Dying for Christmas (19 page)

‘Sorry,’ she said when she caught Kim looking. ‘Given up fags for New Year. Only Day Two and I’m already gagging.’

‘Be worth it in the end, though,’ said Martin, who had given up himself the previous year. Kim had lived through a couple of months of hell while he chewed nicotine gum so relentessly and loudly she dreamed about the sound in her sleep.

She tried to steer the conversation back to the case in point. ‘So there was no workplace bullying you were aware of?’

‘Absolutely not.’ Henrietta Belvedere appeared genuinely appalled at the idea. ‘Look around you, does this look like the kind of place where members of staff make fake pornographic webpages on social media sites to persecute other members of staff?’

Kim had to agree it did not. Everyone they’d spoken to had seemed considerate and amiable, just keen to get on with their own jobs.

‘So Jessica gave no indication at all that she was unhappy, or that she might be considering a change?’

‘None at all. She kept herself to herself, but she was always perfectly friendly and conscientious. There
was
an odd thing that happened, but that was months ago, and she’s been fine ever since.’

‘Odd?’ Kim could tell from the inflection in Martin’s voice that his attention had been grabbed.

‘Well, one of the preservation team – they’re the ones responsible for making sure the recordings and documents and reels we store here are kept in optimum condition and fully digitalized – was concerned that he’d found Jessica in one of the climate-controlled vaults long after she’d usually have gone home.’

‘Climate-controlled vaults?’ Kim hadn’t really been paying attention when they were looking around the archive earlier on.

‘You must understand that most of our work here is done on computers. Every single reel and tape is catalogued and kept in a digital format, so there’s very little call for us to actually access the physical recordings themselves. Some of these recordings are incredibly valuable, and because of the need to preserve them, we try to handle them as little as possible, keeping them in special vaults, so for Jessica to be there was really quite … irregular.’

‘And what was her explanation?’ Martin wanted to know.

‘She came up with some story about needing to double-check something for a research assignment she’d been given, but it was very weak. It was her demeanour that was suspect more than what she was actually doing. Jessica is normally a very calm, very self-contained individual, but she seemed very stressed. I would even say
dis
tressed.’

‘And you never found out why?’ asked Kim.

‘No. I asked her if she was all right and she assured me she was fine. And that was that. Nothing like that ever happened again, as far as I know.’

As they walked to Martin’s car, Kim tried to fit this bit of information into everything else she knew about Jessica Gold, but as always when she tried to build up a picture of the missing woman, the pieces refused to fit together, and when she tried to force them together, the result was something deformed and not quite human.

* * *

All night I’d lain awake in the kennel. Dominic, still in Solicitous Mode, had given me an extra blanket to go between my flayed skin and the hard wooden floor, but still pain surged across my back and shoulders where the whip had lashed them. My body seemed to have entered into another dimension where all was magnified – every single follicle, cell, atom inside me burned, and the light-headed feeling was worse than ever.

But the physical discomfort wasn’t the only thing keeping me awake. The weaker I was the less able I was to keep the voices at bay. I kept hearing a woman weeping and thinking about what Dominic had said about his wife killing their son, and feeling sick. Bella was back as well. I must have been delirious because when she said she felt cold, I tried to give her a blanket.

That morning passed in a blur of pain. Dominic couldn’t do enough for me. He made me breakfast and brought it to me on the sofa as it hurt to sit on the stool. He made so much fuss of me, I found myself feeling grateful to him. And when he stroked me gently on my cheek and said, ‘You know, I do love you, Jessica Gold,’ actual tears came to my eyes. ‘I love you too,’ I told him. For once lunch did not contain a single morsel of meat. Butternut-squash risotto with crème brûlée for pudding. I ate it obediently though it tasted of nothing.

I tried to add up the number of days I’d been in that flat by listing all the presents, but my mind kept going blank. At one point I looked down at my hand and noticed that two more fingernails seemed to have fallen out.

‘Are you up to a present today?’ Dominic asked mid-afternoon, his face a picture of concern.

I knew I was about to find out something I didn’t want to know but at the same time I had a compulsion to know what had happened to Cesca – and to their son. I was starting to realize that my destiny was bound up in theirs and Natalie’s and Bella’s, that we were all part of the same long, twisted path, though where it led, I had no clue.

This present was small and soft to the touch. When I placed it gently against my hot cheek I felt a fluttery vibration deep inside me like a baby’s chuckle.

Inside the package was a miniature Arsenal football strip. The back was emblazoned with the message
Sam Lacey 1
. There were tiny knee-length socks and even little soft replica football boots with padded soles.

Dominic took the top from me and held it up in front of him. It was hardly bigger than his face.

‘I bought this for him for his first birthday. I can still remember how he looked in it. He had blond hair that his mother refused to cut, so it curled around his face like a girl’s, and a dimple in his cheek just like mine. His eyes were huge. He was the most beautiful child. I know all parents think that about their children, but trust me, Jessica, he really was.’ He glanced up at me. ‘Oh, I forgot, you’re barren so you have no idea what a parent thinks. You’re just going to have to use your imagination.’

Barren
. It shouldn’t have hurt but it did.

‘The trouble is, of course, that by the time I gave it to him, I had already met Natalie. Oh, I’m jumping ahead. Let me start from the beginning.’

I’d noticed how, when Dominic was about to start telling one of his tales, he settled back into his seat to make himself more comfortable as if it was story time at school and he was the teacher.

‘I was never in love with Cesca, but as I told you, I was excited by her ignorance of pain. Her parents had cushioned her from hurt so it came as twice as much of a shock to her. She opened herself right up to it, like a flower. Also, she was rich. And she was head over heels in love with me. She used to stay awake all night watching me sleep. I’d wake up in the morning to find her inches away. It was quite sweet really. At first I made a huge effort to be nice to her, focusing on the money, but then I realized that being unkind actually made her want me more so I stopped bothering.

‘Our wedding was a huge fussy affair with a helicopter and a castle. When she first told me she was pregnant, I wasn’t ecstatic. I think I refused to talk to her for a whole week that time. She was a total wreck by the end of it. I wasn’t the kindest of husbands though, in my defence, her body disgusted me. The skin of her belly was stretched so tight and thin by the end, like it could tear right open like pizza dough.

‘But when Sam was born, everything changed. I never knew you could love someone so completely and uncomplicatedly. And you know, I felt such a sense of loss that Bella wasn’t there to meet him.’

Even in my groggy state, that one shocked me. It was as if Dominic had no memory of having told me his part in his sister’s death.

‘I’d hoped having a baby might make Cesca grow up a bit so she was more of an equal to me, but instead she let herself go completely. Always smelling of sour milk and her skin all yellow and her eyes all sunken in her face. At first she used to complain to her parents. “Oh, I’m so tired, oh, Dominic never helps.”’ He raised his voice to a falsetto for this imitation. ‘But that didn’t last long. It’s quite common for there to be a rift between in-laws and new parents at that time, I’ve since discovered.

‘I didn’t ban them. Nothing like that. I just made it quite uncomfortable for them to come round. Or any of Cesca’s old friends. Or her sister. I didn’t see why she needed other people now she had Sam. He should have been enough for her.
We
should have been enough for her.’

I pictured Cesca, isolated and cowed, with her yellow face.

‘Things were plodding along. We were the very image of domestic bliss. Then along came Natalie and destroyed it all.’

I stayed silent while he continued.

‘Natalie knew that I was married but she made a beeline for me. She was a successful stylist – very beautiful, very determined. I was powerless.’

I looked at Dominic and tried to imagine him powerless. It was impossible.

‘Ours was a whirlwind romance. I didn’t want to leave Sam, but Natalie wore me down. She was like an addiction. I left Cesca and moved in with Natalie. Cesca went to pieces, of course. She was such a sensitive little thing. She rarely left the house and practically mainlined prescription pills so I had no choice but to apply for custody of Sam.

‘Of course, Cesca’s parents didn’t like that one bit. They launched a law suit. Against me. Can you believe that? They wanted Cesca to divorce me – even offered to pay me off if I’d give up my claim to Sam. That’s the kind of people they are. They believe money is at the heart of everything.’

What is at the heart of everything? I wondered. Power?

‘I kept going back to see Cesca, to persuade her to see sense and to check Sam was being properly cared for. I worried about him so. Then, get this, she took out a restraining order against me. Said I was harassing her. That was her parents’ doing all right. Now I could only see Sam in the company of a social worker.
My own son
. This dumpy, nosy old cow in a beige mac was always there watching whenever I picked him up or changed him. It was a total violation.

‘So I went to see Cesca again, to explain things from my point of view. And I got threatened with court. For being a concerned father. British justice for you. I went to see her a few more times. She was a complete mess by this stage. She wasn’t capable of looking after anyone. She shook all the time. I didn’t want to take Sam away from her, but she wasn’t capable of looking after him. I had no choice.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Cesca moved house. Without telling me. I had no idea where they’d gone. I was completely frantic. In the end I hired a private detective to find them and paid her a visit. I was pretty angry, I have to confess, but I think I was justified, don’t you?’

He was looking at me as if genuinely seeking validation.

I nodded, which seemed to appease him, so he continued.

‘Well, after I left her that time, it seems she completely lost the plot. I blame the quack doctor who prescribed her all those pills. They were messing with her head. She crushed up five sleeping pills and put them in Sam’s nighttime bottle. And then she smothered him with a pillow.’

After his passionate outburst about the justice system, Dominic delivered this last snippet of information in a flat, indifferent voice, but my own emotions were all over the place. I looked down at the little football kit in my lap and felt again the gentle rumble of a baby’s chuckle. ‘What happened to her? Did she go to jail?’

Dominic’s smile flashed across his face like a blade catching the light. ‘No. After killing Sam she downed enough pills from her personal arsenal to fell a fucking elephant and then hung herself from the light fitting on the landing for good measure.’

I had my hand over my mouth now. Cesca dead, Sam dead. Bella too. Death seemed to follow Dominic around like a love-struck fan and yet it never properly touched him.

‘Her poor parents,’ I said, then immediately regretted it.

To my surprise he threw back his head and laughed. ‘They weren’t happy, as you can imagine. But not as unhappy as when they realized she’d never changed the will she made when we first got married, leaving all her money to me.’

Was that true? Could someone really drive a person to suicide and infanticide and then walk away with everything?

‘Oh, there was an enormous legal challenge,’ he said, seeing the disbelief on my face. ‘In the end we settled out of court. I could have won. But I thought the parents had suffered enough, even though they’d brought it on themselves. Their daughter killed my son. Any decent people would have felt guilty enough to offer me the shirts off their backs. If they hadn’t encouraged her to be so obstructive, none of it would have happened. They and the doctor have got to take equal blame – as well as Cesca, of course. I don’t know how they live with themselves.’

He wasn’t joking.

‘Sam’s funeral was the worst day of my life. As I carried that little white coffin I could hardly see for the tears. Thank god Natalie was there or I might have actually stumbled.’

I shouldn’t have been shocked that he’d taken his girlfriend to his baby son’s funeral, but I was. I imagined how it must have been for the grieving grandparents. And then I thought about my own parents and how their faces might look at my funeral. It was the first time I’d allowed myself to think of how this whole thing would end.

It’s a measure of my weakened state that it almost felt like a relief.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Natalie
. Since the minute I learned of her existence, her presence had hovered on the edge of my vision. In my weaker moments she crawled beneath my skin.