The Other Woman’s House (48 page)

‘Jackie was playing at being his wife,' Sam said. ‘I get that part, but not the Gilpatricks.' He looked up, at Simon. ‘Why do Bowskill and Jackie want to have sex in their house – in two of their houses – while they're out? Is it some sort of sexual obsession thing?'

‘Simon.' Charlie's voice caught in her throat, which was horribly dry. ‘Fuck. I think I've just…'

‘What? What?' Simon always demanded to know everything before she'd had a chance to get her thoughts in order.

‘The house opposite the professor's – what number is it?'

Simon screwed up his face, trying to remember.

‘It's number 12, isn't it?'

‘That's strange. Just before you said that, I was thinking
“12”. I suppose it must be. I half remember seeing it on the door.'

‘I think Alice misunderstood what Connie Bowskill told her,' said Charlie, tripping over her words in an effort to get them out quickly. ‘About Kit's joke name for 18 Pardoner Lane. I think the joke was calling the house 17 Pardoner Lane when the address was
18
Pardoner Lane. It wasn't the duplication that made it funny – 17 Pardoner Lane, 17 Pardoner Lane, Cambridge – it was the idea of confusing the postman by giving the house, as a name, a different address on the same street. Not only annoying the postman, but annoying the people who lived at number 17 too – Mr and Mrs Talker.' The memory of Alice's words came suddenly into sharp focus. ‘Annoying people was on Kit Bowskill's mind when he was making his stupid suggestions,' Charlie said, certain now that she was on to something. ‘He asked Connie if she thought it'd annoy the Beth Dutton people, them calling their house the Death Button Centre.'

‘17 Pardoner Lane, 18 Pardoner Lane, Cambridge,' said Sam slowly.

‘You're right,' Simon said. ‘It works as a joke. Might even be a better joke.' Humour wasn't his area of expertise, and he knew it. ‘It'd also explain why Connie misremembered the address, all these years later – if the joke stuck, if 17 Pardoner Lane became her and Bowskill's nickname for the house…' Simon pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket, pressed some keys, then thrust it into the space between Charlie and Sam so that they could both see it. ‘Proust's not Proust in my phone – he's “Snowman”. Nicknames, pet names – they stick. Don't they, Stepford?'

Sam cringed visibly at the nickname Colin Sellers and Chris
Gibbs had devised for him when they hardly knew him and found his unwavering politeness frustrating.

‘Forget about teasing Sam,' Charlie said impatiently. ‘Don't you see what I'm saying? Kit Bowskill did it again – he repeated his nickname trick, so proud was he of his little in-joke. He's never had any connection with Selina Gane, or with her house – hers wasn't the house he had in mind when he put 11 Bentley Grove into his SatNav as home.'

Simon's eyes were wide, unfocused. Charlie could see that he was getting it. ‘11 Bentley Grove is his name for
12
Bentley Grove,' he said eventually. ‘His private name for his and Jackie's…'

‘“Love-nest” is the word you're looking for,' said Charlie pointedly.

Simon was biting the inside of his lip. ‘If he cares enough about that house to give it a special name…No, it doesn't work. If he's obsessed with 12 Bentley Grove now, it's only because the Gilpatricks bought it. It's a massively less attractive house than 18 Pardoner Lane, and Kit Bowskill wouldn't be prepared to compromise on the aesthetics. Which means it's not about the house any more…' Simon's eyes narrowed. He drummed his fingers on the table.

‘We've lost him,' Charlie said to Sam, who looked worried.

‘You can't dismiss 11 Bentley Grove as irrelevant,' he told her. ‘That's where Connie Bowskill saw the woman's body.'

‘Why did they buy new curtains?' Simon demanded, startling Charlie and Sam with the volume of his question. ‘No one buys curtains for a house they don't own. Basil Lambert-Wall said the new curtains hadn't gone up yet, but today, when I went to the house and rang the bell, all the curtains were drawn – closed. Sunny day like this, why wouldn't you let the light in?'

‘You went to 12 Bentley Grove today?' said Charlie.

‘I was hoping to talk to some or all of the Gilpatricks,' Simon told her. ‘Seven years ago, they got what Kit Bowskill wanted. I wanted to check they'd survived their victory. No one answered the door.'

‘So you thought you'd enlist our help to smash it down,' said Sam with a shudder he tried, unsuccessfully, to hide.

‘The woman at 17 Pardoner Lane told me where Elise Gilpatrick works,' Simon said. ‘The Judge Business School. I couldn't get through to them on the phone – they're probably closed Saturdays. If I'd got through, I'd have asked when Elise last turned up for work.'

‘Aren't you leaping to rather extreme conclusions?' said Charlie.

‘Who was the dead woman Connie Bowskill saw on Roundthehouses?' Sam asked her. She inferred from the question that he shared Simon's concern for Elise Gilpatrick's welfare.

‘You could wrap a body in a pair of curtains,' Simon said in a monotone. He seemed to be talking to a point beyond Charlie's shoulder. ‘The prof said Jackie Napier's car was full of them, curtains wrapped in plastic – so many she'd had to put the back seats down. Wrap a dead body in curtains, cover the whole lot in plastic, make it airtight with parcel tape so that the neighbours don't smell anything…' Simon was pressing buttons on his phone. The same button, three times: number 9. ‘We've got enough,' he said. ‘No breaking and entering required.' A few seconds later, Charlie and Sam heard him ask to be put through to the police.

‘You can still save me,' I say to Kit, as calmly as I can. ‘Saving me doesn't mean killing me. You must be able to see that.'

He's behind me, his face pressing against the back of my skull. When he shakes his head, I feel it. ‘You don't understand anything,' he says, his words indistinct, muffled by my hair. ‘Nothing.'

The knife moves beneath my chin. I lift my head, try to pull my neck back.

‘Listen to me, Kit. You've always told me I'm clever. Remember?' This is what I have to do: I have to talk. There can't be silence, or space for him to think.
Space for him to act
.

‘You're not as clever as Jackie,' he says flatly.

I want to scream at him that I'm cleverer than Jackie, that she's lying lifeless in someone else's congealed blood and I'm still alive.

I'm clever enough to find a key labelled ‘No. 12' in a mug with a red feather design, and remember about 17 Pardoner Lane, 18 Pardoner Lane.
11 Bentley Grove, 12 Bentley Grove
.

If only I'd been clever enough to stay away – to be satisfied with knowing, instead of having to prove it to myself.

How can Jackie Napier have wanted me dead? She didn't know me.

‘Please listen,' I say evenly. ‘There's no way out of this, you're
right, but there is a way
through
. If we face up to what's happened, take responsibility…'

Kit laughs. ‘Did you know there are no prisons in Cambridge? I Googled it yesterday. There's one in March, one in a place called Stradishall, near Newmarket. Postcode's CB8 – sounds like Cambridge, but it's not.'

I open my mouth, but no words come. It's not what I was expecting him to say. He searched for prisons in Cambridge. On the internet.
Why?

‘We were idiots – we shouldn't have wasted our time on the villages,' he mumbles. ‘Should have stuck to the city. Those tiny hick places – Horningsea, Harston – they're not Cambridge, they're not civilisation. Might as well stagnate in Little Holling. Reach, Burwell, Chippenham – you might as well be in Newmarket, once you've gone that far.'

My teeth are chattering. Is it still hot outside? It can't be; I'm freezing. Kit's body feels cold too.
Freezing each other to death
.

‘We wasted so much time,' he says sadly. He's talking about 2003, our house search.

Seven years ago. Gone, finished. There's no past and no future, no point talking about either. There's nothing but now, and scared of dying, and silence piling up around me, suffocating, spreading like blood.

Blood that disappeared when Kit sat down to look.

I breathe in sharply. Knowledge rushes at me, before I have time to doubt it.
The blood wasn't the only thing that disappeared
.

I try to push my fear aside and think in an ordered way, but I can't think – all I can do is see what's no longer in front of me, like a film playing in my head: Kit sitting at my desk, staring at the laptop. Me standing behind him, scared I'll see the
horrific picture again, even though he's saying it isn't there; Nulli's certificate of incorporation lying on the floor in its smashed frame…

‘I know how you did it,' I say. ‘Everyone kept asking me why you didn't see the woman's body, when you looked at the same virtual tour that I looked at, the one I started. I kept having to explain what I thought must have happened.'

Kit makes a noise, a small exhalation. Somehow, I can tell that he's smiling.

I can feel the expression on his face without seeing him: does that mean I know him?

‘It was a good theory,' he says. ‘A virtual tour with a variable that comes up only once in every hundred or thousand loops.'

‘I was wrong, though, wasn't I? You were looking at a different tour. When you first went into the room, I stayed outside.'

Shaking on the landing. Kit on the other side of the closed door, complaining.
Great. I've always wanted to look at a stranger's dishwasher in the middle of the night
.

‘You closed down the lot,' I say. ‘The tour, the internet, everything. One click and it was gone. On the desktop, you had the other tour ready to go – the original one.'
You got it from her, from Jackie
. ‘Another click and it started playing. There was the lounge, with no woman's body in it.'

Kit says nothing. I don't think he's smiling any more.

‘When I came back into the room, there was no Roundthehouses screen behind the virtual tour box, only the desktop screen. Before I woke you up, when I was watching the tour on my own, the screen behind it was the Roundthehouses screen. The address was there – 11 Bentley Grove – and the Roundthehouses logo.'

Why has it taken my memory so long to produce this detail?

Because you can't see everything at once. You can't see your husband's face when you're staring at the knife in front of your own.

‘When you got angry with me and went back to bed, I sat there and stared for a few minutes, just stared. Watched one room after another turn in slow motion. Every time the lounge came back, it was the same – no woman's body. Then I closed the tour down – your tour. I decided to start from scratch, in case that made a difference. All I could think about was how the dead woman could possibly have disappeared. I didn't ask myself why I was having to reconnect to the internet – I was barely aware of doing it.'

‘You didn't wake me up,' says Kit quietly.

Of course I didn't. ‘No. You were awake. Doing a convincing impression of somebody asleep.'
Those long, slow breaths, the stillness…Both of you, you and Jackie, lying still, pretending. Lying.

‘You knew I went to Cambridge on Fridays, looking for you, looking for evidence of your other life at 11 Bentley Grove. You must have known long before I told you.' I feel disorientated as I pull the story, piece by piece, out of the darkness. I still can't grasp what it means, still can't see the full picture. It's as if I'm shining light on one fragment at a time, trying to connect each new part to the others I've managed to gather together.

‘You didn't go every Friday,' Kit says. ‘I could always tell. Some Thursday nights you'd be massively on edge – you'd ask me what time I was setting off to London in the morning, what time I'd be back at the end of the day. You wanted to know how long you had.'

I close my eyes, remembering how exhausting it was – pretending to have one motive, concealing another. I needn't have bothered.

Needn't bother with anything, ever again.

No. Keep talking. Keep telling the story, before the chance slips away
. Kit has spent so long and worked so hard trying to keep my reality separate from his. I need to tear down the barrier. We are going to die here, together; I want us first to live, just for a short while, in the same world.

‘Jackie knew exactly when 11 Bentley Grove went on the market. She works for Lancing Damisz. Worked,' I correct myself. ‘She'd have known all the details. You both knew that when I went to Cambridge that Friday, I'd see the “For Sale” board outside the house for the first time and be desperate to look inside. I rang them, you know.'

‘Who?' Kit brings the knife closer to my throat.

‘Lasting Damage.' I hear a noise, a manic laugh, and realise it's coming from me. ‘I wanted someone to show me round there and then. The woman I spoke to told me no one was available, it was too short notice. Was it Jackie who told me that?'

Kit says nothing, and I know I'm right. I shiver: cold feathers on my neck.

‘You knew I'd come home and go straight on the internet to look at the pictures. That's why…' I stop, sensing the presence of an obstacle without knowing what it is. Then it comes to me. ‘How did you know I wouldn't go to an internet café? I thought about it. If I'd known where one was…'

‘We figured you were bound to,' Kit says.
We
. Him and Jackie. ‘Didn't matter. We knew you'd look again at home, soon as you could. You were so suspicious and paranoid by
then, once wouldn't have been enough for you – you'd have had to check, in case you'd missed something.'