Double Deceit

by Julienne Brouwers

  “You were leading a busy and hectic life,” the detective interrupted. “Where did you find the time to do so?”

  I shrugged. “Things weren’t too perky between Oliver and me for a few months. We figured spending quality time together with our son, far from the turmoil of everyday life, would help us rekindle things.”

  The detective’s eyebrows shot up. “Did it?”

  I furrowed my brow. “Friday had been wonderful. We’d taken a refreshing dip in the swimming pool upon arrival at the park in the afternoon, and Tim had been enjoying himself in the paddling pool.” I fought back the tears that were stinging my eyes as my mind relived the last moments of the three of us enjoying happy times together. “In the evening, when Tim was asleep, we ordered sushi and relished it on the couch while watching our favourite film.” I smiled at the thought of how Oliver, craving for sushi, had managed to persuade a courier in the nearest town to deliver our order all the way to the holiday park for an obscenely large surcharge.

  “Sounds wonderful,” the detective scoffed with mock enthusiasm. “What about on Saturday, the day your husband died?” he queried, a harsher tone to his voice now, clearly eager to press ahead.

  I coughed and shifted in my seat. “We decided to head to the indoor pool again. We were enjoying ourselves and had agreed that Oliver would watch Tim so that I could read my book for a while. But after just a few moments I looked up and realised that Tim was no longer there – Oliver had been distracted and Tim had wandered off.”

  “You must have been fuming with rage,” the detective said, trying to rile me. “What kind of father doesn’t keep a close eye on his two-year-old, near a swimming pool?”

  “I wasn’t best pleased,” I said euphemistically. The anguish over loosing Tim that had tormented me in those moments came flooding back, but I pulled myself together. “Fortunately our panic was short-lived and there was no harm done. We located Tim just a couple of minutes later in the sandpit,” I said, trying to dismiss the incident.

  “Then what? The pair of you were all lovey-dovey again?” the detective asked.

  I glanced at Dan, who gave me an almost invisible nod.

  “No,” I answered truthfully. “We had an argument, and Oliver decided to go for a stroll around the holiday park.” I looked straight into the eyes of the detective. “It was the last time I saw him alive.”

  The detective was still leaning back, elbows resting on his belly and fingers interlocked, as he twiddled his thumbs. “Right,” he muttered. “So, let’s summarise. The relationship between you and your husband has been in dire straits for months – you keep nagging your husband about not being at home enough and it regularly ends in heated arguments. Then …” The detective slammed his hand onto the table “… Wham! Out of the blue you find out your better half is romantically involved with another woman.”

  I straightened my back and interrupted him. “I didn’t know that when he died,” I exclaimed, biting my lip, writhing in suppressed fury, but Dan waved his hand, urging me to calm down.

  The detective ignored us and carried on summarising. “You decided to go away for a weekend to patch things up, full of hope that your husband would see the attractive woman in you that he once fell in love with, but it didn’t have the intended effect. Things turned sour and Saturday evening ended, once again, in a bit of a ding-dong.” The detective slowly leaned forward and planted his hands on the table. “You’re claiming you had a good time together on Friday evening, but I have the idea that maybe things weren’t quite so rosy,” he said with derision, narrowing his eyes. “Did your husband confess to you that he wanted to choose Sandra over you, and break free from the shackles of marriage?”

  I was shaking my head fiercely to indicate that wasn’t what happened at all, but the detective rested back in his chair and continued undisturbed. “Who knows, maybe Oliver decided that weekend he was going to leave you for good and wanted to build a life with his mistress. Who’s to say you’re speaking the truth, Jennifer. Oliver can’t corroborate your account of events, can he?” The detective brought a finger to his lips and looked up, pretending to be in contemplation. “Oh, wait. Sandra can’t anymore either.”

  My jaw dropped open and I shook my head, trying to swallow the lump that had formed in the back of my throat. “It wasn’t like that, honestly it wasn’t,” I whimpered, hearing my voice skip. I looked desperately at Dan, but his gaze remained straight ahead.

  “So your brutally murdered husband was discovered a day later by an unsuspecting hiker, at the base of a steep hill – a giant gaping hole in his head. His lifeless body was drenched in blood, while the pounding rain and roaring winds thrashed him relentlessly for hours.”

  I closed my eyes, picturing my beloved husband lying there all by himself the entire night, exposed on those hard rocks in unforgiving weather, and felt a desperate longing to change history and run over to save him.

  “What did you hit him with?”

  I opened my eyes and snapped to attention. “I didn’t hit him, honestly,” I muttered.

  “I want to notify you that as we speak, a new and vigorous team of investigators is scouring the crime scene again. We will find the murder weapon.” The detective seemed to recall something and slowly leaned over to us. “Oh yes, the red knickers he was wearing when he was found, which had belonged to Sandra and that you dressed him in: was that a symbolic gesture towards your husband?” The detective started musing again. “Come to think of it, it may have been a warning from you directed at his mistress. You just wait, you trollop. You’re next.” A contented smile formed on the detective’s lips, he seemed to be enjoying painting this picture of me as a raging, jealous killer. “Did you stumble upon the knickers as you searched through the pockets of his jacket that weekend? You must have gone ballistic when you learnt your husband didn’t take your final attempt at reconciliation seriously.” He gave a snicker and shrugged. “In any event, there are several plausible explanations.”

  “It didn’t happen like that, it really didn’t,” I said in despair, trying to conceal my tears. “I did not kill my husband! It wasn’t until months after his death that I discovered his deceit and the affair with Sandra.”

  Dan raised his hand. “Listen, Detective Armstrong,” he interjected, his lips pulled into a straight line. “We find your train of thoughts immensely entertaining. You should seriously consider becoming a screenwriter for a day-time soap opera.” He folded his arms and squared his shoulders, his face all business-like in a heartbeat. “But if you can’t come up with any solid evidence against my client, I’d like you to end this so-called interrogation right now.”

  The detective raised his finger. “Oh, right, the evidence supporting all this – I was just about to get to that. We discovered a hair, right in the centre of Mr Smits’ head wound.” The man shot me a penetrating look, as if he wanted to make sure he’d caught my attention. “We’ve got you bang to rights, lady. The hair transpires to be from you.”

  An ominous stillness fell amongst us as I tried to wrap my brain around what had just been said.

  “I’d like to talk to my client in private for a moment,” I heard Dan say formally, his body all stiffened up. Dan’s self-assured attitude from before seemed to have vanished in an instant.

  “As you wish,” the detective said, rising from his chair.

  Dan waited for the detective to leave the room before turning towards me, his head still bowed. A long pause filled the air with silence. He rubbed his chin, then his eyes slowly raised to meet mine, shocking me with the look of anxiety on his face. “I’ll be honest with you, Jennifer. This isn’t looking good.”

  It felt like an imaginary rope was being tightened around my neck. The detective had me hauled me into a corner, like a rat in a trap.

  “Finding your DNA on all parts of Oliver’s body was in line with expectations, that goes without saying. Except for in the wound. You said you never saw him alive again after you’d been quarrelling?” Dan asked
tentatively, worry lining his forehead.

  I raised my hand like in court. “I swear,” I said imploringly. “You do believe me, right?”

  “Yes,” he replied, but for the first time I saw a flash of doubt cross his face and it felt like my world was shattering to pieces.

  “But I can’t seem to find a straightforward explanation for the presence of your DNA at the trauma site.” Dan leaped up, started pacing up and down the room, his lips pressed tightly together and his gaze averted, firing questions at me. “When did you first see Oliver after his death?”

  I summarised the events of that fatal weekend to the best of my recollection. “The police showed up on the doorstep of the holiday bungalow that Sunday morning. They informed me of Oliver’s passing and then took me with them in their police car to the station, where he was laid out on a table in a cold room, covered by a white sheet.”

  “Did they let you see him?”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “Was there anyone accompanying you in the room?”

  “No.”

  “Had the coroner already examined him before you went to see him?” Dan asked.

  I shook my head, thinking back on how I’d managed to persuade the young female police officer to allow me to have a moment with Oliver by myself. “That must be it,” I exclaimed and jumped up, as this little glimpse of hope – a justification for this piece of evidence against me – presented itself. “I wanted to touch him, hug him one last time. I ran my fingers through Oliver’s hair and before knowing it there was blood all over my fingers. That’s when I knew he had a major head injury. That must have been the moment when my DNA ended up in the wound.”

  “Thank goodness. Yes, that must be it,” Dan said, an unconcealed sense of relief flitting across his face. “Okay, we’ve got our work cut out with this – that woman completely disregarded the protocol and she may be unwilling to admit it. But if need be, we’ll question her under oath. She’ll need to come clean and ultimately will confirm you were with Oliver before any forensic analyses were carried out.”

  I gave a big sigh of relief and lowered myself onto the chair next to Dan again.

  “It’s a stick to beat them with, but we’re not out of the woods yet. That’s just step one,” said Dan. “The other missing part of the jigsaw is how Mason & McGant managed to put your DNA on the luggage rack of Sandra’s bike.

  I shrugged. “I really don’t know, Dan. I’ve been racking my brain over it.”

  Dan looked me in the eye as he held my hands, our knees lightly brushing. There was a gentleness and familiarity in his touch that made me feel safe, in spite of the predicament I was in. “I know we’ve been over this before but I just want to make sure …” Dan said tentatively. “You really weren’t with Sandra that day?”

  “No, I really wasn’t,” I said, in a drained voice. My mind was going round in circles trying to come up with an explanation that made sense. “You know I broke into Mason & McGant twice with Sandra at night,” I said, for the first time admitting it had indeed been trespassing rather than just a visit. “Do you reckon they somehow collected my DNA during one of those nights?”

  Dan sunk his teeth into his bottom lip, his gaze wandering off, and shook his head. “I highly doubt it. The place must be swamped with hairs and other bodily material. Suppose someone would go looking for traces of you a few hours after you went in, it would be impossible to establish which hair belonged to you. No, it can’t be that.” Dan released my hands and started drumming his fingers on the table. “You said you met Sandra on a few occasions. Where was that?”

  “A cafe, restaurant. Those kind of places.”

  Dan kept shaking his head in vexation, his finger held up to his lips. “No, it’s too farfetched.”

  Out of the blue he slammed his hands onto the table, scaring me out of my wits, and leaped up. “Damn it!”

  Then he turned to me and grabbed my shoulders, towering over me. His forehead creased with worry. “Think hard, Jennifer. It is of pivotal importance that we find out.”

  I felt the immense pressure – my future was hanging in the balance. “I really don’t know, Dan,” I whimpered.

  Slowly, Dan retreated and proceeded to pace up and down the room, hands clasped behind his back. His eyebrows drew together in an anguished expression.

  “You must have had another moment of contact with Sandra, there is no other way. I have a strong inkling that if we ascertain where it was, it will ultimately be the key to your acquittal.”

  “Did she lend you any of her clothes? Perhaps you got cold on one of those nights at Mason & McGant and she offered you her coat?”

  I tried to recollect if any such thing had occurred but soon concluded it had not.

  Dan continued throwing suggestions at me. “Did you perhaps borrow her bike? Or maybe you just sat on it when you went for a coffee with Sandra?”

  Desperation was taking hold of me. “Absolutely not, I never sat on her bike, I never even so much as touched her. I haven’t even been to her home …” My voice trailed off.

  There was a click in my mind – all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place, suddenly exposing the big picture. The devious stratagems, the lies and deceit, the calculated coverup defied all imagination. I slapped a hand over my mouth and my eyes popped wide open. “How could I have been so stupid?” I whispered.

  Dan’s voice sounded far away. “Jennifer?”

  I slowly pushed myself out of my chair and started pacing the room, my arms dangling lifelessly on either side. “So it was him all along. It’s all starting to make sense. That man – just like me – had a legitimate reason to be outraged with Oliver and Sandra. They hadn’t just deceived me with their affair, but him too. Besides, as a partner of Mason & McGant, he had to prevent Oliver from blowing the lid on their ‘arrangements’ with the DFI. That bastard must have made a boatload of cash with that scam.”

  I looked at Dan, who had a bewildered look on his face.

  I continued rambling. “I wasn’t able to see the light all this time – he played his role of grieving husband far too convincingly when I visited him in their home that day.”

  Dan gawked at me and was shaking his head. “Jennifer, you have to take me with you. I’m not following.”

  I narrowed my eyes and started bobbing my head as the logic of the events increasingly started to seep into my brain. “It must have been my coat …Yes, of course it was,” I exclaimed. That innocent-looking woman plucked my hair from my coat in a supposedly trivial act,” I reasoned out loud. “She told me he had requested it – she probably didn’t even have the faintest idea why she needed to brush my coat.” I gave a wry smile, my fists clenching. “It was the perfect moment for him to seal the deal against me – it was the final nail in my coffin. And I just handed it to him on a plate when I decided to pay him a visit – he hardly had to make any effort. That rat must have been laughing himself silly.”

  “Jennifer,” Dan said, gently tugging at my sleeve and snapping me out of my train of thought. I came to a halt and looked at Dan – it dawned on me he didn’t have a clue what I was referring to.

  I straightened my back as I delivered the message. “Roderick,” I said. “It is Roderick delaHaye, Sandra’s husband, who killed Oliver and Sandra.”

  As Dan’s mouth dropped open, I filled him in on my rendezvous with Roderick, who was a partner at Mason & McGant as well as Sandra’s life partner, in that exclusive, cold-hearted penthouse, where I had fallen for his trap – hook, line and sinker.

  37

  The next morning, I was gazing out of the tiny window, which formed my only connection to the outside world. The people on the streets hurried about, heading to school or work, just following their everyday routines. They had no notion of the privilege they had as autonomous citizens being able to go their merry ways. In the far right of my field of vision, a small boat glided smoothly through one of the countless canals of the city. The freedom of the vessel contrasted sharply with the
utter lack of it I was experiencing up here in this tiny cell.

  After I’d shared with Dan the ins and outs of my visit to Sandra’s husband a few weeks ago, he told me it was Roderick who had put him on hold after finding out we’d been going through the secret files, something I’d never known. I, in turn, had never mentioned to Dan that Sandra was Roderick’s wife and that I’d recently met him. And so it transpired that we each had a missing piece of the puzzle in our possession, without knowing it.

  Not long after my epiphany, Detective Armstrong had re-entered the interrogation room and told us that questioning for that day was over. I spent the remainder of the day on this wretched bed in my cell, right in the heart of the city. The detective had expedited an application for my remand, to give them more time to collect further evidence against me, and, if granted, I would be transferred to a nearby maximum-security prison at the end of the day, so I was told. The thought of being incarcerated among criminals who had a long tally of Lord-knows-what kind of horrific crimes, filled me with terror.

  During the night, I’d tossed and turned on the uncomfortable mattress, drifting in and out of sleep as I kept hearing snippets of conversations, shouts and bellows coming from the corridor, and only managed to get a few hours of sleep, until the unforgiving spirals poking into my back roused me again. The unpredictability of the season had brought a cold night, and the threadbare grey blanket offered insufficient comfort. I must have dozed off again after hearing the first birds chirping outside, announcing a new dawn, only to be rudely awakened by a prison guard shortly after, announcing it was time for breakfast.

  I tried to freshen up at the basin as best as I could, and smooth out the creases in my skirt. There was no mirror in the cell – presumably for safety reasons – but I didn’t need one to know I looked scruffy and ghastly. I only managed a few nibbles of the boiled egg and washed it down with two or three swigs of tea. The rest of the food was collected by the guard later in the morning.