The Friend

by Dorothy Koomson

  Miranda opens the door and steps in. I step in behind her. I notice the smell instantly. It is delicate, fragile; ripe and uncontrolled.

  ‘Mr Solarin, your wife is here.’

  Sol sits behind his desk with his feet up on it, his profile to the large corner window. On the sofa on the other side of the room sits a woman in a green skirt suit, with her stockinged feet up on the coffee table while her shoes with their high, toothpick-thin heels wait patiently beside the table to have her feet returned to them.

  I smile at Sol first, then I smile at the woman, then I return to looking at Sol so she can sit herself upright, tug down her skirt, which is quite high up her thighs, and can discreetly try to reinsert her feet into her shoes. The scent, the atmosphere, is familiar, obvious. Obviously, she is ‘T. B.H.’

  ‘Oh, hey,’ Sol says. Awkwardly, he gets to his feet, unable to work out how he’s supposed to act – not in front of me and ‘T. B.H.’ at the same time. We’re only supposed to meet under carefully managed circumstances, not like this. He comes to me. ‘What are you doing here? Has something happened to the kids?’

  ‘No, everything’s fine. I was in the area and thought I’d drop by.’

  ‘What were you doing in the area?’ he asks. Now he’s here with me he’s too embarrassed to kiss me, obviously he can’t shake my hand, so he sticks his hands into his trousers pockets and rocks on his heels.

  ‘Seeing you. I thought we might go for lunch or something.’

  ‘Oh. I see. Well, it’s great that you’re here.’ He extends his hand to the woman from the sofa, who now has her shoes on, her skirt back at her knees, and is standing, looking like a jewel in her green suit, her mass of thick red hair flowing over one shoulder. ‘This is Pia. She’s another vice president. Pia, this is my wife.’

  Her smile flickers with nerves and surprise. I extend my hand to her and shake it warmly. She’s at least ten years younger than me and fifteen years younger than Sol. ‘Cece, my name is Cece,’ I say. ‘I think Sol sometimes forgets that.’ Sol and Pia laugh – more nerves. Nothing physical has happened yet. I can tell. Not yet. But if she offers herself to him, if she makes a pass, he will turn her down. No doubt about it. That’s the sort of person he is. It won’t end there, though. He’s already down this path; what will happen is that he will turn her down and then begin to question everything about his life and he will decide he doesn’t want to be married any more.

  ‘Good to meet you, Pia,’ I say. And it is good to meet her. It is good to meet the person who will bring about the end of my marriage. She has a face now: I know who to imagine when I argue with Sol. I know who he is thinking of when he doesn’t respond to any of my touches, and when ‘T. B.H.’ and other tells slip from his lips.

  ‘You too, Mrs Solarin,’ she says.

  We shake hands and hers is confident and assured. She can relax now she’s met me. I am older, I am curvier, I am wearing a leather jacket that is nearly as old as her, and baggy jeans. I am not the nightmare rival she expected.

  ‘Pia, we can pick this up later,’ Sol tells her and she nods, smiles, leaves without saying another word.

  Once the door clicks shut behind us, Sol moves away from me. He returns to his desk, a decent barrier between us.

  ‘Nice office,’ I say to him.

  ‘Thanks,’ he replies.

  His large corner window gives a view right over the Downs, the green hills seeming to go on and on. He has thick carpet, leather furniture, a glass desk. At the edge of his desk there is a chrome-framed picture of our children: Harmony in the middle, Ore on the right, Oscar on the left. They grin out of the frame at their dad, and I know he’ll look at that photo several times a day, thinking about them. Telling himself he’s working so hard to provide for them. There’s no picture of me. Not anywhere. In his last office the place was plastered with them.

  Why wait? Why wait until she makes a pass at him to end this? Why don’t I just do it now and be done with it? I’d be putting us both out of our misery.

  This is familiar. Even though we have never been here before, it is familiar. I take a deep breath in and the smell – the natural pheromones of attraction that have mingled with the synthetic ones in Pia’s musky, heady perfume – drifts slowly to me. I close my eyes and I am overwhelmed by it: the smell, the atmosphere of deceit, the future together we’re not going to have. I inhale again. Under the smell of sex, and the scent of Pia, there is the smell of calla lilies. Delicate, light, fresh. Synthetic, so probably an air freshener. Calla lilies. Musk. Jasmine. There is a pattern. It’s forming in my head. It’s a pattern, a memory. It connects. I can see how now.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Sol asks contemptuously.

  I open my eyes. ‘I was working my way up to asking you for a divorce,’ I say.

  ‘What?’ He sits forward in his seat. His face corrugates quite dramatically for a man who is further down the road to the end of our marriage than me.

  ‘But I’m not now.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Cece, you can’t come in here and start throwing around words like divorce and expect me to understand.’

  ‘I’ll explain later,’ I tell him. ‘But right now, I have to go. I have to … I’ll tell you later.’

  ‘Cece—’

  I open the door and across the room, Pia ducks her head, goes back to pretending to discuss something with a colleague so she can keep an eye on Sol’s office. I smile and wave at her, but she looks down. I only want to thank her. She’s helped me make that final connection. I think I understand it now. I think I can see that link that breaks across the lines of the hexagons, that connects the different parts of the Yvonne Whidmore honeycomb in a way I hadn’t properly registered.

  If I’m right, then I think I know who did it. I think I’ve worked out who tried to kill Yvonne.

  Hazel

  12:30 p.m. They’ve separated us. We arrived together and said we wanted to tell them everything we knew together, and they still separated us. They’re questioning us at the same time, and I think, from the way another police officer will come in and ask other questions, that they are using one person to check our stories.

  I am so tired.

  I’ve answered a million questions and I’ve been honest. Even about Ciaran. I am so tired. I just want this to be over.

  The door opens and the policeman who keeps going and coming and asking other questions he can only have formed from talking to the other two enters the room. He’s good-looking. I’m probably not meant to think that, and it didn’t really register the first time I met him, but he is. ‘I think you’re going to need to get a solicitor, Mrs Lannon,’ he says when he sits down. ‘I think you all are.’

  Cece

  1 p.m. I called him at work but they said he was working at home today so I’ve come here – I need to see his face when I ask him.

  He opens the door after the first ring of the doorbell and does a double-take when he sees me. ‘Cece? Hi.’

  ‘Can I come in?’ I say.

  ‘Sure, sure.’

  I’m probably crazy coming here all alone without anyone knowing where I am, and without calling Gareth, but I need to see if I’m right first. There’s no point in putting everyone on high alert if I’m wrong. Although I know I’m not.

  ‘Do you fancy a coffee?’ he asks. ‘I’m working from home today.’

  I shake my head. ‘No, I’m fine. I just – well, I need to talk to you about something.’

  He frowns and leads the way to the kitchen. ‘Sounds ominous.’

  When I don’t say anything, he stops reaching into the cupboard above the dishwasher for a cup (even though I’ve refused his coffee), and turns to face me. ‘It is ominous?’ he asks. ‘What’s going on, Cece?’

  Thing is, I like Trevor Whidmore. Not as much as I like the other three, but me and him could have been friends because the boys and his girls are friends and Oscar is quite set on marrying Madison, but this is down to him. Not Yvonne, him.

  ‘Who
are you sleeping with Trevor?’ I ask so he doesn’t have time to brace himself, prepare his face, shore up his body. His response will be real and revealing.

  His whole body freezes for a second, his face flashes shock, then settles on anger. Immediately he goes to anger to mask the guilt that runs like a powerful river through a barren valley. ‘What?’ he says.

  ‘Who are you sleeping with?’

  ‘I can’t believe you’re asking me this. My wife is in a coma, and you’re asking me … Get out.’ He steps forwards, right up to me, intimidating me with his size. ‘I mean it, get out.’

  ‘Trevor, just admit it. I know you’ve been sleeping with someone else. Who is it? I’m not going to go running to put it on PPY3 or anything like that. I just need to know.’

  He leans down, gets right in my face. He is suddenly threatening, and I’m aware of his height, his strength, the fact that no one knows where I am. I don’t step back, don’t let him know that he is really quite scary. I did at one point think it was him, that he’d decided to end his marriage rather than end his affair. ‘Get out of my house, you horrible, horrible woman.’

  But it’s not him. Someone who bludgeons a woman almost to death will not settle for ‘horrible woman’ as an insult. He didn’t do it, but he knows who did. Even if he doesn’t realise that yet. ‘The night I came and sat for you, you came back smelling of a woman’s perfume; your shirt wasn’t buttoned up properly. I know you went out to be with her and I don’t care about that. I just need to know who it was.’

  He stands back, clearly shocked that I’ve known all this time and have not let on.

  ‘Who is it? Maxie? Hazel? Anaya?’

  No, no, no. Not a flicker. None of them, his face tells me so. Someone else. Damn it. He won’t tell me.

  ‘Whoever it was, they’re responsible for what happened to Yvonne.’

  He becomes still. He is finally connecting the dots, seeing how his actions have consequences and the main one of him sleeping around is that his children have been without their mother for nearly four months. ‘What? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Whoever you’re sleeping with did this thing to Yvonne. So tell me who it is.’

  ‘No, but that’s—’ He frowns, his eyes clearly running through the tangents, the things that are only now starting to make sense.

  ‘Who is it?’ I ask.

  ‘Get out of my house. Right now!’

  ‘I wish you would talk to me, Trevor. I can help you work out how to—’

  ‘GET OUT!’ he screams at me. ‘RIGHT NOW!’

  1:15 p.m. I sit in my car, waiting to see if he’ll do what I expect him to do, or if I really have got it all wrong and he’ll sit there getting angrier and angrier at me and my accusation. I have my seatbelt on, the car parked halfway down the road with the engine running. If he does what I think he will, the first thing he’ll do is go to the woman and tell her what I’ve said.

  My heart is racing, my breath is thick in my chest. It feels like my stomach is filled with the stormy and choppy sea at high tide, threatening to explode out of my throat at any second. I remember, at work, whenever we had to confront someone with the extent of their fraud, I’d feel a watered-down version of this. My heart would thump, my stomach would swim and I would be almost deaf with the sound of my own breathing. I never wanted the people I caught to be guilty, I always wanted them to have a proper explanation, for it to work out so they could keep their jobs. I was still waiting for that to happen when I left.

  I want to be wrong about Trevor. I want—

  The green door flies open and slams shut loudly after Trevor as he races down the steps leading from his house and then virtually leaps over the bonnet of the family car to get to the driver’s side. He’s in and moving – no seatbelt or mirror checks – before I get the chance to take off the handbrake. He roars off in his seven-seater like it is a sports car and heads to the end of their road. I’m catching up with him when he swings onto Sacksaway Road, the main street that leads up to the motorway, narrowly missing scraping the back of a white van that has stopped partially covering the yellow hatchings at the end of the road. Trevor doesn’t stop at the amber light that is flicking onto red, instead he goes right through, turning right at the crossroads and racing on. The camera at the top of the traffic light flashes its displeasure at him, but he’s gone. Out of reach.

  No, no, no, no! My eyes flick to the rear-view mirror. There are two cars behind me so I can’t reverse to get the correct angle to get around this stupid white van. And even if I could, the light is red. I won’t be able to catch up with him, not at the speed he is moving – by the time the light has gone green again, he’ll be who knows where.

  Why did I think I could play detective? I should have called Gareth the moment I realised there was someone else in the mix. Now I’ve just tipped Trevor off and he’s going to tip off his lover – whoever they are.

  Maxie

  4:30 p.m. When I told Ed last night that I was going to go to the police and tell them everything, he asked me if I was sure and I said yes. He said he would come with me but I said no, Frankie needed him and he was Frankie’s legal parent so to let me go and confess to everything. Which is what I have done.

  The good-looking detective returns to the room and sits down again, looking weary.

  ‘The thing is, Mrs Smith,’ he says, ‘no one really knows where to begin with you. My best advice is that you get a solicitor and we take advice from the CPS about how to proceed.’

  ‘OK,’ I reply.

  ‘How are my friends?’ I ask before he leaves the room.

  ‘I really think you should worry about yourself,’ he says.

  Cece

  5:40 p.m. I have called Gareth and he hasn’t answered his phone. I was cautious about leaving a message.

  Trevor isn’t here at pick-up, making me believe that I was right. He went to see his lover. His girls aren’t with the other children who are standing in a huddle at the gates waiting for their parents to pick them up from their after-school activities and homework club.

  The boys aren’t there either. They never are. Oscar, who has maths club with Madison, is almost always the last one out because he goes back in for pretty much everything. Ore, who is in graphic design club with Scarlett, usually takes an age to do everything but is always the one who comes home with everything, and first time. Ore often ends up waiting for Oscar, or carrying stuff for Oscar even though they have the same amount of stuff. It’s a quandary I’ve never managed to solve.

  They’re never this long, though. The playground is almost empty of children, and even the just-made-it parents have been to fetch their offspring.

  I stare at the doorway to the school but the boys do not appear. I walk up to the gates, to the teachers who are discharging the last of the children. I am not going to panic. There is nothing to panic about.

  ‘Do you know when Oscar and Ore will be down?’ I ask them. The teachers look at each other.

  ‘They’ve left already,’ says Mrs Thackery, Ore’s teacher.

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Applebaum, Oscar’s teacher, adds. ‘They left with Madison and her sister. We were told that you’d asked Mr Whidmore to pick them up.’

  I will not panic. Panicking will make this all worse.

  ‘I didn’t ask anyone to pick up the boys. Are you absolutely sure about this?’

  I have told the boys not to go with anyone except when I have told them specifically that someone else is picking them up. I’ve said, if I am unexpectedly delayed, the school secretary will tell them I called to say that, but she must have the password. Trevor Whidmore does not have the password. Well, he shouldn’t. Unless Anaya, Hazel or Maxie told him.

  ‘We’re sure,’ Mrs Thackery says. ‘The message came via the school office. They didn’t go to after-school club or their activities. The password was used.’ She looks at Mrs Applebaum, who nods in agreement.

  ‘I didn’t make any calls to the school today. I did not tell anyone e
lse to pick up my children. Where are my children?’ I ask them.

  The pair of them look at each other, stricken. But not completely. They think I’ve lost the plot a little, that I must have arranged this and forgotten. Mrs Carpenter appears at the entrance to the school, obviously wondering why there are two teachers still in the playground and the front door is propped open when it is probably usually shut by now. She pulls up the collar of her navy-blue coat and comes over to us. I need to start panicking. I need to call the police, I need to panic, and I need to call my husband and I need to find Trevor Whidmore. He has my children. Trevor Whidmore has my children. I am suddenly seeing he is not as innocuous as I pegged him earlier. Trevor Whidmore has my children.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ Mrs Carpenter asks when she arrives with us.

  ‘Mr Whidmore collected my children earlier without my permission. He lied to their teachers and has taken them.’

  ‘Pardon?’ she says, shocked. She turns to the teachers, her eyes searching their faces. ‘What is this about? How has this been allowed to happen?’

  ‘Mrs Artum came in and said that Mrs Solarin had asked Mr Whidmore to pick the children up early. She said he had the password. We didn’t think anything of it.’

  ‘Have you called Mr Whidmore?’ Mrs Carpenter asks. An obvious question. The obvious thing to do at a time like this. ‘I’m sure it’s all a misunderstanding. He’s probably got the days mixed up.’

  My hands are trembling as I bring up his number and press ‘call’. My hands are trembling and my mind is starting to race ahead. To see the pattern, and where it generally leads.

  ‘This is Trevor Whidmore. Leave me a message.’

  I click the hang-up button and lower my phone. ‘Straight to voicemail,’ I say. I look first at Mrs Applebaum, then at Mrs Thackery. ‘Are … Are you sure it was Mr Whidmore that picked them up? I’ve never asked him to pick them up before. Are you sure it was him? It wasn’t Priya’s mum, or Frankie’s mum, or Camille’s mum? It wasn’t one of them and you’re mistaken?’