The First Wife (36 page)

‘And that was only for a weekend, and I didn’t see any of the sights,’ I added. ‘But I liked it a lot. And I’d be loving Barcelona, if it wasn’t all so . . .’

‘So fucked? You’re a small-towner like me? Well, in that case, Singapore would freak you out. It’s the people everywhere. The heat – it’s so humid it’s hard work even to pick up one foot and put it in front of the other. There’s spices and damp hot air, and shops and people yelling. Some of it’s all modern and Western, I guess, but I only knew that because I’d read it in the book. It looked pretty
un
Western to me. It was not one bit like the South Island. That is for bloody sure.’

I thought about it. ‘I’d like to go to Singapore one day. When all of this . . .’ I looked at the sleeping baby, and then back at Jack, the familiar stranger. ‘When it’s all sorted out.’ It was easy to say the words. I could still not think about it, not directly. If I had got Harry so wrong, just because he was nice to me, then what else was I getting wrong? I was in a hotel room with a stranger and someone else’s baby. Anything could be about to happen. I edged away from Jack. He seemed to understand.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry – all right? I’m not like him, I can promise you that. I could never have it in me to do that.’

I looked at him, into his clear grey eyes. I believed him. Yet I had believed Harry. But now that I looked back, I acknowledged that I had known some things about Harry for a long time. I had suspected for ages that his might have been the silver car that knocked down Darren Mann and put him on a life-support machine.

I put the bottle down, sick at my own weakness. I had been brought up better than this. Both my grandparents had strong morals and they had imparted them to me. We were kind to animals, we fed the birds, we gave our old clothes to charity. We recycled everything. We donated to Oxfam and bought all our Christmas cards and wrapping paper from charity shops. Yet when I had found myself the only person who was able to put a killer into prison, I had shrunk away and agreed to marry him instead.

‘I believe you,’ I told Jack. If he had bad intentions of any sort, he would surely have acted upon them by now. We just had to pass the time until Fergus arrived. I took a deep breath, and changed the subject.

At quarter to two in the morning, there was a gentle tap on the door. Jack was lying on the bed, dozing with baby Carlos on his chest. The two of them looked so peaceful that I tiptoed to the door and opened it as quietly as I could.

When I saw him, I threw myself into his chest. He grabbed me with both arms and pulled me close.

‘Lily,’ he said. I was surprised by the tears that were seeping into his shirt. I was not expecting to fall apart at the sight of him, but I let him take me by the hand and lead me into the room. He closed the door behind us and clicked it so it was double-locked. Then he sat me in the chair by the window, and stroked my hair.

Fergus looked so much like Harry. The part of me that still wanted to give Harry a chance clung on to him as the nearest thing I was going to get. He crouched beside me.

‘Lily,’ he whispered. ‘It’s all right. I’m so sorry. You were in way over your head and you had no idea what was going on. I’ll explain it all to you later on. I’m just checking in on you before I go to Sarah. This is the Kiwi then?’

We looked at Jack. He and Carlos were both snoring. Jack looked younger like this, asleep and vulnerable. He was beautiful, I realised.

‘He’s been good to me,’ I said. ‘He still is.’

‘Yeah, I hope he’s genuine. Be careful.’

I tried to smile. ‘I haven’t been much of a judge, have I?’

‘Oh, older, more experienced people than you have been taken in, believe me. I wanted to tell you about Harry, but he swore it was different with you. I don’t know – I should have tried harder. Look, you’re all right here, aren’t you? Stay right where you are. I’m off to see Sarah. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

I hung onto his hand. ‘I want to come with you. I can’t bear just to sit here and wait.’

‘I’m older than you – I’m forty-two. I’m afraid I have to pull rank. I want you here, with the Kiwi and the baby. I can’t leave my nephew with a stranger. Sorry, but I just can’t.’

‘Jack’s not a stranger any more. Please, Fergus. I made all this happen. I’m right in the middle of it and I’m coming with you.’

He was smiling at me with a funny look on his face.

‘The Lily of a few weeks ago wouldn’t have done this. She would have hidden away.’

‘So let me come. I’m an adult.’

He sighed. ‘Against my better judgement, I suppose I can’t stop you. Leave a note for the Kiwi explaining that you’re with me and you’re fine. We’re seeing Sarah, though. Not my brother. I don’t want you going anywhere near him.’

We walked through the night, back to the very police station at which I had discovered that Sarah was alive. The air was velvety, surprisingly warm for December, and there were Christmas lights hanging between lamp posts and in people’s windows.

There was so much I wanted to ask Fergus.

‘So,’ I said. ‘um . . .’

‘Yes,’ he said, smiling down at me. ‘Um, indeed.’

‘Tell me about Harry.’

He sighed, and the tension, which I could see he was trying to hide, was obvious on his face.

‘Harry is a very damaged man,’ he said carefully, as we walked up the Ramblas. There were so many people out, talking and laughing, drunk and happy. We wove our way between the groups. ‘In a way it’s not his fault. He and my mother were very close. When our father died, Harry and Nina were almost happy, because it had always been the two of them in their own mutually adoring world. They were a strange little unit. You could trace it back to Nina’s neuroses, but let’s not bother. My mother is a poisonous woman, as you must have seen for yourself. She put a lot of stuff onto Harry. He had to be her golden boy. I was barely noticed in comparison. When Father died, I was on my own.’ He paused. ‘And then she sent Harry away to school, and that was the undoing of him, really. From then on, his behaviour seemed to verge on, well, some might say the psychopathic.’

‘He’s not a psychopath!’

‘Who knows? I think he is, actually, but he’s not exactly going to submit himself for testing. He built a shell around himself, for protection. The woman he adored sent him away, as a child, to live in an institution. It’s hard to grasp what a trauma that was for him. Far worse than our father dying, which he had actually seen as a positive.

‘He hated me, for those two years when I was still at home, living in a kind of distant way with Nina, who didn’t give much of a shit about me. Then when
I
got to school he bullied me like you wouldn’t believe. Other boys looked to their older brothers for protection. I was the one desperately trying to avoid mine. He spread it around that I wet the bed. He would walk up to me, take my bag, and I’d be trying to explain to the masters that I had done the work, but I didn’t have it, and because of the stupid code of honour thing, I couldn’t say that my own brother had flushed it down the loo. I did not do well at school and I rejoiced when he left.’

I felt so sick that I had to stop walking for a moment. Fergus put a hand on my shoulder.

‘You OK?’

‘Yes. Then what?’ We started walking again. We pushed through a crowd of students, who ignored us.

‘Then he did the law for a while, presenting himself as a hot-shot lawyer. It’s always been about validation from the outside world, and from Nina, so although it seemed surprising when he suddenly veered into showbiz, I was probably less astonished than most.’

I remembered what Julia had told me about his soap career ending suddenly. ‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘Oh, he drank too much, took too much coke, spiralled out of control, got violent.’ Fergus took my arm and made me wait while a taxi drove past, at a surprisingly stately pace, and then led me across the road, onto the street with the police station on it. ‘Violent to women,’ he clarified. ‘He was on the edge. Worse than the soap character he was playing. Very mixed up with hookers, totally lost sight of the normal way to behave, but if it was ever pointed out to him, there was fury. It was never his fault. It was the woman, it was his dealer, it was the bosses, it was generally me. My wife, Jasmine, loathes him. That’s why she left me. Because I wouldn’t cut him out of my life.’

‘Why wouldn’t you?’

‘Because of Sarah. And then because of you, Lily. So, showbiz and Harry did not mix well. And eventually it all went too far. He was with two girls, two escorts, in a hotel room, and he went berserk and attacked them. One managed to lock herself in the bathroom and call the police, but by the time they got there, he’d beaten the other poor woman so badly that she had to have part of her face reconstructed. It was hushed up, the series he was in paid her off so she didn’t press charges, and Harry had to get the hell out of there, find himself a wife, and get respectable pretty bloody quick.’

‘And Sarah married him, knowing all that?’

‘Sarah married him, not knowing most of that. Lily, don’t you see? You sound incredulous. If I’m not mistaken, you’re due to do the very same thing, next month.’

I swallowed hard. ‘I’m going to need your help, Fergus.’

There was a woman on duty at the police station this time. As soon as we started speaking to her, filling in each other’s sentences in our basic Spanish, she nodded.

‘English?’ she said. ‘Family?’

‘Sí,’ said Fergus. ‘I’m his brother.’ I was in the same building as Harry and Sarah. How, I wondered, were the police managing to untangle the threads of their insanely complex story?

‘Hermano
,’ I said, remembering the pages ofvocabulary I had memorised.

The woman started speaking, but it was too fast and I could not understand her. She pointed us towards the waiting room, and we shut the door and sat on the rickety chairs. No one else was in there. The vending machines hummed.

My stomach was full of acid. I tried to block out everything Fergus had told me. He could not have been talking about my Harry. Those things had been done by another man. I was scared to be close to him, now.

I looked back at the past six months. It was simply impossible for me to put the man who had made me feel that I was the most spectacular and beautiful person in the world, next to the man Fergus had just described, and to slide the two images together until they were on top of each other, one person. The person Fergus had just told me about was not the man who had come to find me at Tommy’s party on the beach, who had got me a job that I wanted, who had proposed to me at Maenporth as the sun set. Yet he had looked me in the eye and threatened to break every bone in my body, and I knew that everything Fergus had said was true.

How long would it take me to be able to accept that, and what I would do next?

‘Bag of crisps?’ Fergus asked, searching through his pockets for change. ‘When did you last eat?’

‘Not really hungry.’ I scooped the change from the bottom of my bag and handed it to him. ‘Here you go, I’ve got loads of coins. Look, Fergus, you were right. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t want to see him. Even knowing that he’s in this building . . . I shouldn’t be in the same place. I need to get out of here.’

He nodded. ‘Yes. I’ll walk you back to the hotel. We could fix it so you never need to see him again, you know, Lily. If they’re keeping him here for any reason, you can dash back and move your stuff out, and bugger off to live your life somewhere else.’

I sighed. ‘It would feel cowardly, but I think it would be best.’

Just then, the screen above the door buzzed into life, and B6 was spelled out in red. At the same moment, the door to the waiting room was opened, and a police officer stood there. He was slightly overweight, and his stomach bulged against the buttons of his shirt. The large moustache that crept from his top lip to the middle of his cheeks made me smile.

He spoke to us in English. ‘You can come, please? You are brother?’

‘Yes,’ said Fergus. ‘I’m the brother.’

‘Good. Is complicated.’

‘Look,’ I said to Fergus, stepping close to him, looking up, ‘I’ll head back to the hotel. I’ll be fine. It’s full of people out there, and we know Harry’s here. It’s not far. I’ll see you back there.’

He looked from me to the officer, and back again, then said, ‘I don’t want you to go on your own. It’s the middle of the night.’

‘If I stay here I’ll see Harry. I’m not ready to do that. And this is the centre of Barcelona. It’s safe.’

‘I know. I suppose we can’t get the Kiwi to come by for you, because of Charlie-boy. OK, walk fast, and text me when you get there.’

I stood on tiptoes and kissed his cheek.

I had almost reached the lights and bustle of the Ramblas, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I should have spun around in shock, but my mind was so far away from Barcelona that I barely noticed it.

‘Lily,’ said the voice, and for a second I thought it was Fergus. Then I knew.

‘Harry,’ I said, and I swallowed the bile that had risen to my throat.

‘Lily,’ he said again, and his voice was gentle. At least he wasn’t going to attack me. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get a beer. Everything seems to have gone completely crazy, doesn’t it?’

I shook my head and walked backwards, away from him, towards the revellers on the city’s main street.

‘You were in the police station,’ I said. ‘In a cell.’

He laughed. ‘In a cell? Of course I wasn’t in a cell! What have I done? It’s my first wife who’s got some explaining to do – not me. I didn’t do a thing, but she called the cops on me anyway. Released without charge, as far as I could understand what the hell they were talking about. Now, Lily. Come on, my darling. We’ll get a drink and try to work out what the fuck has been going on behind our backs.’

I wanted to get to where the crowds were. Harry was sounding like the man I had fallen in love with, and it was confusing me.

‘No,’ I said. It was all I could think of.

‘Hey.’ He was hurt. ‘Lily? It’s all right. This is not about you and me, is it? It’s about Sarah. She had me totally fooled. Completely. I feel like the biggest mug in the world.’