Woman with a Secret

by Sophie Hannah

  “It’s the Damon Blundy murder. Something’s cropped up on the CCTV. Simon and Sam are still at the house.” Gibbs shrugged and managed to look almost shy. “I’d like to know what you think.”

  “Why? I don’t work for CID any more.” Charlie said this whenever she could, to anyone who would listen, in the hope that she would one day be able to say it without its causing her pain.

  Gibbs grinned. “Except when you do, unofficially.”

  Now Charlie was really suspicious. “When I do unofficially, it’s because Simon drags me in—something you’ve never done or tried to do. So why now?”

  “Spur-of-the-moment impulse? Maybe I miss my old skipper.”

  “Gibbs, what’s going on? Why are you being nice to me? If Liv’s dumped you and you’re looking for a new bit on the side with similar DNA, forget it. I’m a married woman—not the Liv kind. The boring sort that only screws her husband.” God, that sounded priggish. Charlie felt almost ashamed as she remembered the promiscuous risk-taker she used to be. She distrusted moral-majority attitudes on principle, and was only faithful to Simon because she was in love with him and the thought of being with another man turned her stomach. In the abstract, she had no problem with sexual infidelity as long as the individuals involved weren’t her exasperating younger sister and her surly former DC.

  She’d often wished she loved Simon less, so that she could enjoy a secret sex life he knew nothing about. Involving someone Olivia worked closely with, ideally—give her a taste of her own medicine, see how she liked her sister trespassing on her territory.

  Gibbs and Liv had been having an affair for several years. It had started on the night of Charlie and Simon’s wedding and, despite Charlie’s hopes that it would end disastrously and early, it had proved irritatingly durable. So far it had survived Gibbs’s becoming the father of twin girls and Liv’s marriage to another man—a wedding Gibbs had attended. He and Liv had gazed at each other longingly over the heads and between the torsos of the other guests, seeing nobody in the room apart from one another, while Dominic Lund, Liv’s husband, had done his best to talk to all the people Liv was busy ignoring. No doubt he’d imagined, incorrectly, that he was the romantic hero of his own wedding. It was one of the strangest social occasions Charlie had ever attended.

  “Bit on the side?” Gibbs frowned. “Is that what you think Liv is to me?”

  “Do you prefer ‘mistress’?”

  “How would you feel if I mocked your relationship with Simon?”

  “You mean how did I feel, on the many occasions that it happened?” As soon as she’d said it, she regretted it. Charlie hated thinking about that part of her past: getting engaged to Simon with everyone knowing they hadn’t yet slept together, all the mockery they’d had to endure, the speculation at the station about the cause of Simon’s abstinence, heavily weighted in favor of its being somehow Charlie’s fault . . .

  “I haven’t mocked you and Simon, separately or together, for a long time,” Gibbs said.

  It was true. As always, the reality of being mean to someone was proving less enjoyable than the idea of doing so. “Fair enough,” Charlie said. “Look, what’s this about? Why are you hovering? Spit it out. Are you leaving Debbie? Is Liv leaving Dom?” I’m at work, for fuck’s sake. I don’t want to be talking about my sister. Charlie doubted she’d ever get over her profound regret that her family had found its way into her professional life without her permission, and vice versa.

  “Nothing like that.” Gibbs was smiling weirdly again, a nervous-about-meeting-the-Queen kind of smile.

  “Then what? Tell me!”

  “Nothing. I just thought you’d be interested in the latest on the Blundy case. But you’re busy, so . . . forget it.” Gibbs turned and started to walk away.

  “I’ve got about a quarter of an hour.” Charlie looked at her watch to check that it was true.

  Sort of. Not really. It wouldn’t matter if she missed the first ten minutes of cultural awareness—not to her, anyway. “Show me some grainy black-and-white film,” she said. “I’ll pretend I’m watching a tedious art-house picture with no plot or mass-market appeal—the kind Liv used to love before she fell for you and decided she preferred Mission Impossible II to Eric Rohmer.”

  “If you’re sure?”

  “I’m sure, polite boy.”

  Charlie followed Gibbs to the viewing room on the first floor. DC Colin Sellers was already in there—had been for some time, by the look of it. His tie was draped over the back of his chair, and he’d undone the top two buttons of his shirt. The lower buttons looked as if they might be next to give way, under pressure from Sellers’s sizeable beer-and-kebab belly. “What are you doing here?” he asked Charlie.

  “Charming. Lovely to see you too, Colin.”

  Sellers shrugged, scratched one of his sideburns and turned back to the screen in front of him. He was normally jollier than Gibbs. Charlie hadn’t often seen him looking as glum as this. She couldn’t think of anything she’d done that might have upset him, and concluded that he must once again have been disappointed in lust. That women existed who were between the ages of twenty and sixty and didn’t want to have sex with him was an unending source of misery to Sellers. He notched up more rejections in a week than most men do in a lifetime on account of his determination to proposition every female who crossed his path when he wasn’t with his wife, Stacey—in pubs, takeaways, shops, on the street—and practiced infidelity on a scale that made Gibbs and Liv’s affair look as quaint and wholesome as a chaste Victorian courtship. Luckily for him, Sellers’s policy of indiscriminate approach netted him as many yeses as nos; it was easy, he’d told Charlie a few months ago, once you’d worked out how to identify desperation in strangers.

  Nice.

  “Show her,” said Gibbs.

  Sellers picked up the remote control. Charlie leaned against the wall at the back of the room. “What am I looking at?” she asked. “I mean, traffic, obviously, but . . .”

  “See the silver Audi?” said Gibbs. “This is from the camera on the corner of Elmhirst Road and Lupton Road. Here’s our silver Audi traveling north on Lupton . . . and turning into Elmhirst at ten fifty-five this morning.”

  “And here . . .” Sellers pressed the fast-forward button, held it down for a few seconds. “Same silver Audi coming back less than five minutes later. Looks like a woman behind the wheel—so why did she change her mind and double back on herself?”

  “Maybe she didn’t,” said Charlie. “Maybe she stuck a birthday card through a letterbox at the Lupton Road end of Elmhirst Road, then did a U-ey and headed back home. Or, if she was planning to drive all the way along Elmhirst and subsequently changed her mind . . . well, there could be any number of reasons.”

  “If it was a one-off, I’d agree,” Sellers said. He stood up, took the tape out, slotted another one in. While he fiddled with the remote control, Gibbs filled Charlie in on the background. “Damon Blundy’s house is on Elmhirst Road. He was found dead by his wife at ten thirty A.M. She called it in at ten thirty-five. Uniforms were there within minutes, stopping drivers on the Blundy-house side of the road for on-the-spot interviews.”

  “Quick work,” said Charlie.

  “Simon’s idea,” Gibbs told her. “I’m guessing you’ve heard about the, er, unusual crime scene.”

  “Yeah, I spoke to Simon at lunchtime. It sounds . . . weirder than usual. Even than usual-for-you-lot.”

  “Simon reckoned the killer might want to try and observe police response at close range, having taken such care over his gruesome death installation,” said Gibbs. “For the benefit of an audience, presumably—so he wouldn’t want to miss out on seeing how that audience reacted.”

  “Makes sense,” said Charlie.

  “Anyway, at ten fifty-five, the Audi driver would have found herself crawling forward in slow-moving traffic, delayed by police in the road ahead—police she’d have been able to see stopping and talking to other drivers—but she’d also have
been able to see that the delay wasn’t severe. Wherever she wanted to go beyond Elmhirst Road, she’d have been quicker waiting than doubling back and taking a different route. And no one else waiting in the line did a U-turn. Not one single other driver.”

  “I refer you once again to my birthday-card-delivery scenario,” said Charlie.

  “Except look at this,” said Sellers. “Same camera fifty minutes later. The same silver Audi drives along Lupton Road coming from the Silsford direction, heading south this time. It doesn’t turn into Elmhirst, but look . . . see how it slows almost to a standstill as it passes the junction?”

  It was undeniable.

  “The driver wanted to see if the police were still there,” said Gibbs. “Why else would she have slowed down as she approached the junction? And why does she care what the police are up to?”

  “Nosiness?” Charlie suggested. “Most people like to have a gawk if they think something excitingly horrible’s going on. We’re all ghouls at heart.”

  “Would most people be nosey enough, and have the spare time, to come back to the same place twice in one day to gawk?” Gibbs asked. “Also, if she wanted to know what was going on, why didn’t she stay in the slow-moving traffic, let the police stop her when it was her turn and just ask them what was happening?”

  “OK, so we fast-forward again . . .” said Sellers, “to . . . here.” He pointed the remote control at the screen and pressed “play.” “Forty minutes later, she’s back, other side of the road, going north again. This time, she comes to a complete stop on Lupton Road at the exact point that’d give her the best view up Elmhirst, holding up the cars behind her.”

  “O . . . K,” said Charlie. “So she’s very, very nosey.”

  “And then we fast-forward again and find . . .”

  “She comes back again?”

  “An hour and five minutes later, yeah,” said Gibbs.

  He, Charlie and Sellers watched in silence as the Audi on the screen drove southbound along Lupton Road and started to brake as it neared the junction with Elmhirst.

  “Again, she stops and sits at the end of Lupton, blocking the traffic,” said Sellers. “For even longer this time. Look at the line behind her—can’t you just hear the beeping of all those angry horns? Still, she stays put for a full minute.”

  “So, something’s fishy there, chances are,” said Charlie. “I’m assuming you know who owns the Audi, since you know it’s silver and our drama premiere’s in black-and-white.” She nodded at the screen.

  “Car belongs to a Mrs. Nichola Clements,” said Sellers. “19 Bartholomew Gardens, Spilling.”

  “So why aren’t you around there talking to her now?” Charlie asked.

  “It’s definitely worth doing that, isn’t it?” said Gibbs.

  Charlie laughed. “Are you kidding me? Have you got so many other promising leads that you can afford to ignore this one?”

  “No, I mean . . . I think it’s worth it, but I wanted your take on it. It could be perfectly innocent, just a local busybody, as you say.”

  “Course we have to talk to her,” said Sellers.

  Charlie exhaled slowly. “What’s this about, Gibbs? You’re trying to flatter me by making out my opinion really matters to you—I get that, though I’ve no idea why—but couldn’t you have found something more interesting to ask me, something a bit less obvious? Anyone with a brain, seeing what you’ve just shown me, would say you should speak to Nichola Clements as soon as you can.”

  “I’ve been saying it,” said Sellers.

  “Anyone with a brain, and Sellers as well, would say interview Nichola Clements,” Charlie teased.

  Sellers attempted a smile, but it didn’t take. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Gibbs asked him.

  A good moment to leave them to it, Charlie decided. Even stone-cold-sober cultural awareness was preferable to this.

  “I CAN’T PROVE THAT Damon never loved me, so if it’s evidence you’re after, you’ll be disappointed. As I have been.” Hannah Blundy faced Simon and Sam across the large oval-shaped wooden table in her kitchen. The family liaison officer, a young woman called Uzma who seemed incapable of performing any action quietly, was making them all tea, if the available visual evidence was reliable and if you considered it in isolation; the sound effects suggested a train crash at close range. Irritating though it was, Simon welcomed the background noise; it helped to add a veneer of normality to one of the most unlikely conversations he’d ever had, and he’d had a fair few.

  “I understand,” said Sam. “You mean there was nothing concrete, only a . . . feeling you had?”

  “No, if I’d allowed myself to be guided by feelings alone, I could have been blissfully happy in my marriage,” said Hannah. “Damon told me he loved me all the time. He behaved as if he loved me. Our physical relationship was great—very passionate.” As she spoke, she seemed to be conducting a kind of inner audit: Is that statement true? Yes. And is this statement also true? Yes. Am I sure? Yes.

  “But . . . you didn’t feel loved?” Sam tried again.

  “Well, no, I did,” said Hannah. “It was hard not to. Damon lavished attention on me—physically, emotionally. In every way. I’ve never known anyone give another person such care and consideration. You could put Damon’s treatment of me in a Hollywood romance and it wouldn’t be out of place.”

  Simon and Sam exchanged a look: where to go from here?

  “He complimented me constantly. He had great respect for my intelligence. Took all my needs and wants seriously. There’s nothing he wouldn’t have done for me, as he demonstrated over and over again.” Hannah spread her hands and stared down at her palms. Simon couldn’t help but look at them too: white and dry like creased paper gloves.

  “I’d ask the impossible of him sometimes, to test him. More often than not, he’d prove it was possible. He really didn’t put a foot wrong, never once let the mask slip. That was the problem: his deception was so seamless that I did feel loved.” Hannah let out a jagged sigh. “At the same time, I knew that euphoric feeling he gave me was based on a lie, so I tried not to allow myself to trust it.” She laughed abrasively. “Easier said than done. My emotions were responding to Damon’s . . . rolling program of false stimuli. I was being manipulated. Brilliantly, to give him his due, but . . . I didn’t want to feel loved if I wasn’t. I wanted to know the truth. And from the day we met until he died this morning, he would never tell me. He denied there was anything to tell.”

  “When did the two of you meet?” Simon asked. He was going easy on himself, starting with questions likely to yield answers he’d understand. Getting to grips with dates and times was easier than trying to make sense of Hannah’s bizarre account of her husband’s spotlessly plausible hoax love. “How long were you and Damon together, and how long married?”

  “We met on November 29, 2011, and married in March 2012,” said Hannah. “On March 18.”

  “And . . . no children?”

  “No. I’m not too old—I’m only thirty-nine—but Damon wasn’t keen. He said he loved me too much to be willing to share—another lie. He wasn’t keen on children at all. Used to say they were boring and pointless. I could probably have persuaded him, though. He’d have given in if I’d framed it in the right way—‘Prove you love me by giving me a baby’—but I didn’t want children either, not with him. Not until I’d found out what he wanted from me.”

  “How long after you married Damon did you, er, start to suspect that his love for you wasn’t genuine?” Sam asked.

  “I didn’t suspect; I knew,” Hannah said. She was a clarifier, Simon noted: pedantically obsessed with the accuracy of her own words as well as everyone else’s. It was a personality type he didn’t often encounter, but he recognized it when he did. Clarifiers made good witnesses normally. Except when they were telling you stories that made no sense at all.

  “Long before I married Damon, I knew,” Hannah went on. “The first time he said he loved me, I thought, ‘No, you don�
�t. You can’t. It’s not possible.’ If you’re wondering why I stayed with him . . . ?”

  “Go on,” said Sam.

  “Several reasons at first: I’d been single for a long time and was afraid I’d never meet anyone. Then I met Damon, or rather he met me. I was minding my own business, looking at cheap wool blankets in the National Trust shop on Blantyre Walk—folding and unfolding them, frowning and muttering complaints under my breath because none was quite right. I doubt I could have looked more frumpy spinster-ish and less sexually enticing if I’d tried. Damon . . .”

  “Are you OK, Hannah?” Sam asked when she stopped. “We can take a break if you—”

  “No. Thank you. Let me carry on.” Having said this, she pressed her lips shut as if she’d resolved never to speak again.

  Simon and Sam waited.

  Eventually, she said, “I didn’t notice Damon until he accosted me and started talking to me as if we’d been friends for years. I was flattered that such a good-looking man would even glance in my direction. I found him compelling to listen to, and, later, to talk to—conversations with Damon were like verbal firework displays. And I was intrigued. Intellectually curious. I wanted to work out what he was up to. That was what I thought at first: that I’d stay with him only until I’d figured out what he wanted so badly from me that he was willing to lie so ruthlessly and convincingly. Thanks, Uzma.”

  Three cups of tea were slammed down on the table like heavy auction hammers. Uzma retreated and started to load the dishwasher; if he’d closed his eyes, Simon could have convinced himself that he was listening to a dangerously out-of-hand bottle fight.

  Hannah had produced a tissue from the pocket of her jeans and was dabbing at the corners of her eyes. “Sorry,” she said. “You’d think I wouldn’t be too fussed about him being dead, in the circumstances.”

  Right. You’re only his wife. Proximity to Widow Weirdo was making Simon’s flesh itch. He knew he was being unfair, but the fact that Hannah was so suspicious of her late husband, and not in the least ashamed of being so, made him suspicious of her.