The Next Wife: An absolutely gripping psychological thriller with a killer twist

by Liz Lawler

  ‘Tess, I’ve got some rather startling news to tell you. The police asked to see inside Daniel’s locker and there was a letter in it addressed to me. The police now have it, but I can tell you what was in it as I have a copy. Tess, I’m so sorry. This letter was written three days after John Backwell’s operation. Tess, have you got somewhere you can sit down?’

  Tess felt her heartbeat in alarm. What had her husband written?

  ‘I’m okay, Stella. Just tell me.’

  ‘Are you sure, my dear, this might distress you?’

  ‘Stella, just read whatever it is, I’ll be fine.’

  Stella cleared her throat before she began. ‘“Dear Stella, I did something which has now badly backfired. My patient John Backwell has died. I cast the blame onto my wife, Tess Myers, as you well know, but this is an inaccuracy in my report. It is a lie. Tess cut a suture at my instructions and cut it at the perfect length. The post-op bleed was not caused by her actions. I was aware of a problem during the first operation. I knew I had put my proximal clamp too high and had mistakenly avulsed a vessel on the back of the artery. I used surgical packing which had stopped the bleeding at the time. I thought I would get away with it, and did not want to admit I had made a basic error in front of my wife and team. I should have taken the time to locate the vessel and do a proper repair or make sure it had been ligated.

  ‘“On return to theatre there was torrential bleeding but I was able to maintain proximal control and prevent further loss. I suspect post-mortem findings will prove this tragic event more likely to have been caused by the vessel bleed that I had failed to ligate properly prior to performing the anastomosis. Needless to say my behaviour in all of this has been contemptible. For which I expect no forgiveness. Sincerely yours, Daniel Myers.’”

  Tess made no response, prompting Stella to ask if she was all right.

  ‘I’m due to attend my hearing on Friday,’ was all she could think to say.

  Stella let out a soft moan. ‘We’re not expecting you to attend that, Tess. This letter will, of course, be put before the board.’ The woman paused and then sighed. ‘I’m so sorry that he didn’t make this known sooner, but I can only imagine he hasn’t been in the right state of mind. Tess, I’m here for you if you need me. Please call any time.’

  When the call ended Tess finally got to sit in silence. He had caused it. Not deliberately, but accidently. Then blamed her, perhaps thinking the patient wouldn’t die. Had he done this solely to save his career or also to stop her working? To mould her into becoming more like his mother and treat her in the same way his father treated his own wife? Tess would need a psychiatrist to answer that. Her husband had been on a journey of conflict from the moment he was left for dead by a father who didn’t care.

  The day had turned into a day of revelations. His letter being the biggest one of all. He had told the truth even if it was only in secret. Just knowing that gave her some courage for the days ahead. She would now be in a period of waiting. Waiting for the coroner’s verdict to come back and waiting to bury her husband. And in that waiting she feared only one thing – the police finding out the truth. The postcard messenger was still out there and so was the man who took her husband’s body away.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  In the hallway Tess shivered from the coldness blasting in through the open front door. The weather over the last five weeks had gradually turned colder and colder. The bookies were predicting a white Christmas and they could be right if it dropped a degree or two. Parked between the gate posts and taking up nearly the entire length of the drive, a large removal van sat with doors wide open. It had taken hours to pack by the two men working hard, and was almost full. There was only space left for smaller items.

  The men’s footsteps echoed loudly from the stone floor of the hallway, louder now than when they first arrived some hours ago. The house, empty now of nearly all of its furniture, was making a great deal of noise. She kept back just a few items, a bed and some chairs, especially a Queen Anne chair which her daily visitor liked to sit in, and a cot she’d found in the attic. Large rectangular patches of wall marked out the spots where paintings had hung. She’d been given back her wedding photograph after the inquest, but had chosen not to put it back on the wall. Eventually, such personal items would disappear altogether. She needed no other reminders of her past life apart from her growing bump.

  At the inquest an open verdict was reached by the coroner’s jury because intent of suicide could not be proven. The train that hit him had not been identified. No reports had come to light of bumps felt or damage found from any driver. For which Tess had been thankful, not wishing to have on her conscience someone out there thinking they’d killed a man. It was explained freight trains more often travel at night. Sometimes even when something is felt if nothing obvious is seen trains just carry on. It was something she could live with at least. Ed and Mark and Vivien rarely referred to it, but she knew they all thought the same, that it was the state of his mind that brought him to that railway track. Whether to intentionally kill himself or just to get away for a while, he had not been thinking straight.

  If Anne thought differently, she kept it to herself and Tess was grateful. That chapter was closed. Nancy and Stuart Myers never spoke about the circumstances of their adopted son – and the newspapers so far had not revealed the identity of his real father. Tess suspected it was the coroner who decided to keep that information under wraps, maybe out of respect for the Myers. They had, after all, been his parents – the ones who had raised him. His real father was in hospital and she’d been asked if she could visit. Something she was not looking forward to.

  Her eyes fixed on the golf bag, pondering what to do with it. A knock on the sitting room door made her turn. The older chap stood in the doorway. She imagined the two men were father and son. ‘We’re all done, Mrs Myers.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. The van full of furniture would soon be heading to an auction room. The money she made would go to good use. She’d decided not to run away back to London but to stay and turn the house into a children’s home. It was still only at the pipe-dream stage, but she would pursue it once she was sure of staying free. There had been no more postcards but it didn’t stop her being afraid. Keeping her baby was all she cared about. She hadn’t known how far gone she was five weeks ago and had feared miscarrying due to stress, but she had reached the end of the first trimester as her scan yesterday put her at twelve weeks. It was safe. They were both safe.

  The man’s eyes gleamed as they rested on the golf bag. ‘That’s a beautiful set.’

  ‘Do you play golf?’ she asked.

  He nodded. ‘I do. We both do.’

  ‘Take them. They’re yours.’

  He protested until he realised she was being genuine, and a short while later she waved them off happy with their gift. They might not mind too much that one golf club was missing. As the vehicle exited out onto the road she caught sight of a man standing at the gate and felt her insides flutter. She placed her hands across her stomach. It was five weeks since Daniel’s death and she hadn’t seen him for all that time. Had he now reflected on what they did and decided it to be too big a secret?

  Tess held onto the front door. She could scarcely breathe as she let the Bradshaw’s book man back into her home.

  ‘I knew you would come,’ she said.

  He closed the front door. ‘I thought you might want to chat about that night.’

  She stared around the hallway at all the open doors. She didn’t want to take him into any of the rooms. He gestured to the stairs and obediently she sat at the bottom of them. Unable to look at him yet she gazed at the wallpaper and saw the shiny patch where a small tear had been painted over with red nail polish. She had forgotten to ever look for it. She felt it now with her fingertips and then turned haunted eyes to look at him remembering back to that night five weeks earlier.

  ‘I didn’t intend to. I didn’t plan to… it just happened. He was going t
o kill me,’ she whispered. ‘Then afterwards I saw you standing there in my kitchen and I thought I was hallucinating. I couldn’t make sense of anything or work out how you were there. He had locked me in. Bolted the front door.’

  He nodded and sat down on the floor, leaning against the wall.

  His voice was calm. ‘I came in through the back. It wasn’t locked. When I saw him on top of you I thought at first it was you who was dead. The knife in his hand… all the blood on the floor. I thought it was yours. Then you blinked and I realised it was his. I made the decision then to just take him away. Take his body to a place where his death could be explained. His body would be…’

  ‘Destroyed,’ she uttered in a distraught voice. ‘But why would you do that? You cleaned a crime scene. You put me in a bath, though I don’t remember it much, but it had to have been you because no one else was there.’

  ‘It had to be done. I knew the police would come knocking on your door as soon as he was found.’

  ‘Only you never warned me it would be you!’

  ‘Again, it had to be done. You needed to register shock in view of what we were coming to tell you.’

  ‘That my husband was dead when I already knew?’ she asked.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But I still don’t understand why. You’re a policeman.’

  ‘What I did, I’d do again,’ he said simply. ‘I have never broken a single law in all of my life, but that night I felt I had to. Too many people have suffered already. You included. And it might not have ended well for you.’ He looked straight at her. ‘It might have been argued that he held a knife to defend himself. A weapon that was readily available to hand. Whereas a weapon brought into that room might have been seen as intent to do harm.’ He gestured towards her bump, starting to show. ‘It wouldn’t benefit anyone to let it be known you killed him. You don’t want your unborn child to carry that stigma their whole life.’

  ‘You couldn’t have known then I was pregnant. You didn’t know.’

  He shrugged. ‘True, I didn’t. But I knew you weren’t guilty of murder, either.’

  ‘How could you have known from just meeting me on a train what I was like, what I was capable of?’

  ‘As soon as I knew who your husband was I knew it was self-defence. You were a type a man like him would pick.’ He shook his head slowly and released a long drawn-in breath. ‘You were just like another young woman who once lived here. A woman who married for love, who was gentle and kind, whose life was brutally ended by a man who only ever wanted to control her. Her father warned her against marrying him. Her mother grieved for her for half her life. The housekeeper found this young woman and her child covered in blood. She called the police, but it was the woman’s mother who came first. And she discovered something that destroyed her. She knew the man who killed her daughter was in this house after it happened. Though her daughter didn’t tell her she was running away she’d seen packed suitcases hidden under the bed a few days before.’ He paused and stared around at the empty hallway as if only realising all the furniture was gone.

  Then he looked back at her. ‘There were no packed suitcases found. He’d unpacked them. The prosecutor tried to prove he was in this house after he murdered his wife and therefore would have known his child was still alive, but it wasn’t backed up with sufficient evidence. And that’s when things got sadly mixed-up in the mother’s mind. She thought this man had got away with it. She thought her grandchild was dead. She lost a hold on reality, lost sight of the living, of the people who loved her who were lost from her mind.

  ‘Then one day she surfaced. One day she went out and her husband had to go looking for her. He found her here watching this house. For years she watched it. Terrified that something bad would happen in it again. She knew somehow someday that he could come back. And in her mind he did. The day her grandson came back from the dead.’

  ‘Daniel,’ she whispered.

  He nodded. ‘And she was right. Something bad did happen again. Something bad enough to make you want to jump in front of a train.’

  Her eyes stretched wide in her shocked face. ‘It was you!’ she whispered almost to herself. ‘You wrote the postcards! You wrote to Daniel!’

  He nodded. ‘And I’m glad I did otherwise history may have been repeated in this house. When I met him that morning I warned him his family secret would become public if he continued with his current behaviour. He was fuming that I dared to say such a thing, but not in the least deterred. I followed him not knowing quite what else to do. He drove to a few places, got out at two of them for a drink. And that’s when I lost him. I spent the next few hours watching your house. Then as you know the next morning his car was found. I got a shock when I heard where. He’d returned to the spot where he and I met and left it there. I got an uneasy feeling straight away so I drove back here fast and parked up the road and waited. I waited all day. He didn’t turn up until dark. I saw your friend leave and then thirty minutes later he showed up on foot.’ He shook his head at her. ‘He left his car there for a reason. He didn’t want it to be seen. I don’t know if he intended to disappear afterwards and let everyone think he was dead. He didn’t come back here that night to play happy families. He came back to kill you.’

  Tess felt she was walking through a maze with no exit. His explanation shed no light on why he was involved in her life in the first place. How he knew who Daniel was? How he knew who his real father was?

  Her eyes turned anxious. ‘I have to visit his father tomorrow, and I don’t want to.’

  He leaned his head back and looked up the stairwell and pointed to the chandelier.

  ‘How on earth do you change the lightbulbs in that thing?’

  Tess stared up at it, realising she still didn’t know. A ladder, she supposed.

  His eyes were on her when she looked back at him.

  ‘There’s something that I need to tell you, but perhaps it would be better to wait until after your visit. Why don’t I come back the day after tomorrow?’

  Tess found herself nodding. This man knew her darkest secret yet she wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t there to harm her or turn her in. She put her hand in her pocket and pulled out Daniel’s mobile.

  ‘I found it two days after he was dead by his kitchen knives. I was too scared to give it to the police as it would have a text message from the person who sent him the postcard. The postcard said he’d be sent an address of where he was to meet the person. Only now I know you didn’t send him a text as they didn’t find a message. So how did he know where to meet you?’

  He half smiled. ‘I’m a policeman. I wasn’t going to leave a message on his phone. I left directions on a piece of paper under his windscreen wiper instead.’

  ‘I didn’t know what to do so I hid it in his golf bag.’

  He took it from her hand. ‘It’s gone,’ he said. ‘It was never here.’

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Tess delayed going straight to the ward. It had taken three hours and three train rides to get to the hospital to visit this man, yet all she wanted to do was walk back out the door and head home. She would never be ready for this visit. This man had destroyed his son. She wondered how Daniel discovered his real father. Had Nancy and Stuart told him he was adopted? Or had David Simmonds been the one to contact him? The Myers lost contact with Daniel when he turned twenty-five. Was it from then David Simmonds started poisoning his son’s mind? It would mean Daniel had been coming to see him for fifteen years. Fifteen years of believing in a man who left him for dead and only on his last visit he understood the father he really had.

  David Simmonds could die for all she cared. He had no part in her future, and if she could help it, she would never think of him again. She was here now so she would see him but only this once.

  On the ward a nurse asked her to wait before visiting as the doctor would like to speak to her. A short while later a harried-looking man introduced himself as Dr Newman.

  ‘We’ve been trying t
o get hold of you for a number of weeks, and have left several messages on your phone.’

  Tess stared at him nonplussed. She never checked the house phone now she had her own phone again. It was only by chance she’d answered the call yesterday morning.

  ‘I’m the doctor looking after your father-in-law.’

  Tess cut him off before he said anything further. ‘David Simmonds is not my father-in-law,’ she stated firmly.

  The doctor turned visibly flustered, and immediately apologised. ‘I do beg your pardon. Your late husband is down as next of kin, and I just assumed.’

  ‘Well, then don’t. My husband was adopted after what his father did, and I am only here because I was asked to come.’

  ‘I see,’ he said, gaining back some composure. ‘So I don’t suppose you want to hear about his condition.’

  ‘No, I don’t, but I’ll see him,’ she said.

  Tess kept her coat buttoned-up as she made her way to the bed. She didn’t want the man to notice her condition. She could see he was tall like his son, even lying down under the covers, and his thick grey hair still had some dark strands showing through. It was his eyes, though, that held her. They were Daniel’s eyes, the same dark green. An interest flickered in them as she stood near the bed.

  He took his time to speak, and then a small sneer moved his mouth. ‘You’re like his mother. Dark hair and small. I thought he would have chosen better.’

  She felt her face go warm, but she made herself stand there and not turn away.

  ‘He loved his mother,’ she answered back.

  He harrumphed. ‘I dare say he did. So is that all you came to tell me?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘That’s all.’

  Then Tess walked away without looking back.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Tess walked up the tree-lined road towards the burial chapel, feeling finally free. The call from Dr Newman last night to tell her David Simmonds had died had shocked her a little. She hadn’t realised until that moment that he’d had a hold on her while he was alive. She supposed it was only natural to feel freer with him gone and consigned to the past. Her child need never know about his biological grandfather.