Woman with a Secret

by Sophie Hannah

  “Nothing. You asked to meet me, remember?” Melissa slid the orange plastic bag off her lap and onto the floor under the table. The harsher Charlie was, the farther away the contents of that bag were going to get. Time to be diplomatic.

  “Fair enough. We have to ask these things, you know. I kind of got the impression you’d brought something to show me?” Charlie smiled.

  “No,” said Melissa flatly.

  Liar.

  Mentally, Charlie kicked herself for being too confrontational too soon. Why had she made such a stupid mistake? Blaming it on Melissa was too easy, but . . . there was something about the woman sitting across the table from her that made Charlie’s skin prickle. She didn’t like her.

  Because she trespassed, like Liv. She married her best friend’s brother. Psychology 101.

  “I hope you don’t mind if I ask you a couple of other questions, unrelated to alibis,” said Charlie.

  “That’s why I’m here. I’m happy to help if I can. Ask away.”

  “Do you own a car?”

  “A car?”

  “Yes.” Charlie mimed steering. “Four wheels, gearstick, dashboard . . .”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” Melissa asked.

  “I honestly don’t know. Look, I told you on the phone, I’m not a detective—I’m a flunky, working her way through someone else’s list of questions.”

  Fortunata chose this moment to appear with a curly-paged notepad and a pencil. “You want something?” she demanded loudly.

  Melissa shrank back.

  “Another latte for Charlie?”

  “Go on, then. Cheers.”

  “And for Charlie friend?”

  “Diet Coke, please,” said Melissa.

  Once they were alone again, she said, “Yes. I have a car. What a strange question.”

  “Do you share it with Lee, or is it just yours?”

  “We have a car each. Lee has a Vauxhall Insignia, and I’ve got a Mazda RX-8.”

  “What kind of driver are you?” Charlie asked her. “Would you happily drive on a highway on your own at night? Do you only do short, local trips unless Lee’s with you?”

  “No.” Melissa looked as if she suspected some sort of practical joke was in progress, and she was its victim. “I drive alone on highways at night all the time. When my mum and dad got divorced, he moved to Truro. I often drive there to visit him, on my own, often getting back at two or three in the morning. I drive in all weathers, through the center of London in rush hour if I need to. I’d drive in light snow too if Lee would let me—he’s the more cautious driver of the two of us, by far. Is that enough information for you?”

  “I think so,” said Charlie.

  “You really don’t know why you’ve been told to ask me that?”

  “Not a clue. What’s in the orange bag under the table?”

  Melissa looked away quickly, as if by avoiding Charlie’s eye, she could avoid answering.

  “Melissa? You brought something with you. You must have wanted to show it to me.”

  “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think it’s got anything to do with Damon Blundy’s murder.”

  “But at first you thought it might have? Please show it to me. If there’s even a tiny chance it could shed some light, I need to see it.”

  Melissa’s eyes had filled with tears. “Well, you know where it is if you want to look at it,” she said.

  Charlie stood up, walked around the side of the table and picked up the bag—all so that Melissa would be able to say to herself, I didn’t give it to her—she took it. Crazy.

  Emptying the bag onto the table, Charlie saw that she’d been nearly right but not quite. Not books, but two white thin-spined notebooks. Lined paper. On the cover of one, in blue pen that had driven grooves into the thin cover, “The Lies” was written in childish handwriting. On the other, someone had simply written, “LIES,” in capital letters.

  Charlie opened the first and started to flick through. “‘Pretended to be doing fun run for charity, got Mum and Dad to sponsor,’” she read aloud. “‘Promised never to go on Danny McKillop’s motorbike, went on it today without a helmet.’ What are these?”

  “Pages and pages of lies,” said Melissa. “Two notebooks’ full. I found them at Nicki’s parents’ house when Lee and I were there over the weekend. I . . . This is going to sound terrible, but I searched Nicki’s old bedroom while I was there. Lee and his mum and dad went out for a walk, and . . . well, I’ve been so worried about this Damon Blundy thing—the thought that Nicki might actually have . . .” Melissa closed her eyes for a few seconds. “I knew Quentin and Nora still had a lot of her old stuff, so I thought I’d have a look at it. Not to find anything directly connected to Damon Blundy’s death, obviously—Nicki didn’t know Damon Blundy when she was a child . . .”

  “Then why?” Charlie asked. “What were you hoping to find?”

  “I don’t know,” Melissa whispered tearfully. “Something that would help me understand Nicki better, maybe. Her psychology, why she lies. When she was a teenager, her parents nearly had her committed. Lee won’t talk about it much, but apparently they got as far as actually taking her to the place, the asylum, but at the last minute they just couldn’t do it.”

  “Committed?” For lying to her parents when she was a teenager? Everyone did that.

  Melissa nodded.

  “So . . . you found these notebooks?” Charlie started to flick through the pages again. It was a record of lies told—an archive of lies, each one in a separate box, with a straight blue-ink line above and below it, each one accompanied by the date, and a number that bore no relation to the date. “In which Nicki listed all the lies she told her parents. How odd. Why would anyone do that? And what are these numbers, after the lies—150, 250, 300—what do they mean?”

  Melissa said nothing. She looked shifty.

  “Please, Melissa, if you know what any of it means or why Nicki did this, you’ve got to tell me. What you’re thinking right now could be right: if she’s crazy enough to collect her lies in notebooks and keep them, she might be crazy enough to—”

  “No. That’s not . . .” Melissa looked desperate. “It’s not Nicki’s handwriting,” she said. “It’s Lee’s.”

  “Lee? Her brother?”

  “And my husband, yes.”

  “Are you sure? Lee kept a written record of his sister’s lies? Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know. And the notebooks were with Nicki’s things, not Lee’s, but that’s definitely his writing.” Two tears spilled over and snaked down Melissa’s face. “I’m too scared to ask him about it. I tried to mention the notebooks to Nicki and she slammed the phone down on me. I’m scared I might have traded in my best ever friend for . . .” Melissa bit down hard on her bottom lip. She seemed to have decided against whatever she’d been about to say.

  “Can I hang on to these notebooks?” Charlie asked her. “I’m sure they have no bearing on the investigation into Damon Blundy’s murder, but . . . I’d like to put them in front of people who know more about it than I do.”

  “Keep them,” said Melissa. “I wish I’d never found them.”

  Was she worried it was her husband and not his sister who belonged in an asylum? Charlie would be, in her shoes. Who keeps lists of lies?

  The table started to vibrate. “Your phone’s ringing,” said Melissa.

  It was bound to be Simon, calling with more ambiguous teasers to drive Charlie insane. “Sorry,” she said. “I’ll switch it off. I . . . Oh.”

  It wasn’t a phone call. It was an email, to Charlie’s “Confidant” account, the one she set up to post her “Looking for a Woman with a Secret” ad on the Intimate Links website. “Can you excuse me for a second?” she asked Melissa. She didn’t notice the response, if there was one.

  In the ladies’ room at Mario’s, mercifully free from Fortunata’s singing, Charlie opened the email that had arrived from “Nicki,” whose email address was “nickibein
gnaughty@hushmail.com.” She started to read.

  Interesting and . . . Oh shit. Too interesting. And potentially lethal.

  She texted Simon: “Just had a reply to my Intimate Links ad from ‘Nicki.’ Meet me CID room asap + team. C.”

  Charlie hurried back to the operatic section of the café. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go,” she told Melissa. “Something urgent’s come up. Do you know someone who goes by the name of King Edward?”

  “Know personally? No. I mean, I’ve obviously heard of King Edward the king—the Mrs. Simpson one. Do you mean him?”

  She was either serious or the subtlest smart-arse in the world. “No, I mean a real-life man who uses the alias King Edward. Possibly an associate of Nicki’s.”

  Melissa shook her head. “I’ve never heard of him,” she said.

  From: Nicki

  Date: Tue, July 9, 2013 14:10:21

  To:

  Subject: Re: Looking for a Woman with a Secret

  First King Edward, then Damon Blundy, then Gavin and now Confidant—your fourth assumed identity. Did you really think I’d fall for another one?

  I’m assuming it’s you I’m writing to—the man I know as King Edward VII. I doubt the police would be stupid enough to post the details of a crime scene on a dating website. The only other person it could be is Damon’s wife, Hannah.

  You don’t understand how it could be her, do you? You think that the knife, and the way you used it on Damon, and what it means, is a secret that only you and I know. Well, you’re wrong.

  Still, I don’t think Hannah killed him. She didn’t have a motive—or rather, she didn’t know she had one. I took care to make sure she didn’t find out about me and Damon (not that there ever really was a “me and Damon,” of course).

  I think it was you who killed him, King Edward. Even though you say in your ad that you think the killer’s a woman. Me, presumably? Are you trying to scare me, make me think you might try to frame me for Damon’s murder? I had no reason to kill him, though, did I?

  You, on the other hand, had a glaringly obvious motive: you were jealous. By pretending to be Damon for so long, you allowed me—encouraged me—to fall in love with someone who was neither entirely Damon nor entirely you. I fell in love with your emails and his newspaper columns—the sensitive private “Damon” and the brash public one, combined. That was the man I became obsessed with—the fascinating, contradictory, complicated creation I fell for. Only one problem: he didn’t exist apart from in my head.

  Didn’t you foresee that once you’d made me fall in love with Damon, you’d be jealous of him? Why didn’t you just make up a name—one that didn’t belong to anyone real that I might latch on to?

  And you had a second reason for killing Damon, too: to prove that you weren’t him. After the way you’d tricked me, you knew I’d never trust a word you said ever again. You’d told me that you weren’t Damon Blundy, but why would I believe you? I did, eventually, but it took a while. For a few weeks, I continued to believe you might be Damon pretending not to be Damon. Once I knew you were willing to lie to me so flagrantly, anything could have been true. You could have been lying when you said you were him or lying when you said you weren’t him—how did I know?

  That’s why you murdered him in the way that you did. Only King Edward, you believed, would choose that precise way of committing murder. It was your way of proving to me that you, King Edward, exist independently of Damon Blundy. You sacrificed his life to show me how much I mean to you. I get that. But I can’t love, or forgive, Damon Blundy’s killer. I loved him, even though I didn’t know him. And part of what I loved about him was the real him. I read nearly as many of his words as yours, remember.

  He wasn’t a bad person. As Gavin, you were wrong about him. Damon was the best kind of good: the kind that’s willing to sacrifice its own appearance of goodness in the eyes of the world, and the ego-boost that goes with that, in order to make a real difference. Damon Blundy wasn’t a good man, no—he was a great man. He stuck up for people. He forced hypocrites and mediocrities to face unwelcome truths so that they had the opportunity to become their best possible selves. Hardly anyone understood this about him.

  You probably waited for the details of how you murdered him to appear in the papers, and when they never did, you placed your “Looking for a Woman with a Secret” ad—to make sure I found out how he’d been killed. What did you hope would happen then? Did you expect me to take a brutal murder as definitive evidence of your love for me, and give you another chance? Or did you simply want me to know that you, King Edward, are a person in your own right?

  Which person, though? Who are you, King Edward? I’m waiting here, in “our” hotel, only because I need to know the answer to that question.

  Please don’t let me down again. I’ve emailed your King Edward account and the Gavin one to say I’m in room 419, the Chancery Hotel, Bloomsbury—same as last time. I’ll wait as long as I have to. Please come.

  Nicki

  Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone

  CHAPTER 13

  Tuesday, July 9, 2013

  KING EDWARD IS LATE. Nearly an hour late. I’ve had nothing from him in the last hour apart from a text message saying, “Wait. Don’t move. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Turn your phone off, prepare the room and wait.”

  I am prepared. In bed, blindfold on. The curtains are drawn; the door is ajar; the “Do not disturb” sign is in position.

  My heart ticks in my chest. It’s the only sound I can hear, since I turned off the too-noisy air conditioning. It makes me think of the old clock in Lee and Melissa’s kitchen. Tick, tick, tick . . .

  Last time I lay blindfolded in a Chancery Hotel room waiting for King Edward to arrive, I told myself that if he strangled or abducted me, there would be a small silver lining: Melissa would have to tell everybody, when they said, “But surely you know something about what Nicki might have been up to, since she’s your best friend,” that she’d forbidden me to tell her my secrets. She’d have been forced to admit—to the police, to herself—that her moral prissiness might have cost me my life.

  The way your recklessness cost Damon Blundy his?

  I wonder what Adam, Sophie and Ethan are doing now. Adam’s probably preparing dinner. Sophie might be on the Internet, Googling singing or talent competitions, planning her quickest route to becoming someone like Una Healey from the Saturdays. Ethan’s patiently explaining to Adam why he has to be allowed to move tables at school, because Nikhil never stops talking about how much he loves Jessica, and it’s boring. Or else he’ll be playing on Minecraft. I don’t know what that is, only that it obsesses my son. Yesterday, he said to me in a tone of great excitement, “Mummy, there are more than three hundred chickens guarding my world!”

  I wish I were at home with my family. I was wrong to think that Bartholomew Gardens and Spilling could never be home. This room, this hotel, contains all the “not home” that exists in the world. If I get out of here alive, I’m never coming back.

  I hear a creaking noise coming from nearby. My body stiffens. Is it him?

  I lie still. One by one, the seconds stretch out and then contract, my imagination racing to the end of each one and back again.

  “Don’t move,” says a man’s voice. “Say nothing. Don’t touch the blindfold. Keep your hands where they are, by your sides.” There’s a thwack as the door closes.

  I’ve never heard the voice before. Nobody I know from my real life. Thank God. Though I never allowed myself to fear the worst, I’m relieved to know for sure.

  I’m pleased to have heard King Edward’s voice, finally. When he and I met here in February, we’d made a pact of silence. He didn’t utter a word.

  I keep completely still. I’m willing to stay silent for the time being because I want to listen. What’s he doing? I can hear movement. Some kind of tape, a cutting sound, whimpering . . .

  Was that a woman? Has he broug
ht a woman with him?

  Tape. Damon Blundy had a knife taped to his face. His wrists and ankles were taped together, around his chair . . .

  What’s King Edward going to do? Now that he’s here, my conviction that he won’t hurt me has grown stronger. So has my fear, which has turned into terror. I don’t think I could move even if I decided I wanted to.

  The whimpering stops—not a clean stop, but a muffling. More tape-pulling sounds, and cutting.

  There’s definitely someone else in the room. King Edward’s put tape over her mouth. I inhale hard, filling my lungs with as much air as I can.

  “Don’t worry, Nicki,” King Edward says. “You’re afraid I’m going to hurt her, but I’m not. I’m not going to hurt anyone. If you want her to, she’ll walk out of this room alive and unharmed once we’re done here.”

  “Done doing what?” I ask, my voice so hoarse I almost don’t recognize it. “Tell me what I want to know—everything.” I pull off my blindfold and see him as a moving shadow in the semi-darkness. And a chair, with someone in it . . .

  “Put that back on,” King Edward snaps. “You agreed to my conditions.”

  “And you told me you were Damon Blundy, you stupid piece of shit! Give me one good reason why I should keep any promise I ever made you.” I would have, if he hadn’t brought a woman with him. Her presence—the danger she might be in—has broken his hold over me.

  I reach for the metal chain dangling from the lamp attached to the wall by the bed, and pull.

  At first, his face is like pieces of a jigsaw assembled in the wrong order: flashes of familiarity not quite adding up to a recognizable picture. Then my brain catches up and it makes sense. I know who this man is. I know what he’s capable of.

  Pain. Unimaginable agony.

  I know I’d be safer if he were someone else, anyone else . . .

  He’s moving toward me with the tape in his hand.

  I open my mouth to scream.

  BRYN GILLIGAN COMMITS SUICIDE AND CONFESSES TO MURDER