The Wife Before Me: A twisty, gripping psychological thriller

by Laura Elliot

  ‘He’s never prevented me doing anything I wanted.’ Rushing to John’s defence, she wondered why she needed to justify their father–daughter relationship, and why, in doing so, her voice rose to a higher pitch. ‘Just give him time to know you. Everything will be all right, I promise.’

  ‘Why are you making things so difficult for me and Nicholas?’ she asked John that night when he returned from the pub.

  ‘Do you ever look deeply into his eyes?’ her father asked.

  ‘Yes, of course I do,’ she replied.

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘Enough love to last me for the rest of my life.’

  ‘I see only emptiness, Amelia. And that emptiness will break your heart.’

  ‘You’re so wrong. He’s the man I love and you won’t make the slightest effort to get to know him. Everyone likes him except you. Why is that so?’

  ‘I’m your father, that’s the difference. I’m able to see beyond his superficial charms and it worries―’

  ‘You’re jealous,’ she snapped.

  ‘Jealous? Why on earth should I be jealous? Haven’t I welcomed every young man you’ve brought to this house?’

  ‘Only because you knew they weren’t a threat to you. But Nicholas is.’

  ‘You loved Jay. You cried in my arms for weeks after he left.’

  ‘We were sixteen. This is different. Nicholas is the first man I’ve truly loved and you can’t bear it.’

  ‘Is he filling your head with this nonsense?’

  ‘I’m perfectly capable of forming my own opinions. You and I have depended too much on one another. It’s not healthy…’

  The pause that followed felt like a missed heartbeat. ‘How is our relationship unhealthy, Amelia?’ he asked, quietly.

  ‘It just is…’ She paused, then blurted out: ‘I want you to stop coming into my bedroom at night.’

  ‘I don’t… what are you saying?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ Shocked at the direction the conversation had taken, she folded her arms and stepped back from him.

  ‘Are you insinuating―’

  ‘I’m not insinuating anything. I’m just asking you to stop… stop making me feel so guilty.’ Unable to continue, she threw logs into the fire and watched the sparks scatter.

  ‘I’ve never… how can you even think— you are my life, Amelia.’ He swallowed, his Adam’s apple jerking. ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you.’

  Reluctantly, she turned, her cheeks blazing.

  ‘How could such an appalling thought have even entered your mind?’ he demanded. His stance, ramrod stiff, reminded her of a wounded animal, shot but not yet feeling any pain. ‘This is his doing, isn’t it? He’s brainwashed you. I’ll never forgive him for that.’

  ‘Why do you keep blaming Nicholas?’ she shrieked. ‘I’m capable of thinking for myself.’

  ‘What are you thinking, then? Let me hear it. Spill it out to me so that I fully understand what you mean.’

  She came to her senses then, drew back from the brink of an accusation that had no foundation. All he had ever offered her was comfort, love, protection. She had always known that and yet… and yet… a worm had entered her brain, creeping in unnoticed and burrowing deep enough to break the bonds that had held them close.

  ‘I didn’t mean anything.’ Stricken with guilt, always guilt, she sobbed into her hands. ‘I don’t know what possessed me to say that. It’s just… I want you to like Nicholas and I feel angry when you make him feel so unwelcome.’

  ‘I hate him.’ No mistaking the harshness of his statement. ‘I hold him entirely responsible for breaking the trust we have always shared.’ His face, so loved and familiar, looked old all of a sudden, the skin slack under his neck, his mouth clamped.

  ‘Just stop feeling you have to protect me.’ She was overwhelmed by conflicting feelings. ‘It has nothing to do with anything Nicholas said. All I wanted to do was bring the two of you together but now, I’ve only made it worse.’ She tried to stem her tears and John, seeing her distress, assured her all would be okay. He needed time to adjust to the changes that would come into their lives. Platitudes – she recognised their hollowness and the distance she would have to stretch to receive his forgiveness. In that instant, she realised with a startling clarity that she could never marry Nicholas.

  His devastation was obvious when she called to his apartment to end their relationship. He demanded an explanation. She was unable to give him one. How could he make sense of something she could not even understand herself? The words she had spoken to her father, dredged from some dark place within her, would always be associated with Nicholas, even though it was she, not he, who had implied the unthinkable. Love at first sight, she realised, could not always withstand the chilling gaze of second sight.

  Twenty-Two

  Two o’clock in the morning, her screams falling into the fathomless ocean. Amelia struggled awake, the whimper dying. Her nightmares had become more frequent of late but she could no longer see the familiar shape of her father bending over her. Regret tore through her when she realised that something tender and fragile between them had been broken forever. She pushed aside the duvet and put on her dressing gown. He would probably still be awake, attuned to her night terrors as he always was. She tapped on his bedroom door. When he didn’t answer, she entered his room and whispered his name. The curtains were still open. His bed was empty, the bedclothes undisturbed.

  She ran downstairs. Usually when he returned from the pub, he made tea and toast before going to bed, and left the clearing-up until the following morning. The kitchen was as tidy as he had left it before going out. She searched the other rooms without success. Her panic grew when she rang Billy and he told her they had parted as usual at his gate. The rain had started on their walk home. Billy had wanted him to shelter in his house until it stopped but John pulled up the collar of his coat and said he would keep going. That was two hours ago.

  ‘There’s probably a simple explanation.’ He sounded unruffled but Amelia knew he must be equally alarmed when he told her to phone Kilfarran Garda Station.

  The guard on duty knew John did not waste time asking questions. He promised to alert a squad car immediately. Frantically, Amelia changed into outdoor clothes and rang Nicholas. A month had passed since their break-up but she needed him now, needed his reassuring presence to ease her fear. An automated voice told her to leave a message on his answering machine. She tried to slow her voice, unsure whether he would be able to make out her garbled explanation. She pulled a hood over her head as the rain, driven by a harsh wind, slanted against her face.

  At the end of the driveway, she turned left onto Kilfarran Lane and shone her torch over the empty road with its zigzagging bends. Clouds hid the moon and the water reeds banking the ditch below the embankment swayed like the manes of ghostly horses. Her dread increased when she heard the sluggish flow of water wending its way over stones towards the Kilfarran River.

  Billy’s house was about six hundred metres away and he was already on the road, his torch splaying over the darkness. ‘We should check the side roads in case he wandered off-track,’ he said. His expression was hidden beyond the beam of his torch but Amelia heard his trepidation. The network of narrow roads and lanes around Kilfarran all looked the same with their dense hedgerows and overhanging trees, but John knew this labyrinth like the back of his hand.

  ‘No, he didn’t.’ She shook her head. ‘He could walk home blindfolded from the Inn.’ Her dread increased when Billy nodded in agreement. She ran to the edge of the grass and shone a light on the stagnant leaves clogging the water. She staggered and cried out, terrified she would topple into the ditch.

  ‘The guards should be here soon.’ Billy put a steadying arm round her waist. ‘You check this side of the road and I’ll check the other.’

  A squad car arrived shortly afterwards but it was Billy who found him. Billy who held Amelia back when she, forgetting her fear of water, tried to clamber into
the ditch to hold her father in her arms. Billy whose wide, soft shoulders absorbed her cries when the police cordoned off the ditch and erected a white tent around her father’s body.

  She was still being comforted by him when Nicholas arrived. Unable to drive past the police cordon, he abandoned his car and ran towards her. His arms were strong enough to lower her gently to the ground when she fainted. His face was the first one she saw when she recovered consciousness.

  A hit-and-run, she was told by a policewoman. The crime committed by someone who was, probably, drunk or unfamiliar with the bends in the road. The driver, with visibility distorted by the rain, must have noticed John only at the last moment, then swerved and lost control. If there had been skid marks from the tyres they had been washed away, but a full-scale search for clues would begin at first light.

  Death, Amelia was told, when the autopsy was performed, would have been instantaneous.

  * * *

  Days and weeks blurred. A searing regret, like pincers around her heart. Sorrow that seemed unassailable. Nicholas carried her through it all. He moved into Woodbine and held her at night when she was unable to sleep. He was patient with her when she turned away from him, incapable of desire, uninterested in food or leaving the house. Even rising from her bed was a struggle. He supported her when she broke down in tears during the reading of her father’s will. Apart from a contribution to a horse shelter, Amelia had inherited his whole estate. His solicitor, David Smithson, who had known her since she was born, stood aside when Nicholas took her in his arms to console her.

  She allowed him to clear her father’s possessions from Woodbine and distribute them to charity outlets. But the house she loved so much still breathed with reproach. She considered putting it up for sale. She could move into Nicholas’s bright, brash apartment, where she would not be haunted by the knowledge that she had wounded her father so grievously. Nicholas explained that this was not possible; he had sold his apartment and invested the money he’d received into a junior partnership with the company. Henceforth, it would be known as KHM Investments.

  She had always known that Nicholas was ambitious. He had been impatient with the slow progress of his career and now, as a junior partner, he could change the company and drag it into the twenty-first century. He needed her by his side as his wife. She refused at first. She did not deserve happiness.

  ‘These feelings will pass,’ Nicholas assured her. ‘No one deserves happiness more than you do. Please, Amelia, make me the happiest man in the world.’

  Once again, he proposed, down on one knee among the bluebells in Kilfarran Woods, a glittering solitaire in his hand. Clouds spiralled around the sun and the countryside, bathed in its brilliance, took Amelia’s breath away.

  John seemed very close at that moment. She could see into the dark eyes that had watched over her so carefully, their sadness never allowing her to forget the tragedy she had visited upon him. She willed him away, stemmed the blame that had stunted her growth. Nicholas made her forget. He made her whole again.

  Leanne flew in from New York and was her bridesmaid. Jay came from California with his fiancée Hailey, and Mark, who had moved to Dublin, came with Graham, his partner. All of them celebrated with Amelia when, two months after her father’s death, she married Nicholas and signed her name on the register as Amelia Madison.

  Twenty-Three

  My father told me once that I’d murdered my mother. I was five years old at the time. Old enough to understand the pressure of responsibility but not to understand the fantasising mind of the alcoholic. He never repeated his accusation. I doubt he even remembered making it. If he did ever have a sudden, hazed recollection of my scared face, the duvet clutched to my shoulders, and wished to apologise for his loaded accusation, it was too late. The damage was done.

  When his alcoholism became too pronounced for his superiors in the civil service to ignore, he was then transferred to deal with nondescript responsibilities in the back room of Kilfarran’s council office. Moving from a Dublin suburb to Kilfarran with its narrow streets, scattered houses and outlying farms was never going to be easy for either of us as we orbited each other in our separate capsules. I had been so influenced by his illusions that when, in secondary school, the new girl in a one-horse town, I became fodder for the class bully and her sycophants, I believed it was only natural that such punishment should be meted out to a mother-killer.

  There was nothing particularly original or inventive about the bullying I endured. It followed a normal process: name-calling, isolation, whispering girls who fell silent as I walked past, their laughter breaking out in my wake. My hair, being long, blonde and tangled, was ideal for pulling and I was constantly being asked if I’d ever heard of an antiperspirant called HBO, which I eventually discovered was an acronym for Hides Body Odour. These were just some of the methods used by Lisa Lynch and her friends to diminish me.

  I was pinned against the school corridor wall one afternoon, holding on to my lunch money, which Lisa was determined to take from me, when Amelia Pierce came upon us. I’d admired her from a distance, envied the way she walked that tightrope of being neither the bully nor the bullied. I’d watched her perform incredible flips and forward rolls in gymnastics, her slim, small frame belying her strength.

  She dived into the fight when she saw what was happening and I, unable to believe my luck, stopped cowering and fought back. A few minutes later Lisa was running towards the bathroom, her nose streaming blood. One of her friends, sobbing as she followed her, left strands of her hair twined around my fingers.

  ‘Let’s go find a table in the canteen,’ Amelia said. ‘Nothing like a bare-knuckle fight to whet my appetite.’

  My lunch money was still in my pocket when I walked away with her, our friendship sealed.

  We had much in common, Amelia and I. No mothers, widowed fathers, mine crazed by drink, hers by a protective need to shelter her that, she admitted, could sometimes be stultifying. Try alcoholism, I wanted to shout, but I stayed silent. We shared the same taste in music, clothes, books and dance. She was a natural dancer. I lacked her grace but made up for it in energy. How we talked in those days. Boys, bands, teachers, classmates and that golden bubble where our futures floated.

  We were fourteen when we discovered Billy Tobin’s ice house. Billy had no objections to us using it and gave us the key to open the rusting padlock. The interior smelled mouldy, dusty, earthy. We imagined spiders and other creepy-crawlies scurrying for cover as the light from our torches flooded the dark cavern. We dared each other to go first, then held hands as we took tentative steps forward, lighting up the shelves and nooks that had stored perishable foods in the days before electricity made the place defunct. We returned the following day with sweeping brushes, dusters, candles, jar lanterns, rugs, blankets. We hammered a set of old curtains Amelia had found in her attic onto the back wall and called it our Hobbit Den. We filled it with books and magazines, listened to the Spice Girls on our Walkmans. After reading Wuthering Heights, we discovered Kate Bush and became goths. We wrote poems of unrelenting grimness that made us weep at the time and, years later, laugh uproariously when we read them aloud again.

  When Amelia’s father introduced us to his album collection, our taste in music changed. We abandoned the net gloves and eyeliner for a slight man in a purple suit and became Prince fans. David Bowie was next. We were developing an interest in older men, especially those with an androgynous allure.

  Nothing androgynous about the boys we befriended, except for Mark, who came out as gay when he was fifteen. He was one of our closest friends, as was Jayden Lee-O’Meara, known to us as Jay. Mark and Jay came everywhere with us, except to the ice house. That remained our own private domain and it was where Amelia cried as if her heart was breaking when Jay, her first love, moved to California.

  I, too, left Ireland when living with my father became intolerable. I returned to Kilfarran, though, to nurse him through his final year. We made peace with each other be
fore he died but it was too late for the wounds he had inflicted on me to heal.

  Amelia had fallen in love with Nicholas by then. Such happiness, the walking-on-cloud-nine kind that was not yet affected by John’s dislike of him. When she introduced us, Nicholas held my hand in a firm grip. He looked into my eyes and I shivered. He knew. Without words being exchanged, he was able to see beyond the friendship I shared with Amelia and it spawned his jealousy. This realisation was instinctive. I didn’t trust my own judgement and, unwilling as I was to say or do anything to mar my friend’s joy, I decided it must be an overreaction.

  Afterwards, when she phoned to tell me John had died, I came back to Kilfarran to comfort her. But Nicholas had stepped into that role and held her with a possessiveness that must have taken her breath away.

  I remember their wedding day with gritty clarity. The country church at the foot of the hill. It was a small gathering, compared to the massive attendance at John’s funeral. Billy Tobin stepped into the role John would have played and was a sensitive surrogate as he accompanied Amelia up the aisle.

  She was dressed in pale gold and I, her only bridesmaid, wore dusty rose. Vows were made, love sealed. We dined afterwards in a nearby hotel where, inevitably, gaiety broke out when the champagne was uncorked. The guests raised their glasses to the blushing bride. To the beautiful bridesmaid. To the handsome groom. And a toast to absent loved ones. Yvonne wore an elaborate fascinator with many feathers and was dressed in purple silk. She was upset that her son’s wedding was not the gala affair she had always envisaged and shed many tears during the ceremony.

  On that wedding day, as Nicholas Madison walked down the aisle with his bride, it seemed for a short, blissful period, that love would conquer sorrow and triumph in happy-ever-after land.