The Third Wife (14 page)

Good, thought Luke, this was good. Neutral. Clothes. He liked talking about clothes. ‘So,’ he said, ‘did you find anything?’

‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘but it’s designer. Mui Mui? Something like that. I took some photos in the changing rooms. Want to see?’ She pulled her phone out of her bag and started searching through it with her thumb. ‘I thought maybe I could get someone to make it up for me, you know, on the cheap. Here.’ She passed the phone to Luke, watching him eagerly for his response.

His brow raised and he nodded, passed the phone back to her.

‘What do you think?’

‘I think’, he said, ‘that if you wear that dress you will be in danger of upstaging the bride.’

She laughed. ‘I knew you’d say that. I did worry. Maybe I could get it made up with a sheer panel across here’ – she passed her hand across her décolletage – ‘to avert the eye. You know?’ She peered at him, all china-blue eyes and soft skin and simmering, deep-seated love.

Luke swallowed some beer and nodded tersely.
No
, he told himself again.
No no no no no
. ‘Good idea,’ he said.

She tucked her phone back into her bag and picked up her pint glass. ‘So,’ she said, ‘what’s the deal with the “intervention”?’

The conversational dog-leg took him by surprise. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yeah. That. I don’t know. I think Mum was getting sick of me. Thought I could be doing more with my life. And my dad probably thinks he should be getting more for all the money he spent on my education.’

She nodded, as though there was something she wanted to say but didn’t feel she could.

‘Not quite sure that sitting in the bowels of my dad’s office folding up paper all day is really much of an improvement on working in a clothes shop, but there you go. And maybe …’ He paused, forming his next thought, wondering if he should share it with Charlotte, if it would unblock sealed-up conversational vaults, and then feeling an uncontrollable sensation of opening up and saying it anyway. ‘It was almost predestined, I think.’

She arched an eyebrow.

‘I found something, on my dad’s computer. Some old emails. To Maya.’

‘Right.’

‘Yes. Abusive emails. Telling her that everyone hated her. That she was ugly.’

Charlotte’s eyes widened and she clapped her hand over her mouth. ‘What! No way! Oh my God. Who are they from?’

‘Nobody knows. They’re anonymous. But there’s this girl …’

She dropped her hand from her mouth and stared at him, gripped.

‘She was kind of stalking my dad for a while, and Pearl. Nothing sinister. Well, we didn’t think so at the time. But now we’re not so sure.’

‘Oh Jesus, Luke! That is just awful. I mean, why would someone do that to Maya? She was such a nice person.’

‘I know. It doesn’t make any sense. Although, in a way, it does help make sense of her death. That it wasn’t just this random act of madness. That there was something behind it.’

‘So you think the two things are connected then?’

‘Well, yeah, definitely. The last email was sent the day before she died. So yeah, I think it’s pretty certain that the emails drove her to it.’

‘So, God, is that, like,
murder
?’

‘I don’t know. It should be. But I don’t suppose it is. I mean, anyone could drive anyone to killing themselves, couldn’t they, if they were brutal enough? Bullies do it all the time, don’t they? School bullies. Cyberbullies. And you know, Maya, she was so …’

‘Immature?’

Luke threw her a look. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I was going to say: soft. Decent. I can totally imagine how badly this would have affected her.’

Charlotte nodded and Luke lowered his face towards hers when he realised that she was crying. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘what’s going on? Are you OK?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘it’s just, I still feel so sad whenever I think about her. She was always so lovely to me. Had such a sweet way about her. And the thought of her … and that bus.’ She sniffed and rubbed away the tears from under her eyes. ‘What’s going to happen?’ she said. ‘About the emails? And the stalker?’

‘No idea,’ said Luke. ‘My dad’s taken his laptop in to the police; they’re going to have a look at it. But if that doesn’t help, I guess we need to track down this stalker woman. See if she’s got anything to do with it.’

‘Weird,’ said Charlotte after a short break.

‘I know,’ said Luke.

‘Who would want to hurt Maya?’

‘Exactly,’ said Luke, ‘exactly.’

Dear Bitch

So you and Big Daddy are trying for a baby. Aw. That’s so sweet. Except, Bitch, for the fact that Big Daddy already has some babies. Lots of babies. Had you noticed? He’s got a really nice little baby called Beau. He’s fucking adorable. And the others, OK, they’re not quite so adorable, but they’re still his babies. Do you know what it does to a family, every time a new baby comes along? Everyone has to shuffle along a bit; everyone has to change. Don’t you think Big Daddy’s family have done enough shuffling and changing? Don’t you think Beau would like to stay the baby? Don’t you think you’ve caused enough problems? Don’t you think you should just back off? Actually, don’t back off, fuck off. Seriously, Bitch. You’re nothing. You’re just a silly little girl. You’ve bitten off more than you can chew. How did you think you could ever be a real part of this family? Seriously? Look at your predecessors, real women, proper women. You look like a sickly child in comparison.

So, keep taking that pill, Bitch, because nobody wants your sad excuse for a baby coming into their world. NOBODY.

Maya selected and copied the foul text, pressed shift and delete to take the email permanently off the server. Then she opened the little document she kept buried deep in the entrails of the computer system and pasted it on to the end. The secret document felt a bit like one of those sanitary disposal units they had in public toilets. Something you tried not to look at, or inspect or linger over, a dark receptacle of unthinkable grimness. She wasn’t sure why she was keeping these words. Her overwhelming instinct was to banish them from the cosmos. But it seemed prudent to have something to prove that these emails really had been sent to her. Just in case she lost her mind. Or did something stupid. Because that was clearly the intent behind the emails. To drive her nuts. So far this person had made no suggestion that they wanted to harm her. The language used seemed very deliberately chosen to encourage her to harm herself. Or disappear. Or both.

Maya still hadn’t told Adrian. He’d won a massive bid for a huge new housing and retail complex in St Albans and was growing the practice again. He’d taken on three new architects and another floor of the new building in Farringdon. He was stressed and distracted.

To save herself from the unpalatable truth that these emails came from someone she knew, Maya had invented an imaginary poison email scribe. She’d made her almost comical: a middle-aged woman, wearing a harlequin-patterned satin blouse, wonky orange lipstick and a fascinator. With a parrot or some other kind of crazy bird on her shoulder. Both of them cackling, maniacally, as she typed.

It helped.

A bit.

But this now, today, this was a sinister development. Mrs Crazy Parrot Woman knew that she and Adrian were trying for a baby. How could that be possible? She got to her feet and went to make herself a cup of tea. Whom had they told? She made a mental list as she opened and closed cupboard doors, switched on the kettle, pulled two teabags apart down a perforation. She’d told Cat. When they’d spent the night down at Susie’s in Hove last weekend. Cat had squealed and jumped up and down and said: ‘Have a girl! Have a girl! Balance it out! Please!’

She’d told Holly at work. Holly and her husband had just started trying for a baby, too. She hadn’t told her best friend Sara yet, because, well, because she knew she’d be funny about it. Sara was funny about anything Maya did that didn’t involve her. Well, actually, Sara was just funny, full stop, one of those ‘best friends’ that had gone kind of past their sell-by date, but you can’t quite bring yourself to throw away. And she’d told Caroline, in a girly sharing-of-confidences over white wine last week, when Maya had been in town looking for a birthday present for Adrian. She’d looked entirely unsurprised and rubbed at the nibs of her elbows in that calm, unflappable way of hers. ‘Lovely,’ she’d said, ‘another baby. That will be lovely.’

And that was it. She hadn’t told another soul.

She dropped her teabag into the bin and took her tea into the garden. Ten more days, she thought to herself, ten more days of summer holidays then it was back to school. It had been a long, dull summer. Adrian at work all the time, the sun barely coming out, these stupid emails all the time. She missed the schoolgirls and the camaraderie of her colleagues. She missed having somewhere to go every morning. She missed coming home tired and drinking wine she felt she’d earned. She missed the gossip and the biscuits and the sense of living for the weekends.

Her phone rang and she looked at it to see who was calling. It was him. She smiled, pressed answer, her mood lifting at the sound of his voice.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello, you.’

‘I’m in London.’

Maya felt a rush of happiness flood her senses. ‘Oh, thank God. I’m dying here. Can you come? Can you come now?’

‘I’m on my way. I’ll be there in half an hour.’

She turned off her phone and rested it on the table in front of her, smiling softly.

Lives on 214 bus route

Kick-boxing

Date with man called Matthew

Possible bag thief?

Lives/works near post office?

May be called Amanda (prob not)

London accent

30–40

Adrian wrote down each fact on a separate square of paper and moved them around his desk. He was hoping, somehow, to use his architect’s ability to break a pretty picture down into literal nuts and bolts and then build it up into something three-dimensional and functional. On another piece of paper he sketched out a visual map:

Ally Pally

UPPER STREET Strada

North Finchley <------214 Bus stop

                      Post office

Community hall HIGHGATE ARCHWAY My flat

SOUTH LONDON (Bag theft)

He spread the pieces of paper around the map, cupped his lower face inside his hand and studied it for a while. The most helpful clue was the 214 bus route. But that might have been a red herring. She might just have jumped on to the first bus she saw to get away from Cat. And living in that direction made it less likely that she would have found her way to the post office in Archway where Adrian had put up the card about the cat.

His phone rang and he picked it up. It was DI Mickelson.

‘We’ve been through your laptop with a fine-toothed comb and I’m afraid, as we both suspected, there’s nothing there. All trace of the emails has been removed. And we’ve looked into the email address they came from. Unfortunately the address was used by someone with a dynamic IP address. In other words almost impossible to track down, though we can say for a fact that the emails were sent from the south-east region, i.e. anywhere between here and the south coast.’

Adrian sighed, waiting for the DI to say something else, the good news, after the bad news. But he didn’t. ‘So that’s that?’

‘Yes, it does look like it. I’m very sorry.’

Adrian sighed again. ‘Well, thank you for trying.’

‘It was no problem, Mr Wolfe. I know it’s hard, not knowing, when you lose someone. It would have been nice to have shed some light.’

‘I wonder,’ said Adrian, ‘could I just ask you a quick question? About stolen phones?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘Well, it turns out that that woman I told you about, the one who was kind of stalking us for a while, used a stolen phone to get in touch with me. A stolen phone, but with the original SIM card reinserted. Have you got any theories about that?’

He heard the DI draw in his breath. ‘Hm,’ he said, ‘that’s an odd one. How do you know it was stolen?’

‘I traced it to the woman it was stolen from. She works at an estate agency. It was her work phone. Got stolen a few months ago. In south London.’

‘Right. Well, maybe when you come for your laptop you could drop the phone off. We could take a look at it for you.’

Adrian groaned. ‘Too late for that. I gave it back to the woman it originally belonged to. She wanted it back in case her mum tried calling her on it.’

‘Any chance you could get it back?’

‘I don’t know.’ Adrian thought back to sour-faced Sian at the children’s home, edgy Tiffany on the phone. ‘Probably not.’

‘Well, usually with a stolen phone, the SIM card is destroyed before it’s sold on or recycled or whatever. Otherwise it’s traceable. Plus, of course, the end user will be plagued by phone calls from the original user’s mates. So it’s very odd indeed. Let me have a think about it. I’ll ask some questions.’

‘Thank you. Thank you so much. And I’ll come after work, for my laptop, if that’s OK?’

‘Sure. I won’t be here, but I’ll leave it on the front desk for you.’

Adrian looked back at the paper map on his desk after he finished his phone call. He held the piece of paper with ‘Lives/works near post office?’ against the post-office area of his makeshift map with the tip of his forefinger, sliding it back and forth gently, agitatedly. And then he jumped slightly in his seat. Of course. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t already thought of it. Another card. He needed to put another card up.

He left work early, collected his laptop from the police station in Kentish Town and made it to the post office five minutes before closing time.

He took a blank card from the pile next to the community noticeboard and he wrote down the following announcement:

DESPERATELY SEEKING JANE

YOU LEFT YOUR PHONE DOWN

THE BACK OF MY SOFA!

PLEASE CALL ME!

ADRIAN

(AND BILLIE)

Pearl threw herself across the ice for the fifth time, finally nailing the double axel that had been eluding her for the past ten minutes. She looked up at her trainer, Polly, who was smiling encouragingly at her from the edge of the rink, her hands clasped together in applause. Cat whistled through her fingers from the bleachers and held her thumbs aloft. Pearl had got it. At least, she felt as though she had; her body told her she had in every neurological pulse passing through it. But she still needed that assurance. She allowed herself a small smile and skated towards the exit, grabbing a towel and a bottle of water.