Charlotte was in full designer offensive: the Roland Mouret dress and jacket which Lew always said he liked her in the best, the Tiffany jewellery which Lew had bought for her, and she was carrying the red Lulu Guinness handbag, the present that Lew had left on her pillow the night of ‘Cakefacegate’ so she would have something nice to come back to if the evening hadn’t been quite up to standard. He could have laughed about that, had it not been so tragic. She had lost even more weight, he noticed. He wasn’t sure if that was by design or stress, but either way it didn’t interest him enough to ask.
‘I have to say it was a surprise to hear you wanted this face to face meeting,’ said Charlotte, blue eyes sparkling, red lips glossy and smiling. She picked up her glass of white wine and sipped it delicately. She crossed her long legs and he knew that every movement she was making was especially deliberate and chosen to show her off at her finest.
‘I thought it was best that we were civil. We have a lot to sort out. We could make it relatively painless or throw all our money at the solicitors,’ he said, then lifted his half-pint of diet cola to his lips; a drink that said both this is not a cosy social meeting and I don’t intend for it to last very long.
‘I agree,’ said Charlotte.
‘Have you found somewhere else to live?’ The Krugers wanted to be in by mid-July.
‘I’m going to move in with a friend for a while and then look for something when I get my settlement.’
He wondered which friend. He guessed it wasn’t Gemma, which would only leave Regina. Surely not.
‘I think a full and final settlement would be best, don’t you?’
Charlotte tilted her head at him and then she laughed. ‘Do you now?’ Regina had warned her not to accept this. Lew expected that answer and had prepared for it.
‘This is what I propose.’ He reached in his jacket pocket, pulled out two sheets of folded paper and pushed the top one across the table at her. ‘I’ve been generous.’ And he had, but not stupid. Charlotte picked the sheet up, opened it and read it, long chocolate fingernails showing at either side, like bear talons. ‘It’s a one-time offer. I don’t want any financial association with you, Charlotte. I want a clean break. This, however,’ and he put the second sheet down on the bar table, ‘is what you are entitled to and the most your solicitor will get for you. You can stick your claws into my pensions if you wish, but you’ll be much worse off for it. Your call.’
He saw her throat rise and fall with a small swallow. She flashed a smile at him then, a hurt, brave one. A little part of her had been clinging to the hope that he’d called the meeting to stop the divorce, not accelerate it. Regina had told her to stick her crampons in until he bled, milk Lew for all he was worth, haunt him and make her presence felt every day for the rest of his life. Charlotte thought she would find a little love still left for her in his eyes, but there was nothing. He was looking at her as if she was a client and they were conducting some business. And he would forget about her as soon as the dotted line was signed.
Charlotte had done a lot of thinking in the four weeks since Lew had walked out on her. She missed him terribly, but with her hand on her heart, she didn’t know if she loved him. It wounded her that he didn’t want her any more, but that wasn’t the same thing. She missed the attention he gave her, his company, the chivalrous way he treated her and the lifestyle they had much more than she missed his arms around her. She had been at her wits end when he had his heart attack, but on more than one occasion, she had sat by his hospital bed and mulled over how she would spend the enormous amount of money she’d receive if he didn’t make it and she had to claim on his life insurance policies. She’d had the decency to hate herself for those thoughts.
She hadn’t lied to Lew about sleeping with Jason because she could. She’d been to see him in all honesty about a car problem. He looked like the cock of the walk in his showroom, and she’d been unsure if she was imagining the little flirtations when he asked her into his office for a coffee. So she went back the week after to ask something else, and realised that her intuition was spot on. He’d taken her on his office desk and it had been dirty and raw, dangerous and thrilling and she hadn’t once thought about the gold band on her finger. She didn’t fancy him at all, but he made her feel powerful, sexy, desired, and a little bit evil because she’d got one over on his Miss Goody Two-Shoes wife whom she had never – and would never – be as virtuous as. Just as Jason would never be as fine a man as Lew. He was the best she could have ever had.
Charlotte had also learned that there wasn’t that much in Regina’s life to envy, apart from her money; and Charlotte could have enough of that without having to tear out Lew’s innards and have him think of her often, but with nothing but spitting hatred, which would have been a result for Regina. As soon as she had bought another house, Charlotte had decided that she would never see Regina again.
She looked at the figures on the first sheet once more. He had been more than generous.
‘Okay, I’ll agree to this. I’ll take it in to my solicitor.’ She smiled, desperate to see a little of the old Lew, the one who looked at her with eyes full of love. But he didn’t exist any more. This was another Lew, one that had grown from the ashes of the man she had destroyed. She had no place in this Lew’s life.
‘I thought you would.’ Charlotte heard it as, I thought you would because you’re a greedy cow. He might as well have slapped her.
‘It wasn’t all bad, was it?’ said Charlotte, gulping back a throatful of tears with the last of her wine. ‘We had some lovely times.’
‘We did,’ agreed Lew, but he wasn’t sure any more. He had loved Charlotte very much, but when he stopped to think about it, he couldn’t honestly say he felt loved by her. So many memories were tainted with the stain of the lies bleeding through them now. Moving into The Beeches because they both wanted a large family, the perfect holiday in Bali – he had taken her there to recover from the ‘miscarriage’ . . . he couldn’t unpick the nice memories from the needles, the hidden barbs, the thorns. And he had no intention of even trying.
When Lew got back to the Pot of Gold, the couple with the guide dog were hovering by the entrance. He’d had to shut up shop when he went to meet Charlotte because there was no one to man it whilst he was away.
‘Sorry about that, hope you weren’t waiting long,’ he said, unlocking the door, switching off the alarm, turning the sign around from closed.
He needed an assistant but he’d kept holding off from advertising for one because he hoped Bonnie would come back. Come home. Much as he loved the Pot of Gold, there was something missing because she wasn’t there busying around, making coffees, dusting, arranging, just being there with her coloured dresses and her sunshiney smile. The Pot of Gold had reduced charm when there was no Rainbow Lady there. He had posted the letter through her door only eleven days ago, and yet it felt like forever. He hadn’t lied when he’d said that no one else fitted. Not in the shop, not in his heart. They both had a Bonnie-shaped hole in them.
‘Where’s that lovely woman that works here gone?’ asked the couple.
‘She’s having some well-needed time off,’ said Lew. He said more or less the same thing to Stickalampinit, Long John, Stantiques, Clock Robin, Butterfly Barry, all the traders and dealers who were her friends and wanted to know why she wasn’t there because they were worried about her. They’d asked him to pass on the message that if there was anything she needed help with, she only had to ask. Every time they came through the doors, they’d enquire when she’d be back. Tell her to hurry up, they said. Tell her the place isn’t the same without her. He’d told them all that she was having a couple of weeks away to ‘sort things out’. He left the reason vague. He didn’t want to admit that she’d gone for good because saying it aloud would make it real.
Chapter 77
Bonnie read the letter for the hundredth time. No one else fits, he had written. She had been in the house when he posted it eleven days ago. She had spotted
him walking past the window and she had frozen. She had heard the letter box flap open and shut and watched the envelope drop to the floor. And that was the last of him that she would ever see, she knew that. It was a small consolation that she would never have to look into his beautiful twilight-blue eyes and find revulsion there.
She boiled the kettle and put a teabag in a cup. She was out of coffee but found it hard to go out to the shop these days. She felt as if that sun in the sky was picking her out like a giant searchlight intent on highlighting to everyone the criminal in their midst. She had too much time to think, sitting alone in the house all day, every day. By now she had enough bags of confetti made to stock an aircraft hangar. She needed a job, but her police bail date was in three days time and she had no idea how long after that her court date would be. She had a meeting with David Charles at two-thirty that afternoon and she was scared stiff about what he was going to tell her. She knew without a doubt that she was going to prison. How could she not? She was guilty of assisting a suicide at best; at worst they would level the charge of murder at her. It wouldn’t be hard to plant seeds in a jury’s mind that she had acted to rid herself of a burden she resented. Stephen was both eloquent and believable, and his barrister would have her saying all the wrong things and twist her words. And at the heart of it all, the truth was that if she could rewind time, she would have acted just the same and helped Alma take the little control she had left. Oh yes, she was going to prison all right, and no amount of wishful thinking was going to change that.
Chapter 78
David Charles gestured towards the chair. ‘Please take a seat, Bonnie.’ He thought that the woman in front of him was so much more fragile than the one he had seen the morning after her arrest. She was wisp-thin, pale and there were dark rings around her eyes that told of sleepless nights, even though she was taking tablets designed to alleviate that. This was a woman crushed under a press of mental torture and yet he noted that she held her head high when she walked into his office. She might have been terrified of this tough world of police and cells and authority, but she had never once kicked against accepting the punishment for the part she had played in Alma Brookland’s death.
‘I asked you to come in for an update because I thought it might help you if you had any questions to talk through with me. Any trouble from your husband?’ said David Charles.
‘He’s left me alone since I quit my job,’ said Bonnie. He couldn’t follow her in the car, because she didn’t go anywhere. ‘David, can you tell me what will happen on Friday? I can’t remember. Do I need to take anything with me when I turn up at the station? Will I have to stay in . . .’ She was gabbling fretfully. David held up his hand and stopped her flow.
‘Look, Bonnie, since my secretary rang you yesterday to make an appointment with me, there’s been a proper update. I won’t beat about the bush . . .’
I won’t soften the blow, I’ll tell you it as it is, plain and simple, let’s call a spade a spade; her whole body scrunched up, her jaw tightened, she prepared herself.
‘. . . in the last hour I have been told formally by the police that the CPS have knocked it back. They aren’t prosecuting you. There’s insufficient evidence and it is not in the public interest to take you to court, so it’s over. And the police agree.’
He didn’t expect her to react. People who were told this sort of news often didn’t. ‘Kicking bricks into treacle’ was the phrase he likened it to. They were numb, thrown into shock, their brains would not accept what they’d just been told because they’d built a protective fence around themselves to guard against false hope and it would not be demolished by the impact of a few words. Sometimes he’d see the sun dawning on their faces as bit by digestible bit the information started to sink in, but he wasn’t seeing this now with Bonnie.
‘Bonnie, you can go home and carry on with your life,’ he said gently, slowly.
‘What about the police station on Friday?’
‘There are no charges to answer, you are free. You do not have to turn up at the station. The police will send a letter to confirm all this but that’s it, the end.’ He buzzed on his intercom for his secretary to get a glass of water for Bonnie. He was a little worried she was going to faint.
‘Please tell me you aren’t in your car. I would not advise you to get behind a wheel,’ said David.
‘I had to get a taxi here because my car’s got a puncture.’ She’d had it a week but didn’t want to go out of the house to get it fixed in case she saw Stephen framed in her rear view mirror. Stephen. She hadn’t realised she’d groaned aloud until David asked if she was all right.
‘Stephen. He’ll go into overdrive . . .’ The water was jiggling in the glass because her hand was shaking so much.
‘Bonnie, he will be in big trouble if he does. He will have to forget it.’
‘He won’t though.’
‘I think we both know that he wasn’t primarily trying to get justice for his mother,’ said David with conviction. ‘If Stephen contacts you again, you must report him to the police for harassment, you won’t have any problem with them believing you. He’ll find that he’s the one being arrested and investigated if he’s not careful. He’s told quite a few lies, has old Mr Brookland.’ DS Bill Henderson had even told the solicitor that the police would be only too happy to review those statements Stephen had made. ‘Once the law has told him to stop harassing you and he doesn’t, he’s flipping the bird at the law more than he is at you and the law doesn’t like that, Bonnie. It makes the law very angry. Do you understand what I am saying?’
‘Yes, I do. There’s no . . . no chance you could have misheard what the police said?’
Maybe with other clients, David might have been slightly insulted by that, but now his face broke into a smile.
‘None.’
‘I’m sorry if that sounded rude. I . . .’
‘Bonnie, you’ve been through a lot. But you can trust me in this, it’s over. Forget it and pick up your life where you left it. One of the receptionists downstairs will ring a taxi for you.’ David Charles held out his hand. ‘I wish you well, Ms Sherman. And I hope I don’t see you again for the very best of reasons.’
Bonnie stood up. David Charles had a warm, firm, genuinely happy-for-her handshake.
‘What about money? I must owe you some . . .’
‘You didn’t incur any charges.’ It was a small lie but a right one. The bill was minimal as most of it had been paid by Her Majesty’s government. As a partner of the firm, he could and would write it off.
‘Thank you, David. Thank you so much.’
She turned at the door. ‘I was very fond of Alma by the end, you know. And she was fond of me.’
‘I don’t doubt it, Bonnie.’ And he didn’t.
Bonnie waited in reception with the glass of water, the words tumbling round and round in her head. It was over. It was over. It was over.
Chapter 79
Just as the taxi was depositing Bonnie back home, Stephen Brookland received the news via Beth his FLO that the CPS were not going to prosecute and he was livid. She couldn’t pacify him and listened patiently to his ranting about all the people he was going to contact: the newspapers, the TV, his MP, the Pope. She tried to warn him, yet again, that he could get himself into serious trouble and he should forget it and treasure his memories of his mother, but he hung up on her with blatant contempt. Then he rang David Charles, whose name was recorded in his thick file of evidence. David was only too happy to take the call when his secretary rang through to tell him there was a rabid gentleman who wished to speak to him about the murder his wife committed.
‘Mr Brookland,’ David greeted him cheerfully. ‘How can I help you?’
‘Do you realise what you’ve done in letting that woman free to roam the streets?’ Stephen bellowed.
‘I think you’ll find the CPS are responsible for the outcome of the investigation, Mr Brookland, not me.’ David was as calm as Stephen was manic.
&n
bsp; ‘I won’t let her get away with this. I’ll make sure everyone knows what a murdering bitch she is. I’ve got an appointment with the editor of the Daily Trumpet later today, in fact.’
He was bluffing. David knew the new editor well and there was no way he’d touch this story with the longest bargepole in history. At least not from Brookland’s angle. There would be mileage in a human interest story from his wife’s perspective, but David would have bet his bottom dollar that Bonnie Sherman would just want it all to go away.
‘I’d be very careful if I were you, Mr Brookland,’ warned David. ‘Unless you want this case to come back and haunt you in the worst possible way. The police just might want to revisit all the evidence you gave and gather up all those inconsistencies. You could find them building a case against you. Perverting the course of justice carries a stiff penalty these days.’
‘What?’
‘Reap what you sow, Mr Brookland. There is no case to answer against your wife, deal with that and move on would be my free advice.’
‘Go to hell,’ said Stephen and slammed down the phone.
Bonnie sat in her front room surrounded by all the lovely hotch-potch furniture with a cup of coffee in her hand. David Charles’s voice was playing in a continual loop in her head telling her that there were no charges to answer, she didn’t have to go to the police station and she wouldn’t end up in court, but she couldn’t believe it. Deep down she knew he wouldn’t have told her if it wasn’t true. But even if they had let the case drop, Stephen wouldn’t.
The coffee had gone cold and she hadn’t even sipped it. What now? asked a voice within. What do we do? She had been so sure she would have to face trial, have her picture plastered all over the newspapers and the internet, end up in prison, that she hadn’t planned for this outcome.
Now there was no longer a reason for Stephen to keep his mouth shut because there was no case to damage, so he would tell everyone what she had done. Once heard, it couldn’t be unheard: mud sticks. Stephen would flout the law, whatever David Charles said might happen to him if he did.
The Queen of Wishful Thinking Page 35
