The Second Wife

by Fleet, Rebecca

  Alex pushes back his chair and glares at me. ‘I’m trying to protect my family, Natalie. You and Jade. How can I do that if I don’t have a bloody clue what’s going on? I needed answers that you weren’t giving me.’

  ‘And did you get them?’ I fire back. ‘What did he say to you?’ Trying to imagine this conversation is making my brain feel like it’s about to explode. I don’t want to know what they talked about. I don’t want my husband anywhere near Kas, and yet another part of me is desperate to hear every detail. ‘Did you get your answers?’ I push him again.

  He looks diffident for a moment, drops his gaze. ‘Not entirely,’ he admits.

  ‘Well, there’s a fucking surprise.’ Abruptly, I stand up and go over to the window. This room feels hot and airless. I push the window open, savagely drawing in breath in the hope that the sea breeze will clear my head. ‘Kas isn’t the sort of man you just – just drop in on,’ I say. ‘If anything, you’ve probably put us in more danger. He’s a maniac – he’s a murderer.’

  ‘I know that now,’ Alex says. ‘But I wouldn’t have done, would I, if I’d hung around doing nothing?’

  I’m silent, thinking, looking out across the rolling darkness of the sea. I can see Alex’s reflection behind me, the shadowy outline of his body standing just behind me, so close that I can smell the aftershave he wears. ‘I know what you’re saying, but I still don’t think you did the right thing.’ My throat feels choked up and I realize I might be close to tears.

  ‘You knew he was in prison, didn’t you?’ he asks.

  I think about denying it, then shrug. It doesn’t matter now. ‘Of course I did.’ I turn round to face him, leaning my head back against the wall. Memories are dragging me back. The polished, gleaming wood of the courtroom, with its strange orange-tinted light. The faces of the jury, neutral and expressionless, bored almost. And the sight of Kas in the witness box, the contained fury that shone out of him; the overt restraint with which he spat out every word.

  ‘I helped to put him there.’

  Part Four

  * * *

  Rachel

  January 2000

  SHE’S ONLY A few metres away, standing under the station’s archway at the entrance to the platform, but it feels as if she’s watching from behind reinforced glass, or through some remote TV link-up – as if this scene has nothing to do with her beyond the fact that it happens to be in her line of vision. She sees Sadie striding up to the woman in the shiny plastic red coat, sees the defiant tilt of her head as she begins to speak. She can even hear the words, or most of them. She listens and she watches, witnesses the brittle interchange of tensions, and still she is strangely detached. If she’s conscious of feeling anything, it’s the discomfort of the night air, the thinness of her tights an ineffectual barrier against the cold. She wishes she wasn’t standing here.

  And then everything changes.

  Rachel sees her sister lunge forwards, her fingernails clawing indiscriminately at the other woman’s face. The savage instinct with which the woman fights back despite the precarious high heels she’s wearing, her hands tearing at Sadie’s hair. She sees that the woman is veering close to the edge of the platform, her feet slipping. It’s the speed of it all which paralyses her, at first; the way in which the situation has abruptly kicked up a gear. And then she is momentarily distracted – seeing a gleam of light in the distance down the track, her eyes flicking to pinpoint its source. The train is coming.

  This is the moment. This is the time at which she could – at which she should – step forward and issue a warning. She knows in that instant that if she were to do so, it would be enough. Enough to make both women turn, to catch them off guard; enough to break their scuffle and draw them away from the platform’s edge. The course of action is obvious. Imperative.

  But along with this realization comes another. In these few split-seconds, she realizes that what could happen here has the power to change everything. And isn’t that what she’s been waiting for, hoping for? For something to stop her sister in her tracks and reach the end of the collision course she’s been hurtling on for years, no matter how violent a landing it might be? She finds herself flashing back over the past few years – the sickening lurching up and down of the rollercoaster that Sadie lives on and which she’s dragged Rachel unwillingly on to as well. And the desire for something to make this stop is so powerful that it takes her over entirely.

  And so she does nothing. Nothing at all. She continues to watch.

  When she looks back, she will start to piece together exactly what it is that she sees. Whether her sister’s arm is raising itself in defence or attack, whether the way in which it swings sharply to the left across the other woman’s body is calculated or involuntary. But right now, there is no judgement. She simply sees that movement, and its impact; sees the woman stumble and fall to her knees, skidding forwards, and then the slow-motion, vertiginous moment in which she tumbles on to the track. The perfect coalescence of this moment with the headlights’ approach, impossibly fast, a blare of violent light and speed. And then the brutal, ugly jolt that the train gives, the slamming on of brakes that comes too late, and the screaming. She isn’t sure who the noise is coming from; will never be sure. But it’s shrill and loud and almost animal, and it drags her hard into reality – as if she’s being pulled by her hair from her bed, from the deepest sleep she’s ever had.

  It’s almost midnight but the train is half full and the passengers are gathering at the doors, their faces etched with shock and concern, stabbing at the door release buttons without success, mouthing at each other, trying to determine what has happened. The driver is running down the platform towards them. He is several coaches away, and Rachel realizes that he must have driven straight over the woman as he braked, that a single human body is nowhere near enough to stop a train in its tracks. It probably only takes ten seconds for him to reach them, but it feels like a lifetime, and in those seconds she looks at her sister for the first time. Sadie’s face is white, unearthly. Her eyes are wide, blinking in staccato rhythm. Shock has made her expression unreadable. But she’s looking straight at Rachel, her focus unbroken, as if she’s waiting for something.

  Before she can think what this might be, the driver is there, his feet pounding to where they are standing. He’s grey haired, in his fifties, a small man with a paunch, dressed in a navy blue uniform. Despite the cold, he’s sweating. She can see it rolling down his forehead, soaking the collar of his shirt.

  ‘Oh my God,’ he says hoarsely. ‘What the fuck happened?’

  Sadie wheels round and stares at him, and now she’s crying, gasping for breath. ‘It was an accident,’ she shouts. ‘It was an accident.’ Her thin arms are wrapped around herself, as if she’s trying to hold her body together. She moves towards Rachel and leans in, and Rachel finds that she is putting her arms around her, holding her in what must look like comfort – what is comfort, maybe. Even from the inside, it’s hard to tell.

  ‘I’m calling the police,’ the driver says. His hands are shaking. He pulls a phone from his pocket and jabs at it, veering away up the platform, his voice hushed and broken as he begins to speak.

  Sadie pulls back, her fingers plucking insistently at Rachel’s arm. ‘We should go,’ she whispers jerkily. ‘We need to go.’

  Jolted, Rachel almost laughs. ‘We can’t do that,’ she says. ‘We have to stay here. We’ll need to talk to the police, give them a statement. You can’t just run off.’

  ‘But it was an accident!’ Sadie interrupts plaintively. ‘I didn’t mean – I don’t …’ Suddenly she slumps, looking around her vaguely. ‘I need to sit down.’

  At least this is better than running, Rachel thinks, and she sits down beside her sister on the platform and puts an arm tentatively around her shoulders. The concrete is smooth and cold, faintly sheered with ice. As she sits, she sees the blood. Spattering up the side of the track, pooling on to the platform less than a metre away. She isn’t sure if Sadie ha
s seen it, and she angles her body to block it from view. She’s surprised by how cool her head is, how well she can deal with this.

  Her sister is muttering something, her head dipped to her knees, her shoulders shaking. Rachel makes some small noise of interrogation, and Sadie raises her head and speaks more clearly. ‘He’ll kill me,’ she says clearly.

  There is a small, strange moment of silence. Rachel turns the words over in her head. They should sound melodramatic, but somehow they don’t. ‘What do you mean?’ she says.

  ‘Kas,’ Sadie says. ‘You don’t understand. You don’t know him. He’ll kill me.’ Her tears have dried up and her tone is soaked through with dread – fatalistic, certain.

  ‘But it was an accident,’ Rachel says. ‘You just said.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ Sadie shoots back. ‘You don’t know him,’ she says again. ‘You don’t know what he’s done.’ The words are pouring out of her now, as if a dam has been released. ‘He’s killed two people before – just the ones I know of – two men, George and Felix, people who used to work with him or for him, I don’t know, and I don’t even know why he did it, I think it was just to make an example out of them, to show people that they couldn’t fuck with him and he wasn’t afraid of anyone. I saw it, I saw it with my own eyes!’

  ‘You saw it,’ Rachel repeats. It’s difficult to take in, this onslaught of information, and she feels briefly dizzy. She has always known that there was more going on in her sister’s life than she was aware of, but she hadn’t gone this far in her imaginings. Even now, she can’t visualize what Sadie is telling her. The images that come to her are slapstick, almost comedic: Kas brandishing a gun with the sneer of a movie villain, her sister lurking in the background wringing her hands – or perhaps looking on, coolly and approvingly. It makes no sense.

  Sadie is wiping her tears uselessly from her face, her fingertips streaking her cheeks with mascara. ‘I love him, I really do,’ she says, ‘but he’s a …’ She pauses, as if she’s testing the word inside her head. ‘He’s a murderer.’

  She is quiet then, her breath coming more slowly, and Rachel finds herself matching the rhythm of that breathing, wondering what she can say. But then she glimpses a movement out of the corner of her eye and when she turns around she sees the policemen – two of them, in uniform, striding towards the train driver who is now sitting hunched by the edge of the platform with his head between his knees. She thinks he might have been sick. One of the policemen crouches down beside him, speaks to him as he puts a hand on his shoulder. And the other is walking in their direction; a tall man who looks barely older than they are, with strawberry blond hair and pale, barely-there eyebrows. His expression hovers uncomfortably somewhere between suspicion and sympathy.

  ‘Good evening, ladies,’ he says. ‘I need to talk to you about what’s happened here.’

  Sadie shoots him a glance, terrified, antagonistic. Peering up through the tangled strands of her hair, she looks like a wild animal. But Rachel nods and gets to her feet, letting her arm slip away from her sister’s shoulder.

  The room is small and cuboid; walls washed with watery khaki-coloured paint, a tiny window set into the door. There is a smell in the air that she can’t quite place; some kind of disinfectant or bleach perhaps. Outside, she can hear footsteps and the occasional rise and swell of voices, echoing emptily along the corridor. The policewoman who curtly introduced herself as Karen pulls the little curtain across the window in the door and switches on a lamp in the corner of the room.

  ‘If you’re ready, Miss Castelle, we’ll start now,’ she says, coming back to sit on the other side of the desk. She is middle aged. Greying hair curling neatly around a round face. Small black-rimmed glasses. Her stare is neutral, impassive. Next to her is the young man with the strawberry blond hair. He’s even younger than she thought, little more than a teenager; she can see the scars of acne on his left cheek. He looks across at her as he switches on the tape recorder. She sees the little red light winking and stares at it a second too long, so that when she looks away it’s still there in her vision, a tiny, bright red pinprick suspended in the air.

  The woman reels off a practised spiel that Rachel has heard on television, and which instantly slips from her mind. ‘So,’ she continues, ‘perhaps you can tell us, in your own words, what happened at Camden Road Station tonight?’

  In the minutes that they left her here alone, Rachel has considered and discarded the possibility of using stony silence as her response. It might be the wisest approach, but she can’t imagine being able to pull it off. The surreal horror of what she has witnessed is swirling in her head and already the words are knocking at the back of her throat, hammering to be let out. And she’s also considered lying outright, saying that she and her sister were simply waiting on the platform alongside the woman in the raspberry-coloured mac, perhaps even saying that they saw her jump. But she’s quickly realized that this would be stupid. For one thing, she has no idea if the station platform is equipped with CCTV. For another, she has no way of knowing what Sadie might be saying in her own interview room across the corridor. It’s clear that the only real option is to tell the truth, as far as she can.

  ‘I was with my sister, Sadie,’ she says. ‘She wanted to speak to the woman who—’ She hesitates. To say ‘the woman who died’ feels odd somehow, presumptuous, although clearly there’s no room for doubt. ‘To the woman on the platform. I wasn’t part of the conversation, but I could see that they began to argue.’

  ‘And do you know what this argument was about?’ Karen interrupts.

  ‘I imagine it was about her husband,’ Rachel says carefully. ‘The woman’s husband, I mean, not my sister’s. Sadie has been – involved with him. She wanted to speak to his wife, to make her aware of the situation between them.’

  ‘Were you acquainted with the woman in question yourself?’ Karen asks. ‘Can you tell me her name?’

  Rachel shakes her head. ‘Her name’s Melanie, but I’ve never spoken to her,’ she says, ‘I know of her through her husband. Kaspar Kashani.’ And as she speaks she sees a quick look pass between the two people opposite her, the briefest flicker of triumph or confirmation.

  ‘Let’s go back to what you saw,’ the policewoman says mildly. ‘They were arguing, you say, and then …’

  ‘Then it became – physical,’ Rachel says. ‘They were lashing out at one another, trying to hurt each other, I would say. I’m sure that neither of them saw the train until it was too late, or realized that they were so close to the edge of the platform. It all happened very fast. One moment they were fighting, and the next moment the woman had fallen on to the tracks.’

  Karen leans forward, her eyes shrewd and hard behind her glasses. ‘Fallen,’ she repeats. ‘She fell? She lost her balance? Or she was pushed?’

  The directness of it startles her; the way it cuts unpleasantly to the heart. She casts her mind back, tries to think. She sees the two figures in front of her, just metres away; sees her sister’s arm rising up. She is not sure, not sure at all. But she notices the policewoman’s expression shift minutely, betraying a flash of world-weary cynicism. Of course, she realizes, this woman expects her to protect her sister. It’s the natural thing to do. Blood is thicker than water. What woman would do otherwise?

  She raises her chin and does as they expect. ‘She fell,’ she says clearly.

  The other woman watches her for a few moments, and she meets her gaze head on. ‘OK,’ she says levelly.

  Silence stretches between them, thick and viscous. The strawberry-blond policeman’s head is bent over a notebook as he scribbles away earnestly. Outside Rachel can hear the sound of some faint altercation: a shout rising and falling on the air, the rhythms of dissent and protest. She realizes that her hands are clenched in her lap, her fingernails digging painfully into her skin.

  There is something rising up inside her, a powerful anger. She is furious with Sadie. For causing her to be sat in this room, for following and
confronting Kas’s wife, for every thoughtless word she has spoken and every thoughtless action she has performed over the past few years – from the tiny throwaway slights to the crippling restraints and burden of responsibility she has imposed on Rachel’s own life.

  It comes at her in a rush. At twenty-two she already feels like a mother. The mother of a wayward, defiant teenage girl who won’t listen to reason and who cares about nothing but herself, and for whom love is a one-way street. She loves Sadie, but there is nothing nourishing or rewarding about this love; it simply makes her miserable. And the longer she sits in this arid, soulless room, the more she begins to realize that it doesn’t really matter whether she is here or not, because even when she walks free she will still be trapped.

  ‘Is there anything else you want to tell us?’ Karen asks. She’s looking at Rachel with sharp, inquisitive eyes, as if she can read her mind and doesn’t much like what she sees.

  Rachel bites the inside of her cheek, tasting the little well of blood. ‘No,’ she says. Her relationship with her sister is not this woman’s concern. The thought rockets wildly through her mind that if she altered her story, then things might go very differently. She pushed her! I saw her, she meant to do it! But it’s a passing fancy, melodramatic and pointless. She won’t lie, or throw out wild accusations, can no more imagine doing so than she can imagine her life being her own, free of this ever-present millstone around her neck.

  ‘Let’s go over it again, then,’ Karen says. And they do go over it again – over and over, the same questions and the same brutal re-hashing in ever more granular detail, until she wants to cry with frustration. Her head feels scraped out, entirely excavated. The young strawberry-blond man looks equally exhausted, slumped in his chair. She wonders if this is just another day at the office for him, how quickly he has been desensitized to drama and tragedy. But Karen doesn’t seem tired at all. If anything it seems that the conversation is energizing her – her bearing ever straighter and keener, the full focus of her attention turned on Rachel.