The Other Woman’s House (9 page)

Stop creating problems where none exist, Zailer.

Charlie swore under her breath. She knew she was about to spend at least the next two hours trying to make him tell her, and she knew she would fail.

‘You've got to
go
,' Olivia told Gibbs, pressing her hands against his ribcage. For the past hour she'd been trying to push him out of her bed, but he was stronger than she was, and resisting.

‘No, I haven't.' He was lying on his back, arms folded behind his head.

‘Yes, you have! We've got to start pretending not to be wicked Godless degenerates. If we start now, it won't take too long for it to become convincing – we might believe it by this evening if we're lucky.' Gibbs almost smiled, but didn't move. It was two o'clock in the afternoon, according to Olivia's phone. Her hotel room was as dark as it had been when they'd stumbled in here twelve hours ago. The black-out blinds and thick curtains were more serious about the preservation of night than any window-dressings Olivia had ever previously encountered, and had joined forces against the daylight.

‘Don't you have to get home at some point? Haven't you got a life, plans, a curfew? I've got all three.' She gave up pushing. It wasn't going to work, and it was hurting her hands.

Gibbs rolled onto his side so that he was facing her. It was funny: though she called him Chris, she could only think of him as Gibbs, which was what Simon called him. Would that change? Silently, she reprimanded herself for thinking about him in the future tense. She needed to pull herself together, but how could she, with him lying next to her, radiating heat?

‘Trying to get rid of me?' he asked.

‘Yes, but…not in a bad way.'

‘Is there a good way?'

‘Of course. There are loads. There's the self-sacrificing “cut me loose and save yourself while you still can” good way, and there's…' Olivia stopped, remembering that he'd compared
her to a Sunday colour supplement, and his reason for doing so. ‘We've got to be out by three o'clock,' she said briskly, to disguise her embarrassment. ‘I can't ring and ask for another extension.'

‘What are the other good ways?' Gibbs asked. Could he really be interested?

She couldn't tell him the truth. She'd just had sex with him, three times. If ever a situation called for the opposite of the truth, this was surely it.

‘I'm going nowhere unless you tell me,' he threatened.

‘For God's sake! All right, then, maybe this'll do the trick where trying to push you out of bed failed. Another good way is: I need you to go so that I can spend the rest of the day thinking obsessively about all aspects of you, and going over your every word and action in my mind, to the exclusion of all else, for the foreseeable future.'

Gibbs grinned. ‘It'll be easier for you to think about me if I stay here.'

‘Wrong. For as long as you're here, I'll be too busy wondering what you're thinking to do any thinking myself.'

‘I'm not thinking anything, apart from I want to fuck you again, but I'm too knackered.'

‘Not listening, not listening!' Olivia covered her ears with her hands. ‘Stop adding more words to the ones I already have to think about. I need to deal with the backlog. Don't laugh – I'm being serious. Please just go. Don't say anything else.'

‘So that you can think about me?'

‘Yes.'

‘And about nothing else?'

‘Not until I've cleared the backlog, no.'

Gibbs nodded as if her request were entirely reasonable. He
sat up and started gathering his clothes together. Olivia looked at her phone again. Five past two. She felt excitement welling up inside her at the prospect of him leaving. There were things she needed to attend to, urgently. First on the agenda was the letting off of steam in an undignified manner: running in circles round the room screaming, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!' Second was standing in front of the full-length mirror by the door and studying her face and body as if she'd never seen them before and never would again; trying to see them as Gibbs saw them, through his eyes. Then she would ring Charlie. Or rather, she would ring the caretaker at Los Delfines, the one whose number was on the website, and ask him to pass on a message for Charlie to ring her. Any decent sister – and Charlie was, generally – would want to hear this sort of news straight away.

Guess who's been a complete and utter slapper? Me!

Some gossip was so momentous that it demolished all considerations of honeymoon privacy that stood in its path; by pure chance, this was exactly such an instance. Olivia knew she would enjoy gossiping about herself as much as she enjoyed gossiping about other people. More, even. She so rarely did anything that would shock anyone. How refreshing, to be a scandal-maker at her age – to do something indescribably stupid when, in forty-one years, no one had ever feared she might.

Could she ask Charlie not to tell Simon? Some people kept no secrets from their spouses. Would her sister become fanatical about sharing everything, now that she was married? Simon would disapprove, in the way that people who lacked life experience always disapproved of others having adventures they had so far missed out on. He would feel that in some
obscure way, his and Charlie's wedding day had been ruined, degraded, by their two witnesses ending up in bed together.

Olivia sighed as she realised the implications. For Simon's sake, Charlie would have to be livid and wounded. She wouldn't see Olivia's one-night stand with Gibbs as something that had happened to Olivia, but as something bad that had happened to her all-important husband. Perhaps she would also object on her own account, and accuse Olivia of trespassing; Gibbs was police, and therefore belonged to Charlie and Simon, and not to Olivia, who'd had no right to barge in to a world that wasn't hers, into which she was only invited from time to time, at Charlie's discretion.

Had she hijacked the most important day of her sister's life? Was it unforgivable to cast oneself as a rival leading lady without consulting anybody, when one was supposed to be playing a supporting role? Olivia couldn't decide whether she'd done a terrible thing to Charlie, or nothing at all. She would never know, unless she told Charlie what had happened; she couldn't work it out on her own, not without knowing what the reaction would be.

I ought to be feeling guilty about Dom, she thought, and about Debbie Gibbs. They're the wronged parties here.

Gibbs was dressed. ‘I'm off,' he said. ‘You can start thinking.'

‘So can you,' said Olivia, wanting a way of attaching him to her, now that he was going. ‘Think about me, I mean.'

‘To the exclusion of all else,' he said. ‘For the foreseeable future.'

It sounded like a quote. Because it was, Olivia realised. He was quoting her.

Sam Kombothekra wasn't used to feeling guilty, but that was how he felt as he sat at a window table in Chompers café bar, waiting for Alice Bean. This was – or would be, assuming she turned up – an entirely unnecessary meeting, yet Sam had chosen it in preference to an afternoon at home with his family. He already knew the answers Alice would give to the questions he planned to ask her. He could have asked them over the phone, but he'd been keen to see her in the flesh, keener than he cared to admit even to himself. Few women were more legendary than Alice in the small world that was Spilling nick. Sam had heard from at least ten different sources that Simon Waterhouse had been romantically fixated on her several years ago. She'd been Alice Fancourt then.

Sam knew that her involvement with Simon (which, according to Colin Sellers, had been ‘a shagless waste of time') had ended badly, that the two of them no longer spoke to one another. How much of the story would Alice tell him today? On the phone this morning, she had asked within seconds of Sam introducing himself if he worked with Simon. She'd suggested Chompers as the venue for this afternoon's meeting, saying, ‘That's where Simon and I always met.' Sam felt guilty about that too: not only was he abandoning his family on one of his days off, he would also very probably be stirring up painful memories for a stranger, for no more noble reason than to satisfy his unwholesome curiosity.

He looked at his watch. She was ten minutes late. Should he ring her? No, he'd leave it until quarter past. Maybe he'd ask one of the waiters to turn down the music. Presumably it was intended to cover the noise from the corner of the room, where there was a fenced-off play area full of howling soggy-faced toddlers, a handful of mothers whose stiff smiles sizzled
with repressed fury, tables and chairs in the shape of toadstools, and an assortment of unrecognisable plastic objects in primary colours. Sam didn't blame the children for wailing; he might soon be doing the same if he had to sit through many more Def Leppard hits from the 1980s.

He stared out of the window at the car park. Any second now, Alice would pull into one of the empty spaces. This might be her, slamming shut the boot of a red Renault Clio. Sunglasses, strappy sandals…No. Simon would never fall for a face like that. Sam wondered if Alice looked anything like Charlie.
So what if she does? And so what if she doesn't?
Why did he find everything to do with Simon so compelling? He wouldn't have put himself out to meet a woman Chris Gibbs used to be in love with, or Colin Sellers. Come to think of it, he would probably travel a reasonable distance to see the rare woman that
didn't
inspire longing in Colin, assuming such a person existed.

Ashamed of his own prurience, Sam tried to focus instead on Connie Bowskill. He soon found himself thinking about Simon Waterhouse again. Nothing wrong with that, he decided, not in this context. Simon was the best detective Sam knew; he was the best detective anyone knew, though most people were reluctant to admit it, and preferred to dismiss him as a rude, unpredictable troublemaker. On the first of January this year, at five past midnight, Sam had made a resolution: instead of constantly feeling inferior to Simon, and allowing more and more resentment to build, he would try to learn from him, to put aside his ego and see if he could acquire by imitation – by studying Simon's behaviour and attitudes as if he might one day be examined on both – a small fraction of that brilliance.

Simon would not have dismissed Connie Bowskill in a hurry, Sam was certain of that. Would he have believed her, though?
In Sam's position, having met Connie and heard what she had to say, would Simon be leaning more towards thinking she was suffering from stress and seeing things that weren't there, or would he be convinced she was lying? Maybe he'd think her story's implausibility made it likely to be true, because few people would have the confidence to tell so outrageous a lie.

You're not Simon – that's the whole problem. You've no idea what he'd think.

No, that wasn't true. You couldn't work closely with someone for years and not have an inkling as to how their mind worked. Simon would think there was at least a chance that a crime had been committed. If he'd gone with Sam to talk to the Bowskills this morning, he'd have come away certain that there was something badly wrong in that house – Melrose Cottage, not 11 Bentley Grove, Cambridge. Sam agreed, in so far as one can agree with one's imaginary projection of an absent person. Something was going on: Connie and Kit Bowskill hadn't told him everything, not by a long way. He'd overheard enough of the conversation he wasn't supposed to hear to be sure that they were conspiring to hide something from him.

The idea of somebody putting an image of a dead body on an estate agent's website was laughable. Beyond crazy. In his mind, Sam heard Simon say, ‘Crazy doesn't have to mean made up. Insanity's as real as sanity. It doesn't need our understanding in order to fuck up and end lives – it only needs to understand itself. Sometimes it doesn't even need that.' Immediately, Sam wished he hadn't remembered the comment; with it came the memory of yet another instance of Simon being proved right and him wrong, despite his more sensible belief in what had seemed so much more likely.