‘Poor all of them.’
‘So the police investigation will be cranking up a notch.’
‘Presumably. I suppose they were already doing plenty, given how high-profile he is.’
‘That’s always the way of it. PR will be looking for a quick win, to make everyone look good. Have they anyone in mind for it yet?’
‘Izzy didn’t say so. But what she did say I think opens up a whole new list of potential suspects.’ She gives Aidan the details: the hidden phone, the architect’s letter, the half-built house. ‘Shall I tell you the worst thing, the thing that’s been preying on my mind? What if Izzy wasn’t telling the truth about when she knew all this? What if she’s known for a while that he’s been playing away? Doesn’t that give her a motive for the attack? If she was seriously, murderously mad at him before that day, what if she was just biding her time for an occasion like the wedding to muddy the waters? If she’d confronted him and stabbed him out of jealousy in their kitchen, it would have been pretty obvious who’d done it, wouldn’t it?’
Aidan considers.
‘Would it? What about Bridget?’
‘Bridget?’
‘If Tris has been putting it about, what’re the chances he’s overlooked the nanny? Don’t they all get caught out that way?’
‘Tris wouldn’t look twice at Bridget. Would he?’
Aidan shrugs. ‘You ask me, it could happen.’
‘But do you see what I mean about opening up the list of suspects? One of these women he’s been – well, at least talking to on that secret phone – one of them might have a reason for wishing him harm, but the police don’t even know they’re out there.’
Aidan stands up. ‘I’m having another beer. You want a top-up?’
‘Two beers on a weekday? What’s going on? I will if you will.’
Aidan takes her glass, and Laura hears the fridge door open and close, the spin of a bottle cap, wine burbling into her glass.
When he sits back down, his face is serious. ‘There’s something I have to tell you too.’
Laura feels the stirrings of disquiet.
‘Don’t tell me you . . .’
Aidan interrupts with a shake of his head. ‘It’s nothing like that. You should know me better than that.’
‘I suppose that’s what Izzy thought about Tris.’
‘Don’t you dare, Laura. One man’s infidelities don’t make all men guilty. Besides, you’ve no proof that Tris has been unfaithful. Izzy might be jumping to conclusions.’
‘What other conclusion could there be?’
‘Listen. I know Tris is someone who likes to keep stuff to himself. That’s why I didn’t tell you about our arrangement.’
Laura’s disquiet is growing to alarm. ‘Arrangement? What arrangement?’
‘I know I should have told you, but he persuaded me not to. He said he wouldn’t tell Izzy and I shouldn’t say anything to you. He said it would unbalance your friendship if you knew, maybe make things awkward.’
‘What things?’
‘When I was setting up the business, Tris offered me a loan, a long-term loan as a sleeping partner. He said I could repay it when I was ready, and it seemed like a much better idea than borrowing more from the bank. It meant I could buy more stock, ramp up the online business.’
‘How much?’
‘It doesn’t matter how much. Enough to make a difference at the time. I was glad to take it and to be honest I didn’t think much more about it. Tris seemed relaxed and I assumed he wasn’t hurting for cash. Then three or four weeks ago, he rang me and asked if he could have the money back. I was shocked. If I’m honest I was hoping he might not ever ask for it, and I certainly never expected a request for immediate repayment. You know we don’t have a lot of cash on hand, and I told him so. He was sympathetic but he said he really needed the money himself, and that I should approach the bank to fill the gap if that’s what I needed to do. Since you’ve told me what Izzy said, it all makes sense. I suppose he wants funds for this house he’s building. But the point is, with him laid up, it’s given me breathing space I really, really need. The bank said no, so I was looking at drastic action. Remortgaging, anything I could think of.’
Laura’s not sure if she feels more hurt, or angry. ‘Without telling me?’
‘I’m sorry. I should have told you in the beginning.’
‘Damn right you should. What were you thinking?’
‘Tris persuaded me. He was so insistent that we should keep it between ourselves. And I understood his reasoning. It might have changed how you felt about Izzy, and he wanted her to have a friend on equal terms. To be honest . . .’
‘A bit late for that, maybe.’
‘To be honest, I never thought it would be an issue. He told me over and over I could repay him in my own good time, whenever, mañana. Then he changed his mind.’
‘Which actually gives weight to Izzy’s suspicions he’s thinking of leaving her.’
‘I suppose it does, yes. Anyway, it’s not mine and Tris’s secret any more. Someone from CID came to see me at work today. They’ve found the payment to me from Tris’s bank account. They wanted to know what was going on.’
‘You had a visit from CID? Is that something else you weren’t going to mention?’
‘I wasn’t sure how to frame it.’
‘So if they came to see you, it really was significant money, wasn’t it?’
‘Depends on your point of view. To Tris, probably not.’
‘How much was it, Aidan?’
‘Twenty-five thousand.’
In the depths of her stomach, Laura’s indignation burns. ‘Are you serious? A twenty-five thousand pound debt you never mentioned?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You should be bloody sorry. And you’ve got yourself in a bit of a mess, haven’t you? What did you tell the police?’
‘What I just told you.’
‘So would you have mentioned that they’d spoken to you if I hadn’t just told you what Izzy said?’
Aidan looks a little sad. ‘Honestly, probably not.’
‘That’s really hurtful.’
‘I just want to protect you from worry.’
‘I don’t need protecting.’
‘Sometimes you do, Laura. It’s not a bad thing, is it? The real question is, what would your dad do now? Because if you come at this with a CID hat on, not only does Izzy have a possible motive for a row with Tris, they might say that I do too.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘I hope you’re not going to ask me if I did it.’
‘Did you?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘But it seemed ridiculous before this afternoon to think that Izzy would want to hurt him.’
‘New information shifts the picture.’
‘Which is why I should tell the police.’
‘Which is why you should keep quiet and let them do their job their way. If there’s anything to find out, they’ll get to it in the end.’
‘And what about your arrangement with him?’
‘They’ve asked their questions, and I answered them honestly. I saw no reason to disclose that he’d asked for the money back. That was in a personal phone call, no record of what was said.’
‘You’re starting to talk like a guilty man.’
‘I’m guilty of nothing. You can trust me on that. The attack on Tris is one hundred percent nothing to do with me. I swear on our kids’ lives.’
‘How come I never saw anything of this money?’
Aidan bows his head. ‘I opened a new account.’
‘You have a bank account I don’t know about? Are you serious? Is it with Lloyds, by any chance?’
‘How did you know that?’
Laura stands and picks up what’s left of her
wine.
‘Thanks for making a complete fool of me. Karen Garner saw you coming out of there and I told her we don’t bank with them. So it’ll be all round town you’ve been keeping secrets.’
‘Ah, come on, love,’ says Aidan, trying to catch her hand.
Laura’s eyes are stinging with tears. ‘I thought we didn’t have secrets.’
‘We don’t. But I thought it was for the best. For your friendship with Izzy.’
‘You patronising prick,’ says Laura, and leaves him at the table, alone.
Thirty-six
In truth, Laura’s more troubled than angry. The conversation she had with Aidan has put a distance between them, turning out to be one of those moments in a long relationship where you realise you don’t know the person you’re sharing your life with anything like as well as you thought.
And Izzy’s revelations have left her rattled, shaken her confidence. She’s not naive enough to think people don’t have secrets. Over the years, there have been things – small things – she hasn’t shared. But now it turns out some people go one step further, and make a life of lies. Which side of that divide is Aidan on?
Might a man keeping one secret not easily have more?
The evening grows cooler. From the lounge, she hears Aidan go upstairs to the spare room he uses as his office. Any other night, she wouldn’t have thought about it twice. Now she can’t help wondering what he’s doing behind that closed door.
Finding the TV remote, her tablet and her phone, she settles down on the sofa. Her nail polish has lost its gloss, and she thinks about giving herself a manicure. Or maybe she should call Izzy. She’s feeling guilty for having left her in that big house, all alone, but Flora will be asleep by now, and Izzy might be too. Heaven knows she looked in need of rest.
Hoping for diversion, she switches on her tablet and scrolls through the latest posts on her Facebook and Instagram feeds. Nothing grabs her.
She puts the tablet aside and casts her mind back to the wedding. If Izzy already had suspicions about Tris, did she have any opportunity to assault him? Did she leave the party for any length of time?
Aidan did. He went to the gents before he went looking for Tris. Aidan was gone a long time, but Tris had already been missing a while before that.
The exercise is pointless. Her memories are blurred by the alcohol she drank, and what she remembers is a kaleidoscope of people coming and going, so she really can’t recall who was where, when. As a witness to that evening she’d be useless, but the fact remains, Aidan and Izzy have motives for a falling-out with Tris. If she were her father’s daughter, she’d report them both, but that wouldn’t be the right thing for a loyal friend – or wife – to do.
The book club choice is still waiting to be read. Opening her copy, she reads a page, then reads it again because the words have made no sense. Giving up, she decides to do her nails after all, but as she’s about to go and fetch her kit, her phone rings.
Mandy, Hannah’s mum, no doubt wanting a catch-up. Well, what the hell. A round-up of Sterndale gossip is as good a way as any to pass the time.
‘Hiya.’
Mandy sounds breathless, intense, but that’s not unusual. Mandy likes everything to be a crisis, and can make a drama out of a trip to the garden centre.
‘Laura, thank God I’ve caught you.’
‘What’s up?’
‘Laura, is Gemma OK?’
Laura bristles. The last thing she wants is for Gemma’s current moodiness to be the subject of local speculation.
‘As far as I’m aware, she’s fine.’
‘When did you last see her?’
‘What’s this about, Mandy?’
‘Hannah says Gemma’s texting some really odd stuff, weird enough for her to come and tell me about it, and you know how secretive they are. I just thought you might like to, you know, make sure she’s OK.’
There’s a prickling at the back of Laura’s neck. What Mandy’s saying, she realises, is hooking into a fear that’s been prowling her subconscious for the last few days, that Gemma’s mood might be running deeper and darker than the usual teenage angst.
‘What kind of weird?’
Mandy hesitates. ‘I don’t want to speak out of turn. It’s really not my business, but if it was Hannah, I know I’d want . . .’
‘What kind of weird?’
‘Self-harming weird.’
Laura ends the call without the nicety of a goodbye, figuring she’ll apologise to Mandy later. Knowing if there’s nothing in it, Gemma will never forgive her – and there isn’t going to be anything in it, is there? – she doesn’t quite run upstairs, but she’s moving much more quickly than normal.
She knocks on Gemma’s door. There’s no answer.
‘Gemma.’ She turns the handle, but the door’s locked. ‘Gemma, open the door, sweetie. I just need to have a word with you.’ She puts her ear close to the wood, but hears nothing inside. Nothing is unusual. Gemma’s never without music or Netflix, but all she’s hearing is silence. ‘Gemma, open the door.’
Aidan appears from his office.
‘What’s going on?’
She tells him what Mandy’s said. Immediately he switches, from family-man Aidan to policeman in crisis-handling mode.
He knocks on Gemma’s door, much harder than she’d dare. She’s always fearful of Gemma’s fallout, whereas Aidan’s hardened to all kinds of abuse and doesn’t care.
‘Gemma, open the door now.’
No response. Aidan and Laura look at each other.
‘I’ll break the lock,’ he says.
‘Really? We’ll look a bit stupid if she just can’t hear us because she’s got her headphones on.’
‘We’ll look really stupid if what Hannah says is right and we do nothing.’
There’s a moment of indecision. Then Aidan steps back and kicks hard at the lock.
The door flies open, and he steps into the room.
If he’s honest, he’s expecting blood, so his first reaction is relief when there is none. But relief turns to concern, and concern to near panic, held in check only because ingrained training stops it from taking over. Calm, calm, calm, and do what’s necessary. Behind him, Laura’s shouting Gemma’s name, and Josh is running down the landing to find out what’s going on. Laura grabs Josh by the shoulder to stop him going into the room, and for his sake stops her own shouting by biting her knuckles.
The sudden quiet is a relief, giving Aidan a moment to decide what he needs to do first – because there in the teenage detritus of her bedroom, among the scattered clothes and make-up, among the posters and the schoolbooks and the outgrown, still-loved toys, Gemma’s lying on the pink carpet she chose when she was nine, ghastly pale and showing no sign of life.
As she and Aidan wait for an update on Gemma’s condition, the thought occurs to Laura that somewhere in this hospital, in another department, on another floor, lies Tris.
They’ve found seats in a busy corridor, near a pair of vending machines. Aidan seems calm, holding her hand when she needs it, telling her not to worry when she asks him how long they’ve been waiting, trying to reassure her this is routine to the medical staff, that they’re all too familiar with overdoses and that Gemma will be fine.
Anyone who doesn’t know him would take him to be relaxed and in control, but to Laura, the constant jigging of his knee gives him away.
Aidan is seriously worried.
‘What I don’t understand,’ says Laura, ‘is where she got those pills. We’ve never had anything like that in the house.’
‘Stuff like that’s easy enough to come by. She probably got it at school.’
‘At school? You have to be joking!’
But Aidan shakes his head. ‘Diazepam, Valium, you name it. Kids nick it from the bathroom cabinet at home and sell it in the playground.’
>
‘But why do they want it?’
‘Same reason adults do. It makes them feel good, or better, at least. And you know what kids are. They like to experiment.’
‘Do you think that’s what Gemma was doing?’
Aidan looks away, as if taking an interest in a young woman battling the coffee machine for her change.
‘You think she meant to overdose. Oh my God, what if she’d taken them all?’
Aidan squeezes her hand. ‘But she didn’t, did she? And we found her pretty quickly. It’s nothing like as bad as it might have been.’
He looks away again, and Laura knows he’s remembering other nights in hospital corridors, waiting for news of other people’s kids, knocking on doors after midnight to break hearts with the worst of all news. Maybe he misses those days, but she’s glad he doesn’t have to be that unwelcome messenger any more. Even if he wasn’t aware of it, those harrowing visits made him moody, pushing him into dark places where he was impossible to reach.
‘Maybe it was a cry for help rather than a serious attempt to . . .’ She can’t say the words, articulate the idea that her daughter, her precious girl, might have wanted to end what Laura has spent fourteen years trying to make a wonderful life. The knowledge that she has somehow failed is crushing. She must be to blame. Something she has – or hasn’t – done is what’s brought them to this pass.
‘I should have spent more time with her. I should have found out what was on her mind.’
Aidan looks sceptical.
‘You think nagging her would have made her come clean? It wouldn’t, Laura. She was in a low place, OK, but there could be any number of reasons for that, none of which a girl of her age would go confiding in her mum.’ His words strike a broadside to her cherished illusion that she and Gemma are close, and Laura’s face shows her pain. ‘Sorry. But she’s not our baby girl any more. We have to accept that. She just isn’t.’
A nurse is walking towards them. ‘Are you Gemma’s mum and dad?’
Laura gets to her feet. ‘Yes.’
‘You can come and see her now.’
Without saying anything else, the nurse walks back the way she’s come.
Innocent Page 20
