She could hear him moving around in the kitchen. She took a deep breath before taking the stairs and another before she walked into his airspace to say her customary and polite, ‘good morning’. She tried not to react when she saw that he was dressed for another stint in the garden.
‘I thought you were back at work today?’ she said, a thumping heartbeat in her throat.
‘Yes, I was supposed to be, but I have a headache. The fresh air will chase it away, no doubt.’
‘Oh.’ She wanted to scream at him Where are my things? She pushed down on the words with all her might and said instead, ‘I’ll make some tea. Would you like one?’
‘No thank you,’ he replied.
Bonnie crossed to where the tea and cups were kept and clicked the kettle on. It could have been her imagination, but she felt his eyes on her back, watching for signs of rebellion. It took every bit of self-control she had not to turn around and launch the tea caddy at him.
‘I did notice that the front borders were looking less than sharp,’ Bonnie said, pouring boiled water over a teabag in a cup. ‘Is that what you’re going to be tackling today?’
‘That’s one of the jobs, yes. In fact, that reminds me, where’s my lawn edging tool?’ He mused, chewing his lip in thought. ‘I haven’t used it in a while.’
Bonnie thought she might have left it in the garage when she used it to nudge the plastic box off the top shelf. She leapt on the moment to buy herself some time, not much, but it might just be enough.
‘My guess would be the shed,’ she said, keeping her voice light. ‘Knowing you, it will be with all the other gardening equipment.’ She sat down casually at the kitchen table. ‘Chicken casserole or cacciatore do you think for tonight because we haven’t had either in ages?’
‘Cacciatore,’ said Stephen, pronouncing the last ‘e’ both as acute and as if correcting her. He lifted the shed key from the hook on the wall and walked out of the back door, heading down the garden. Bonnie bolted from the chair and up the stairs as if she were spring-loaded.
She threw open the door to Stephen’s bedroom and began looking around. She never came into this room, not even when she was cleaning because he insisted on doing it himself and he was so finicky that she didn’t argue. The room was showhouse perfect: the carpet, which was laid over twenty-five years ago, looked brand new, though the pattern was hideously old-fashioned. The mirrors on the wardrobe didn’t have a single fingerprint, the clothes brush, comb and various toiletries on his dressing table were artfully positioned, even the bed had been made precisely and every crease smoothed out to an icing finish. Bonnie dropped to the floor to look under the bed, but there was nothing. She opened all his drawers and tried not to disturb the carefully placed contents to see if her box was there, but it wasn’t. The wardrobe was locked, which was interesting. She first looked on his dressing table and struck lucky because she found the key in a glass lidded dish, with a couple of other keys for the windows and assorted enamel lapel badges. She quickly unlocked the wardrobe and checked the base where there was an ordered stack of boxes containing his shoes except for the second one from the top which had all her missing treasures in it. The bastard, she thought. The arrogant bastard, she amended that to, because he’d presumed she wouldn’t dare enter his secret lair, otherwise he would have hidden them elsewhere. She grabbed the whole shoebox, locked the wardrobe door and wiped her dull fingerprints from it with her sleeve and then put the key back in the pot. She crossed to her own room, put her most precious possessions in her case and zipped it shut. She was ready to go now. She couldn’t stay another minute in this house.
She heard the kitchen door opening with a cheerful two-tone ‘Avon calling’ alert. Stephen shouted her name, a note of panic in his voice. Bonnie loaded herself up with her case and holdall. She’d need to come back for the plastic box, but if she had to leave it, she would do. She took a deep breath, ready for the inevitable confrontation. She heard his hurried footsteps taking the stairs. She opened her door to find him standing there, tall and wiry, drained of colour and wearing an expression she had never seen before; one of disbelief and confusion, the whites of his eyes laced with red as if blood vessels had exploded in them. She had lived with him for thirteen years and yet at that moment he looked like a stranger.
‘What are you doing?’ he said, his voice a breathy whisper.
By comparison Bonnie’s voice was iron. ‘I’m leaving, Stephen. You will not keep me here by hiding my things. How dare you even try. Now don’t make this harder than it is, because I am going and you cannot stop me this time.’
He looked as if a puff of wind would have blown him over, but when she stepped into the narrow gap between his body and the door, he was unyielding. She looked up at him and he appeared taller than she pictured him being, as if he’d grown inches in minutes.
‘Get out of my way, Stephen.’
Without a word, Stephen’s palms came out and pushed her backwards with such force that she landed on the bed. He grabbed the handle and slammed the door shut. Bonnie righted herself and lunged for the handle on her side but he was holding it firmly on the other. She wrenched on it with everything she had and it gave slightly and through the gap she saw that he was doing something with a rope. It slammed shut and when she tried it again, it was as if it had been sealed. He had tied the handle to the one belonging to the airing cupboard next to it.
‘Let me out,’ she screamed.
‘You can’t leave, it’s not how it’s supposed to be,’ Stephen screamed back. It’s not the way of things.
In yesterday’s article entitled ‘The Stars are Turning Out for Jack’ we mistakenly reported that attending the funeral of popular antique ceramics dealer Jack ‘Pott’ Pitt were celebrities Cristiano Ronaldo, star striker of Real Madrid and Jason Orange of Take That fame. We should have said Chris Ronald, striker for Rotherham FC and John Lemon, silver expert and friend of the deceased.
Chapter 33
Bonnie had been trapped in her room for hours when Lew pulled into the estate where she lived. The back, where Bonnie’s bedroom was, looked out onto long fields of yellow rapeseed. There was no house opposite and no chance of being seen waving madly out of the window, unless the small boy who lived five houses down happened to be flying a drone or the local farmer decided to cut his crop early. Her phone was downstairs in her handbag. The key to the window which was always on the sill was missing, Stephen had taken it as a precaution, presumably. She had tried reasoning with him through the door, calmly, offering to talk things through, even lying that she wouldn’t leave, but he hadn’t answered. He was past responding to anything she might say, she’d decided after a couple of hours so then she’d tried to smash the double-glazed window with a cup then a perfume bottle but it hadn’t worked. She looked around but there was nothing she could have picked up and launched at the glass to smash it; her only hope was to wrest the sink from the wall of her ensuite and try that. She sat on the bed and thought it was ludicrous that she could be trapped in a bedroom with no means of escape. How would she get out if there was a fire? She had to treat this as if it were the same because she was sure as hell she would get out if her life were in immediate danger. She had just started looking for something to help prise out the sink when she heard the front doorbell ring, followed by a tattoo of heavy knocking. She raced to the bedroom door and pressed her ear to it, hearing the muted notes of an exchange of voices. Only postmen, Jehovah’s Witnesses and old Gerald at stupid o’clock on Sunday mornings ever called. Any of them would surely find a woman screaming was cause for further investigation. So she filled up her lungs with as much air as they could take and screamed.
*
Lew had already seen Bonnie’s Vauxhall parked on the drive as he approached the detached house in an estate filled with samey-samey others. The style of the house didn’t fit her at all, he thought. He imagined her in a cottage setting with non-conformist windows and a riot of coloured flowers bursting from crowds of pots and
window boxes. He strode up the path and rang the doorbell, following it with a series of staccato knocks that no one on the inside could miss. It was almost immediately opened to the length of the attached security chain by a tall, wiry man with short, thick greying hair and a long, gaunt face. Stephen, her husband, presumably. Something else that didn’t match her.
‘Is this where Bonnie Brookland lives?’ asked Lew.
‘Who wants to know?’ asked the man cautiously.
‘I’m her boss. She didn’t turn in for work today and I . . . I wondered if she was all right.’
Lew’s ear picked up a high-pitched sound, as though he’d inadvertently switched on his phone in his pocket and someone were screaming down the earpiece. A woman’s voice.
‘She’s fine. She’s ill,’ said Stephen paradoxically, closing the door so his face was just a slice of skin and one grey eye.
Help. Help me. Get the police. Was Lew imagining this or could he really hear it?
‘Is there any chance I could have a quick word with her? She’s got a key of mine that I really need,’ he said, thinking on his feet.
More screams. He felt vibrations on the edge of his radar now, as if someone were stamping their feet.
‘I’ll ask her to ring you.’ The door was closing.
Help me. I’m locked in.
Lew’s hand shot out to stop it.
‘There’s someone shouting for help in your house.’
‘Go away,’ said Stephen, putting his full weight against the door, but Lew was younger and, thanks to his post-trauma healthy exercise regime, stronger than he had ever been in his life before. He countered Stephen’s effort with his shoulder, giving it everything he had. Stephen fell back, the door swung fully open as the chain broke. The shouting was louder now and unmistakeably Bonnie’s voice.
Lew strode over Stephen’s prostrate form. ‘Bonnie?’ he shouted, trying to trace the source of her distress call.
‘I’m upstairs.’
Lew took the stairs two at a time and there at the top of them were the door handles bound with figures of eight rope.
‘Bonnie, it’s Lew. Are you all right?’ he asked, deftly unlooping it. He checked behind him for her lunatic husband but there was no sign of him. He threw the rope onto the carpet and opened the door and there stood Bonnie, ashen-faced, her hazel eyes large and shiny with anxiety, her hand holding up a metal nail file as a weapon.
‘Oh Lew.’ She ran to him in relief and his long, strong arms closed around her. She could have stayed there forever, breathing him in, the scent of his unnamed cologne mixed with his warmth.
‘I have to get out of here,’ she said, gulping as if she had been starved of oxygen. She moved out of his hold to pick up her things.
‘What do you need?’
‘The case, the box and the holdall. That’s all I’m taking.’
‘Let me go first,’ he said. ‘You get the bag, I’ll manage the rest.’
Lew tucked the box under his arm and walked tentatively down the stairs, not unconvinced he’d be met at the bottom by Bonnie’s soon to be ex-husband wielding a bread knife. Any man that locked his wife in a house was going to be unpredictable. But Stephen Brookland was slumped at the kitchen table, a cloth pressed to his rapidly swelling cheekbone. He didn’t lift his eyes when Lew walked past him.
‘I need my handbag,’ said Bonnie, darting past Stephen towards a row of hooks on the wall where a line of coats were hung. As Bonnie checked through the contents of her bag, Lew looked at him hunched and pathetic and his lip curled instinctively. He couldn’t imagine anyone more unlikely for her to be married to.
Bonnie took her two coats down from the pegs and lifted her umbrella from the stand. She could have taken more now, but she just wanted to get away.
‘Can I have a minute?’ she said to Lew. ‘Please.’
‘Really?’ Lew said with disbelief. He didn’t want to leave her alone with this brute if he could help it.
‘I won’t be long.’
‘I’ll be just outside the door,’ said Lew, dragging his eyes away from the contemptible creep.
When he had shut the door, Bonnie stood squarely in front of Stephen but his eyes remained downcast, his hand still pressing the cloth against his cheek. He looked old and disgusting and she shuddered at the thought that she was joined to him in marriage. She pulled her wedding ring off her finger and set it on the table in front of him.
‘It didn’t have to be like this, Stephen,’ she said. ‘I don’t want anything from you, just a divorce.’
‘Don’t worry, you won’t be getting anything from me,’ said Stephen, flicking his eyes up towards her for a second. ‘Not a single penny.’
‘Let’s do this quick and painlessly, for both our sakes.’
Then his head rose slowly and she saw a smirk spread across his dry, thin mouth.
‘Quick and painlessly, eh?’
She picked up her things feeling panic wash over her like a cold shower.
‘You’ll be back. There will be no life for you if you don’t, as well you know,’ he went on.
She rounded on him. ‘Stay away from me, Stephen. I mean it or I’ll get the police onto you. You wouldn’t want them calling around here, would you? Setting all the neighbours off talking?’ His respectability was important to him, he would find that excruciating.
But the warning bounced straight off him and that smirk remained, twisting up the side of his mouth. A nasty, rotten, smug smirk that burned itself on her eyeballs so fiercely that she would see it for a long, long time.
‘Call the police, would you? Pass me the phone and I’ll ring them for you.’
She turned quickly, half-running towards the door, slamming it hard behind her, striding down the path away from his voice that was intent on following her.
You know what you did, you bitch, and I’ll make sure everyone knows as well.
Chapter 34
Lew had put the case and the box in his car. The boot was still open for the holdall.
‘Put it in here and let me drive you,’ he commanded. ‘We can pick up your car later.’
‘No,’ said Bonnie. ‘I want to take it now so I don’t ever have to come back here.’
‘Are you all right to drive?’ She didn’t look it.
‘I’ll be okay. I’ll take it steady.’
‘You go first,’ he said. ‘I’ll follow close behind and make sure he doesn’t come after you.’ Lew thumbed behind him at the house. ‘What sort of car does he have?’
‘A blue Mondeo,’ Bonnie informed him and reeled off the reg number.
Bonnie turned the engine and immediately stalled it. Her leg didn’t seem to have a bone in it when she pressed down the clutch. She forced herself to concentrate and not look any more of a fool in front of her boss than she did already. She adjusted the rear-view mirror and caught sight of her face. Death warmed up didn’t even touch on it. What on earth must he think of her? Shame rushed into the spaces which the adrenalin had vacated. She looked every inch the wreck outside that she felt inside.
She pulled up in Spring Hill Square car park with Lew at her rust-bucket heels in his polished Audi. She felt shaky and weak as she placed her feet on terra firma but she willed some strength into herself. She couldn’t bear that he might see her as a victim.
‘Let’s take your things into the shop where they’ll be safe. You okay?’ asked Lew, opening up his boot. The warm concern in his voice made her feel even more embarrassed that he’d seen her so low and needy.
‘I will be,’ she said, trying to smile and fearing she looked demonic instead.
‘Come on.’ He handed her the holdall and they walked towards the shop where, once inside, he locked the door behind them and didn’t turn the closed sign around to open. ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ he said.
‘Oh don’t keep the shop closed because of me, I . . .’ she protested, but Lew was having none of it.
Bonnie sat down on the chair behind the counter and let the
tension relax in her body. She was out of that house yet half an hour ago she had been trapped in a room about to try and pull a sink off the wall. It felt as if she had just slid out of a bad dream too fast and was disorientated. She shouldn’t have tried to threaten Stephen with the police. He would see that as a battle line being drawn. She should never have mentioned the police. He wouldn’t, her mind argued. He wouldn’t do what he could do. He would be damaged in the process. But didn’t bees sting even though they knew they would kill themselves too?
Lew returned with two mugs of milky coffee.
‘I think you might need this,’ he said with a gentle chuckle.
Bonnie smiled, wishing he wasn’t looking at her so intently. She wouldn’t want to view herself through his eyes.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t come. There’s no one else who would have realised I was missing. Not for days anyway.’
‘You haven’t told any of your friends what you were planning?’ asked Lew, pulling a packet of Florentines out of his pocket and peeling the opening strip.
Friends? One by one she’d lost them all over the years. There was just Valerie and she wouldn’t have wanted to burden her with all this.
‘No, I didn’t tell anyone,’ said Bonnie.
‘Have you put any furniture in storage anywhere?’
‘All I have, I brought with me.’ Bonnie looked at the holdall at her feet. The handle, resting on top, looked like the curve of an upside down smile, as if it knew it held a pathetic dearth of possessions for the life of a forty-two-year-old woman.
The Queen of Wishful Thinking Page 17
