by Louise Voss
I caught the glance that shot between Geoff and Maddie.
‘Go on.’
I opened my mouth and began to tell them all my fears, omitting the part about why I’d come to Molesey in the first place, of course; beginning instead with what Alvin had said on the phone about Ed snogging someone at MADS and how that could have been April. How April hadn’t replied to any of my emails and had sent Caspar a fake photo of the alleged holistic sheep farm.
‘I mean – a holistic sheep farm? How unlikely does that sound?’
Maddie didn’t even crack a smile, trying to take it in.
‘So you’re now sure Ed’s gone off somewhere with April?’
‘Not just that, Mads. I have a horrible feeling that he’s been planning this for years. That he faked the whole dementia thing to give him an alibi for killing Mike. That, like Ellen thinks, he killed Shelagh too, all to be with April.’
Maddie’s face drained of colour and Geoff was motionless. Then she stood up and began pacing around the room.
‘Lynn, I … I don’t know what to say. But you can’t believe that, surely! You love Ed! Ed adores you! He’s your husband! He’s not having an affair with April. We’d know! We’d have been able to tell…’
I gritted my teeth hard to try and stop tears springing into my eyes. I’d thought Ed adored me, too. He was the love of my life, without a doubt.
‘I’m not saying they’ve been having an affair the whole time. Maybe it’s been on and off. But you’ve got to admit it’s the most likely explanation. Oh – and I just remembered, right after his supposed diagnosis, I was convinced there was someone sneaking around in the house when I thought he was asleep. I bet it was him! And other strange things happened, you know, blinds down when I knew I’d left them up, that sort of thing.’
They looked unconvinced, so I ploughed on. ‘And what about the money? The money’s gone, all our savings.’
‘All your savings?’ Geoff asked, grim-faced.
I nodded. ‘Everything. Our retirement money.’
Maddie was still not prepared to accept it. ‘But even if he did, it doesn’t mean he planned it all along. Like you said, what if that was just a leftover symptom of his illness? It could’ve changed his character, his personality … dementia does that. Robs them of who they were.’
‘But he’s “better” now,’ I said, with heavy ironic emphasis. ‘Funny that, isn’t it?’
‘What proof is there of the recovery? Apart from his behaviour and his language improving? He must really have been part of that trial, surely. Didn’t you see an email about it?’
I sighed. ‘There are the brain scans that show his brain as normal again, and the first lot I told you about, the ones I didn’t know he’d had when he was first diagnosed, that show it as damaged.’
‘Which hospital?’ Geoff asked, delicately picking walnuts out of his cake and leaving them on the side of his plate.
‘I don’t know but after Maddie suggested it, I’m guessing it was that hospital where April used to work. It would’ve easy enough for her to call in a few favours, steal or borrow someone else’s diseased brain scans and put Ed’s name and the wrong date on them. Probably would only have taken a few minutes at a computer. So when he was “cured” and re-scanned, it would look as though his brain had been restored.’
Maddie leaned her forehead against the conservatory door and stared out at the sea. ‘I still don’t believe it. I’m sorry, Lynn, I know you’re desperate for answers but – not April. Are you saying that she and Ed plotted to kill Mike? She just wouldn’t! And I don’t believe that Ed would be enough of a bastard to put you through eight months of hell, believing he had Pick’s Disease! Why would he do that?’
‘I told you. Because he wanted an alibi for Mike’s murder. Around the time that Mike was killed, Ed started punching me in his sleep – at least that’s what I thought – so he suggested I lock him in the spare room at night so I could get a good night’s sleep, and not be worried that he’d wander. Well, actually, he suggested he locked himself in, but he’d have known I wouldn’t let him do that, and he could have been planting the idea for me to suggest. Which I did. So then, when the police interviewed us, I could – and did – confirm that Ed was ill, and locked in a bedroom that night for his own safety and mine. He could easily have had a spare key. And, you know what else? I think he was putting something in my tea to make me sleep.’
I was unable to keep a tremor out of my voice but I forced myself to stay calm. ‘He loved Mike – although they definitely weren’t as close in the last few years as they used to be. I put that down to the illness too but just say, hypothetically, that it was April all along he really loved and wanted to be with. Then perhaps they did split up for the first few years that I was with Ed, and perhaps he was in love with me enough then to want to give things a go…’
Maddie held up a hand like she was stopping traffic. ‘No, no, no, that doesn’t make sense! Why would he kill Shelagh to be with April, only to break up with her and marry you instead?’
I shrugged miserably. ‘Why would he do any of it? Logically though, just say he’s completely innocent – then where is he? If he’d been in an accident, I’d know by now. His passport and our money are gone. April’s gone. Mike’s dead. What am I supposed to think?’
‘It does seem weird,’ Geoff agreed. ‘You need to find them, and if they’re not together that’ll put your mind at rest.’
‘I set up a fake Facebook profile and sent her a friend request, pretending to be an old schoolfriend. April’s so rubbish with names she probably won’t smell a rat. I thought if she replied, then I’d know she can get internet wherever she is, and that she’s ignoring me.’
‘And has she?’ Geoff asked.
‘I don’t know, I haven’t checked. I’ll look now.’ I pulled out my laptop from its grubby, stripy zip-up case – grubby, because it had been Timmy’s favourite place to sit. The ginger cat outside reminded me of Timmy and I wondered how he was getting on with Naveeta and the girls.
I switched it on and waited. ‘It’s been so slow recently. I don’t understand why – I mean, I’ve not got much on it, and it’s only two years old.’
Geoff tipped his head to one side and his jowly neck settled into a different and lopsided concertina of folds. ‘How long has it been running slow?’
‘A few months now.’
‘Can I have a look at it?’
Geoff’s job back in Surrey had been in IT.
‘You can if you want,’ I said, handing it over, ‘but to be honest, a slow laptop is the least of my problems.’
His hands were big and solid, comforting, with startlingly white moons on his fingernails. ‘It’s not that…’ he said, ‘I just want to check something.’
He keyed in some commands while Maddie perched on the arm of the sofa and rubbed his greying hair affectionately. She was still gazing out to sea with a troubled expression in her huge green eyes.
‘I’m not making it all up,’ I said, and she turned sharply.
‘Oh, Lynn, of course you aren’t! I wouldn’t think that of you, not for a second. It’s just … such a huge accusation, of both of them.’
‘Shit,’ Geoff said, his fingers frozen over the keyboard.
‘What?’ Maddie and I said in tandem.
‘Just been going through the processes. I’m really sorry, Lynn, but someone’s installed spyware on here.’
Maddie’s hands flew to her mouth.
‘Three guesses who that would be, then,’ I forced myself to say. ‘Is that why it’s been running so slowly?’
‘Almost certainly. Can you pinpoint exactly when it started its go-slow?’
I groaned. ‘Around the time of his diagnosis. I remember moaning to Ed about it and it was as if he didn’t understand what I was talking about. But – if it was Ed, which it must have been – that means he was definitely faking the Pick’s.’
‘And I’m afraid it also means that he can see whatever you’ve
done online ever since then,’ Geoff said apologetically.
Maddie jumped up off the arm of the sofa and faced us, her hands bunched into fists at her sides. Tears began to stream over her round cheeks, so fast that she looked like a crying cartoon of herself.
‘How can you both be so calm?’ she shrieked. ‘Ed … our friend Ed, your husband Ed … faked all that? He’s a bastard who’s lied and cheated and spied on you, possibly murdered either his first wife or his best friend – or both – and you’re just – sitting there? I want to fucking kill him!’
Maddie, who wouldn’t kill a wasp that had stung her.
‘I’m not calm, Mads, I’m not. But don’t forget I’ve had longer to think about it. I’ve had my suspicions about him for ages – I’d have to be a completely gullible idiot not to. April, however – she’s another matter. It never crossed my mind that she and Ed might have been…’
I stopped. Was this true? I thought of April fluttering her eyelashes at Ed, putting her hand over his at dinner, flattering and complimenting him, shrieking and splashing him flirtatiously in the sea on our joint holidays. I’d always thought that was just her manner – but she’d never done that with Geoff, for example. She was equally affectionate to Mike, but not as flirty as she’d been with Ed, I realised in technicolour hindsight.
‘Well,’ I conceded. ‘We all knew what a flirt April was, but I didn’t think for a second they had any history.’
‘Me neither,’ Maddie sniffed. ‘Like we said on the phone, if it was anyone, I’d have thought it would be Naveeta, she’s always been all over him.’
Geoff put my laptop to one side and wrapped his arms around me. ‘We’re so sorry, Lynn. You don’t deserve this.’
I remembered the glib excitement with which I had undertaken my original mission, just to escape the affair with Adrian Sodding McCloughlin, and then, how easily I’d let myself be lured back into bed with him again, while my husband was – or wasn’t –battling a terminal illness…
Whatever ‘it’ was, I probably did deserve it.
45
I linked my fingers at the back of my neck, massaging the knobbles of my vertebrae.
‘So the question is – where are they, and how do I find them?’
‘You said the police had confirmed he hadn’t left the country?’ Maddie said, wiping her eyes on the napkin Geoff had supplied under the banana cake.
‘He might have done by now. He’s not a high-risk missing person, which means that even if his name was flagged up at airports, it would be up to the discretion of the airline staff as to whether they detained him or not.’
‘How about asking them to check if there’s a record of him and April having gone somewhere together? Tell them what you think he’s done.’ A cake crumb stuck to Maddie’s cheek.
‘Yeah. Maybe.’
I imagined the humiliation of confessing my fears that Ed could have been instrumental in Mike’s murder, and therefore possibly Shelagh’s too. Being interviewed by Superintendent Nicholls or Brian Metcalfe and having to admit that, ten years after the event, I’d spectacularly miscalculated: cost the taxpayer thousands of pounds to let a guilty man go scot-free, just because he had wooed, flattered, impregnated and pretended he couldn’t live without me.
Rage rose up in my gullet like sick, reeking green and toxic. All the sympathy I’d had for Ed, and for poor widowed April. All the tears I’d shed for their plights, while all the time they were scheming and lying. Using me. I imagined those tears as acid, burning where they fell. Scarring Ed’s smug features and marring April’s peachy bloom. I changed my mind.
‘Nope,’ I said firmly, reaching forward and gently flicking away the crumb, trying to stop my fingers shaking. ‘Not telling them. Not until I know for sure.’
‘Lynn – I think you must. He’s spying on you!’
I’d never seen Maddie look so troubled.
I snorted. ‘Spying is the least of it, if he killed his first wife and his best mate. But back to the spyware, Geoff, for a minute – what does that consist of, exactly? Does it mean he can see everything I’ve done on my laptop in the last few months, or just some stuff? Emails?’
Geoff was looking a bit emotional, too. The tip of his nose had turned pink. ‘It depends if it was spyware that harvested your passwords – in which case it would probably just be emails he could read – or a key-tracker that follows everything.’
‘So would he – they, assuming April’s with him – have seen that I was the one who sent her that Facebook request?’
‘I’ll need to check. Give me another hour and I should be able to find out.’
I thought of the email I’d sent Maddie yesterday, expressing my suspicions about April’s disappearance and Ed’s being on the same day. At least I’d never mentioned Waitsey in any correspondence to anybody, and Adrian and I had never emailed each other. That was something.
‘Dammit. He’ll know that I suspect him. I emailed you about the meeting with Ellen. And I emailed Caspar asking for April’s postal address – oh, and I told April she needed to contact me urgently, that I was worried…’
‘So will he know for sure that you’ve figured out that he was faking it, and that he’s done a runner with April?’
‘Not for sure, I don’t think. But he must know I’m very suspicious if he knows I went to visit Ellen.’
Maddie sat down on the floor in the lotus position, inhaling deeply through her nose as she tried to gather herself.
‘God,’ she said. ‘He had us all fooled. What you must have gone through…’ She looked up. ‘Do you think April knew he wasn’t really ill?’
‘She must have done, if she did the fake scans for him. But if she didn’t, then maybe he fooled her, too. I still can’t believe that she would have agreed to him murdering Mike. She might be a vain, shallow cheating bitch but she’s not a psycho. She and Mike had their issues and rows and he could be horrible, but they were married for so long … Why would she have wanted him dead? She could just have divorced him if she didn’t love him anymore.’
‘Mike had money, didn’t he? I’d say that would be a good enough excuse, if I was Ed,’ Geoff said, looking up from the laptop. ‘April and Mike and Ed were all good at acting. They might all have been pretending the whole time. It’s despicable.’
He gnawed at the tuft of hair growing under his bottom lip, his teeth worrying at it. ‘I’m sorry, Lynn. Now I’m the one who’s jumping to conclusions. I know it’s not looking good, but as you rightly said, we don’t have any actual proof. April might still Skype you tonight and show you round her sheep farm with her iPad, and then you’ll feel bad you ever doubted her.’
‘I think it’s unlikely,’ I said.
Suddenly all three of us burst out laughing; a tired hysterical laughter borne out of stress and disbelief. I had a mental picture of April, with her three-hundred-pound highlights and top-of-the-range Sweaty Betty yoga pants, earnestly panning her iPad around pens of sheep dip, treading daintily to avoid piles of sheep shit, mystified, bronzed outback farm workers wondering what the hell she was doing there.
‘Why are we laughing? This is horrific!’ Maddie croaked.
‘That bastard, pretending to have a life-threatening illness!’ I roared – but then Maddie stopped.
‘That really isn’t funny, Lynn,’ she said, sober again.
I stopped laughing, too. ‘I know. But if I don’t laugh, I’ll … well, I don’t know what I’ll do but it won’t be good. I just want to get some proof. Confront them. Unless I have firm evidence, he’ll wriggle out of it again. So – let’s think: if Ed and April were to run away together, where would they go?’
‘Somewhere hot,’ Maddie and Geoff said in tandem.
‘Exactly. That’s what Ben said – about Ed, anyway. The Caribbean, I reckon. Every time I ever talked about moving to Jersey to be nearer you guys, all Ed would say was that it wasn’t hot enough. Jokey stuff about how you couldn’t get Banks beer or Dark and Stormy cocktails in Jersey.�
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‘Banks beer is from Barbados, right?’
‘Yes, but you can get it all over the Caribbean,’ Geoff said, still busy on my laptop. He was a guitar player and kept the nails on his right hand long, so he sounded like a secretary with a manicure as he clicked away at the keys.
‘Would he go somewhere that you and he had gone before?’ Maddie asked.
‘I doubt it. If he’s planned it that far in advance, I reckon he’d pick somewhere that doesn’t have any connection with me. If he’s with April, they might be on a boat, or with access to one. They’re both such good sailors.’
‘Did he leave a computer we could hack into? His search history might make interesting reading.’
‘No, he took it with him when he went into town that day. I thought it was so he could watch iPlayer on the train.’ I snorted with fresh derision at my gullibility.
‘Hmm,’ Geoff said. ‘That’s too bad. Maddie, while I’m still on Lynn’s laptop, will you get the iPad please? You can log her in to check Facebook, see if she’s had any bites from April.’
Maddie retrieved an iPad from the drawer of the mahogany writing desk in their living room, powered it up and handed it to me. I took it, frowning as I tried to remember the login details that accompanied my fake profile. ‘OK … here we go … no, nothing. That’s disappointing.’
‘Perhaps she smelled a rat because you – your alter-ego – doesn’t have any other Facebook friends,’ Geoff said. ‘Why don’t you get a few more then try her again? Do you know the name of anyone she genuinely did go to school with?’
‘There was a girl called Sally she used to talk about,’ I said, thinking hard. I imagined April and this Sally, as giggly schoolgirls, radiant with teenage beauty, blithely setting off on a lifetime path of using their allure to manipulate and acquire.
‘She’s got one friend called Sally in her friend list.’ Maddie pointed at the screen. ‘Looks about the right age.’
Sally Prentiss was mid-gallop on a horse in her profile pic so it was hard to tell much about her other than she rode. But that fitted in with what I knew about April’s boarding-school-privileged upbringing.
