The Second Wife

by Fleet, Rebecca

  As she scoops up a bundle of clothes from the floor of the wardrobe, she notices the thin folder of photographs at the back. She had them printed a couple of months ago, she remembers, after one of her and Rachel’s earliest visits to the club. The pretence was that she wanted some shots of the two of them there, but of course, the person she really wanted photographs of was Kas. She flicks through them slowly, staring at his face. He treats the camera the same way he treats most people, surveying it coolly, dead on, with little expression. As ever, he’s giving nothing away.

  She gathers the photos together and stuffs them into the case, then picks a few out again. She’ll leave them outside Rachel’s room. She’s not entirely sure why she’s doing it, but the motive doesn’t feel pleasant. Ultimately, she thinks, perhaps it’s just a reminder that her sister was there too. She might want to believe that her hands are clean, but she’s been part of this, in her own way.

  She steps back, surveying the near-empty room, then she crosses to the table and tears a piece of paper from the notepad, scribbles a message. Think it’s best if I stay elsewhere for a while. Didn’t want to wake you to say goodbye. She pauses, pen in hand. Is there anything else to say? She thinks for a while, but nothing comes, and in the end she just scrawls her name at the bottom of the page, the lettering large and dark. She goes out into the corridor, dragging the case behind her, and she thinks about propping the note carefully against Rachel’s door, but it seems more fitting to just toss it on to the floor along with the photographs, and so she leaves it there behind her, exiting the flat without looking back.

  She doesn’t know where she’s going at first, but she gets on the train and heads north. As it rattles along the tracks she gets out her phone and scrolls through her contacts. There are a few names there she could target, people who would probably let her crash on their couches for a night or two if she just turned up and presented it as a fait accompli. Or she could call one of the men she used to see, even though it feels like a long time since she did that casual dating thing; she knows there are plenty of guys who would put her up for a while in exchange for sex on tap. But something about the idea feels grubby and sad, and she doesn’t want to sleep with anyone. It feels like betraying Kas.

  It’s this thought that decides her. She’ll go to his house. She’ll find him and warn him about what the police have been saying to her. By now they’ll have contacted him about Melanie. They’ll have told him that she was involved. But he’ll still want to know what they’ve been talking to her about – about George and Felix. That, surely, trumps everything else. And when he realizes that she’s on his side, he’ll look after her.

  She gets off at Camden and trudges towards Fraser Street, pulling the case behind her. She’s glad she brought her winter coat, because the air is even icier than it was yesterday and her breath is coming in clouds around her face. She can’t wait to be inside, but when she reaches the street she’s shaken by the way it looks in daylight. Half the houses are derelict, with broken windows and sprayed graffiti covering the walls. Even those that look more lived in are run-down and unwelcoming. Number 17, the house where she knows Kas lives, is no different from the rest. There’s a small pile of rubble and rubbish stacked against the front wall, and the door is covered with cracks and scratches, as if it’s been smashed and badly repaired. It isn’t the sort of place she imagined him in. She thinks of his gleaming, polished appearance and the care with which he’s sculpted his body. But of course that’s what matters to him: himself. He doesn’t care about the stuff around him; it’s incidental, irrelevant.

  She raises her hand and knocks on the door hard, three times in quick succession. She presses the doorbell too, even though it doesn’t look as though it’s worked in years. Silence, and stillness. She tips her head up and peers at the darkened windows. There’s no hint of life behind them. The whole place looks abandoned. Dead.

  Of course, he could just be out. Gone to visit family, or Dominic, or another associate. But something tells her that’s not it. The police have come for him already. They’ve taken him away and he’s not coming back.

  She takes out her phone and scrolls to his messages. Kas, she types. I know what’s happened. I … She hesitates. I believe in you? I’ll stand by you? It feels too schoolgirlish, too melodramatic for him. I love you, she types in the end. She’s never said this to him before, and she’s wanted to for such a long time that it brings a kind of release, even if she knows he’ll probably never reply. He probably won’t even get this message, if he’s already been arrested. But there’s still a sort of satisfaction in the words. If you love someone, you’re loyal to them. You give them everything.

  One final knock, and then she turns and leaves, the case rattling behind her on the uneven stones. She thinks, for a few moments, about disappearing. Getting on a train and going into the middle of nowhere, relying on her wits and her charm to survive … But it feels like a lot of effort and, at the end of the day, she doesn’t really believe she can do it. They’d find her, in the end, and what point is there in running from something that’s always going to find you?

  The wind is rising and there’s a fine smattering of rain carried on it, settling coldly on her hair and the nape of her neck. Ahead of her the horizon stretches, curling in a grey mass of cloud. Cars are screeching down the main road, horns blaring, and there’s an unruly blast of reggae music spilling out from a shop doorway. On the doorstep sits an elderly Jamaican man, smoking a spliff, raising it to her in greeting. The smell hits the back of her throat as she breathes in the cold air. She’ll remember this, she thinks, this strange, harsh morning that has the quality of a lucid dream.

  She turns her footsteps towards the police station. There’s something fatalistic in this, walking into the hands of people who have the power to change your life for better or worse. She’s tired of her hands being on the wheel. She wants to take them off, hand over the controls and close her eyes and never wake up. There’s an ache in her stomach, spreading dully downwards, but she ignores it and keeps walking, driving herself forwards.

  Rachel

  February 2000

  WHEN SHE LOOKS back on the weeks that have passed, Rachel finds it hard to put the memories in order. Hours at the police station, filled with soft, insistent questioning about Kas, the people he spends his time with, the patterns of his behaviour, her impression of his character, her feelings towards him. They treat her very nicely, solicitously offering drinks and snacks, asking her if she has been experiencing any difficulties.

  She knows that Kas and Sadie have been charged, and that they will remain in custody until the trial. It has taken some time for her to fully realize what she has done – that by telling them what Sadie had told her she has exposed her sister’s part in something about which she still knows very little. I saw it, I saw it with my own eyes, Sadie had whispered, and at the time Rachel had not interrogated this, not traced the thread through to its conclusion. She had not realized that this effectively made her sister an accessory after the fact, perhaps even a conspirator to murder. And she hadn’t realized, either, that Sadie was already on the police’s radar, already woven into the case they were trying to build.

  At times she feels guilty – so much so that the crushing weight of it makes it hard for her to breathe. And yet when she thinks about the reality of these charges, she is reminded more forcibly than ever before that her sister is damaged, broken. Dangerous, even. She was always going to have to crash. She wonders, often, what Sadie is doing now. How she is feeling towards her, how much she knows about what Rachel has said – and the thought of her sister’s fury at her betrayal is frightening, but she forces herself to block it out.

  They ask her at the station several times if there is any possibility she would be willing to bear witness against Sadie as well as Kas, but every time she dries up, deflects the question. To her, the trial is an amorphous concept, barely even real. In the unfriendly dark of her flat, barred against the outside world, sh
e has a hazy, queasy realization that she has little or no idea what is happening around her, to her. It is too late. The wheels that have been set in motion are far bigger than she is.

  She keeps herself to herself. She finds herself staying out late less, taking the most direct route back from the office to the flat, and seeing fewer people than she used to. She spends a lot of time curled up in front of the television, staring unseeingly at the flickering static. On some level, she thinks, she’s detaching. Just in case. She hasn’t forgotten what they said to her about the witness protection. But as the weeks go by her life is rolling on just as it always has, and now that Sadie isn’t in it, it’s staggeringly uneventful.

  And then one Sunday afternoon, two weeks in, she’s walking to the corner shop in the rain without an umbrella, her hair plastered wetly to her scalp as water runs in tiny rivulets down the back of her neck. She hasn’t planned to go out, but she’s hungry and there’s not much in the flat. She’s waiting at the traffic lights when she sees the man. He’s there diagonally across the street, leaning back against a wall, his arms folded across his chest, and he’s staring directly at her.

  She doesn’t recognize him at first, so out of context – just feels a breath of unease at the way he’s watching her, then a little tug of familiarity that she can’t quite place when she sees his cropped white-blond hair and the heavy set of his shoulders. Moments later she realizes that it is Dominic Westwood.

  The lights are flashing green, but her legs feel like they’re giving way and it takes every ounce of her strength to force herself to cross the street and keep on walking. In the shop, she fumbles for a packet of biscuits, a carton of orange juice, keeping her head down and whispering a few pointless words of reassurance to herself. The air inside is warm and fusty, reminding her of a children’s nursery. She pushes the money at the shopkeeper and goes back to the doorway, looking out on to the street.

  He’s still there. She sees him instantly, out of the corner of her eye, but she keeps her head directed straight ahead and starts walking fast, away from him. Behind her, she hears him say her name. She starts to run, her heartbeat thudding through her body, and she doesn’t stop until she is home. Jamming her key in the lock, she whips her head round, and she sees that the road outside is empty. He hasn’t followed her, but it doesn’t make her feel any better. If anything, it feels even more threatening.

  After that it gathers pace with relentless speed and subtlety. She sees Dominic again several times, always at a distance, but he is not the only one. The network goes deeper, reaches further than she has thought. She starts to see the same strangers’ faces on the street again and again – background figures who peer at her as if through bulletproof glass, unapproachable. At first she thinks she is imagining it; seeing patterns where there are none, finding similarity in a host of anonymous faces. But deep down she’s aware that this isn’t true.

  Once, she tries looking back steadily – facing one of these men head on and not letting her gaze drop, even though it brings her heart into her mouth. She tells herself that she will not look away first, but she can’t stick to it. It’s the gap in their respective knowledge that scares her: the realization from the expression in the man’s eyes that he knows all about her, and that she knows nothing about him. She lets her gaze drift across the street as if she is simply bored, but she knows he isn’t fooled. When she looks back, he’s gone.

  Strange notes appear on her doormat in the mornings; cryptic warnings and badly drawn symbols that she does not understand. She is being sent messages that she can’t interpret, being set up to fail. The first time, she rips the sheet up, tearing it into tiny shreds of paper as she kneels on the carpet by the front door. She thinks that she will feel better afterwards, but this small act of defiance achieves nothing. If anything, she starts to panic that somehow they will know, and later that day she finds herself with her hands halfway down the kitchen bin, pressing the shreds of paper deep within the detritus to conceal them. She takes her hands out and stares at them, sees that they are covered with dirt and the slime of rotting food, and for a moment it’s as if she has risen out of her body and is looking down at herself and detachedly reaching the judgement that she must be going mad.

  And then there are the calls. Her phone often rings in the middle of the night, and when she picks it up, there is silence. Always silence, with one exception: an unfamiliar man’s voice, low and vicious. Do it, and you’re dead, it says. She has barely gathered breath to speak when the dialling tone buzzes in her ears.

  She logs each incident meticulously and relays them to the police station, unsure of how much weight they are given or what picture they are gradually building. These men have never touched her or come near her – rarely even speak to her, save for the odd mumbled comment here and there as they pass by. They are simply letting her know that they are there.

  She thinks that it will get easier – that she will grow to cope with this constant sense of surveillance, this continuous hair-trigger alertness that makes her turn around swiftly whenever she hears a sound she cannot place. Slowly, with increasing horror, she realizes that she was mistaken.

  Three weeks in. She shuts herself in the flat as usual, double-locks and pushes a chair up against the door. She has a strange sense of foreboding, nauseous and nebulous. Unplugging the landline, she switches her mobile to vibrate. In bed she wraps herself tightly in the duvet and concentrates on her breathing. She watches the numbers click forward through the hours on the digital clock by her bedside, until they blur in front of her eyes and she loses consciousness.

  When she wakes, the numbers say 08:44, and yet the room is completely dark, like the inside of a tomb. She lies there for a full ten minutes waiting for this darkness to lift, seized by a strange feeling of unreality. The flat is silent, watchful.

  She rises slowly from her bed and walks out on to the landing, feels her way around the walls. It is pitch black in every room. Taking the mobile from the pocket of her dressing gown, she checks the time again, the numbers glowing greenly on the screen. Confusion rises queasily inside her, but something stops her from turning on the light.

  Instead she fumbles her way down to the front door, feels for the keys by instinct in the darkness and turns them in the locks. The door swings open, and the winter sunlight pours in, hurting her eyes with its force. She steps out on to the pavement. Some realization is brewing inside her, but she does not fully understand until she takes a few steps away and looks back up at the building, and then, with a deepening shiver that passes inwards from her skin to her bones, she sees.

  Someone has been there, to her flat in the night, while she was sleeping. They have painted every single one of the windows black.

  The Programme officer, a woman named Deborah, is waiting for her in the little room. Karen is there too, giving her a nod of greeting. Over the weeks they have developed something between them, Rachel and this sergeant with the greying wavy hair and the determined eyes. You couldn’t call it a friendship; you wouldn’t want to. But there’s some kind of understanding there.

  ‘So let’s sum up where we are,’ Deborah says. She looks as if she is announcing a death. ‘We’ve completed the threat assessment, and your case has been classified as a Level 1, which means we believe the threat to your safety to be serious and immediate. The Assistant Chief Constable has approved you to be admitted on to the Protection Programme. This means we will be making arrangements for your temporary, and subsequently for your permanent relocation, but before we can do so, we need you to sign the Memorandum of Understanding.’ She pushes the papers towards Rachel, fans them on to the desk. ‘It’s important that you understand what this means.’

  Dimly, Rachel hears the voice continue, but the words zoom in and out, echoing as if down a long tunnel. She looks down at the papers, the bright white pages stamped by black ink. The words blur and separate, making it hard for her to read them. She catches the odd phrase or line: … agree not to give or pass on any inf
ormation which could lead to the disclosure of your new location to anyone, including all friends and family members … forbidden to enter within the boundaries of Greater London. Taking it in is impossible.

  Deborah is still talking, her voice loud and steady. ‘If you sign now, we can go ahead with all preparations for your relocation, and the formation of your new identity,’ she says. ‘If you do not wish to sign, the responsibility for your protection will continue to rest with your investigation team. I would strongly advise …’

  The voice fades out again. Rachel looks down at her hands, white and still, the fingernails painted pale pink. The varnish is chipping, worn away entirely in patches to reveal the pearly, translucent covering beneath. She cannot remember when she last painted her nails. Slowly, her left hand reaches for the pen. There is a roaring in her head, a pressure that builds and builds. She thinks of Sadie, of all the years of effort and anxiety that finally came to a head on the night that Melanie died. If she went back to that night, she’d feel the same way again. Sitting in the interview room, she’d do the same again.

  She presses down on the paper and writes her name. The handwriting looks shaky and erratic, the writing of a pensioner or a madwoman. Throwing the pen down, she pushes the paper away.

  They come for her at dawn the next morning to take her to the safe house, in a dark blue car with tinted windows. She answers the door to a thickset man, and for a moment, despite his uniform, she finds herself searching his face, wondering if he is for her or against her. She feels her heartbeat quickening and she starts to close the door against him, but as she does so she catches sight of Deborah, peering out of the car behind him, and her body relaxes.