My Husband's Wife

by Jane Corry

  Morning.

  A desk.

  Sharp voice on the other side.

  No comment.

  Relief.

  Someone who might believe her side of the story.

  Only then did she lift her face, staring at the woman in front of her across the desk. She had a mole in the middle of her right cheek. It stood out like a third eye.

  Carla addressed herself to that. Find someone’s weak points. The bits that made them different. It was what they had done to her at school. So it was only fair that she did the same to others. It was how you won.

  ‘It’s my right to see a solicitor,’ Carla said firmly to the mole. ‘Here’s the number. They’ll find her.’

  ‘Her?’ said the voice.

  ‘Lily Macdonald.’

  The dark-blue suit looks down at the paperwork on the desk.

  ‘Same surname as yours?’

  Carla nodded. ‘Yes. Same surname.’ And then, as if someone else was moving her lips, she added, ‘My husband’s wife. The first one.’

  57

  Lily

  ‘Sugar? Sellotape? Sharp implements? Chewing gum?’

  What happened to the crisps? Maybe chewing gum has been used as bribes here instead. Or perhaps it can be employed for other purposes. It’s been a while since I’ve visited a client in a police cell. Since leaving London, my work has revolved around parents like me. Families whose lives have been torn apart by trying to provide for children who aren’t like others. Those who don’t get what they’re entitled to from the system. Not only babies who are damaged at birth and whose hospital notes then ‘disappear’. But children like Tom whose loved ones have to fight to make sure they go to the right school and who, in the meantime, struggle for support.

  Cases involving murder or theft or bankruptcy or money laundering – all of which I dealt with at the London practice – now seem a long way back in my memory.

  But here I am. Showing proof of identity to the policewoman at the desk. Still not sure why I am here. Why I’m not at home with Tom (the head has given him a week off school in view of ‘the circumstances’). Why I’ve left Mum to console him (although Tom has been remarkably matter of fact, asking questions like, ‘What will happen to Dad’s brain now he is dead?’). Why I’m in a police station.

  About to see my husband’s wife.

  A great deal has happened since that night in London when I found Carla and my husband outside the hotel. The divorce. Ross’s news that Carla was expecting. Their daughter’s birth. Ed’s death. It sounds so unreal that I have to repeat it again.

  The timescale is neat. Agonizingly so. Almost as if the whole thing had been planned with one of those clever little fertility charts. Birth. Death. Two opposites which have more in common than we realize. Both are beginnings. Both are ends. Both are miracles which we cannot fully explain.

  And that is, I suddenly understand, exactly why I am here. I’m not here because of Carla’s demand. (She’d actually called Ross after I hadn’t picked up. Presumably she’d been the ‘Caller Unknown’.) No. I’m here because I want to look her in the eye. Want to ask why she did it. Want to tell her that she’s ruined three lives. That she’s a bitch. A bitch who had her eye on my husband from the minute she saw him. A child with the heart of an evil adult.

  Yes, I wanted Ed to be punished, but I never meant this. Murder. I grieve for that sandy-haired man who took me by the hand at the party all those years ago. I can’t believe he is dead. Or that it took his death to show me that I still – dammit – love him, even though I don’t know why.

  There was a woman at my old office who came in red-eyed one morning. ‘Her ex-husband has died,’ one of the secretaries had whispered. Back then I couldn’t understand why she was so upset. But now I do. The fact that you no longer have a right to grieve for someone you once shared your life with makes the pain even worse.

  We go down a flight of stairs. Stone stairs that make my high heels ring out. When I first started making police station visits, cells were no more than a stained mattress on the ground; a window slatted across with iron bars; and – if you were lucky – a plastic cup of water.

  This cell has a window without bars. A water cooler. Sitting on the bed, swinging her legs and looking for all the world like a bored model waiting her turn to go on the catwalk, is Carla. I say ‘model’, yet her hair is matted. Her usually glossy lips are pale, devoid of lipstick. She smells of sweat.

  Even so, she still has a certain something. A style which rises above her squalid surroundings. A presence which suggests she has far better things to do than be here.

  ‘I didn’t do it.’ Her voice is low. Husky. Challenging.

  ‘Thank you for coming, Lily,’ I say, as if I’m reminding a sulky teenager of her manners. ‘Thank you for driving all the way up from Devon to see the woman who murdered your husband.’

  She tilts her face at a certain angle, again reminding me of a difficult adolescent. ‘I’ve told you.’ Her eyes are on mine. There isn’t a blink. Her voice is calm. More confident than it was a second ago. ‘There’s been a mistake. I didn’t do it.’

  I laugh out loud. She sounds for all the world like the child I first knew. The little Italian girl with the big brown eyes and innocent smile. Mamma is at work. The pencil case belongs to me.

  Lies. All lies.

  My anger bubbles up, spitting itself out of my mouth. ‘Surely you don’t really expect me to believe that?’

  She shrugs, as if I’ve suggested she’s taken the wrong turning on a road. ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Then who did do it?’

  Another shrug, followed by an examination of each one of her nails as she speaks. ‘How should I know? I think I saw someone – a man.’

  A prickle of unease runs through me. Is this one of her stories again?

  I sit forward on the edge of my chair. ‘Carla, my husband is dead. Tom is distraught because his father has been murdered.’

  Then she looks up with that same cool, cat-like stare. ‘You’re wrong.’

  A beat of hope springs up inside. Ed isn’t dead? Someone, somewhere, has got it all wrong?

  ‘He’s not your husband any more. He’s mine.’

  I make a ‘pah’ noise. ‘I was married to him for fifteen years. We’ve brought up a child together.’

  For a minute, I stop, remembering the paternity test. I squash the guilt back into its box. Then I continue. ‘You were a plaything. A nothing. You were with him for the blink of an eye. That’s no marriage.’

  ‘It is in the eyes of the law. And you’re forgetting something. We have a child.’ Her fists clench by her side. ‘They’ve sent my daughter to foster-parents. I need you to help me get her back.’

  I try to bury a small stirring of sympathy. ‘A baby,’ I spit. ‘You’d only just started. You haven’t had to go through what I have. Haven’t had to give up everything to look after a demanding child while Ed –’

  ‘Ha!’ Carla breaks in furiously. ‘Don’t be so self-righteous. I’ve paid my dues too. Ed wasn’t an easy man to live with. The drinking, the lies, the mood swings, the jealousy, the so-called artistic temperament …’

  So he was the same to her too? I feel a shot of pleasure. Yet when it comes from her mouth, I find myself wanting to defend him. He was under pressure … he felt everything too deeply … Why is it that I seem to remember the best side of my ex-husband instead of the bad bits? Yet I am forced to agree that he had his defects.

  ‘He was so controlling,’ shudders Carla. ‘And he was a bastard to you.’

  This isn’t a word I care for, but I find myself nodding. Then I stop. Time to be professional. ‘Controlling?’ I repeat. ‘Is that why you killed him?’

  She leans forward now. Her hands are clenched into two small balls. I can smell her breath. Minty. Fearful.

  ‘Someone was there. I told you. I saw a man.’

  ‘Well, that’s convenient. What exactly did this man look like?’

  ‘Can’t remem
ber.’

  She sits back now, supported by the wall, crossing her legs on the bed. Cool. Too cool. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I’m in shock. By the way, do you have a hairbrush on you?’

  A hairbrush? Seriously?

  ‘I shouldn’t be here either,’ I say, getting to my feet. It’s true. I should be at the hospital, in the morgue. Identifying my husband instead of allowing Ross to do it.

  ‘No. Please. Stay.’

  Her hand reaches out and catches mine. It’s cold. Stone cold. I try to pull it back, but it is clutching mine, continental style, as if we have just met at a dinner party and discovered we have a mutual friend.

  ‘I need you, Lily. I want you to be my lawyer.’

  ‘Are you insane? Why should I help you? You stole my husband.’

  ‘Exactly. But if you defend me, it’s a message to the rest of the world that even the woman I wronged believes I didn’t kill Ed. The barrister that you pick will trust you. And you’re a good person. You have a reputation for saving the underdog.’

  Her eyes flicker. ‘And that’s what I am now.’ Gone is the confident young woman. The latchkey kid is back.

  But I’m still getting my head round all this. ‘Let’s say you are telling the truth. What’s in it for me? Why should I help the woman that destroyed my family?’

  ‘Because you lost all those defence cases before you moved out of London.’ Grown-up Carla now steps in. ‘You might be doing all right with negligence cases. But this is a chance to prove you can do it again with a murder.’

  She looks at me like she knows she’s hit a nerve.

  ‘Please, Lily. Do it for Poppy if you can’t do it for me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My child. Our child.’

  I hadn’t known her name. Deliberately. I’d asked Ross not to tell me. It made her less real.

  ‘If I go to prison, I’ll lose my daughter.’ Carla’s eyes fill with tears. ‘I … I didn’t feel well for a time. I wasn’t … I wasn’t a great mother. But now my own mother is dead.’

  I hadn’t known that. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I murmur. ‘How?’

  ‘Cancer.’

  Carla lifts her big brown eyes to mine. ‘I miss her so much! I can’t let Poppy miss me like that. Please, Lily. You’re a mother. Help me.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say, feeling an almost pleasurable harshness coming out of my mouth, ‘foster care is the best place for her.’

  Her eyes bore into mine. ‘You don’t mean that, Lily. I know you don’t.’

  Damn her. She’s right. This is a baby we’re talking about. A baby who will be screaming with anguish because she can’t smell her mother. Children, however old they are, need their parents. How would Tom cope if I wasn’t around?

  ‘But I’m not sure I believe that you’re innocent.’

  ‘You have to.’ Carla’s hands are tightening even more firmly round my wrist. She’s a small girl again. I am the older woman. Too old to be a sister. Too young to be a mother. Yet we have so much in common. It’s as if her life is inextricably bound to mine and, however hard I try to shake her off, she’s always there. An evil shadow? Or a child who’s been misunderstood?

  I run my hands through my hair. ‘How do you know I wouldn’t put up a poor defence? To make sure you’re convicted to get back at you.’

  Her eyes are trusting. ‘Because you’re too moral for that. And because you’re also ambitious. Think about it, Lily. You could go down in history as the lawyer who helped acquit your husband’s new wife.’

  It bears, I must say, a certain ring to it. And yet there are numerous holes in this argument, so many flaws in the defence. I also don’t care for the fact that Carla keeps using my name. It’s a legal technique to get a client onside. And she knows it.

  ‘There’s still the small matter of who murdered Ed if you didn’t do it.’

  Even as I say the words, they don’t feel true. My husband – because that’s how I still see him – can’t really be gone. He’ll be at home. My old home. Sketching. Breathing.

  Carla’s grip is strong for one so small. I’m still trying to shrug it off, but she’s determined, it seems, to hang on to me as if I am a lifebelt. ‘Ed was up to his eyes in debt. I don’t think the money was always borrowed from official places. Maybe someone wanted it back. Surely the police could find out. And I saw that man at the door. Someone must have seen something.’

  She seems so certain. My legs begin to shake as if someone else is rocking them.

  ‘There’s something else too. I’ve been receiving anonymous notes.’ Carla’s eyes are locked on mine. ‘They implied something bad would happen to me and Poppy because of what I’d done to you.’

  I go hot, then cold.

  ‘Have you kept them?’

  ‘Only the last. Then I tore it up, like the others, because I was scared Ed might go mad. But I’d recognize the handwriting again.’

  Handwriting?

  A paralysing chill crawls down the length of my body, eating it up, inch by inch.

  ‘You can’t afford me.’ I’m clutching at straws now. ‘I can’t do it for free. My firm will need to charge you.’

  Those eyes now glint. She can tell she’s winning me over. Suddenly I know what she’s going to say before she says it. ‘Ed’s sketches! The ones he gave me as a child. They’re worth something now. I will sell them to prove my innocence!’

  It tastes, I have to admit, of the most delicious irony.

  58

  Carla

  Of course, Carla told herself, she hadn’t meant all that stuff about needing Poppy and getting her back. That was just to get Lily onside.

  For the first time in months, she was finally feeling more like her old self. With Ed gone, she was no longer a child who did everything wrong. She no longer had Poppy’s screams ringing in her ears day and night: a painful reminder, as if she needed one, that if it hadn’t been for getting pregnant, she would still be free. Without the child, she was sleeping better, although her dreams were still punctuated by Mamma. Sometimes she would sit bolt upright in the night, convinced her mother was still alive. Then she would remember. If only, she sobbed, hot tears streaming down her face, she could have been with Mamma at the end.

  Meanwhile, she had to convince the judge that she was innocent.

  It wasn’t easy being a defendant instead of a lawyer, Carla soon realized through this haze of grief. If only she understood more about what was going on. If only she’d specialized in criminal law, not employment.

  Now, as Lily prepared for the bail hearing – to determine whether she had to wait in prison until her case was tried – Carla attempted to remember the murder cases she’d covered at college.

  ‘Surely all I have to do is plead “Not Guilty”,’ she protested to Lily in the police cell.

  ‘It’s not as simple as that.’ Lily glanced at her notes. ‘The judge will look at the evidence – like the front and back doors, which don’t look as though they’ve been forced – and then decide if you pose a risk.’

  ‘A risk?’ she pouted. ‘Who am I going to hurt?’

  ‘That’s the point, Carla. The judge doesn’t know you from Adam. For all he knows, you’re a husband-killer. It’s unusual to get bail for a murder charge. But not impossible.’

  Lily was getting frustrated. Carla could see that. Better not push it, she told herself. She’d been amazed, frankly, when Lily had agreed to take her on. And she was lucky – or so Lily told her – that the bail hearing was happening so fast.

  When she saw the judge, he would surely see she was no murderer. Lily had brought in some shampoo and a hairdryer; a hairbrush too, although it was one of those thin wand designs instead of her usual paddle brush. Lily had also lent her a dull brown calf-length skirt, even though Carla had specifically described the one she’d wanted from her own wardrobe. ‘This one is more demure,’ Lily had told her brusquely. ‘It all makes a difference.’

  She had been trying. Carla had to concede that. What was it that had swa
yed her? The ‘Ed was a bastard’ bit? The baby bit? Or the argument that taking on her case would help Lily’s career?

  Maybe some of each.

  It would have been easier, though, if Lily had been nicer to her instead of being all brusque and cold. Cold … Ed’s body would be cold now. It didn’t seem possible. None of this seemed possible. Any minute now, she’d wake up at home. Not the ‘home’ that had once belonged to Lily and Ed. But real home.

  Italy home.

  Sunshine streaming in through the shutters; the sounds of children walking past on the way to school; the old man from next door grumbling about the tourists; and Mamma. Beautiful Mamma, calling her in that sing-song voice. ‘Carla! Carla!’

  ‘Carla Giuliana Macdonald. Do you plead guilty or not guilty?’

  Were they really in front of the judge already? Carla looked around the courtroom. It was so easy to travel in your head. So easy to blank everything out.

  They were all looking at her now. Far away. And then close. Out and then in. The room was swaying. The handrail in front of her in the defence box was slippery from the sweat on her hands. There was a loud ringing in her ears. ‘Not guilty,’ she managed.

  And then the room danced backwards and forwards as if someone was stretching it out and in again, like the concertina the old man used to play in the square by the fountain back home …

  The first thing Carla saw when she opened her eyes was Lily. Lily in a smart navy suit that could have been black unless you were looking closely.

  ‘Well done,’ Lily said.

  It was difficult to know if she was being sarcastic or not.

  Carla looked around to give herself time. They weren’t in a police cell. Or the court. They were in a room that looked a bit like an office.

  ‘You managed to get the judge’s sympathy with that rather dramatic faint. Luckily for you, your grandfather put up the bail.’

  Nonno? Carla began to sweat again. ‘He knows of this?’

  ‘The news is all over the place. The press is having a field day. They’re outside the court right now. Waiting for us, cameras at the ready.’

  Lily’s eyes were bright. Glazed like an animal’s, although Carla could not work out if she was in search of prey or being hunted herself. The thought made her uneasy. ‘ “Ménage à trois in the courtroom,” they’re calling it. Someone’s got wind of the fact that we shared a husband.’ There was a hoarse laugh. ‘I’d like to say it was at different times, but there was some overlap, wasn’t there?’