‘You’re diving headfirst into quicksand, Maguire. You’re going to sink.’
‘What are you so worried about me finding out?’
His steely eyes glint and he steps towards me. I move back. My spine hits the wall, hard. Either he’s forgotten or doesn’t care that his threatening body language is being recorded and Leanne is witness to it. He presses his jaw against my forehead, glaring down at me. I can feel his hot breath on the bridge of my nose. ‘Stop digging into the past.’
‘Why? What are you so concerned I might discover?’
He presses his mouth against my ear. ‘If you keep digging you won’t learn anything.’
‘Don’t threaten me, you condescending wanker!’
‘Hey, that’s enough.’ Leanne presses her foot between us and tries to prise him away from me, but he doesn’t do so much as flinch.
‘What exactly is it that you’re accusing me of, being favoured by the inspector?’ he spits.
‘Evesham kept you on the case to save face. He thought denying you promotion was a far worse punishment than letting you rot in prison for getting stoned. A bent copper is a dream to a long-serving convict, isn’t it?’
‘And you drew the conclusion that was because I have privilege?’
‘No. I think Evesham wanted to keep an eye on you. And prevent you from having too much authority.’
He steps away from me, noticing two of our colleagues entering the L-shaped office.
‘I thought at first that Rawlings had a hold over you, but it would make more sense that he was concerned you had something on him considering Sinead lost her job with the force and you somehow managed to stay on the frontline, unscathed after Evesham’s death.’
‘You’ve lost the plot.’ He has the audacity to laugh.
‘No, Pierce. I think you did back in 2015. The year Evesham’s house went up in smoke with him inside. The year Sinead uprooted her family to Wales.’
And according to DI Locke, the year Gareth Delaney, who until that year had been earning a substantially smaller wage than the amount he declared when he put in an offer on the Market Hall building, secured a twelve-million-pound contract to reconstruct the premises. Though I’m unsure what the connection is, I feel there is one.
‘The fire that killed Evesham had fuck all to do with me,’ says Pierce, through gritted teeth. He pauses a second too long after the final syllable leaves his mouth and my heart begins to thunder in my chest.
‘I don’t think you lit the match, but you know who did, don’t you?’
SINEAD
Newport, Wales
I sit with a cup of tea in hand, gazing out of the window, focused on Tulip’s house. His mother left for work earlier. I watched him appear outside the moment her vehicle withdrew from the small space in front of their house. He turns to the window as though he can feel my gaze scoring into the back of his head, and I catch a glint of menace in his eyes. He wears a floral shirt over stripy linen trousers and Jesus sandals over cream socks. He gets away with the hippy look because of the flouncy way he walks. He scrunches his nose up at me like he’s bitten into a peppermint cream from his poncey selection box and retreats inside.
My attention diverts to his car. Today he has a line of string wound round the interior roof handles, tied into a triangle inside the cabin of his vehicle to dry his washing. I suspect, due to his arrival home at 3 a.m. and the fact he is now leaving in his car to go god knows where at 4 p.m., that he is a serial killer and uses his car to lure his victims to their deaths. That would explain the odd times he enters and exits the road, the fact he carries a lot of tarpaulin, rope, bin liners, water bottles, and bedding in the boot.
I know I’m coming across as crazy but being stuck in the house all day with no one to talk to is driving me slowly insane. Inventing stories around my neighbours is keeping my mind occupied on anything other than theorising why Gareth would involve another person in the attempt at my life.
Though I know with absolute certainty, the blond driver wasn’t him or anyone I recognise, he could have been paid by Gareth to cut me off the road.
But then again it may just be my guilty conscience trying to come up with clues. The not knowing is what’s maddening me. But worse is the thought that my husband, the man I chose to stay with because I believed no one could ever love me as much as he does, might also be the reason someone wants me dead.
That is until I receive an SMS from Pierce who must have got my new mobile number from Detectives Locke or Jones – they couldn’t have known I’d left London behind to escape the Met – then I wonder if it has something to do with him.
Monday 15th October 2018 11:17
Sent from mobile 44+*****631
Maguire thinks I’m responsible for the fire. You’re going to have to come clean about Alex.
My stomach does a backflip.
This is it, I think. The beginning of the end.
*
I accost Aeron the second he enters the living room. Home an hour early to collect the children from school as he’s been doing since my attack, hospital admission, and subsequent return home.
His eyes narrow, absorbing my erect posture and worried hands as he takes a seat on the sofa beside me. I turn to face him, thinking I detect a knowing glint in his eyes even before I open my mouth. Almost as though he’s been expecting me to tell him, waiting for me to divulge my fatalistic lie.
‘I need to talk to you.’
He retains a neutral expression, holds my gaze for so long I feel my cheeks begin to colour.
Then we speak at the same time.
‘I had an af—’
‘I’m leaving y—’
We’re cut off by a knock at the door, freezing instantaneously.
‘Are you expecting someone?’ His eyes become daggers. ‘Him?’
I note his relatively calm posture and it unnerves me. ‘You already knew? Before today I mean.’
‘Of course, I did. That’s why I re-mortgaged the house.’ He stands and exits the living room.
But we did everything we could to ensure no one ever found out about our trysts.
‘Forty thousand pounds, Aeron! Where’s the money?’ I say, moving towards the door.
‘I bought a one-bedroom flat with it. I’m moving out next month.’
My hand finds his, half wrapped around the door handle. I tug on it and he snaps his palm away, and we both step back.
‘Cynthia?’
‘Mum!’ says Aeron.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Well, aren’t you going to let me in, darling?’ she says, pushing past me and reaching out to embrace Aeron, her conniving son.
I want to ask him for how long he’s known, if he’s aware my affair was with Gareth Delaney.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ says Cynthia, turning on me in the doorway of the living room, her face pinched as though she’s been chewing on nettles during her two-hour long drive here in her Hyundai hybrid.
‘I don’t think it’s a very good time, Cynthia.’
She gives me a perplexed look and I suddenly feel dizzy and nauseous and it has nothing to do with my concussion and everything to do with the revelation that Aeron knew all this time about my affair with Gareth, and within days of my confession to DI Locke, he tells me he’s leaving me because of it.
Aeron looks pleased with himself. As though disclosing my lie to him has lifted a weight off his shoulders instead of my own.
‘You told her,’ says Cynthia.
That’s why Cynthia has been acting especially rude towards me in recent months.
She looks at Aeron then at the window.
‘When?’
‘I’ve known ever since I met you,’ she says, walking towards the window, something catching her eye between the blinds. ‘I knew you were a liar the moment I looked into your eyes.’ She fingers the blinds and stares through the glass. ‘You’ll never be good enough for my son.’ She snaps them back into place and turns slowly, re
vealing her pearly white teeth, mouth set in a semi-permanent faux smile. ‘You forced Aeron to give up a decade-long business he’d worked hard to build, you took my grandchildren away from me, then you betrayed him.’
She turns to Aeron then. ‘And you. You told me that money was going on a new home for the four of you. I risked my own house to guarantee you’d repay the loan, an investment you said!’ She stalks back to the window, something stealing her attention. ‘You’re just as guilty for deceiving me as her. You’re as bad as one another, and you deserve each other.’ She notices Aeron’s face is etched in confusion and adds, ‘I heard you arguing from outside. Your voice is deeper than you credit yourself with.’
Pushing her bony manicured fingers through the slats once more, she directs her final words at me. ‘I’ll never forgive you for breaking his heart.’
A long silence fills the empty void between us. I detect no resentment between me and Aeron. No anger or sadness. Only regret. And perhaps a smidgen of pity. Self-pity. Mine.
‘Why are you here, Mum?’
‘To put this right,’ she says. ‘I knew the second I spoke to Sinead something was wrong between you both and I guessed it might have something to do with what happened before, in Croydon. You both need to sort this mess out. And you can’t do it with the children in the house.’ She catches the look of confusion on my face and softens her voice. I dislike the look of sympathy she offers as she moves towards me to take my hands in hers. ‘I detected your desperation over the phone and after we spoke yesterday decided I had to travel here.’ She presses her lips together and smiles in sympathy. ‘Call the school. Tell them I’m picking the children up. Go out somewhere, the two of you, and talk it out.’
‘What if it’s too late?’
She exhales in vexation. ‘It’s never too late, Sinead.’
‘It is,’ says Aeron, and a stab of pain punctures my skull like a serrated drill bit. ‘She returned home every day and slept beside me each night, looked me in the eyes and told me she loved me, after shagging another man behind my back.’
‘We didn’t. It wasn’t physical. And I had no idea you knew. If I had—’
‘You’d what? Have told me, to prevent me from experiencing the humiliation of discovering it myself?’ He doesn’t wait for an answer before continuing ‘No. I didn’t think so. And physical or not, like my mum said, you lied to me. And you would have kept on lying to me if all this hadn’t have happened: the car incident, Terry…’
I don’t reply. Because everything he’s said is true. ‘What can I do to fix this?’
‘You can find out who’s been posting dog shit through the letterbox for the past two months. You can speak to that fucking detective who’s been calling me all morning because you won’t answer your phone and you’ve unplugged the landline. You can start being honest with me and tell me who else you’ve sha—’
‘I just told you I never slept with Gareth.’
‘You’re a prize,’ he says, stalking towards the window and halting, enabling me to see the look of incomprehensibility on his face turn to rage. ‘What is that fucking moron doing now?’
I ignore him. Knees weak, head swaying, I fall onto the cushion-soft sofa beside Cynthia, who for once appears unsure as to what to do with herself. ‘Leave him alone.’
‘I suppose he’s on our Christmas card list now, is he? Or are you planning on shagging him too?’
‘Aeron,’ says Cynthia. ‘That’s quite enough.’
‘Or maybe you already have?’ He twists the lever and tugs on it so hard the plastic pully snaps and the blind jams to the top frame, twisted and broken.
‘Aeron?’
‘What?’ His frustration is palpable, but it’s the look on Cynthia’s face that’s bothering me. She turns her attention back to the window, to Tulip, who’s stuffing sleeping bags into the boot and every conceivable space he can find within the cabin of his car. His eyes focused on our house.
‘There must be over forty of them,’ says Cynthia wistfully.
Aeron opens the window wide. ‘Oi!’
‘Aeron?’ says Cynthia trying to coax him out of his hysteria.
‘She’s all yours,’ he says.
Tulip stalls, turns to face him. ‘What?’
‘My wife. She’s who you’re staring at, isn’t she? Or do you prefer your women a bit older?’
‘Aeron!’ Cynthia exclaims, holding a hand to her chest as though she’s about to faint.
‘I’m not… I wouldn’t—’
‘Spit it out, dumbass.’
‘Aeron, leave him alone.’ His mum is making far more sense to me than he is. Aeron’s too far gone to listen. Too tightly wound. And I fear nothing will stop him when he stomps towards the front door, flings it open, storms towards Tulip, and with a look of pure determination on his face grabs him by his shirt front and raises his fist at the cowering man.
‘See what you’ve done to him,’ says Cynthia coolly, almost calculated. ‘You wanted this.’
I follow her to where Aeron stands over Tulip.
‘Him to lose his mind? No. This isn’t all on me, Cynthia. He wasn’t there for me, for the kids.’
‘That’s no excuse to cheat on your husband.’
‘No, it’s not. But it takes two to hold a marriage together, Cynthia. Talking of which, why isn’t your husband here with you?’
‘He’s working.’
He spends more time away from his wife than with her, and who would blame the man?
Tulip is crouched on the ground in a position of self-protection. Arms over his face, half kneeling, back resting against the rear-side passenger door.
I slide between Aeron’s legs, and he momentarily stops ranting and raving to allow me through. I crawl to Tulip, reach out and prise his elbows apart, sitting on the gravel in front of him, looking directly into his unfocused eyes. ‘It’s okay, Tulip.’
‘My name is Logan.’
‘Logan, he’s not going to hurt you.’
‘He’s angry.’
‘Yes, with me. I did something I’m ashamed of. And I’m sorry.’ I give Aeron a sideways glance, which he refuses to acknowledge.
We’ve never argued about anything serious before. And I’m discomfited by Aeron’s sudden aggression. Especially when just this morning he showed no sign of awareness regarding my deception. Yet I’ve just learned he’s known long enough to re-mortgage our house and put a deposit on a flat. Which means he must have known about me and Gareth for at least eight or twelve weeks.
I remember the Market Hall contract delays being reported on in the local newspaper in August. Two months ago. When the first pile of shit fell through the door.
‘I haven’t done anything wrong,’ says Logan.
‘No, you haven’t.’ I dart a quick glance at Aeron, then turn my gaze back to Logan.
‘I’m going to be late now. And that’s no good at all.’ He stands, moves jerkily, backs into the car. I nod and revert my gaze.
‘What are you doing with all that lot?’ Aeron points to the loaded boot, the rolled-up sleeping bags.
‘I… give them away to the homeless.’ He begins fiddling with his fingers, eyes cast on the ground.
‘You buy them with your own money?’
‘I’ve got a job working in Tesco, but I’m registered disabled because of my condition.’
‘Condition?’ says Aeron, temper visibly waning.
‘Asperger’s. I get Personal Independence Payment as well as Employment and Support Allowance. What benefits I don’t spend I use to help others, when I can.’
‘That’s a thoughtful thing to do,’ says Cynthia. ‘I wish there were more people in the world with a heart like yours.’
‘No, you don’t. I’m on beta-blockers. High blood pressure.’
‘You buy all this stuff with your own money and then give it away?’ says Aeron.
‘Yes.’
I watch Aeron, watching Logan secure the car boot, hop inside, and drive away. The tyres of his
Renault dislodging small jagged stones and splintered gravel from the ground that spray Aeron’s shins. He sucks in air and I bite my cheek to prevent myself from laughing aloud. ‘Happy now?’
‘Look, I know I may have come across as a bit unreasonable, but I didn’t actually punch him so—’
‘There’s no excuse for what you just almost did.’
‘That was unnecessary,’ says Cynthia.
It’s probably the first time we’ve ever agreed on anything.
Cynthia glances down at her rose gold Armani watch that’s probably as fake as her earrings. ‘I should get going too. I need to collect the children from school. Have you called them yet?’ She aims her question at me.
‘Did you see me pick up the phone?’
‘The landline is still switched off, Mum,’ says Aeron, refusing to look my way.
I don’t bother to explain the batteries are still under the sofa where they rolled after Logan’s roaring exhaust caused me to drop the phone in fright, days ago. That only his mother who’s stood in front of us ever bothers to call us on it.
Cynthia moves towards her car, but Aeron stops her in her tracks. ‘I’ll collect the children from school. I’ve booked the time off to do it so I might as well.’
I groan. Being stuck in the house with Cynthia is my idea of hell.
Once inside I tread carefully upstairs and lock myself in the bathroom despite the doctor’s warnings not to, in case I have a ‘funny turn’ and no one can get inside to help me up off the floor.
I switch my mobile phone on then flick through the messenger log and hit the number Pierce used to text me from earlier, before I turned my phone off to avoid answering. ‘Your colleague knows about Alex.’
‘Yeah. I’ve told her to keep quiet, but I don’t know for how long that’ll last. She’s a mouthy c—’
‘Don’t finish that sentence.’
There’s a tap on the bathroom door. ‘Sinead?’
‘I’ll be right out, Cynthia.’
‘Are you on the phone?’ Her sing-song voice is starting to grate on me.
‘Yes, I won’t be long. Just talking to a—’
‘He’s been released,’ he says.
I Know You (DI Emma Locke) Page 18
