The Third Wife (12 page)

‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’

‘Yes,’ said Adrian, ‘and, well, the circumstances of her death always struck me as totally out of character. I mean, she was drunk, for one. Eight times over. Enough to kill her. She was tiny. And not only that but drinking alone, it appears. Or at least none of her friends ever came forward to say they’d been with her. So, we must assume …’ He lost his momentum for a second, imagining again the sheer wretchedness of Maya drinking vodka shots on her own. ‘Anyway’ – he brought himself back – ‘Maya died, we buried her, we tried to get on with our lives and then my son came to live with me, just over a week ago. He was using my laptop on Saturday. And he found a folder, hidden somewhere in the bowels of my home drive, filled with pages of these …’

He passed the papers across the table to DI Mickelson, who pulled them closer to himself with the tips of his big fingers and cleared his throat. Adrian watched him, silently, monitoring his facial expressions for signs of shock and distaste.

A few moments later, DI Mickelson pushed the papers away from himself an inch or two, again with his fingertips, and leaned back in his chair. He pulled a breath in through his teeth and said, ‘Very unpleasant. Very unpleasant indeed.’

‘So,’ said Adrian, ‘what do you think? Is there anything we can do?’

‘Well, yes, we can certainly look into this. I assume you have the original emails?’ He nodded at Adrian’s laptop.

‘Well, no,’ he replied. ‘It looks like Maya deleted them all. I’m not exactly a technical whiz-kid but I’ve had a root about, and I can’t find the originals anywhere. Just these cut-and-pasted copies. But it’s all definitely connected. I mean, look’ – he pointed at the last email – ‘right there. April the eighteenth, that was the day before she died. And there were no other emails from this person. I went straight into Maya’s email account after her death, looking for clues, you know, and this person, this Dear Bitch person, never showed their face again. Clear evidence that they were involved somehow in Maya’s death.’

‘Yes,’ said DI Mickelson, running his fingertips around a button on his bright white polo shirt. ‘I can absolutely see that there must be some connection. But I’ve looked at the files, Mr Wolfe, and whichever way I look at it, nobody was directly responsible for killing your wife. Two separate people saw her fall into the path of the bus; it was three thirty in the morning; the streets were virtually empty. If there’d been another person involved, the witnesses would have seen it. The bus driver would have seen it.
Someone
would have seen it. So while I can look into this for you, open a file, see if we can track this person down, I’m not sure we’ll be able to use it to open an inquiry into your wife’s death. It would be a separate crime.
Assuming
’ – he looked directly at Adrian – ‘we can get anything out of your laptop to lead us to this person. As it stands, without any hard data,’ he sighed, ‘these could just be a creative-writing exercise.’

Adrian flinched at these words.

‘Leave it with me.’ DI Mickelson tapped the edge of the laptop with his fingertips, signifying that the meeting had reached its natural conclusion. ‘I can get someone to have a look at this over the next twenty-four hours; you can come back for it tomorrow. We’ll call you.’

‘Oh,’ said Adrian, clutching the arms of his chair, bringing himself up to standing. ‘Right.’

‘We’ll just need your password, if you’re happy to let us have it.’

‘Yes, yes, of course.’ He dictated it to the DI, who scribbled it down on his notepad. ‘I guess if I can’t trust you lot with my password, we’re all doomed.’

Ian Mickelson looked up at him, half amused and said, ‘Yes. Indeed.’

And then he left, emerging into an unexpectedly hot Kentish Town, feeling strangely euphoric. Something was happening. The events of 19 April 2011 were taking some kind of form. For so long it had felt like a sick joke, a hiccup in the space–time continuum. Maya, walking in front of a bus eight times over the limit when she should have been lying next to him in bed. It lacked context. It lacked depth. It simply was not supposed to have happened. And now, maybe, he could start to shade it in, make it look like something he could comprehend.

And he knew, he just knew, that beautiful, glittering, disappearing Jane had something to do with it.

Adrian went straight back to the office after his meeting with DI Mickelson at Kentish Town. He ignored the emails in his inbox, the Post-it notes flapping on his screen, the paperwork neatly arranged inside a clear folder with the words: ‘For the meeting with Brent. Please read and sign ASAP!!’ attached to it. He brushed it all aside and he typed the words ‘Baxter and Cross Acton’ into his search engine, sipping gingerly from an overly hot cup of tea as he did so.

He dialled the number on the estate agent’s website and he asked to speak to the manager. The manager wasn’t available so Adrian asked the man on the end of the line, ‘How long have you worked there?’

The man said, ‘Eight years.’

Adrian said, ‘Great! Listen, do you remember a woman called Tiffy or Tiffany?’

‘Yeah, yeah, definitely. I remember her.’

‘Well, she … sorry, my name is Adrian Wolfe. A woman left a phone at my flat some time back. She didn’t come back to claim it but I traced the phone back to a woman called Tiffany Martin. Your former colleague. She told me the phone was one she’d used when she worked at your agency. She said the phone would have been passed on to her replacement. Now, since all this happened it has come to light that the woman who originally left the phone at my house might know something about the, er …’ He paused. ‘Sorry, what’s your name?’

‘My name is Abdullah.’

‘Great. Thank you. And sorry, this is a bit rambling, Abdullah. But it seems that she might know something about the death of my wife a year ago. Accidental death. Not murder or anything like that. But still, it was a very inexplicable death. Odd, you know, and I’ve never been able to make any sense of it. So, as you can imagine, I’m quite keen to follow any leads I possibly can. And if there
is
a connection between your agency and the woman, well … Anyway, I’m grabbing at straws, I know. I’m desperate. So …’

There was a suspended silence on the line. Adrian couldn’t tell which way it was leading.

‘God,’ said Abdullah eventually. ‘Is this for real?’

‘Yes,’ said Adrian, ‘I’m afraid it is.’

‘Well, listen, the boss is out and I’m not sure how much info I can share, but I’m pretty sure Tiff’s phone went to Dolly.’

‘Dolly?’

‘Yeah. But let me talk to the boss. I really want to help you, but I don’t want to get into any trouble. You know, these days, privacy, all that, I never know where the lines are drawn. It gets tighter all the time.’

‘Sure,’ said Adrian, feeling pretty certain that Abdullah would have given him Dolly’s bra size if he’d thought Adrian was a potential house-buyer.

‘But give me your number. I promise I’ll call you straight back, minute I’ve got the all-clear. Yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ said Adrian. ‘Thank you.’

While he was supposed to be reading the notes for the big meeting with Brent Council and checking the final plans for the last-minute penthouse extension to the shared-ownership block on Goldhurst Road and signing off the budgets for the last quarter and popping in to see Derek in response to Derek’s scribbled note imploring him to ‘pop in to see me when you get back’, Adrian read the
Dear Bitch
emails. Again. There were three pages of them and he’d read them all at least six times since Saturday afternoon. He kept waiting for some little turn of phrase, some light bulb of recognition to jump out and make sense of it all.

The phrases danced in front of his eyes; he’d read them so many times now that they’d started to lose their shape:

Pathetic loser

Home wrecker

Selfish to your core

The worst teacher in the country

You think they all love you so much, but they don’t, OK

Even your own parents hate you

Don’t know what he sees in you, you’re not all that

This last comment hurt him the most. Sweet Maya. She’d been so insecure about her looks. I’m nothing special, she’d say, with an apologetic shrug as if she was somehow letting everyone down by not being more beautiful. She’d delete perfectly nice photos of herself from his phone and sigh over the cheekbones and hairstyles and buttocks of women she perceived to be more attractive than herself. He remembered the way her eyes would follow Caroline about when they were all together, as if she was trying to glean from her some essential trick about how to be beautiful. And he tried to imagine her reading these words, words that backed up all her insecurities. The thought of Maya dying thinking she wasn’t beautiful enough made him want to weep.

He pulled a pen from the pot on his desk and began scribbling his thoughts down.

Knows she has two parents

Knows she is a teacher

Knows she is my third wife

Knows when she is at home

Knows what she looks like

Knows the names of people in her family

‘Think
they
love you.
They
don’t’ Suggests someone on periphery of family

References to physical appearance sound bitchy. Suggests written by a woman

He stopped and looked up. Would ‘Jane’ really have known so much about Maya? Surely not. Adrian had known everyone in Maya’s life: her headmistress, her weird best friend, her cousins in Maidstone, a couple of friends from teacher training college, the new friend from the posh school, what was her name? Holly. Yes. Holly Patch. He could even remember her surname. He’d met everyone. He was sure he had. Maya wasn’t a great collector of people. She was fussy, like him. So if it wasn’t ‘Jane’, then who the hell else knew so much about his wife? One of his ex-wives? Could it be? No. No way. Not possible. Susie and Caroline were too clever, too secure, too wrapped up in their own lives to waste time sending poison emails. Cat? Pearl? Could it be? Could it be that these emails had come from one of his own daughters?

Could it?

‘No.’ He said this out loud as if to ensure that his subconscious would hear it too. ‘No.’ The thought was unpalatable to him. His girls. His angels.

His mobile phone rang. He sighed and put down the notebook and pen. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Is that Adrian Wolfe?’

‘Speaking.’

‘Oh, hi, my name is Dolly Patel. I was just talking to my colleague, Abdullah, about your problem with the phone. I’m not sure how helpful I can be. But it might be something, you never know …’

‘Oh. Good. Great. Thank you.’ Adrian sat up straight and grabbed a pen and paper.

‘My bag was stolen, from the hall table of a house I was showing clients around. I’d left the door on the latch for the next viewers. My phone was in it. Well, at least I think it was in it. I wasn’t really using it then, I’d been given a smartphone. But I’m pretty sure it was. Apparently there’ve been loads of similar crimes on that street. Opportunists. They found my bag down a hedge around the corner. But the phone was gone, and my purse. So …’

‘So …’ Adrian’s pen was suspended above his notepad, his breath drawn.

‘So, that’s it really. That was about two months ago. The phone never showed up. The police tried to trace the SIM but it wasn’t being used. So. Game over.’

‘The police had the SIM number?’

‘Yeah. But, like I said, the thief wasn’t using it.’

‘I wonder …’ He shuffled through the papers on his desk, looking for DI Mickelson’s number. He found it and covered it over with his hands. ‘Good. OK. Thank you, Dolly. Actually, yes, that is helpful. Or potentially. Thank you very, very much.’

‘Good luck,’ she said. ‘I’m really sorry about your wife.’

‘Yes,’ said Adrian, ‘so am I.’

Within sixty seconds of Adrian hanging up the phone to Dolly Patel, he was taking a call from Caroline.

‘Hi, hello,’ he greeted her distractedly.

‘Adrian. Listen. I’ve had a call from the school. From Otis’s school. He’s not there. He’s not answering his phone.’ Her voice broke slightly. ‘I’m quite worried.’

Adrian took his hand from the piece of paper and touched his heart with it. ‘What? Since when?’

‘I don’t know. They called about an hour ago. I’ve been phoning and phoning him ever since. I just thought, you know, he was bunking off. So I texted him, saying if he went straight into school, he wouldn’t be in trouble. That was half an hour ago. No reply. And he’s still not in school. I’m really scared. What shall I do? What shall I do?’

‘But it’s nearly lunchtime,’ said Adrian incredulously. ‘That means he’s been missing from school for the whole morning.’

‘I know! I know! I was at … at an appointment. I had my phone switched off. And he’s done this before, you know, he’s bunked off before.’

‘He has?’

‘Yes! Not much. Just a couple of times. About a year ago. After Maya died. You know. So I thought he was just, you know,
skiving
. But now I’m thinking … Christ, he’s so beautiful. And so secretive. All those hours on the internet. He could be talking to anyone! He might have met someone! You know. Someone pretending to be a cute fourteen-year-old girl. I’m shitting myself. I’m shitting myself!’

‘Where are you?’

‘At home! I’m at home!’ Her voice had reached a pitch several octaves above her usual cool baritone.

‘Stay there. I’m coming. I’m coming right now.’

By the time he got to the house in Islington, Otis was sitting on the armchair in the kitchen with a dog on his lap looking bullishly ashamed of himself.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said before Adrian had even opened his mouth. His fingers plucked at the dog’s fur and his eyes bored into the floor.

‘Jesus,’ said Adrian.

Caroline was standing against the kitchen counter, flicking her thumbnail against her fingernail.

He leaned over Otis and tried to hold him. His son allowed this, but didn’t reciprocate.