by TM Logan
My stomach lurched again as I guessed what I was about to hear next. A sick, sinking feeling that spread to my arms and legs.
‘And?’
‘I was flattered.’
‘Then what?’
She paused, looked away.
‘What happened, Mel?’ My voice was hoarse.
‘And then he leaned in and kissed me.’
It was like being sucker-punched in the back of the head. I felt dizzy, disoriented.
‘What did you do?’ My words seemed to fall over each other.
She shrugged, a tiny movement as if the answer was obvious.
‘I kissed him back.’
‘And then what?’ Heat was rising to my face.
‘He said he was staying in the penthouse and that there was more champagne in his room. And strawberries for breakfast. That kind of brought me to my senses and I ran out of there as fast as I could, jumped in a cab and came back to our hotel.’
‘How long did it last?’
‘The conversation?’
‘The kissing.’
‘A minute? A few minutes, maybe.’
‘Maybe?’ I tried to keep my voice level.
‘Not very long. I was drunk. I’m so sorry.’
I stood up, paced the room once, twice.
A kiss. Just a kiss, two years ago. Nothing else. They were drunk. It happens. It changes nothing.
‘Talk to me, Joe,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘Come and sit down again.’
I sat down next to her on the bed again, trying to blink the dizziness away.
‘Jesus, Mel. This is a bit of a bloody bombshell. What the hell were you thinking?’
‘That was it, I wasn’t thinking. It was the booze. That’s no excuse –’
‘No, it isn’t.’
She paused, seeming to choose her next words with care.
‘I’m so sorry, Joe.’
‘Nothing else happened?’
‘It was just a snog, that was all. A stupid, drunken snog.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me about it then, or since?’
‘Because I was mortified, couldn’t believe what had happened, and worried about how you’d react. By the time I’d started to get over the shame, it seemed like there wasn’t any point in telling you because it was over and done with, all in the past. Obviously I couldn’t tell Beth because she’s a friend. And anyway, nothing really happened. Not really.’
‘But you’re telling me now.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
She sniffed and dabbed her eyes with the tissue again.
‘The thing was, after that night, Ben was . . . different.’
‘With you?’
‘Yes. He never let me forget it.’
17
Something clicked in my head, like two cogs slotting together.
‘He wanted more, didn’t he?’
She nodded.
‘He wanted us to be together. Obviously we’d known each other since university, through Beth, and we’d seen each other at parties, weddings and christenings in the years after. Stuff like that. Nothing had ever happened. But then after Charlotte and Gary’s wedding, he friended me on Facebook and got my email address somehow, then my mobile number. He wasn’t creepy about it, or weird, in fact he was mostly quite sweet and funny and chatty, at least to begin with. At first I wasn’t too bothered by it, but then he’d want to get closer, make it more than friendship, and the contact would increase – from his side, at least. I tried to keep him at arm’s length, and got him to back off a few times, then he’d relent and say we could just be friends. Really good friends. But I knew it wouldn’t be enough for him, and it would start up again. You know what he’s like.’
‘All or nothing?’
‘Exactly. Anyway, eventually he said that one of the reasons he’d moved to London – moved his family, his company, uprooted everything – was to be nearer to me, so that we could be together. He said it was our future to be together.’
‘When did he say that?’
‘A few months ago.’
‘And you never told Beth any of this?’
‘How could I? “By the way, Bee, I snogged your husband by accident and he’s obsessed with me and wants to sleep with me and marry me, and in case it wasn’t obvious he doesn’t love you any more?” I wanted to, but I’d never figured out how I could do it without it being a disaster – for everybody.’
‘What a scumbag that man is. I never realised.’
‘Lately it had got to a point though where it couldn’t carry on. It was starting to make me ill, some of the stuff he was saying –’
‘Like what?’
‘Like he would do anything if it meant we could be together. Anything. It was kind of like an escalation of what he’d been saying before and it was starting to worry me.’
‘What do you think “anything” meant?’
She shrugged.
‘That he might split with Beth, or do something to you.’
‘Do something? Like what?’
‘I don’t know, it had just got to the point where I thought he was going to do something stupid. So I asked him to meet me on Thursday after work.’
‘What happened at the hotel?’
She didn’t answer.
‘Clearly something happened,’ I said, ‘otherwise he wouldn’t have tried to deck me in the car park, gone home drunk and disappeared with one of his shotguns.’
She sniffed again, and when she finally spoke, her voice was very small.
‘I told him enough was enough. That it was never going to happen, and if he didn’t back off once and for all, I’d tell Beth and tell you everything. I told him I loved you, you were my husband, that we were soulmates and that was never going to change. Ever.’
‘And he was angry.’
‘Furious.’
‘Basically he’s obsessed with you.’
‘Yes.’
‘And he hates me as a result.’
She nodded, but couldn’t look at me.
‘ “A classic underachiever”: that’s what he says you are.’
I remembered the way Ben had talked to me, looked at me at dinner parties and barbecues. We had never been close, more friends of friends, but there had always been the little ‘jokes’ and asides about money and ambition and success – and the unspoken message: Who has more of all three? Me or you? He’d never tried very hard to disguise it. It didn’t bother me, that sort of thing never had. I’d always assumed he was looking down on me because in his eyes I was just a lowly schoolteacher with a three-bedroom semi in an OK neighbourhood and a ten-year-old car.
But now it seemed there was more to it than that.
Contempt.
Jealousy.
Hate.
Mel said: ‘He once asked me what might happen between me and him if you weren’t in the picture any more. As in, whether I’d get together with anyone else.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘That he should stop being stupid. That you were the best, kindest, loveliest man I’d ever met, and that I loved you and that was it.’
‘Did he ever say anything else about me?’
‘He used to say, “There’s no one as blind as the person who refuses to see”, or something like that.’
The phrase rang a bell.
‘He said that to me on Thursday evening too. What did he mean?’
She shrugged, looked away.
‘That . . . you could never see it. The way he looked at me, talked to me when we were all together. It didn’t seem to register with you, like you couldn’t believe anyone would ever do that.’
‘I’m not blind,’ I said. ‘I just happen to trust my wife.’
‘Are you angry with me, Joe?’
My emotions were all over the place, but there was no anger – at least not for my wife. It had already passed. I just felt sorry for her.
‘Come here,’ I said, and folded her in my arms.
&
nbsp; She apologised again and I hugged her tight, her breath warm on my ear.
‘Those Facebook posts make more sense now,’ I said.
We never know how little we deserve what we have until it is taken away from us.
‘I didn’t want you talking to some policeman without knowing all the background. Can you forgive me?’
I kissed her on the forehead.
‘Of course. I love you.’
‘Love you too.’
We sat like that for a few minutes, holding each other, Mel clinging to me like she never wanted to let me go. My arms around her, comforting her.
‘We should make that call,’ I said eventually. ‘Are you going to tell the police all of this?’
‘Yes, but you had to hear it from me first.’ She looked up. ‘Wait – do we have to tell the police everything?’
‘I think we should.’
‘Oh.’
‘What is it?’
‘The thing I said to Beth about you reversing into Ben’s car. If she finds out I lied about it, that I lied to her . . . I don’t know what she’ll think. I’d be mortified.’
I looked at her. She looked tired out from her confession. Small and vulnerable and ashamed of what she’d done. I kissed her eyebrow.
‘I’m sure we don’t need to go into absolutely every last detail.’
The phone number on the business card Beth had passed on connected me to an answering machine at Kilburn Police Station. I left a message and went downstairs to the lounge, where William was emptying out his baskets of toy cars one by one. We spent the next hour arranging them in long lines, according to colour. Silver was the winner. Silver was always the winner. Each row of cars had a lane in front of it and William then drove his police cars and fire engines up and down the lanes, responding to imaginary accidents and chasing bad men. The bad men always drove a battered black Renault with only three wheels, for some reason I had never worked out.
As we sat on the rug and William revved his cars up and down, I thought about what Mel had told me this afternoon.
Just a stupid drunken snog, that’s all.
But was it, though? Was that all? For however many months, years, Ben had courted my wife behind my back – and I had never realised. It felt like discovering your house had a room you’d never even realised was there. A room full of secrets.
My wife is an attractive woman, men have always been interested in her. Ben took advantage of her in a weak moment. It was a one-off. Now she’s admitted to it, we put it behind us. That’s all there is to it.
The phone rang somewhere in the kitchen.
‘I’ll get it,’ Mel shouted.
She came in a minute later.
‘That was the policeman. He wants us to go in.’
18
The reception area at Kilburn Police Station was tired but functional, lots of grey plastic and bolted-down chairs. It smelled strongly of disinfectant and floor polish, but neither could banish the faint smells of sweat and vomit that greeted us as the doors slid open. An old man with bottle-bottom glasses and a cloud of white hair surrounding his head sat alone on the front row of seats, a small shivering dog in his lap. As soon as William and I sat down, he got up and moved to sit on our row, two seats away.
‘Look at that man’s dog,’ my son said in loud voice. ‘It’s tiny.’
I glanced across. Both dog and man stared back at me with large unblinking eyes.
‘Wills,’ I said, ‘do you want to play on the iPad?’
He took the gadget from me, unlocked it with the speed of an expert, and began swiping rapidly right and left to slice pieces of electronic fruit tumbling from the top of the screen.
Mel had gone into the interview room first. PC Khan had offered to sit us both down together to save time, but I didn’t want William to hear any of it, so we had agreed to go in separately. She came out after half an hour.
‘Mummy!’ William announced as she re-emerged from the security door beside the front desk. He ran over to her and hugged her around the waist as if he hadn’t seen her for a year. ‘I’m bored. Can we get an ice cream?’
‘It’s too cold for ice cream, William.’
‘How was it?’ I said to her.
She shrugged.
‘I just told him . . . you know. Everything.’
‘You feel OK?’
‘Yes. Weirdly, I feel better for it all being out in the open. I’m actually all right.’
I followed PC Khan through the steel security door and into a small interview room at the back of the station. He was in his early twenties, slightly built, with calm, intelligent eyes. His uniform was immaculate.
‘So, Mr Lynch, you’re a friend of Benjamin Delaney?’
Friend was stretching it somewhat but I nodded anyway.
He checked his watch and wrote some details at the top of a pre-printed form. Careful, neat handwriting, talking as he wrote.
‘As you’re aware, Mr Lynch, I’ve already spoken to Elizabeth Delaney and to your wife about this matter. Mrs Delaney reported her husband missing yesterday and obviously she’s keen to establish his whereabouts, or at least to confirm that he’s safe and well. Can you tell me about the last time you saw him?’
I told him what I could remember about Thursday evening, just the way we had described it to Beth. Mel was right: it felt good to get it all out in the open, like setting a heavy weight down at the end of a journey. The young policeman took notes throughout.
‘And that was the last time you saw Mr Delaney?’
‘Yes.’
From a file, he produced an identical form with my wife’s name at the top.
‘Let me make sure I’ve got these timings right, Joe. Can I call you Joe? Your wife said that she might have been one of the last people to see Mr Delaney on Thursday evening, at around 5 p.m.’
Despite what she had told me this afternoon about her drunken kiss with Ben – or maybe, weirdly, because of it – the instinct to protect my family, my team, was stronger than ever. Ben had taken advantage of her when she was drunk and on her own, he’d caught her in a weak moment, and even though I knew some of the blame lay with her, I couldn’t be angry at her. If I hadn’t been too naive to spot his intentions, if I’d put a shot across his bows sooner, maybe he wouldn’t have taken advantage of her. And she wouldn’t have been left to fend him off all by herself.
In that respect, it was I who had failed her. I wouldn’t fail her again. What had happened in that car park was on me – it was mine to deal with.
‘She wasn’t the last to see him,’ I said to the young policeman.‘I saw Ben after that, when she’d already driven off. I was the last person to see him in the car park.’
‘After your wife had gone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you remember any other drivers arriving or leaving at that time? Anyone else around who might have seen Mr Delaney after you?’
‘There was a black Range Rover, I think, just arriving as I was about to leave.’
‘Remember any part of the registration?’
‘No, sorry. Can’t you check CCTV or something?’
‘We may do that further down the line if Mr Delaney doesn’t turn up safe and sound. For now, though, based on the information I’ve been given today, it appears you were the last person to actually set eyes on him before he went missing.’
‘I think Beth Delaney saw him later that night.’
He consulted another form from the file.
‘No, she said she heard him at their house, but was too frightened to go downstairs.’
‘He was drunk.’
‘Apparently so. But roughly 5 p.m. was the last direct contact you had with him?’
‘Not exactly. He posted on my Facebook account later that evening.’ I described the Facebook posts as clearly as I could remember them.
‘On your account?’
‘He had my mobile. I dropped it.’
‘Right, got you. Did you leave the posts up?’
‘Deleted them. Sorry, was that the wrong thing to do?’
‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘We can get that stuff back anyway.’
He made a note of my Facebook username and was silent for a minute, checking off the other details on the form.
‘What happens now?’ I said. ‘With Ben, I mean?’
PC Khan stacked the papers in front of him and stapled them together.
‘All the recent paperwork gets passed on to the demand management inspector tomorrow morning, for what we call the daily management meeting. He makes an assessment of the current caseload, and decides how resources are going to be allocated each day in our area. We only have a certain number of officers on any given day, obviously.’
‘So, do you think an officer will be allocated to this?’
The constable shrugged, smiled.
‘That’s a bit above my pay grade, I’m afraid. The inspector makes an assessment of the level of potential risk to an individual, and allocates resources accordingly. That’s how it works with mispers – case-by-case basis, according to the level of risk.’
‘Mispers?’
‘Sorry: missing persons.’ He smiled again. ‘Jargon.’
‘And then what? Is Ben deemed to be high risk, low risk, somewhere in the middle?’
‘There are no hard and fast rules about it – it’s a judgement call by the inspector according to the evidence and the resources he has available. And it depends on the individual. So, for example, if you were talking about a young child, that would almost always get elevated into a high-risk category straight away, for obvious reasons.’
‘So an adult, a businessman like Ben, he’d probably be lower risk?’
‘Like I said, that’s a bit above my pay grade.’
‘And what if he poses a risk to others?’
‘How do you mean, sir?’
‘Beth said one of his shotguns is missing. He may have taken it with him.’
‘Mrs Delaney mentioned that. But in the absence of any other intelligence about her husband and his whereabouts, all I can suggest is that you stay vigilant, and if you have any concerns at all about your family’s safety, call us on this number.’
