The Strangers We Know

by Pip Drysdale

  Did Oliver know it was her? And what had she hoped to find on his laptop when she stole it? Proof of what he’d done? Proof of that shady investment?

  And when he remote wiped it and she didn’t find what she was looking for – what, she’d formed a new plan?

  A plan to kill him?

  I minimised the browser window and went through to Brooke’s recent files. And that was when the next thought hit.

  All those times I told her how close Oliver and I were, how we told each other everything, how I was his ‘problem solver’ – no wonder she wanted to frame me. She probably thought I knew what he’d done. That I’d stood by him and did nothing.

  Yes. The very shell I’d created to protect myself – the image, the armour, the token-blonde-wife, all the lies I’d told Brooke – was precisely what had landed me here.

  But couldn’t I just take this to DCI Holland? Couldn’t I just tell her? I considered how that conversation might run.

  Me: Oh it wasn’t me (with all the motive in the world) who killed my husband – it was a girl named Brooke I met in Pilates two months ago. She was the sister of a girl my husband used to date, Alyssa. Brooke blamed us for Alyssa’s death and was after vengeance.

  Maybe. It didn’t sound too bad …

  DCI Holland: Charlie, how did she get into your house? What evidence do you have that she ever even met Oliver? What about that taser search on your work computer – did she magically get in there too?

  Me: She had keys. She copied them.

  DCI Holland: Oh, well that’s convenient, isn’t it? Do you have any proof of that?

  Me: Yes, I have them right here [pulls Brooke’s copy of the keys].

  DCI Holland: Ummm, how can you prove you didn’t make those copies?

  Me: Oliver’s computer is in her house. She stole it from our flat. So is the taser! You should go and look.

  DCI Holland: Okay, well (a) it’s slightly concerning that you know that – how can we be sure you didn’t plant those things there yourself to shift the blame? And (b) we’ll need a search warrant for that. Let’s give Brooke a call and see if she’ll chat to us in the first instance.

  Brooke: Denies everything.

  No, I needed to somehow show DCI Holland the truth, have her reach the conclusions herself, that was the only way. I swallowed hard, staring at the screen: the files were listed in order of ‘date last opened’.

  There was a spreadsheet at the top so I clicked on that and while it was opening I checked the titles of all the other files. A little further down, there were three image files named Oliver1.jpeg, Oliver2.jpeg and Oliver3.jpeg. I didn’t need to open them to know they were the images she’d used on his dating app profile but I clicked on them anyway. Up they came in quick succession: the first was the one I’d taken on our honeymoon. I’d posted it an hour after I took it. Then the next: him tanned, green eyes gleaming, grinning. And the third: him in a tux, my hand around his waist, just my red nails and bangles visible.

  Brooke had used our happiest memories against us.

  The spreadsheet had opened by then. Down the left hand column were dates. Then beside that were two columns. One was titled ‘Charlie’; the other ‘Oliver’.

  Beside the most recent Monday in my column was written: Nothing of interest. In Oliver’s column: He is still away.

  Beside Tuesday in my column: Didn’t come home at usual time. In Oliver’s column: He got home just before nine. Unpacked. Went out for pizza. Think in UK until mid-next week. Need to check.

  Wait …

  How did she know he got pizza? Or that I didn’t get home at my usual time? Was she there? Watching him? That made sense … Because on the night I saw Oliver on Tess’s dating app, she’d changed the radius of her matches to within three miles. If Brooke had been in Bow, she wouldn’t have fallen within that range. But if she’d been at our house in Battersea …

  I quickly scanned the document – she’d been watching us for months. Tracking our patterns. Making notes when I told her things.

  See? I told you we should have closed our curtains. She must have found a place nearby to watch us.

  But I knew what I needed to do now: make sure I wasn’t the only one who had seen this information.

  However, I couldn’t just send it to the police. I was too involved and, like I said, they might think I’d created it. Planted it. Whatever.

  Even though I had access to Brooke’s emails, I couldn’t send it from her address either because why would she implicate herself if it were true?

  No, it needed it to come from someone else.

  An anonymous tip-off.

  From someone who didn’t even really exist.

  It needed to come from my catfish persona, Annabella Harth, the Gmail address and Facebook profile I created at that bus stop to catch Oliver.

  And so, I opened a private browser window and signed into Gmail as Annabella.

  I hadn’t signed into that account since I’d created it and a lot had happened since then. As it opened, all I could see was message after message with subject line: Annabella_Harth you have a new message.

  All the messages I’d thought had come from Oliver.

  I let out a deep breath as I moved back to Brooke’s emails. Slowly, methodically, I forwarded the three messages from the apps (these proved Brooke had pretended to be Oliver), the one from the lawyer (telling her to stop harassing Hornbsy Private Equity) and the two from Alyssa detailing what had happened (motive). If I could piece it all together, surely the police could too. I then forwarded the spreadsheet detailing our movements. And deleted all of them out of her sent and deleted folders.

  Once there was no trace of me in there, I closed down Brooke’s emails and cleared her browser history. Now it was time to focus on Annabella.

  I pulled up Google and found the editor’s email address for The Evening Standard and the tip-off email address for the MET Police.

  I forwarded all seven emails with the subject title ‘Oliver Buchanan case’ to both addresses simultaneously so they were aware the other knew too.

  Then I closed down Annabella’s Gmail account. I don’t mean logged out. I mean, navigated to the bit where you can permanently delete it.

  Finally, I went back to Instagram and changed Brooke’s privacy setting to ‘public’. Now the entire world could see that Brooke had been mourning Alyssa. That she had motive. Then I logged out of her account and cleared both browser histories.

  Shutting down the computer, I wiped it for fingerprints, put it back in its case and returned it to where I’d found it.

  Then, taking off my shoes, I ran to the kitchen, and grabbed a rag from the sink and frantically wiped down the areas where I might have stepped, the areas the police might dust for footprints, and, covering my hand with that same cloth, I locked the window so there was no possible point of entry. I’d learnt that little trick from Brooke. No forced entry means nobody else was there.

  Finally I wiped down the taps in the kitchen, keeping the rag to dispose of outside just in case.

  I grabbed my shoes, slung my bag over my shoulder, made sure all my hair was tucked into Josh’s baseball cap in case anybody saw me leave, checked the room once more and went to the front door. I’d done it. I was home free.

  That’s when my breath caught in my throat.

  Because I wasn’t alone.

  Someone was watching me through the window.

  Waving.

  The postman.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I waved back. And a moment later tap-tap-tap. He was knocking on the front door. This was bad. This was very, very, very bad. Now there was a witness. But he’d seen me so if I didn’t open the door it’d look even more suspicious.

  You can do this, Charlie.

  And so I reached for the deadbolt, turned it and opened the door, preparing to speak.

  ‘You almost missed me,’ I said in my best Scottish accent as he handed me a small, book-sized parcel.
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  ‘Lucky me,’ he said as he handed me an electronic thing to sign. I wrote out the letters: B-r-o-o-k-e. Then I gave him a smile.

  ‘Can I get your last name?’ he asked.

  ‘Why of course,’ I said, ‘Shaw.’

  And then I closed the door.

  And all I could hear was Ba-boom. Ba-boom. Ba-boom.

  There was no way around it – it was not good that he had seen me, but my hair colour was covered and my accent was strong. And with the emails I’d just sent, there should be no reason for him to be looking at mug shots.

  And so, my heart banging against my chest walls, I told myself that everything was going to be okay, opened the door and finally put on my shoes.

  The air was crisp and cool outside. I left the book leaning up against the door and I rushed around to the back garden. The wheelie bin was sitting there below the bathroom window, right where I’d left it. I pulled it back to its place at the front, wiped down the top with the rag, and pulled closed the cold metal latch on the wooden gate. And then, with my face angled down to the ground, I walked faster than I ever have in my life towards the Tube station, throwing the cloth into a dumpster on the way.

  I was shaking.

  My heart was thudding.

  But I’d done it.

  And now I had to do something even harder.

  11.06 am

  So how do you walk into a police station knowing they want to arrest you for murder? You do it the same way you walk on stage, the same way you jump into a freezing cold ocean: you don’t think about it. You stay in the moment. You just jump.

  I was in a small room, all alone. The woman at the front desk had taken me there as soon as she’d heard my name: a dark wood door, white walls, a white massage-type table against one wall and cabinets full of plastic jars and tubes with white and yellow lids. I suspected the door was locked.

  I’d done some research on the way over and I knew they could hold me for a maximum of 96 hours before they charged me. That was long enough for whoever went through the police emails to realise Brooke was a suspect and pass the information on to DCI Holland. Until then, while she was still out there, I figured a police station was probably the safest place for me.

  Tap-tap-tap.

  ‘Come in,’ I said, my voice feeble. It felt weird, like I was at a doctor’s surgery, but what else was I going to say?

  The door opened and a man came inside. He had dark hair, black, square-framed glasses and was around 35.

  ‘Hi Charlene,’ he said. My heart beat faster as he moved past me to the cabinet with all the jars in it. He told me his name but I missed it. I need to learn to listen when people tell me their names. But I caught the next bit. ‘I’m going to take some swabs from you. Take a seat.’ He motioned to the white table by the wall.

  He came over to me and I opened my mouth ‘ahhhh’. He smiled as he reached a cotton bud inside my cheek and circled it around. He was close enough that I could smell him: bergamot. He turned around and put the swab in one of the longer tubes, screwing on the top and asking me to check my name on the label. Then he did the same with the other cheek. Next it was fingerprints: it took hardly any time at all. It was all electronic and portable. All I needed to do was place my fingers on the sensors.

  But he was nice. Calming. And my heart rate was almost back to running at normal speed when the door opened for the second time. It sped up again the moment I saw her. Because you can feel in someone’s energy if they have ill-will towards you. I knew it probably wasn’t personal – she just thought I was guilty – but it felt personal.

  DCI Holland.

  The first thing I thought when I saw her was that she looked totally different to what I’d expected. She was small-boned and delicate looking with mousey ash-blonde hair a few shades darker than mine pulled back into a low ponytail and she wore a light pink polish on short nails. She was wearing navy trousers and a white shirt with a fine gold chain visible around her neck.

  ‘Charlene?’ she asked as she came inside, nodding at the man whose name I hadn’t heard. Her voice sounded hurried, stressed. And her forehead was creased.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, my heart beating so fast now I thought I might not be able to stand up without falling over.

  ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t come on Monday, like I said I would. It’s all been such a shock.’

  She nodded, watching me with her hazel eyes, and directed me to follow her down a narrow hallway. We came to another door and she led me inside. ‘Would you like a cup of tea? Coffee?’

  ‘Yes please, coffee,’ I said. This is civilised. And then she left me there and I heard the door click as it locked. It felt a lot less civilised then.

  I walked over to the table and reached for the jug of water in the middle, pouring myself a glass. Then I sat down on one of the two seats on either side of the table and looked around. It was a stock-standard interview room. There was a black recording device right there beside me. The walls were dark green, the chairs were standard issue with a small amount of padding on the seat, the table was worn and lights flickered from the ceiling.

  I let out a big exhale and looked down at my nail polish. It was chipped now. Much like me.

  Then the door opened.

  DCI Holland had been joined by another police officer. He was only around thirty but was already losing his brown hair, his scalp visible beneath the fluorescent lighting. His cheeks were pink and his light blue eyes turned down at the corners which gave them a sense of kindness. Or was it sadness?

  ‘Charlene,’ Holland said, placing my coffee in front of me. ‘This is Officer Kowalski.’

  ‘Hi Charlene,’ he said, sitting down.

  I swallowed hard. ‘Hi,’ I said, picking up my coffee and taking a sip. It was Nescafe. I remembered the taste from drama school.

  ‘We’re going to record this interview, okay?’ DCI Holland asked, her hand already moving across to the recording device. I nodded and she flicked it on. A small red light began to glow.

  Lights, camera, action.

  She cleared her throat.

  ‘This interview is being tape-recorded. It is 11.26 am on June thirteen, 2018. I am Detective Inspector Josephine Holland and with me is Officer Dennis Kowalski. We are at Charing Cross Police Station and we are enquiring into the events of Sunday the tenth of June and the days that followed.’ Her expression was sombre. Her mouth pursed. Her eyes moved to me. ‘Please state your full name.’

  ‘Charlene Paige Buchanan,’ I said, my voice coming out stronger than I expected. ‘But everyone calls me Charlie.’

  ‘Can you confirm your date of birth for me, Charlie?’ she asked.

  ‘March sixth, 1985.’

  ‘Thank you. Now, Charlie, I’m just going to read out a caution to you.’

  I nodded. I’d been expecting this. Everybody knows how this bit goes. I could have recited it along with her.

  ‘You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something that you later rely on in court. Anything you say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?’ Her eyes were on mine and my chest panged. I felt a wave of panic spread through me – recognition of what was happening – and my head grew light.

  ‘Yes.’ I nodded again. My eyes burned with tears and my lip wobbled. ‘I understand.’

  ‘You are entitled to a lawyer. Would you like to call one?’

  I shook my head. Not yet. A lawyer would look like I had something to hide and I’d already run from them for over 48 hours.

  ‘Please note that the interviewee is shaking her head “No”,’ Holland said for the benefit of the tape. Kowalski sat silently, watching me.

  ‘Charlie, let’s start with the events on the evening of Sunday the tenth of June this year. Are you married?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, Oliver’s face flashing before me.

  ‘And what is your husband’s name?’

  ‘Oliver Buchanan,’ I said, and then the tears started to fall as I re
membered his body being wheeled out of the house, his wedding ring sparkling in the morning light. Stop it, Charlie, stop it. It would look like I was crying because I’d killed him. I clenched my jaw, willed the tears to stop. ‘I already know he’s dead. I saw them taking him out of our house.’

  ‘You saw them?’ Holland asked. She was frowning now.

  Shit.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The police. Yesterday morning.’

  ‘So you were there?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Charlie, we spoke on the phone that day. Why didn’t you come in to talk to me as we agreed?’

  I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders as if to say I really don’t know. But then I answered her anyway. ‘I was just so scared.’

  ‘Scared of what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Scared that I’d get blamed. Scared that whoever did that to him would do it to me. And I was in shock, you know. I mean, he’s dead. Every time I close my eyes I see him. And we fought. The last time I saw him we fought.’

  DCI Holland looked down at her notepad.

  ‘Yes, one of the neighbours heard you. Could you tell us a little more about what that fight was about?’

  I nodded. ‘I was pretty sure he was cheating on me.’ Even as I said the words I felt disloyal. But I couldn’t tell her that I knew it wasn’t Oliver on that app now without revealing how I knew that. If I knew it was Brooke who faked those profiles, if I started throwing around accusations, it would open up a whole can of worms I couldn’t afford to open, like: had I sent those emails to the police? And if so, how did I get access to Brooke’s email account? And then the biggie: did that mean the information contained in those emails couldn’t be trusted?

  No. I needed to be patient. To wait it out and let them figure it all out on their own. And they would, wouldn’t they?

  ‘How did you discover this?’ she asked, pen poised.

  ‘I found a garter belt,’ I explained. ‘That was the first thing. But there were others.’ I intentionally kept it vague. I didn’t want to get into the fact that I’d signed up to a dating app to catch him out in case they somehow realised the email I’d signed up with belonged to Annabella Harth.