My Husband's Wife (13 page)

Despite my brave words to my husband – ‘I can look after myself, thank you' – I am shaken by the anonymous note and everything that's gone on since. Earlier today, I found myself breaking my vow as I walked to the bus stop. Something made me look back. It's dark on these nippy winter mornings, and there is ample opportunity for someone to hide in the shadows of the bushes.

But I couldn't see anyone.

I haven't seen Carla for some time now, either. I hope her tummy ache is better. We missed her the other Sunday, Ed and I. Missed the buffer she has become between us, the distraction that means we don't have to talk to each other. Missed the role she plays as a muse for Ed – his new portrait of her is really coming on – and the permission it gives me to work on the case uninterrupted.

There's little time in my life to do anything else. ‘The Court has allowed the appeal and we have a re-trial,' Tony Gordon rings to tell me. ‘The date is set.' His voice sounds excited but also busy and slightly apprehensive. ‘March. Doesn't give us much time, but they're catching up on their backlog. Prepare to cancel Christmas.'

I suspect he's not joking. Not long now. The berries on the holly trees are already out in force when I walk past them every morning.

Red for blood. Red for anger. Red for the jacket that Daniel was wearing that night.

‘Christmas is like a battlefield with mince pies thrown in,' my brother had told me once. I had the feeling that this was something he'd heard, but he told it as though he'd made it up himself.

Either way, he's right. Ed wants us to go to his parents for the day. I want him to go to mine. ‘They don't have anyone else,' I point out. We still haven't come to an agreement.

As I speak, I wonder how Joe Thomas will spend the so-called festive season. Will anyone visit
him
? I also wish – too late – that I had never given him Daniel's old sticker album during our last meeting. I'd crossed the line. What had got into me?

Today's visit has to be different.

Joe Thomas's eyes are blazing. They remind me of a tiger. ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright.' One of Daniel's favourites. Joe's almost snarling as he speaks. ‘Someone put a threatening note under your door?'

On the way to prison that morning, Tony had declared this was the time to come out with it. ‘We've got to squeeze him now we've got a court date,' he says, his mouth tightening. ‘Get things moving. Provoke him, see if we can get more out of him. If there are any holes.'

It's doing that all right. Joe's jaw muscles are tightening visibly. His hands, on the table between Tony and me,
clench into hard, ball-like fists. The
HOPE
poster is sliding down the wall.

‘What did the note say?'

‘If you try to help that man, you will be sorry.'

Tony pronounces each word very clearly, as though there is a large area of space around it.

‘I ought to add,' says Tony with a half-laugh, ‘that it wasn't spelled very well.'

‘Leave it to me.' Joe's eyes grow blacker, if that is possible. I've read about eyes changing colour before, but thought it was poetic licence. Yet here's an example, right before me. ‘I'll put out feelers.'

Tony nods. ‘Thank you.'

So that's why, I suddenly realize. Tony wants to see if Joe has contacts on the outside. By playing on what my barrister has already referred to as ‘the client's obvious empathy with you', he's confirming his suspicions.

‘How else could your feelers help us win this case?' asks Tony, leaning across the metal table, rocking it so one of the legs comes down against my leg, laddering my tights.

Instantly, Joe sits back in his chair, arms folded. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Those figures that were sent to you in the post,' says Tony softly, ‘they came from a mole, didn't they? They must have. Someone working for the gas people or the boiler company or somewhere in the industry. Are you paying them, or do they owe you a favour?'

Joe's face is a study of emotion wiped clean. I've seen it before on my husband's canvases. An outline. Nothing more. Then Ed fills in the feelings: a curve of the eyebrow
to indicate disbelief or amusement; a curl of the lip to imply irritation or longing. Joe's face does none of these.

‘Why would I do that?' he asks. ‘And why do you assume I'll tell you if it's true, even though it isn't?'

‘Because,' snaps Tony, ‘you need to help us in order to help yourself. I'm going to give you some time to think about this, Joe. When I come here next, I'd like you to tell me who your mole is and then we might stand a chance of winning your case. And before you start bleating about honour among thieves, I want to ask you something. Do you really want to spend another Christmas inside this place?'

He looks around the bare room with its
DO NOT REMOVE
notice next to the clock and the torn lino on the floor. ‘Because I wouldn't, in your position.'

As we go out of the room, I shoot Joe an ‘I'm sorry' look. I can't help it. His reaction to the note has helped to convince me once and for all that he's innocent. You can't fake that kind of thing.

‘Thanks for the pictures,' he whispers as I pass him.

I freeze, hoping the officer standing by the open door hasn't heard.

‘I don't get many gifts in here.'

I don't dare reply.

Then Joe's eyes go down to my legs; he's noticed the ladder in my tights. He frowns. ‘You need to do something about that.' And then he slinks off down the corridor in the opposite direction as though I have personally offended him.

Knees knocking, I follow Tony down the corridor, past
men staring; wishing I could look as confident as my colleague with his straight back and arrogant air.

As we hand in our passes at security, I'm still trembling. ‘You did very well,' says Tony, placing a hand briefly on my shoulder. ‘Prison isn't easy. Don't worry. Joe and I have built up an understanding now. I won't need you to come with me on future visits. A secretary will be enough. The next time you'll see that man is when we're all in court.'

I glance back at the high wall with its rolls of barbed wire still visible through the window. Not see Joe until the court hearing? I feel an irrational rush of disappointment. But there's something else too. He'll think I don't care about him. And suddenly I know that I do. Very much.

Joe Thomas represents my chance to save an innocent man.

To make up for not saving Daniel.

The phone rings when I am deep in the middle of my papers. Not the ones that I should be looking at: cases that my boss has piled on my already overloaded desk, about fraud and battery and shoplifting. But Joe's.

It's all very well Tony saying that he would take over from here, but I've got to carry on at my end in the office. Surely the more information I can give him, the better? And there is so much. Every day, the post brings more letters from people who've read about the impending case in the papers. A woman who had been burned horrifically when she'd taken a shower (‘I was told it was my fault for not checking the temperature first, but it was on the usual setting – and it had just been serviced'). A man whose
face is scarred for life. (‘I was drunk when I turned on the water, so I assumed it was my fault when it came out scalding.') A father who had almost – but not quite – placed his toddler in a bath where he had taken great care to run the cold along with the hot, only to find that the cold itself was boiling. Apparently, a part in the boiler had been faulty.

The case is building up, and with it the press fever. Time and time again, reporters call, pleading for updates – anything that will add fuel to what might well become a national scandal.

I've already just put the phone down on a particularly persistent female journalist. So when it rings again within seconds, I presume it's her.

‘Yes? What?' I bark down the line, realizing as I do so that I'm beginning to sound like my boss. It isn't a thought that pleases me.

‘Your Joe Thomas has come up with the goods.' It's Tony Gordon's smooth, deep voice. ‘We've got him. The writer of your note.'

My mouth goes dry. It's hard to imagine a silent attacker. Someone who scares you without showing his or her face. Someone who haunts your dreams: dreams that make you wake up screaming.

‘Who is it?' I ask.

‘The victim's uncle.'

The victim! Such a cold, hard way of expressing it. I glance down at the folders on my desk. Sarah Evans smiles glossily up at me. She was a person. A woman who shared Joe Thomas's bed. He may have been a control freak. She may have fallen out of love with him. Or she may not have
known exactly what her feelings were for this man. Rather like how I feel confused about Ed.

But she does at least deserve a proper name.

‘Do you mean Sarah?'

Tony Gordon's voice sounds amused. ‘I used to be like you once, you know.' Then his tone hardens. ‘Let me give you a piece of advice, Lily. Don't get too involved with your cases. If you do, you begin to lose touch with the real world and then everything can become a bit of a mess.'

I glance across the room at my boss in his glass office who's holding the phone and gesticulating wildly at me. ‘I've got to go,' I say.

‘The man's been cautioned. But I still want you to be careful. This case could release a flood of lawsuits. We are going to upset a lot of people, including the nutters that are always out there. Do you understand? Change your route to work. Lock your flat. Make sure that new husband of yours looks after you.'

I'm not sleeping. I'm not eating. I'm hardly talking to Ed. There is no time.

Our previous intimacy has become lost in this manic build-up towards the case. I'm home even later, especially now the Christmas lights are up in Regent Street and the traffic is slower because everyone is gawping. Ed and I no longer have discussions about what he might want for dinner. We both take it for granted that he'll sort out his own. At least he seems to have cut back again on his drinking. That's because he wants a ‘clearer head' when he's painting in the evening. It's for that reason, I tell
myself, that I decided not to tell him about Tony's warning. I don't want him worrying, getting distracted.

‘Your mother rang,' Ed says one evening when I am back just before 11 p.m. He says it in the way a husband might speak when his wife is barely around and only merits a kiss dropped on top of her head instead of a proper embrace.

‘It's urgent,' he adds before returning to our little kitchen table. His sketchpads are everywhere. Pictures of a young girl twisting her hair. Skipping through the park. Jumping over puddles. Reading a book with a cardigan casually draped round her shoulders. Cooking in the kitchen. Another girl – more like a woman, actually – with an expressionless face. All studies for a bigger painting that he intends to work on shortly.

An unexpected flash of jealousy shoots through me. I'd like time to have a creative passion like my husband. But instead, I am stuck. Stuck in something that is too big: a web of lies and truths that I – with my limited experience – am expected to unravel. I'm not the only one. Another newly qualified lawyer in the office is currently grappling with a divorce case without really knowing how to do it. I pity her client.

Mum picks up the phone immediately. In my mind, I'm back home. She'll already have decorated the hall with tinsel woven round the banisters; mistletoe hanging from the central cartwheel light; holly on the pictures going up the stairs, including the pastel portraits of Daniel and me when we were younger. Pretty bits and pieces on the dining-room table to hide the emptiness of the unlaid fifth setting at the table. Christmas decorations waiting
for me to come home, because without one child, my parents have nothing.

The weight of my responsibilities hangs in my words. ‘Sorry it's late but I've been working.'

I wait to hear Mum tell me, as she has done before, that I am working too hard. That a new husband needs his new wife to be around more. But instantly, I know before I even hear the break in her voice that something has happened.

‘What is it?' I croak.

After Daniel, there was a weird relief that nothing awful – nothing truly awful – could ever happen again. It's a feeling I have heard others voice too. There was a woman on the radio, not long after, who said that when her daughter died in a crash, she knew she didn't have to worry so much about her surviving son because her worst fear had already happened.

That's how I felt too until I hear Mum's voice.

‘Is Dad all right?' I manage to say.

For a minute, I have a picture of him at the bottom of the stairs. He's slipped. Had a coronary.

‘We're not ill.'

Relief washes through me in the form of sweat. Ed, meanwhile, is poring over the woman with the expressionless face, but in such a manner that I suspect he is listening.

‘Then what is it?'

‘Merlin … It's Merlin. He's … well, he's gone.'

I clutch the edge of the table for support. Ed's hand reaches out for mine. Gratefully I clutch it. ‘He was old …' I begin.

‘The vet says it looks like his food was poisoned,' sobs Mum.

‘Poisoned?'

Ed's face is startled as I repeat the word.

‘How do you know?'

My mother's voice is choked. ‘We found him in the paddock. There was a note on the stable door.'

A note. My body begins to shake. My chest rises to my throat. The hunger I was feeling when I got home has disappeared.

‘What does it say?' I ask.

But already I know.

‘It says, “Tell your daughter to drop the case.” ' Mum's voice rises with anguish. ‘Is this the one you told us about? The one about the boiler that's been in the papers?'