Woman with a Secret

by Sophie Hannah

  I’m also married, with children, about to turn forty. I want something exciting in my life that no one else knows about. Not necessarily something sexual, not necessarily an affair, but definitely something I will need to keep secret from everyone in my life. Maybe even something a little bit dangerous.

  I would love to hear from anyone who thinks he might like to be my secret. A man who, once he becomes my secret, won’t allow me to keep any secrets from him. I want someone who would leave no stone unturned in his determination to find out every single secret thing there is to know about me. I promise I will reciprocate.

  If you’re the man I’m looking for, then I want to hear from you. And . . . if you also happen to like BBC4, the television channel, that would be great too! Maybe one day we could watch it together—in secret, of course!

  •Location: London

  •It’s NOT OK to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

  Posted: 2010-06-03, 23:10PM GMT

  CHAPTER 5

  Wednesday, July 3, 2013

  “I GOT NOTHING,” SAYS Ethan bitterly. “No marks. Even though I definitely got four of the five questions right! I should have gotten eight out of ten. The last question wasn’t even a question!”

  “Yes, tragedy, tragedy,” Sophie drawls. “Can you bloody well shut up about it now? I can’t hear the TV.”

  “Mum, Sophie just—”

  “Yes, I heard her, Ethan. I’m standing right next to her chair. Sophie, don’t say ‘bloody.’ It’s a swear word.” I manage to recite my parental line of dialogue without fluffing it or sinking to the floor in a sobbing heap. I need Ethan and Sophie to be as easy and unobtrusive as possible for as long as there’s a strange man following me and police officers suspect me of murder. Unfortunately, I can’t explain this to them. I don’t want to; I want to have as much energy as their petty little dramas and fights require of me, not to be so consumed by my own ongoing crisis that there’s nothing left of me.

  And so you’re going to do . . . what? Just hate yourself as usual and continue to behave like a self-destructive idiot?

  “You’re wrong, Mum,” says Sophie. “‘Bloody’ is not a swear word. Neither is ‘Oh God.’ Alexis in my class, her mum won’t let her say ‘Oh God.’ If she says it and her mum hears, she loses her computer privileges for a week.”

  “I’m not bothered about ‘Oh God,’ but ‘bloody’ is a swear word.”

  “What about ‘damn’?” Ethan asks.

  Oh God. “Can we not debate rude words? Ethan, this test—if you got four out of five questions right, you’d have gotten some marks. If you got no marks, you can’t have gotten any right.”

  “I did,” he squeaks indignantly. “One of them was, ‘What’s your name?’ I put, ‘Ethan Daniel Clements.’”

  “That is his name,” says Sophie, yawning.

  “OK, there’s some mistake or misunderstanding involved,” I say, relieved. “After supper, you can show me the test and we’ll sort it out. All right?” Ethan nods. I tick it off in my head: unhappy son, happier. Toast and juice delivered to living room—already ticked off, eaten, drunk, sticky plastic tumblers and plates bearing crusts and crumbs on the floor. Nearly free. If I have to wait much longer to call Kate Zilber, I’ll explode. She was away all yesterday and today on some kind of training course for head teachers. I managed to persuade Izzie to pass on a message, and was told grudgingly when I picked up the children this afternoon that I could call Kate on her mobile anytime after 4:45 P.M.

  I glance at my watch. Dead on a quarter to five. I don’t care if I look too eager: I want to know the name of the man who’s been following me. I haven’t seen him in the playground since Monday, which is perhaps not surprising. Until I’ve spoken to Kate and heard whatever she can tell me about him, I won’t know if I want to tell Adam or the police.

  I pull the door closed as I leave the living room and head for the phone farthest away from Sophie’s and Ethan’s ears, the one in the spare room. My right hand seems to start to sweat the moment I pull the scrap of paper with Kate’s number on it out of my pants pocket.

  Two doors between me and the children now: one pulled to and one firmly closed. This is how habitual liars measure their safety: by the number of closed doors between them and their loved ones. “Answer, answer,” I hiss as I listen to the rings, feeling helpless. I can’t imagine that Kate Zilber has ever been as keen for someone to answer their phone as I am now.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Kate. It’s Nicki Clements.”

  “Hi, Nicki—Izzie said you’d probably call. Is there a problem?”

  “I don’t know. Well, actually I do know.” I laugh awkwardly. “Don’t worry too much—I mean, nothing’s happened yet, but . . . one of the dads from school has been following me. On Tuesday, he followed me all the way to London, where I used to live. Which means he must have followed me from my house to the train station and then on to a car-rental—”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Kate silences me. “Which dad? Most of them wouldn’t have the gumption or the energy to follow the mother of another child. I’m almost impressed. Tell me everything, from the beginning.”

  I do my best, aware of the inadequacy of my story. Until two days ago, I simply didn’t notice him apart from in the school parking lot. He might have been following me for months, or he might have only started on Tuesday.

  The day after Damon Blundy was murdered.

  I describe him as accurately as I can: the kind of clothes he wears, his car, the streaks in his hair. “I’ve always thought of him as Flash Dad,” I tell Kate.

  “Can you describe his child or children?” she says quietly, after a short pause. “Let me answer that question for you: you can’t, can you? You’ve never seen him with his children.”

  “No. Not that I’ve noticed. How did you know that?”

  A longer pause. “You say you’ve noticed this guy a lot in the parking lot when you’ve dropped off and picked up your kids—going back a few months?”

  “Yes. I can’t remember when I first noticed him, but . . . yes, certainly a month or two.”

  “Have you ever seen him talking to any of the other parents?”

  “No, but that’s not unusual for a school-gate dad,” I say. “It’s the mums that want to talk, generally. Lots of the dads keep their heads down and pray no one’ll put them out by forcing them to have a conversation. Look, just tell me who he is,” I blurt out.

  “I’ve no idea who he is,” Kate says.

  “Then how did you know I’d never seen his kids? Why do you sound so worried, as if you’ve worked something out and you’re wondering whether you should tell me or not? You should. This man followed me to London, to my brother’s house!”

  “OK, don’t freak out. You will, but don’t. The guy you described isn’t a parent at Freeth Lane. I know every parent—more’s the pity—and there’s no dad with streaked hair and a blue Beemer. And before you ask, no, there are no mothers’ boyfriends, male nannies . . . There’s no one I can think of who fits that description, Nicki. No one associated with Freeth Lane.” Kate sighs. “Which means . . . well, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you.”

  I want to protest—to say it’s impossible, he must be a parent—but I’m interrupted by the door of the spare room opening. Ethan walks in holding a piece of paper. “My test,” he says. I press my finger against my lips to shush him. He mouths, “Zero marks out of ten,” just in case I’d forgotten. I give him my best solemn nod, then steer him out onto the landing and close the door again. Sophie would never let me get away with ushering her out of the room so frantically. She’d have narrowed her eyes and said, “All right, what’s going on? And don’t lie!”

  “Nicki? You still there?”

  All those days and weeks, leaning against his shiny blue car, looking like a bored dad, waiting. “It was the perfect way to follow me, wasn’t it?” I say. “Pretend to be a parent, blend in with all the other parents. Hang around the schoo
l in full view, in a way that no one would unless they had a child there, or unless they were some . . . psychopath, so practiced at following people that they know how to do it without arousing suspicion.”

  “I’d have said professional, not psychopath, but . . . yeah. That’s my conclusion too.”

  “Professional?”

  “A private detective of some kind,” says Kate. “What’s going on with you, Nicki? I’ve always thought you seemed far more interesting than any other school parent who’s ever crossed my path. You must have an exciting life if someone’s paying to have you followed! If I invite you around and bribe you with cocktails, will you tell me the full story?”

  It’s so tempting. The full story, though? Maybe not quite. But Kate doesn’t need to know that. Thinking about it, I don’t know the whole story myself. Assuming I decide I want to trust her with it, should I tell her only what I know for certain, or what I suspect as well? What do I know for sure? I can’t think straight—haven’t really been able to since I opened my front door to the police on Tuesday.

  Analogies. Gavin said he loved my bizarre analogies, plural, but in my entire correspondence with him I only produced one: the vegan Barack Obama. I read all my emails to Gavin again last night to check.

  King Edward, with whom I carried on a proper correspondence for more than two years, heard many of my analogies. The one he seemed to find most entertaining was the one about private tutors and bikes. I mentioned a parent at Sophie and Ethan’s old school who’d hired a private tutor, and he said, “What’s the point in paying to send your kids to private school and then having to pay for a tutor on top of that?” I asked him if he thought it was all right for state-school children to have private tutors and he said yes, that made more sense: if he had children at a state school, he might hire them a tutor if they needed one, but not if they went to a private school. “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “That’s like saying if you have a car that was given to you as a present, it’s OK to buy a bike, but if you’ve paid for your own car, then you mustn’t buy a bike.”

  A bizarre analogy, King Edward said. He used those same words. “It’s hilarious, and I’m not criticizing you,” he said, “but why not stick to the relevant subject?” I told him I find it hard to think clearly about certain situations unless I compare them to other similar things. Analogies help me to get my bearings. I said, “If someone smacked me over the head with a hammer, I’d probably say, ‘How would you feel if I hit you in the stomach with a brick? Because that’s just as bad and, in fact, exactly equivalent to what you’ve just done to me!’”

  Just as bad . . . What? What alarm bell did those words just ring? Something I know so well that won’t announce its presence in my mind, though I know it’s there, waiting.

  He is no less dead . . . A white-cold spark of terror jolts me. Then I go limp, as whatever fear it was that gripped me passes. For a fraction of a second, I knew what those words meant.

  I didn’t want to know. I pushed them out of sight. That was the jolt I experienced: my memory trying to toss the evidence away, like a . . .

  I stop myself before I come up with another pointless analogy. I use them too often. Gavin—the man who calls himself Gavin—was right to use the plural.

  When King Edward finally backed down and admitted I was right about the private-tutor thing, he said, “I surrender. You win. When the war starts, can I be in your unit?” Gavin said the same thing to me in our latest exchange.

  The horror is still sinking in, though I’ve known since Tuesday: Gavin is King Edward. There’s no room for doubt. I have not had two cyber affairs with two different men; King Edward and Gavin are the same man. King Edward knew precisely what I’d be looking for after what he put me through—I was moronic enough to spell it out for him. He created the Gavin identity to attract me, and I fell into his trap. Until Tuesday, it didn’t once cross my mind that, in Gavin, I had found King Edward under a different alias.

  How could he do that to me? After nearly destroying me once . . .

  Those horrible words—He is no less dead—are connected to King Edward somehow, I’m certain of it. My sudden pulse of terror that passed so quickly brought his name with it—his false name. The knowledge is there, like something dark swelling inside me. I can feel the answer tapping at the back of my brain, trying to get in.

  Did King Edward murder Damon Blundy? I know he was aware of him, perhaps even obsessed by him . . .

  “Nicki?” Kate Zilber’s insistent voice drags me out of my morbid thoughts. “Have you gone into a tunnel? Have I gone into a tunnel?”

  “Sorry,” I say, trying to pull myself together. “Yes, I . . . I could do with talking to someone,” I say. “When are you free?”

  “How about tomorrow night?”

  “That should be OK . . . Kate, I’m going to have to go. That beeping noise means I’ve got another call.”

  “OK, let’s confirm at school tomorrow. Meantime, if I see Streaky Boy, I’ll rugby-tackle him to the ground.”

  I almost smile as I press the “line 2” button. Kate’s not worried, not anymore. Though she sounded all portentous at first.

  Because she thought Flash Dad was a Freeth Lane parent and therefore her problem? No, that’s unfair. She was probably just trying to make me feel better by treating it all as entertainment and nothing to be scared of. She succeeded. I didn’t see Flash Not-Dad today. Maybe I’ve scared him away.

  “Hello?” I say, on line 2, shivering.

  No response. Silence. Then a breath.

  “King Edward?” I whisper.

  IF MELISSA AND LEE hadn’t decided to fall in love, if Melissa hadn’t told me she didn’t want me to tell her my secrets anymore, I would never have looked at the Intimate Links website. I looked—there, and on Craigslist, and Forbidden Fruit, and several other similar websites—because I felt as if something important had been ripped out of my life. I wanted a replacement for the person who’d been my best friend since the first day of secondary school—someone I could confide in no matter what stupid thing I’d done. I’d never heard of any New Best Friend websites, but I knew there were sites for those seeking new lovers, and I soon found plenty of them. I chose Intimate Links because, aesthetically, it was my favorite. It had a better look than the other sites.

  I called my advert “I Want a Secret.” I wrote it quickly, off the cuff, and posted it not really expecting any decent replies. Indecent ones flooded in, from people who couldn’t spell and seemed incapable of writing more than a line or two. I deleted them all. Then, after about four days, I got a reply that sparked my interest, from a man calling himself King Edward VII. We began a correspondence, and within a week I was completely hooked on him. By email we discussed all kinds of things: our mutual love of secrecy—we talked about that a lot, and the possible reasons for it. We listed our favorite everything: books, films, songs, animals, cities, countries, wine, color, words, food. Then we moved on to our least favorite.

  Once, we spent days going back and forth on the subject of Clark Kent and Superman. King Edward asked me, out of the blue, whether Superman was always still Clark Kent on some level, even while in Superman mode, or whether he completely ceased to be Clark Kent when he became Superman. I was firmly of the view that he never entirely lost his Clark Kent identity, even with his magic cape on, and King Edward drew all sorts of far-fetched conclusions about my character from this one opinion.

  Conversations with him, on any topic, glimmered with unpredictability. He was more interested in the contents of my mind than anyone has ever been, before or since—totally absorbed in me. He wanted to know absolutely every detail about everything and everyone I mentioned. He had fascinating, unpredictable views on whatever topic came up, and he wrote really well: long, thoughtful emails. I had the impression that he was devoting all his attention to me, to the point of neglecting the rest of his life. After a while, he said he was curious to know more about me, and to know what I looked like, so I told him as much as I c
ould without revealing my identity. He said he was falling in love with me—more strongly than he’d ever fallen for anyone before. I sent him a head-and-shoulders photo of myself. He replied saying he wouldn’t have minded whatever I looked like but that he was glad I was as beautiful as my emails. I loved that—the idea that my emails were attractive.

  At that point, our correspondence became overtly romantic. We started to write to each other more erotically—nothing too graphic, but we talked a lot about love. And even when we tried to talk about other things, it always came back to love. He’d become my significant other: the only person in the world that I wanted to share anything with. I’d never experienced such an intense connection before. I was living with Adam, Sophie and Ethan, but there was no doubt that King Edward had taken over as my “significant other.” I couldn’t wait to get away from my family, any chance I got, so that I could read his latest email and reply to it.

  We discussed the possibility of meeting, but by the time we got around to discussing it, I was terrified of putting it into practice. He admitted he was too. What we had seemed so perfect; we both feared we’d endanger it if we subjected it to the reality test. So we continued with the emailing—which was passionate and amazing and didn’t really feel like “not enough” in any way—for several more months.

  I became discontented before King Edward did. In July 2011, after I’d known him just over a year and with only his emails and my fantasies to represent his presence in my life, I started to crave real-world physical contact with him, and I told him so. I was scared things might start to become a little less urgent and exciting between us if we didn’t take them to the next level soon. King Edward said he felt the same, but that, having seen a photo of me and knowing how stunning I was, he’d be too scared of rejection to meet me in person. He said he wasn’t anywhere near as good-looking for a man as I was for a woman. I told him, truthfully, that I honestly couldn’t care less what he looked like. I’ve never fancied men for their looks—it’s always their attitudes, and personalities, and I knew I loved King Edward’s. To me, the idea of me rejecting him in person was unthinkable, to the point where I couldn’t quite understand why he was so worried about it.