘Stop it. Dry up, you pair of bastards.’
Dan reached behind him, tore off a strip of kitchen roll and handed it to her without saying a word. It felt too strange to be sitting there unquestioned, trying to eat chicken and dabbing at leaking eyes. Bel felt she should offer some sort of explanation before the tension in the room popped like a massive balloon full of carbon monoxide and killed them both.
‘I jilted my fiancé,’ Bel blurted out. ‘Well, technically he’s my husband because we married before I walked off.’
‘Ah,’ said Dan, keeping his eyes on his dinner.
‘Just in case you were wondering why I turned up as a bride in your house. Would you pass the salt, please?’
Dan passed the salt. ‘You’re licking your wounds, then.’
‘I don’t know what I’m doing,’ said Bel, spearing a mushroom.
Silence reigned for a few moments as they both sipped their wine.
‘If it makes you feel any better, I’m kind of doing the same,’ said Dan at last. ‘Licking my wounds.’
‘The woman on the keyring?’ said Bel without thinking. She clamped her hand over her mouth.
Dan’s head s
lowly twisted round to her.
‘I knew it. I was right. You were snooping in here earlier.’
‘I saw it the other day,’ said Bel.
‘Liar.’ Dan wagged his finger at her. ‘I found those keys under my seat in the car last night, so you couldn’t have.’
Bel held up her hands. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I sneaked in to get a jigsaw from the cupboard upstairs.’
‘The cupboard that is nowhere near where I left my keys.’
‘Okay, okay, I admit it. Shall I leave?’ Bel growled, cross at her own big-mouthed stupidity. Dan shook his head and Bel noticed he was grinning. The only way out of this really was to make him smile some more, she decided.
‘You might laugh, but the other day when I came round I saw your notes about strangling a bride and I thought you were that escaped serial killer.’
‘You looked at my laptop?’
‘No, I just saw your notes.’ Bel smiled nervously, unsure now if she should have said anything. ‘I didn’t take anything of yours.’
‘You took my tin opener.’
‘It’s not technically your tin opener,’ said Bel firmly.
‘I refuse to have another argument about my tin opener,’ said Dan. ‘Now shut up and eat your meal.’
‘It’s really my tin opener.’
Dan harpooned a chunk of chicken while making a growling noise in his throat. The rest of the meal-eating was conducted in a strained silence. When she was finished – and she didn’t leave so much as a mushroom stalk – Dan whipped the plates from the table and transferred them to the sink.
Bel sipped at her newly replenished glass of wine.
‘What’s for pudding?’ she asked. Dan whirled round with a dish brush in his hand. Then he burst out laughing, shaking his head slowly from side to side.
‘This has to be the most bizarre week of my life,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Being mistaken for a serial killer by a jilting bride who is haunting my house and stealing my implements.’
White Wedding Page 14
