Woman with a Secret

by Sophie Hannah

  “Waterhouse, enough.” Proust lifted his head from the desk. “What did Nicki Clements, calling herself Melissa Redgate, say to Reuben Tasker–slash–King Edward and then repeat in the presence of her therapist, Hannah? Take pity on us. What was this all-important utterance that inspired a murder?”

  “It was a flippant remark. She drew a kind of . . . well, an analogy, I suppose. Between sex and killing.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Tuesday, July 9, 2013

  I RECOGNIZE HIM FROM the Internet: Reuben Tasker, the author. Writes supernatural novels. I’ve read half of one. It won a prize.

  “Look at me,” he says.

  I can’t tell him I’d rather look anywhere but straight at him. He’s put tape over my mouth. I’m scared to move. He’s kneeling astride me, holding a pair of scissors in one hand. If I make him angry, he could stab me.

  Behind him, in the corner of the room, there’s a woman sitting in a chair, crying. She also has tape over her mouth. She could run to the door while Tasker’s busy with me, but she doesn’t move.

  Why not?

  “Look at me, Nicki. Don’t keep turning away. I want to see your face. I haven’t seen it for a long time.”

  I should have made a run for it while I could. Now he’s sitting astride me. In order to escape, I’d have to push him off. Can’t. He’s too heavy. He might have a handsome face if he had different eyes, but not with these: two round, dark insects determined to burrow into me. I try to blur my focus so that I won’t see him clearly, try not to dissolve in fear and lose my grip.

  Why Tasker? Why did you have to be this man, King Edward—a man whose imagination dreams up tortures and punishments so intricately gruesome that no ordinary person would think of them if they tried for a year?

  If he can invent horrors like the ones I read in his book, he can hurt me. He’s likely to hurt me. How would it feel to be stabbed with scissors?

  In the eye. In the neck . . .

  “Open your eyes.”

  I come to. I must have blacked out for a moment.

  If I’m going to die, I don’t want to miss the last part of my life. I’d rather die with my mind working.

  Think. Not Sophie and Ethan. Too hard, too painful. Think about anything else.

  Craving and Aversion—that was Tasker’s book. I gave it up. Too frightening. Damon hated it. He got into a fight about it with Keiran Holland and I decided I’d read it. I was on Damon’s side—I was always on his side against anyone, and especially against that stupid windbag Holland—but I wanted to be able to write something intelligent in the comments about why Damon was right.

  Gave up. Couldn’t write anything.

  I make a noise that means “Take the tape off my mouth,” moving my face to show what I mean.

  “No. Not until I’m ready. Keep still.” He sounds sad, not angry. Sad, holding scissors.

  What can I do? There has to be a way out. Nicki Clements, super fibber, can talk her way out of anything. I try to remember what else I know about Tasker, in case there’s something I can use. All I can dredge up, from something I read online, is that his father was a professional gambler who ran off with a singer. No help at all.

  I used to do my best to keep up with Damon’s various obsessions, Googling all the people he ranted about. It was exhausting: infant male circumcision, athletes banned for taking drugs, pretentious novelists, hypocritical MPs.

  I didn’t pay much attention to Tasker. Damon wasn’t interested in him in his own right. He’d only written about him to illustrate a point he wanted to make about Bryn Gilligan. Oh, but wait . . .

  “Keep still, Nicki.”

  I can’t. Can’t stop shaking.

  I’ve remembered something else. The woman, the singer Tasker’s father eloped with—she was accused of murdering a young boy, before they caught the actual . . .

  Oh my God. The boy, the murdered little boy.

  His name was Gavin. Was that why King Edward chose that name? It never occurred to me to make the connection.

  Of course it didn’t. You had no reason to think about Gavin in connection with Reuben Tasker.

  “What’s the matter?” He knows I’ve thought of something. Wants to know what it is.

  I move my face again from side to side, chin in the air. Let me talk, you fucker.

  He puts the scissors down next to him on the bed and tears off the strip of tape. I cry out in pain.

  “Sorry,” he says. “Nicki, the last thing I want to do is hurt you. That’s not why I’m here.”

  “Who’s the woman?”

  “My wife, Jane. You said you wanted to know who killed Damon Blundy. She killed him.”

  His wife. His wife murdered Damon Blundy? Impossible.

  I open my mouth to speak, but nothing makes sense—nothing I’ve heard and nothing I might say. “No. You killed him.”

  “That’s not true, Nicki. Can I kiss you?”

  “No.” My stomach flips over.

  “All right, I won’t if you’d rather I didn’t. I don’t want to do anything you don’t want.” He looks at my naked body as he says it, taking his time. Lingering with his eyes.

  I try to imagine that I am wearing clothes, lots of them: underwear, dark woolly tights, a skirt, a shirt, a thick sweater . . .

  “I want to leave this room,” I say.

  “Well, you can. But you said you wanted me to explain about Damon Blundy.”

  “I don’t need your explanation. I know you killed him and I know why.” If Hannah Blundy didn’t kill Damon, Tasker must have. His wife wouldn’t have done the thing with the knife. Why would she? It would mean nothing to anyone apart from me and King Edward. “I know what ‘He is no less dead’ means,” I tell him.

  “Do you?” He smiles.

  I’m not going to give him the reward he’s after: the satisfaction of hearing the solution to the puzzle that means so much to him. All the trouble he went to: organizing his cryptic murder scene, then typing it out in painstaking detail in his “Looking for a Woman with a Secret” ad for me to find.

  Yes, King Edward. I know what “He is no less dead” means. After you emailed me to explain your strange views on adultery—that it doesn’t count and isn’t wrong if you only kiss and stroke and rub and lick and suck and bite, then run away in time to salve your conscience—I told you in no uncertain terms what I thought of your hypocrisy. I used one of my bizarre analogies that you’re so fond of. I wrote back and said, “You’re free to behave as you like, obviously, but if you want to know what I think of your ethical position on infidelity, I think it’s the stupidest, most self-serving piece of crap I’ve ever heard. If a married man writes to a married woman secretly for years telling her she’s the love of his life, that’s cheating. If he meets her at a hotel and they both remove all their clothes and touch each other in every conceivable sexual way bar one, that’s cheating. To pretend it isn’t is so dishonest it’s pathetic. It’s as pathetic as forcing a man to lick fatal poison off a knife and then, once he’s dead, saying, ‘But I didn’t stab him, Officer. The knife didn’t actually penetrate his skin.’ So what? He’s just as dead, isn’t he? You’re still a fucking murderer.”

  “You’re a murderer,” I hear myself say.

  “No, Nicki. I didn’t kill him. I’ll admit the way of doing it was my idea, but I wasn’t there when it happened. I was at home, writing. Jane was the one who killed him.”

  My eyes move to the woman in the corner. She’s nodding. Nodding and crying. She won’t be able to breathe through her nose for much longer if she doesn’t stop crying. Fuck. I don’t want to watch a woman die. Thinking about it gives me a sharp pinch of fear in my heart.

  “You made her do it, Reuben,” I say gently. “It’s not her fault. Take the tape off her mouth—let her tell me.”

  If he gets off me, I can try to run. I still have a life, at the moment. A husband, two beautiful children . . .

  You can’t run and leave her here with him. He doesn’t care if she
lives or dies.

  I think about what Gavin wrote in an email: “The only person I know whom I can never forgive is my wife . . . It was my inability to forgive her that drove me to the Intimate Links website.”

  Tasker’s shaking his head. I can’t remember the last thing I said to him. I must stop my mind from wandering. “Jane’s a free agent,” he says. That’s right: I asked him to take the tape off her mouth. “Yeah, I said, ‘Do this, do that.’ She didn’t have to listen. I was upset—I didn’t mean what I said. I wanted to see if she’d do it. She’ll do anything I say, won’t you, honey?” His words speed up as his eyes start to flit around the room. As if he’s lost me and is frantically looking for me, even though I haven’t moved. He tips forward suddenly, nearly losing his balance before he rights himself. His breath touches my skin like warm poisonous gas. “She took it too literally. I was depressed. A chance encounter between a policeman and a friend of mine had ruined a promising relationship.”

  “My relationship with Gavin, you mean?”

  “You met a policeman and you dumped Gavin. You wouldn’t tell him why.”

  “I want to hear Jane tell me what she did,” I say. “Please, Reuben. Let her speak.”

  “No. I want us to speak, not her. You and me, Nicki. We need to decide what to do about her. She killed Damon Blundy—I bet you think the person who killed Damon Blundy ought to pay for their crime, don’t you? He wasn’t evil—that’s what you said—so the person who murdered him must have been. Jane’s willing to accept whatever punishment we decide on. She’s come here by choice. I explained everything to her. She’s OK with it. Look, she’s not restrained in any way; she’s just sitting there. She could get up and leave if she wanted to.”

  “If you want Damon’s killer punished, call the police,” I say.

  Tasker lunges for the scissors, holds them up in the air. “No police,” he says.

  “All right. OK, no police.” My heart is pushing to exit my body through my mouth. “It’s up to you.”

  I watch as his breathing returns to normal. He puts the scissors down again. “Sorry,” he mutters. “Look, you want to hear Jane’s story? Be my guest.” He climbs off me and walks over to the chair in the corner. Rips the tape off his wife’s mouth. Her face twists in response to the pain. A nondescript face. “Tell Nicki what happened,” he says.

  “I killed him. Reuben’s telling the truth. I . . . I thought he wanted me to. He was so . . . clear about what should happen. Every detail.”

  “Tell me,” I say. Slowly, as she starts to talk, I raise myself up to a seated position, reach for the bed’s coverlet and wrap it around me.

  “I . . . had to send Damon Blundy an email, as if it were from him. From Reuben. Had to say I wanted to set up a staged murder scene, for research for my next book, and could he help by posing as the victim? ‘You’ll be meeting my wife, Jane, not me’—that’s what I put. Reuben said to put that. ‘Jane’s my research assistant.’ Reuben said Damon Blundy would like the idea. He told me to say that he could make a good column out of it.”

  “I knew Blundy wouldn’t be able to resist,” says Tasker. “For all his self-proclaimed brilliance and cleverness, he let Jane tape his hands together behind his chair, tape his ankles to the chair. And then it was too late. Wasn’t it, Jane?”

  Her nods are like the mechanical vibrations of an inanimate object. “I felt terrible. He was nice to me. He must have been watching out of the window when I arrived. He came out to greet me, helped me carry all my things into the house.”

  “The man was an idiot, Nicki,” says Tasker. He’s not interested in Jane. He’s watching me, all the time, for my reaction.

  “Oh, he couldn’t possibly have suspected what I was going to do,” says Jane. An anguished expression contorts her face. “Until . . . well, he screamed when he saw . . . But no one came. I thought someone might come, but his wife must have been in the basement, which was two floors down. I heard a radio on my way out of the house, quite loud. No one tried to stop me, you see. And, I mean, Damon liked me, before I started in earnest. I liked him. He was nice. We had a nice chat about Reuben’s new book and his research. Damon seemed pleased to be helping—quite sincere, I thought. He zipped up my suit—my protective suit.”

  Suit. The word makes me think back to the “Confidant” email. “What about his computer password?” I say. “Why would he give you that?”

  “I threatened to stab him to death if he didn’t,” says Jane, her brow creased in anxiety. She sounds as if she’s confessing to accidentally having put some whites in with a coloreds wash and ruined a favorite shirt. “Once he was taped to his chair securely, I could do whatever I wanted to him. He shouted out, but no one heard. Then I knocked him out with the knife sharpener, painted the words Reuben had told me—”

  “Wrong order,” Tasker snaps. Jane shrinks back as if he’s physically struck her. He turns to me. “I had to give her a numbered list of instructions, right down to deleting all her emails-as-me from Blundy’s inbox, all his in response from his ‘Sent’ box and both from his ‘Deleted.’” To Jane he says, “After you knocked him out, you sharpened the knife and then taped it over his mouth.” He sniggers. “That was kind of the crucial part. I’m surprised you’d choose to forget that bit.”

  I want to throw up.

  “Actually, I’m not surprised,” Tasker contradicts himself. “It’s typical of you, darling wifey.”

  Jane says and does nothing. Just carries on crying.

  “Why are you so hard on her?” I ask.

  “When she’s good enough to kill a man to make me happy, you mean? I agree.” Tasker walks over to the window and pulls open the curtains. Bright sunlight outside. Unbearable: people free and light out there, going about their business. “I really thought this one might do the trick, but it made no difference. You know what they say: once the rot’s set in.”

  “What did Jane do that you couldn’t forgive?”

  He’s coming toward me. Too fast. He grabs the scissors and holds them out like a knife to keep me away, as if I’m moving in on him. “How do you know about that? She didn’t do anything!” I’ve made him angry.

  “Gavin told me. Remember? In the email where he said he’d forgive me anything.” I force a smile. “I hope that’s true.”

  The rage doesn’t leave his eyes, but his mouth forms a smile to mimic mine. “Jane’s never done anything I can’t forgive. It’s what she hasn’t done that’s the problem.”

  “What?” she wails. “What haven’t I done? There’s not one single thing I haven’t done for you! Name it!”

  I recognize that sound. I’ve never heard it, apart from inside myself: boiling fury, silenced for years.

  Tasker doesn’t look at her. He keeps his eyes on me. “She’s never read any of my books,” he says. “Can’t stand violence. Even the misery memoirs she reads, she skips the nasty bits—don’t you, wifey? Pretty pointless, really, when the nasty bits are the whole point of that particular genre.”

  I watch Jane. She’s frozen. Her skin is gray. A Pompeii volcanic-ash woman.

  Adam and I went to Sorrento for our honeymoon. We went on a day trip to Pompeii. The coach was too hot, and we didn’t take enough water, and all the shops had sold out—there were too many tourists. We wished we’d stayed in Sorrento, lounging by the swimming pool.

  I’m going to see Adam again. If Tasker were intending to kill me, he’d have done it by now. He doesn’t want to hurt me; he wants to talk. I’ll talk to him for as long as it takes, until I think of a way out of this room.

  “I didn’t think I’d be able to kill a man, because of the violence involved,” said Jane quietly. “Reuben’s right—I can’t read about it. In books, it’s presented in a way to make you care, though, isn’t it? Books make you feel upset about violence. In real life, there’s no one in charge behind the scenes steering your feelings in a particular direction. You just do it, and it . . . it’s not so bad.”

  “Remember your ad, Nic
ki?” Reuben asks. “‘I Want a Secret’? You said you wanted someone who would leave no stone unturned in his determination to find out every secret thing there is to know about you. You promised to reciprocate.”

  “Yes. I remember.”

  “That’s how I knew you were the one for me. You’d have read my novels—every one, cover to cover. How can you claim to love someone who puts their whole heart and soul into their work and completely ignore that work? How can you think that any amount of admin and cooking and cleaning and fucking can compensate for such a blatant lack of interest in the person you’re married to?” His anger’s building again.

  “Why didn’t you say something?” asks Jane. It’s strange: she doesn’t seem to be scared anymore. “If I’d known it mattered to you that much—”

  “But you didn’t, did you, darling wifey? I didn’t say something because if you don’t do it of your own accord, it’s worthless. What’s the point? Nicki read what Damon Blundy wrote, didn’t you, Nicki? She commented on it on the Daily Herald’s website. Religiously. That’s love, Jane. Nicki knows how to do it properly.”

  He turns to face her finally, scissors still in his hand, pointing at her. “I should kill you now, save you a life prison term.”

  “Do it if you want to,” Jane says quietly. “I don’t care.”

  He takes a step toward her. Raises his hand above his head.

  “No! You murdering . . .” I leap up and throw myself across the room at him. We land in a pile on the carpet, by Jane’s feet. Brown shoes. I struggle to push Tasker off me, but he’s too strong. He’s on top of me, crushing me. His eyes are glazed, then manic.

  “Looking for a secret,” he says. “Tell me a secret, Nicki.”