A Fatal Debt (32 page)

The lights went past the open window and we heard the sound of the vehicle for the first time as it came to a halt by the foot of the Shapiros’ lane, the hum of its engine idling. I reached for Anna’s hand and she held mine as we stood there half-naked. The glow penetrated
the gap in the curtains near us and shone across the room. Then it faded and turned a fainter red as the car moved again, turning left up the drive to the Shapiros’ house. I could hear it take the hill rapidly and the crunch of the gravel spurted out from its tires, as if the driver weren’t familiar with the slope.
My car
, I thought.
I left it by the house
. We walked to the room adjoining the kitchen at the front. There was a sofa by the window and we knelt on it, her robe slithering with a silken hiss.

I reached to part the curtains for us to peer through, hearing her soft breath and feeling her warmth next to my face. She was panting slightly—now out of fear rather than desire. She placed her face beneath mine to look through the parting and we gazed up along the drive, past the split-rail fence and the weeping trees. The car had halted next to mine and the driver was climbing out. I still half wondered if it might be Nathan, having ignored our agreement for him to return to the city.
What if he catches us together like this?
I thought.
He’s going to strangle me properly this time
. I didn’t believe it, though. I knew it hadn’t been a man behind the wheel of the car. It was a woman—the one who’d controlled this affair all along and who had fooled everyone but Harry.

As she extinguished the headlights and stepped out of the car, her face was shrouded by dark. A cloud covered the moon and only her outline was visible against the still-glowing sky. She stood by her car, then walked to mine and stepped around it at a slow, deliberate pace, as if inspecting it for damage. She bent to look through one window, then straightened and stepped onto the lawn, disappearing from sight.

“Where’s she going?” Anna whispered.

“I don’t know. I can’t—”

I stopped speaking as the woman reappeared from behind the house and walked up to the kitchen door. She reached into her handbag for a key and unlocked it. As she walked inside, I expected her to turn on the lights, but the room remained in darkness. We had a vista of the front of the house, but it was useless without light. Then the moon emerged from behind the clouds. It shone through the conservatory
and cast a glow in the living room. It was empty for a minute or two, until the woman entered the room from the hallway. She walked across the room and then halted in the middle on the spot where Greene had died.

I glanced briefly down at Anna, her lips open and her breasts uncovered by the robe, before the woman regained my attention. She moved toward the kitchen and flicked on the lights as she entered, clearly visible for the first time. She stopped at the brushed-steel intercom by the door and pressed a button, as I’d seen Anna do the first time I’d been in that room. As she did, there was an electronic crackle in the room, and I remembered Anna telling me that the whole estate was wired.

“Dr. Cowper?” said a disembodied voice.

We both flinched, and Anna’s face, pale with panic, gazed at mine. She shook her head, imploring me not to answer.

“I know you’re there,” the voice said matter-of-factly.

Anna looked at me again and I shrugged. There was no way out of the cottage except through the front door, straight into our tormentor’s line of sight. The rear of the building led to ponds and reeds, and I could hardly walk, let alone climb out of a window and swim. The only shred of privacy we had left was that Anna hadn’t been caught in the headlights with me. I couldn’t sacrifice that.

“Yes, Mrs. Shapiro?” I said.

“Come here,” Nora said.

I
stepped through the front door of the cottage into the night air. It was cool to the skin, the last warmth of the afternoon gone, and I walked down the path where I’d stood with Anna a few hours before. Then I crossed the lane to the bottom of the Shapiros’ drive. The moon was full in the sky, and the night was silent: no sirens, no city hubbub, nothing but the hiss of the sea. As I started to walk up the drive, the crunch of my feet on the gravel echoed in the night.

Passing this way by car, concentrating on taking the turn up the hill in the daylight, I hadn’t noticed that the drooping trees formed a tunnel, blocking the house from view until the last minute, like the long drive to a country mansion. It was more artful than I’d taken the time to realize. I looked up at the house as I walked but couldn’t see anything through the trees except the glow of lights. I rounded the
last curve and there in front of me were two cars: my own and Nora’s Range Rover.

I walked the last few steps to my car and pulled open the front passenger door as softly as I could. The car wasn’t locked because I hadn’t bothered when I’d arrived, but things were different now. Nathan had caught me defenseless out by the airfield and I needed a means of protecting myself. Leaning into the car, I pulled open the compartment in front of the passenger seat. I removed a small package and placed it in my pocket.

The kitchen door gave to my touch. I stepped inside to see Nora’s leather bag on the counter, the one from which she’d extracted Harry’s gun as I’d sat with her in the waiting room of the ER. The kitchen was bare: the cutlery was put away, the plates stacked. Dust from the renovation had been wiped from the kitchen surfaces so thoroughly that I doubted if there were fingerprints left. The door on the far side of the room was half-ajar, displaying a glow from the living room. I paused for a second, thinking of watching Nora and Anna together in this kitchen on my first visit. Her arm had hung around Anna’s shoulders as if in casual friendship, but the gesture felt freighted now—a display of dominance.

“Come through,” Nora called from the next room.

I walked to the steel intercom and pressed a button on its façade, making a light on it glow red. Then I opened the door and went through to the living room. The room was bathed in a soft light from the moon and a lamp next to an armchair at the far end of the room. It was dim where I stood, looking across the room.

Nora was thirty feet from me. She was sitting in the seat under the lamp and her face was pale, immobile. She held a gun in her right hand, trained on me. It was the Beretta that she’d retrieved from the safe. I’d seen that weapon before and even handled it, but I’d never observed it from that angle. I stared helplessly into the tiny hole of the muzzle, the sight notched above it on the barrel. She waved the gun in the direction of the sofa opposite her, like a short wand. I hesitated, but there was nothing I could do. I walked to the sofa obediently and sat down where she’d indicated. We were about ten feet apart, slightly
farther than a psych and his patient, with her looking at me and me gazing back. There was no question about who was in charge.

From close up, I could see that her face was a mask of exhaustion. She’d never resorted to Botox or the knife, and her makeup was no longer doing its job. All of the softness I’d seen in her before had disappeared, leaving only an intimidating blank.

“You don’t need a gun, Mrs. Shapiro,” I said.

“You tell me what I’ve got to lose,” she said, keeping the weapon pointing at me as she spoke. “The Episcopal sticker on your car let me know I’d find you in here. But where’s Anna? Pretty little Anna.”

I’d never heard such awful, dead cynicism in her voice before. Of all those who’d fooled me, she done it most adroitly. The woman in front of me felt completely different from the one I’d believed I’d known.

“I told her to leave. She’s gone somewhere safer,” I said, trying to control the quiver in my voice.

“You
told
her, did you?” Nora said in a tone of ridicule. “She used to take her orders from me, but I can see things have changed.”

She scared me, but the sting of her betrayal hurt worse. I’d had a few hours to become accustomed to the truth, but it would take a lot longer than that to get over it. Why had I placed such faith in her from the first moment we’d met? She hadn’t needed to work hard to deceive me because she had been my fantasy—the calm, devoted wife of an aggressive, selfish man. I’d rushed to help her without pausing to examine her story.

That was my failure, I knew now. It wasn’t Harry I’d misdiagnosed in the psych ER—it was Nora. She’d been able to play me because I’d yearned to believe in her. She’d become the mother I still missed, and I’d rushed to take vengeance on the man I thought had betrayed her. My life was spent disentangling the psychological traps into which people fell, yet she’d lured me into the oldest one of all.

“The first time we met,” I said, “did you know then what you were going to do? I believed everything you told me.”

Nora smiled faintly, but the blank look in her eyes didn’t alter.

“I didn’t lie to you. Not then. I found him with the gun that afternoon.
Just through there.” She pointed to the wall behind which Harry’s study was located. “He looked so haunted, as if he’d lost everything. I was scared for him. Then I held him and he broke down. He told me about that
woman
.”

She pronounced the word with distaste and then paused for a few seconds, purging the memory again. Then she went on talking in a low, steady voice with her eyes blank. It was a kind of therapy for her, I realized, and I tried to encourage her by saying little, not even looking at the gun. It was some sort of redemption to be able to use the skills she’d abused to keep her from killing me.

“You must have felt hurt,” I prompted her.

“Hurt?” she said contemptuously. “I didn’t care about
her
. She thought she knew him, but he’d already forgotten her. It was Greene who’d taken him away from me. Harry was going to kill himself, but Greene had pulled the trigger. I’d only just caught Harry in time. If I hadn’t, Marcus would have finished him.”

“When did you decide what to do?”

“It was after you’d admitted him to the hospital. He was in a wheelchair and you’d taken his clothes away. He’d been stripped bare and humiliated. He was being wheeled away from me and this rage started to boil up inside of me. It wasn’t Harry who deserved to die, I thought. It was the man who’d done that to him.”

I remembered that scene. I’d witnessed it myself from another angle, in the hallway of the psych ER—Harry in the wheelchair with his notes on his lap, Pete O’Meara pushing him to the elevator silently, and Nora watching them. I’d believed she was just looking on sadly, with love for her shattered husband, not realizing the fantasy that was taking shape in her mind.

Nora looked at me with resolute, still eyes. She wasn’t caught up in passion and self-pity as Harry had been—she was capable of murder. She gestured with her gun as she spoke, but it swung back to me as if drawn by magnetism.

“After I’d left Harry, I went home and thought. I knew I had a choice. Either I left it to you and you’d give him pills and talk to him, get him to accept defeat, or we could fight. That was the only way I’d
get my Harry back and not a shadow. I realized that you’d given him an alibi. He couldn’t be convicted of murder if we acted fast.”

“Why did you choose me?” I said, remembering the moment I’d arrived at Episcopal on Monday morning to be told by Jim Whitehead that Harry had refused to be treated by anyone else. He’d come in on Saturday to see Harry, he’d told me, but the Shapiros had wanted their privacy. Now I knew why.

“You’d been kind in the emergency room and you were young. Whitehead was older and more obstinate. I thought you’d be, I don’t know …”

“Malleable?” I suggested.

“Oh, dear. That sounds bad,” she said, as if it mattered anymore what word I used. “I just thought you wouldn’t ask questions. Sarah was so eager to help.”

She certainly was
, I thought. When I looked back on it, Nora had expertly ambushed me. Duncan and Harry had appeared to be forcing me to do what he wanted, but Nora had fixed the whole thing. The image of her sitting on the bed in Harry’s room in York East as we had discussed him came back to me—both mother and seductress.

“You went to all that trouble and he still wouldn’t do what you wanted. How did you feel about that?” I said.

It was the harshest question I’d asked, but I was already tired of playing along with her narrative. It had a weird logic, killing Greene in order to save her husband. Yet kill him Nora had. Harry’s confession to the crime had been a concoction.

“You can take the credit for that,” Nora said, regarding me coldly. “You were too good at your job. You got him talking on the beach and he told you things he shouldn’t have. After you’d left, he told me he was thinking of therapy.”

She laughed as if my profession were absurd, and for the first time since I’d known her, I started to hate her. All the kindness she’d shown me—how she’d flown me on their jet to London and asked after my father—had been calculated. She hadn’t wanted to lose me as Harry’s doctor because she’d thought I’d be compliant.

“By Saturday, I got tired of waiting,” she said. “I called Felix and
he came over to the apartment. I said I knew what he’d done to Harry and he was a spineless coward. He said he’d try to make it up, so I told him what to do.”

That was what Felix meant
, I thought. He had walked into the sea and drowned himself. Was that the act of a man who’d merely been indiscreet about Harry’s affair to his old friends at Rosenthal? That shouldn’t have been enough to prompt suicide. Felix had been far more involved in Greene’s murder than he’d confessed, and he’d known that his deception was unraveling. Nora had made him pay dearly for his betrayal of Harry.

“Felix called Marcus and told him he should contact us that afternoon. When he called, I said Harry wanted to see him in East Hampton later. Harry was in a bad way, not coherent. The pills hadn’t helped, they’d made it worse. He was lying on his bed, really depressed. I took him to the car and I drove him out there. We left Felix in the apartment. I thought he might be needed.

“When we arrived, I gave Harry the Beretta and told him what to do. He was shaking and sweating, very ill. I was so sad for him. I went to the study and I waited. I heard the whole thing on the intercom. Harry brought Greene in here. He’d just walked from Sagaponack, he said. It was such a nice day. Harry told him he knew everything he’d done, and Greene just laughed. ‘Too late now, Harry,’ he said.