by Louise Voss
‘Weren’t you in Death of a Salesman, the one he directed? I’m sure I remember him saying something about that, when I mentioned your name.’
Alvin gave a small laugh. ‘I wasn’t. I auditioned and didn’t get it, but by then I’d realised I really didn’t like Ed, so I wouldn’t have taken it even if he’d offered it to me.’
I hesitated. ‘This is slightly awkward, but I’ll come clean: what he actually said about it was that you had a bit of an, um, diva hissy fit in the audition? Chucked your script on the floor and stormed out, argued with him and Mike?’
He laughed again, much more heartily. ‘Absolutely not! Lynn, you know me pretty well by now. Can you see me doing that? I’m not averse to yelling at a student with the musical ability of yeast, but I’m not one for throwing my toys out of the pram.’
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘I always thought it sounded odd, when Ed told me. I can’t imagine anyone less likely to have a tantrum than you. I assumed he’d just mis-remembered.’
‘I’m not surprised that he came up with a story like that, though, to cover up what I saw…’
I wondered if I had heard correctly. ‘Saw?’
‘Lynn, I don’t want to sound like I’m gossiping and, like I said in my email it might have been nothing, but…’
‘What?’
The sky outside was darkening. A wind had whipped up and from my bed I could see the bunting strung to and fro across the main street flapping wildly in the twilight.
I realized I was holding my breath.
‘It was the day of the Death of a Salesman auditions. I was a bit early, came straight from work and parked in the car park round the back, you know, there are a few spaces at the back of the theatre?’
I nodded, as if he could see me.
‘When I drove round, I saw a couple jumping apart. They’d been kissing in the fire escape doorway. It was Ed and another woman, but I didn’t see who she was, other than she had blonde hair in a ponytail. They shot inside and he couldn’t meet my eyes during the audition. There was no sign of the woman.’
‘Not his wife, then,’ I stated flatly. Shelagh’s hair had been dark auburn.
But Ed had always been so strident about infidelity, always said how shocking and unforgivable it was! Who had this woman been? If that had happened in 2000, it was years before I had been sent to Surrey.
After the call concluded, with me promising to keep Alvin updated with any developments, I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes, falling almost immediately into a deep dreamless sleep, as if my system had abruptly crashed and shut down.
I woke with a start two hours later, April’s face looming unbidden into my mind.
43
I lay staring at the ceiling, my imagination running riot as though my thoughts were chasing each other around the room, squawking and bouncing off the walls. Snatches of recent conversations kept repeating on me like a hot curry, Ellen’s vitriolic voice saying ‘Mr Am-dram himself’; Alvin commenting ‘He was a superb actor, really natural’.
An ex-GP who was good at acting could definitely have pulled off feigning dementia. Particularly when he’d had plenty of first-hand experience of knowing how to behave, having watched his own father go through it. It was the ultimate in method acting. Ed always had loved a challenge and I knew he would have seen it like that, throwing himself into the role, giving himself months to prepare and execute the biggest part he’d ever played.
For what, though? To escape with our pension pot? Another woman? To kill Mike, or have him killed, for some reason? Just for the hell of it?
Rage rose in me, and then was gone in a flash. There was no way he’d faked it. I sat up, determined to stop torturing myself like this. Why would he spend months creating an elaborate pretence, only to knock it on the head? The dirty clothes, the lack of grooming and bathing – whatever the reason, I just couldn’t believe Ed would put himself – and Ben – through that voluntarily. This was a man who could feel queasy at the smell of a cheesy sock. Ed loved his clothes! He’d always taken such pride in his appearance.
An affair seemed the most likely reason for it all, though.
I thought again about April, analysing my friendship with her and how she was when she was around Ed. I was sure I had never spotted any telling little lingering glances between them, or illicit embraces. I remembered that night on the boat when Mike had screamed at her for getting chilli in his eye, and Ed and I had later talked about how temperamental their marriage was. Ed always claimed that while April was really pretty, he’d hate to be married to her because Mike moaned so often about how high-maintenance she was.
An elaborate double bluff?
Again, no way. If April had been the girl Alvin caught Ed snogging in a doorway, and Ed was still seeing her, that would mean they’d been having an affair for well over ten years!
Ed loved me. I was sure of it.
Unless Ed and April had been on and off over the years, and the shock of Mike’s death and then the joy of Ed’s recovery had made them suddenly re-evaluate their lives and decide they wanted to be together…?
I remembered coming downstairs the night after Mike’s death, finding the two of them with their heads together at my kitchen table. My husband and my best friend – well, second-best friend, after Maddie.
I got off the bed and went to the window. If I craned my neck, I could see Ellen’s flat. It was eight o’clock and getting dark now, a few people sauntering up and down the street, presumably heading out to restaurants or pubs.
There was a butcher’s shop opposite, whose window was empty of everything except some springs of parsley and a few packs of sausages. My stomach growled at the thought of sausage and mash, and I realised I hadn’t eaten anything since the croissant that morning at Guernsey airport. I turned on the overhead light, pulled down the blind, then took out my laptop. A couple of emails and then I’d go in search of food.
I wrote to Maddie first:
I’m here and have seen Ellen. What a piece of work! I mean, I knew she wasn’t a fan of Ed’s but she was bang out of order. She thinks Ed was having an affair and insists he killed S. She even implied he’d murdered Mike as well!! I stormed out. Tell you the rest tomorrow. Xxx
There was still nothing from April, which gave me a twist of unease in the pit of my belly – although it was plausible that she just didn’t have any internet in the outback.
Bit of a coincidence that she upped sticks the same day that Ed went missing though, I thought again. Yet, I rationalised, if they had planned it, they would surely have staggered their disappearances. Far too obvious for them both to take off on the same day, surely? And the police had confirmed that Ed hadn’t flown anywhere.
I went on to Facebook, opened up my fake profile and did a search for April Greening.
April’s page came up immediately, her profile picture a lovely shot of her and Mike on the boat – taken by me a couple of years ago, I realised with a faint start. They looked happy and relaxed. There were no other photographs showing, but being inexperienced in Facebookese, I didn’t know if this was because there weren’t any, or because April’s privacy settings hid them from all but her friends.
I clicked ‘add friend’ and wrote a brief accompanying message:
Hi April! Great to find you on here. I’m new to all this stuff – what a dinosaur, eh?! Can’t even figure out how to add a photograph. I’ll get my hubby to help. Anyway I hope you remember me from school. We were in awful Sister Margaret’s class together. I was the one who totally had a girl-crush on you – you were by far the prettiest of us all. I see from your profile pic that you still are. I’ll stick up some photos of those days as soon as I work it all out. Do write and tell me what you’re up to. I’m living in Windsor with my husband. No kids but two black Labs! Bye for now! Christine xxx
April had often talked about Awful Sister Margaret, who had been the bane of her life at the convent school. She’d never mentioned anyone called Christine, as far as I remembered,
but she was hopeless with names and a sucker for a compliment, so I thought this could work.
I paused. I could have just joined Facebook as Lynn Naismith and added April that way – April was always on at me to join. But I wanted to see if April would respond to a fake request, thus proving she did have internet access, when she had ignored my emails.
I clicked on Monty Greening and his twin Caspar. Neither of them had any sort of privacy settings in place, and I scrolled through thousands of photographs of them both in a variety of exotic locations, sometimes with April and Mike, mostly with a succession of beautiful girls in tow and similarly bronzed and fit men of their age in bars, up mountains and on beaches. There were a few comments further down Caspar’s page under a photograph of Mike that he’d posted: ‘So sorry to hear about your dad, dude,’ and ‘Hope the memorial went well, sorry we couldn’t make it. Our thoughts are with you and Monts.’
Nothing from April; nothing public, at any rate. Looking through Caspar’s ‘About’ section, I found an email address that I copied down. I typed a quick email:
Dear Caspar, just wondered if you could give me your mum’s postal address in Australia? I want to post her something for her birthday and I know it can take weeks to get anything out there. How’s she getting on? She hasn’t replied to my emails – have you heard from her? Dying to know what she’s up to. If she’s sent you any photos will you forward them? And if you Skype her, please ask her to contact me urgently, there’s something I need to speak to her about (tell her not to worry though!). All the best to you and Monty, love, Lynn xxx
Pressing ‘send’, I thought about trying to write to April again, but my stomach began to rumble so loudly that I felt sick and faint. Food, I thought, closing the laptop lid. Now.
An hour later, full of fish pie and red wine from a quirky family restaurant right next door – no sign of Ellen, thankfully, just lots of comedy condiment sets on the tables, Rodney and Del-Boy in pottery salt and pepper incarnations – I climbed the narrow stairs back up to my little tartan hotel room. The first thing I did once inside was check my emails again. My laptop creaked into action and I noticed again how slowly it was running. Annoying, since it was only a couple of years old.
My emails eventually loaded. There was still nothing from April, but a new message from Caspar:
Hi Lynn, hope you’re OK. No, sorry, I don’t have an address for Mum! All I know is that it’s a sheep station where they do yoga and stuff – sounds crazy, doesn’t it? She said she’d be in touch via Skype and FaceTime, but we’ve not heard from her yet apart from an email when she arrived with a photo, which I’m forwarding. She said the guy who runs it is called Douglas and the yoga was nice, but not much else.
April had been in touch with the twins, so she must have had some internet connection at some point. Interesting, I thought. I clicked on the attachment and a photograph of a scrubby view under a vast cerulean-blue sky slowly appeared, pixel by pixel, a rusty-brown painted verandah rail in the foreground. It could have been anywhere.
It took a matter of seconds for me to copy the image into a Reverse Image search on Google, where the same image immediately appeared as part of someone’s collection of photographs of Australia on Flickr. Someone who wasn’t April, and the photo had been taken back in 2012.
Not April’s photo, then.
I exhaled. It wasn’t definitive proof that April wasn’t there, but it was fairly damning. Why else would she nick someone else’s photograph and pass it off as her own? And why would she lie to her sons about where she was?
‘Where are you really, you husband-stealing bitch?’ I said out loud, hearing my voice crack. If April had betrayed me too, I thought my heart would break into pieces. The only thing that would be worse would be to find that Maddie was in on it and had helped stitch me up.
I logged into LinkedIn and went to April’s account to check through her contacts, which was allegedly how she had ended up getting the invitation to Australia. But there was nobody there called Douglas or Doug, and nobody based in Australia, either.
Think, Waitsey, think. Where would they go, if they had gone somewhere together?
Waitsey. I hadn’t thought of myself as Waitsey for years.
Somewhere hot, that’s where.
I sat up straight and rubbed my lower back, which was beginning to ache from being hunched over the laptop. I imagined I was back in the police station incident room and there was a pristine whiteboard ready to write out all our theories and leads.
Say Ed had been planning it for years. It would have to be for something really major. Money, probably.
How would faking illness then running away bring him tons of money? April, was the obvious answer. She was rich … really rich. She’d be inheriting all Mike’s Internet of Things wealth, plus a hefty life insurance policy payout.
Ed would have known that – but not three years ago, which was when he started claiming he was too afraid to fly anywhere.
I couldn’t help dwelling on the thought that Ellen had planted more firmly in my mind: Unless he killed Mike himself. Had been planning it all that time.
No, it was impossible. Ed had had a rock-solid alibi in me – I’d personally locked him into the spare room that night. It was far more likely that it was someone with a grudge against Mike; a sacked board member, perhaps. He’d made some enemies in his time, he said.
But … but … if Ed had been faking the Pick’s Disease, he could have done it for the sole purpose of exactly that: to get me to unwittingly give him an alibi. He could so easily have got himself a duplicate key to the spare-room lock, or hired a hitman. I’d been sleeping so heavily that he probably could have held a rave downstairs without me waking up, so it would have been simple to sneak out, lock the door behind him, and go and murder his best friend so that he could run off with his lover, April, and live off her wealth somewhere sunny.
I remembered the day of his diagnosis, the noises I thought I’d heard outside on the gravel. It could have been him, sneaking over to the studio to ring April when he saw I’d nodded off in the conservatory, then jumping back into bed and pretending to be asleep when I’d gone up to check on him. If I’d caught him, it would just look like he’d been wandering or sleepwalking, his mobile slipped into his dressing-gown before I could spot it, April still on the other end of the line, knowing she had to keep silent…
‘My friend April,’ I said, to the painting of the thistle. ‘My friend.’
I forced myself to sit back down on the bed. I might be putting two and two together and coming up with eight. I could be doing them both the most massive disservice. Ed might be lying dead in a ditch somewhere, and April really was on her sheep farm in the lotus position with a slice of cucumber on each eyelid.
But – and here was something else I’d never thought about before – I never used to be a heavy sleeper, not until a few days before I started locking him in the spare room to stop him hitting me in his sleep. Now that I thought back, it was Ed who had put the idea into my mind by suggesting he locked himself in. He’d have known I’d never let him do that – but he’d made it look like it was my idea. And I’d slept like a baby for those weeks, despite the guilt, waking feeling groggy every morning but relieved to have slept so well.
The bastard had been putting something in my Ovaltine to make me sleep!
I groaned out loud, not least because it seemed that I owed Ellen Brigstock Lamb an apology. Ed could well have killed her sister.
44
I did not return to see Ellen again before I left the next morning, even though I knew I’d been rude to her. Let’s just see if she was right first, I thought, and then I’d apologise for storming out.
My eyes were sticky with fatigue and sleeplessness as I sat in the same taxi back to the airport, all five minutes of the drive, with the cabbie chatting away about the weather; fog and sea mists and cold fronts. ‘Anyway, here we are again,’ he said, pulling up to the door of the tiny terminal.
By the time I finally stepped out of Jersey airport, I was wearing an uncharacteristically foul mood like an overcoat. Even the sight of Maddie waving at me from her car didn’t raise my spirits.
‘Hi.’
‘Oh dear,’ she said, getting out and hugging me. ‘You look exhausted. It didn’t go well then?’
‘That was a lot of flights in a very short time. I need to talk to you both. Is Geoff home?’
‘Yes. Oh Lynn, are you OK?’
‘No.’
‘We’ll look after you,’ she said, and I felt very slightly better.
Not for long, though. Like the sun, my momentary optimism had vanished again by the time we got back to Maddie and Geoff’s. We were ensconced in their conservatory overlooking the garden, a streak of choppy grey ocean behind it. Tiny sparrows pecked at something on the lawn, until a large ginger cat stalked across the grass and they all took flight.
‘That bloody cat! I’ll wring its neck if I can get close enough to it. It keeps pissing on my hydrangeas.’
Geoff came in with a tray of tea and homemade banana cake, which he plonked hastily on the coffee table so that he could rush over and bang on the patio door to scare off the cat, which gave him a look of disdain, lifted its tail and unleashed a thin stream of pee on the holly bush nearby, shuddering theatrically.
‘I swear it does that on purpose,’ Geoff said, and glumly handed me a plate with a fat slice of cake on it.
I couldn’t even pick at the cake. I felt flimsier than the sparrows and more vulnerable. I wasn’t able to speak for a while, knowing how it was going to sound when I did.
‘Talk to us, come on, spit it out, sweetie,’ Maddie encouraged. ‘What happened? Does she still think Ed killed Shelagh?’
‘Yes. But it’s not so much what she said,’ I said, eventually. ‘More what’s been happening for the last decade.’
