The Other Woman’s House (46 page)

‘I need you to help me break into a house,' said Simon, as if it was the most reasonable request in the world.

Charlie nearly lost her grip on the three pints of lager she was carrying; somehow she managed to lower them onto the table without spilling a drop. She, Simon and Sam Kombothekra were sitting outside the Granta pub in Cambridge, by the river. Charlie had been waiting for Sam at the Brown Cow in Spilling when Simon's summons by text message had arrived. She'd had to abandon her drink and tell Sam he wasn't getting one either, not until he'd sat in a car for two hours.

‘On Bentley Grove,' Simon helpfully provided more details. ‘Not number 11 – the house opposite Professor Sir Basil Lambert-Wall's.'

‘Why?' Sam asked. ‘What's in there?'

Simon took a sip of his drink, frowned. ‘Dunno,' he muttered. ‘Maybe nothing.'

‘Well, there's an irresistible incentive if ever I heard one,' said Charlie sarcastically.

‘I'll tell you what I do know,' said Simon. ‘That'll be easier. When I left Kit Bowskill's parents' house, I broke the speed limit all the way to 18 Pardoner Lane. There was no one in, so I tried number 17. The owners were as pleased to see me as they were last time I turned up unannounced, and today I
accepted their offer of a coffee. I figured they'd be the people to ask about number 18 – they've lived on Pardoner Lane since 2001, and they're talkers. Especially her.'

Seeing Sam's puzzled expression, Charlie explained, ‘He means they're socially adept human beings who speak and are friendly to people.' In stark contrast to Simon, who kept his head down when he entered and left the house, and could imagine nothing worse than knowing all the neighbours and having to chat to them when he saw them. Charlie had grilled him about it on numerous occasions. ‘You chat to your colleagues, your mum and dad, me,' she'd pointed out, aware of the linguistic inaccuracy. What Simon did could hardly be described as chatting. ‘If I talk to the neighbours once, it sets a precedent,' he'd said. ‘Every time I walk out of my front door, I'll have to stop on the street and exchange pleasantries – I don't want to have to do that. When I leave the house, it's because I've got somewhere to go. When I'm on my way home, I want to get home, quickly.'

‘What did Mrs Talker tell you?' Charlie asked.

‘When she and her husband first moved to Pardoner Lane, number 18 was owned by the Beth Dutton Centre people – the school next door.'

Charlie wondered again about Connie Bowskill getting the address wrong. How could she have remembered every detail about it correctly apart from the house number, especially when Kit had made that joke about using the address as a name for the house?

17 Pardoner Lane, 17 Pardoner Lane, Cambridge.

But that was wrong, surely. It must have been 18 Pardoner Lane, 18 Pardoner Lane, Cambridge.

‘The headmistress lived at number 18,' Simon was saying.
‘Short commute to work for her – just next door. Then, in 2003, the school got into financial trouble and they sold number 18 to raise capital. The headmistress now lives in a rented flat on the next street along.'

‘Mrs Talker told you that?' said Charlie.

‘She and the headmistress belong to the same book group. I asked her if she knew who the house had sold to. She did: a family called the Gilpatricks. She also knew which estate agent had sold it, both in 2003 and last year, when it came up again, because she and her husband nearly put in an offer. Both times, the house was sold by Cambridge Property Shop. Estate agents' offices are open on Saturdays, so they were my next port of call.' Simon's eyes had taken on the glassy, possessed look that Charlie and Sam knew so well. ‘Guess who worked for Cambridge Property Shop in 2003? And in 2009 – she only left to go to a new job in February this year.'

‘Lorraine Turner?' said Charlie.

‘No,' Sam said. He normally sounded tentative when he made a suggestion, but not now. ‘It was Jackie Napier, wasn't it?'

‘What makes you say that?' Simon asked. Charlie sighed. She was obviously wrong, if he was asking Sam to explain his thinking and not her.

‘I've got a bad feeling about her,' said Sam. He turned to Charlie. ‘That's why I wanted to talk to you today.' He had the grace to look contrite, at least. ‘Sorry, I should have told you in the car.' All the way from Spilling to Cambridge, Charlie had tried to persuade him to tell her what had been so important that it couldn't wait; Sam had refused to be drawn, claimed he'd misinterpreted something, that it was nothing, really. ‘I figured Simon knew what was going on and
he'd tell us when we got here. If it was nothing to do with Jackie Napier, then my hunch was wrong – I suppose I wanted to hold off on bad-mouthing her. I've got no proof of anything.'

‘Let's hear the hunch,' said Simon.

Sam looked cornered. He sighed. ‘I didn't like her at all. She seemed…This is going to sound unforgivably snobbish.'

‘I forgive you,' Charlie told him. ‘Embrace your inner snob – I did, a long time ago.'

‘She seemed stupid. Ignorant, but thinking she knew it all – that was how she came across for most of the interview. The sort of woman who imagines she's making a brilliant impression when actually everyone listening to her thinks she's a bigoted idiot. She came out with some classic self-righteous lines: “I live in the real world, not fantasy land”, “No one pays me to worry about murders” – that sort of thing. Quoted herself a lot, too: “I always say”, followed by some pearl of non-wisdom or other.'

Charlie laughed. ‘God, Sam, you're such a bitch!'

Sam's face coloured. ‘I'm not enjoying this,' he said.

‘Go on,' said Simon.

‘She had fixed ideas about herself, kept telling me what sort of person she was. “Two things about me,” she said, and then she listed them. The first was loyalty – if she was on your side, then she was on your side for ever.'

‘How tedious,' said Charlie. ‘The people who bang on about their own loyalty are always the first to turn vicious if you send them a birthday card late.'

‘She told me she wasn't “an imagination sort of person”,' said Sam. ‘Seemed proud of it, too. She'd just got back from staying with her sister in New Zealand. From what she said, it was clear she'd spent her time there criticising her sister's
life choices and flaunting the superiority of her own – completely insensitive. But then there were times when she seemed to know exactly what I was thinking – sensitive to the point of telepathy. She was inconsistent.'

‘Some people are,' Charlie felt obliged to point out.

‘I know,' said Sam. ‘That's what I told myself. But then she said something else, about Selina Gane's passport photo, something that struck me as…wrong. Gut instinct, before I'd had a chance to think about it, even. I knew I'd heard something that jarred as soon as she said it, but I couldn't work out what it was, not for ages. Then last night it came to me. She was talking about the woman who pretended to be Selina Gane and tried to put 11 Bentley Grove up for sale. “She was clever,” she said. “She knew all she had to do was talk about people not looking like they do in their passports. If she made me think about all those other people, she wouldn't have to convince me – I'd do all the work myself.”'

‘So?' said Charlie. ‘What's the problem there?'

Simon was nodding, infuriating know-all that he was. He couldn't possibly understand what Sam was getting at. Could he?

‘Maybe no problem.' Sam sighed. ‘That's why I kept quiet about it.'

‘What might or might not be the problem?' Charlie rephrased her question, rolling her eyes at his annoying humility. ‘I'm not asking you to commit to its problematicness – just tell me what it is.'

‘What do you think Jackie meant when she said that the woman knew she'd do all the work herself?' Sam asked.

‘She knew Jackie would immediately think of all the friends' passport photos she's seen that have looked nothing
like them,' said Simon. ‘All the times she's asked, “Is that really you?”'

Sam was nodding vigorously.

‘The weight of your own experience always feels like solid proof.' Simon directed the comment at Charlie. Did he think she was lagging behind? ‘Jackie's subconscious reminds her that in all the cases she, personally, has come across, without exception, the implausible photographs
were
of the people in question, however unlike them they looked.'

‘That's exactly right.' Sam sounded relieved. ‘Whoever she was, this woman didn't so much lie to Jackie as invite her to lie to herself: to think beyond the specific issue of the picture in Selina Gane's passport to what she knew to be the norm in the generic situation: that
no one
looks much like their passport photo, and yet that
never
means it's not a photo of them. It means it's a bad likeness, that's all.'

Charlie thought she'd grasped it. ‘So you're saying this woman deliberately invoked one of Jackie's firmly ingrained assumptions…'

‘One of her firmly ingrained
personal-experience-based
assumptions,' Simon amended. ‘Those are always more powerful: I once met a gay man who had a high-pitched voice, therefore all men with high voices are gay. A group of Asian teenagers once stole my handbag, therefore all Asian teenagers I meet from now on must be criminals. Our minds are reassured by patterns that repeat and repeat: whenever X is the case, that means Y is also the case. That's what Jackie Napier meant: that the woman was banking on her mind, all on its own, finding that familiar groove and slotting into it – no passport photos look like their subjects, yet all passport photos are, nonetheless,
of
their subjects.'

‘So Jackie was right,' Charlie concluded. ‘Liar Woman was clever.'

‘She might or might not have been, but that's not what matters.' Sam looked worried again. ‘It's Jackie's cleverness I'm concerned with. When she told me, in passing, that this woman knew she would do all the work herself, she was making a point that was quite profound, quite subtle – a point we've just taken several minutes to unpack, and we're three pretty intelligent people. Sorry.' Sam blushed as he apologised for having awarded himself praise he perhaps didn't deserve. ‘She was demonstrating that she understood and could sum up, far more succinctly than we just have, exactly why the deception had worked so well. That level of instinctive understanding of something so complex would be way beyond a hell of a lot of people. It'd be way beyond someone with the – sorry, this is going to sound terrible – with the hackneyed, below-average mindset she seemed to have the rest of the time.'

Simon downed the dregs of his pint, slammed the glass down on the table. ‘There's no doubt that Jackie Napier's clever,' he said. ‘She's also an expert liar. If you're bright, it's almost impossible to present yourself as the opposite – much harder than for an evil person to present himself as good. It's not only the attitudes you express that are different, it's the speech patterns, the sentence structure, vocabulary, everything. But she very nearly pulled it off. If she hadn't said that one thing, you'd have been convinced.'

Sam nodded.

‘You were privileged,' Simon told him. ‘She must have thought highly of you. For you, she pulled out all the stops and produced the biggest lie she's ever told or is likely to tell. She told you she wasn't an imagination sort of person. Wrong –
that's precisely what she is. She's an imagination person, but with no conscience, no empathy, very little fear, hardly any awareness of her own limitations.'

Charlie felt a shiver pass through her. The description was too familiar; other names sprang to mind.
Names of monsters
.

‘Jackie Napier's the sort of person you wish had no imagination at all,' said Simon.

‘I can't breathe,' I gasp. Kit's pressing the knife too hard against my throat. ‘You're suffocating me.'

‘Sorry,' he whispers. He's buried his face in my hair. I can feel his tears wetting my neck. He takes the knife away, holds it in front of my face. It shakes in his hand. His other arm is round my waist, holding me in place, pinning my arms to my sides. No way I can get away from him; I'm not strong enough.

The knife's serrated blade gleams silver.

Images flash through my mind: a teapot, chocolate cake, a plastic beaker with a lid, the blue and pink hourglass dress.

It's our knife, from Melrose Cottage. I last saw it on a wooden tray, beside my birthday cake.

Why didn't I think that Kit might be here already? How can I have been so stupid? New tears prick my eyelids. I blink, try to hold them back. Try to think. I can't die now, can't let Kit kill me. Can't let my own recklessness turn me into a news headline. People will hear the story of what happened to me and say, ‘It was her own stupid fault'.

‘Don't be scared,' Kit says. ‘I'm coming with you. Do you really think I'd make you go alone?'

Go
. He's talking about dying.

‘We'll go together, when we're ready,' he says. ‘We're in the right place, at least.'

When we're ready
. That means not yet. He's not ready yet, not ready to kill us both – I cling to this shred of hope.

‘Who was the dead woman I saw on the virtual tour?' I make a vow to myself: I might not live through this, but I won't die until I know. I won't die in ignorance.

‘Jackie Napier,' says Kit.

No. That's not right
. Jackie was alive on Tuesday. She walked into the room Kit and I were in. Said to Grint,
I don't know where you got her from, but you can put her back. I've never seen her before in my life
.