The Woman He Loved Before (8 page)

‘So, are you going to marry me or what?’ he asked as we collapsed onto the shingle, fighting each other for a corner of blanket to dry ourselves off with.

I kept the blanket covering my face as I froze. Had he said what I thought he had said? After he waited for a reply in silence, I cautiously took the blanket away from my face to look at him.

‘Did you just—?’

He nodded.

I licked my lips, the salt from the sea tingling as it dissolved on my tongue. ‘How about we live together first?’

‘How about we live together while we plan the wedding?’

‘Marriage is a big commitment.’

‘I know. And I want to make that commitment to and with you.’

‘We’re having fun, but …’

‘But you’d marry me in a shot if we weren’t having fun?’ He
smiled that smile that had been making me feel something like drunk these past few months, and I felt all my sensibility and reason start to beat their wings as they prepared to fly away. Again.

‘Marriage is for ever,’ I said.

‘I know that.’

‘Are you serious about this?’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever been as serious about anything in a long time. Possibly in my entire adult life.’

What about Eve?
The thought popped into my head. ‘What about Eve?’ The words popped out of my mouth.

Over the last few months, he’d talked about her, of course. Had mentioned her in passing but nothing major had been discussed, and I hadn’t had the guts to ruin what we had by asking. I could have looked on the Internet to find out about her death, but that felt like violating his privacy and trust in me. If I wanted to know about her I should ask, not sneak around finding things out behind his back.

His gaze was unwavering, direct. ‘I don’t want this moment, this proposal, to be about anyone but you and me. Afterwards, when you’ve said yes or no, we can talk about anything and anyone you want. But not right now – this is about you and me.’

‘And for ever.’

‘And for ever.’

The wind blew across the beach, pushing the chill that had begun to settle upon me from my damp clothes closer to my skin. I shivered. Shivered, but did nothing to dry myself off.

He shivered too, obviously as cooled by the damp and air temperature as I was. ‘I didn’t mean to ask, by the way,’ he said. ‘It just came out, but the moment it did I knew it had because I do want to marry you. Not simply live with you, but make that permanent commitment.’

Something told me to take a leap of faith. To go with the flow and take that leap. It was the voice that had wanted me to run out of Brighton Station that time to see if Jack was still
parked outside and to let him drive me to London. It was the crazy, idiotic part of me that I should probably ignore – but it was also the voice that spoke the loudest whenever Jack was involved.
Besides
, the crazy voice reasoned to the sane voice,
I can always change my mind at a later date, can’t I
?
Can’t I?

‘OK, yes. Yes, I will marry you.’

‘And move in with me before the wedding?’ he pressed.

I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. ‘Yes. And live with you before the wedding.’

For one moment I felt the world stand still, and I allowed myself the indulgence of revelling in doing something reckless and foolhardy because I was madly in love and I didn’t have to worry about the consequences.

jack

Almost everyone says they hate hospitals. I don’t mind them so much – I hate them less than mortuaries, anyway. And cemeteries. When you point that out to people, they generally come around to your way of thinking. Or they shut up because they don’t know what to say.

I am starting to hate this hospital. I have been pacing this corridor for an eternity and I’m no nearer to finding out whether Libby is going to be OK. She
has
to be, she’s going to be, but I’d rather someone else confirmed it. Instead, they’ve been trying to keep me down in Casualty, asking me stupid questions, getting me to do simple memory tests and trying to get me to sit still so they can treat my wounds. Wounds? A few cuts and a little airbag burn are not wounds. Bleeding internally and externally, being so scared you cannot make sounds with your speech, technically dying in the ambulance; those are the results of real wounds, and those are the things that had happened to Libby.

Unbidden, the image of Libby twisted and trapped inside the crushed and torn pieces of metal that was once my pride and joy wells up in my mind and, as it has done since the crash, it rips a new hole inside my being. I’d tried to reach her, I’d wanted to stay and hold her hand, but the firemen said No. They were trained to be inside this sort of wreckage while they cut someone free, I
wasn’t. ‘
But you don’t love her like I do
,’ I wanted to say as two of them forced me back to the ambulance. ‘
If push came to shove, if it was a choice between you and her, you’d choose you. I’d choose her. Always
.’

This waiting is killing me. What can be taking so long? There was internal bleeding mainly from her spleen, they said, and the deep slices into her skin were as bad as they looked, they said. They seemed so certain and so sure of what was wrong and how to fix it, that I’d expected to have had an update by now. That they would have some idea if she was going to be all right. If she will get better and go back to who she was. I lean my head against the coffee machine and try to breathe. Try to take comfort in the fact that no news is good news and the longer they’re in there, the longer they must be spending curing my wife.

‘
Mr
Britcham, fancy seeing you here.’ Her voice is the stuff of nightmares, her face is not much better. She is not ugly to look at, she is simply ugly to be around. They say beauty is only skin deep; ugliness, when it comes to this woman, begins at the core, slimes its way through every artery and vein, fills every organ then spills out to show the world who she really is.

I raise myself to my full height and turn to face the woman who haunts me. She is small and androgynous, a short brown bob compliments her beige skin, turned up nose and mean, circular eyes. My glare is probably expected because she smiles at me in response as she reaches inside her pocket for a notebook and pen.

‘Ms Morgan,’ I say.

‘Detective Sergeant Morgan to you,’ she says. ‘Or you can call me Maisie if you want. We’ve got that kind of special relationship, haven’t we, Jack?’

The plain-clothes policeman standing slightly behind her is as generic as she is, but I do not recognise him. He probably hasn’t arrested anyone I’ve ever represented, but then they don’t usually bother themselves with the small-time criminals I take care of.

‘So, Mr Britcham,
Jack
,’ she says, dramatically raising her pen
and pressing the point into the notepad, ‘do want to tell me what happened?’

‘They’ve got you on a routine road accident?’ I ask. ‘What did you do to get demoted?’

‘Sorry to disappoint you, Jack, but when I heard that it wasn’t any ordinary accident because you and your wife were involved, I
had
to come and see for myself how you were going to explain away another woman dying by your side.’

She has a way of modulating her speech so that everything sounds sarcastic and condescending but, more than that, as if you’re guilty of something she’ll eventually find out about.

‘She’s not going to die.’

‘Let’s hope not, eh? Because it’d be pretty difficult to explain away two dead wives – both with only you as a witness – won’t it?’

‘There were plenty of witnesses and someone drove into us, not the other way around.’

‘Hmmm, but it’s odd, don’t you think, how your airbag deployed and your wife’s didn’t?’

‘The passenger airbag was faulty. I kept meaning to get it checked but never got around to it. I hate myself for that.’

‘Did your wife know the airbag was faulty?’

‘Yes,’ I say through gritted teeth.

‘A suspicious person might say this was an accident waiting to happen. Or should that be
fated
to happen?’

‘If you’ve got something to say, Ms Morgan, say it.’

She shakes her head, twists her miserly little mouth and fractionally cocks an eyebrow at me. ‘No, nothing. I just wonder if your second wife knows that being married to you should come with a health warning – something about a short life expectancy.’

‘If you’ve got evidence that I killed …’ I still find it hard to say her name. I try not to around Libby, but in general it is a name that causes a sob to swell in the back of my throat, a name that claws her memory across my tongue as I speak it. ‘… Eve, then charge me and we can go to trial. If you haven’t then I’d appreciate it if you left me alone.’

‘Ah, Jack, if I left you alone, you’d think you’d got away with it, and I can’t ever let you think that.’

She wants me to lose my temper, she wants me to shout at her, to show her the other side of me. This is what she did during the interrogations last time: she would push and goad until I snapped. Then she would be in there, asking, ‘Is this what happened? Did she wind you up about her past and you accidentally killed her? It’d be understandable, some women can drive a man to it. They do things that are just asking for a slap or two to keep them in line. Is that what happened? We’d understand if it was.’ And even in my rage I’d tell her that I couldn’t hurt anyone like that, especially not Eve. ‘I love her,’ I’d repeated over and over. ‘I love her, how can you kill someone you love?’

‘Are you going to take my statement about the crash or not?’ I ask calmly.

She’s a little peeved that I’ve ignored her last verbal dig. ‘Why of course, it should make for interesting bedtime reading.’ She flips over to a clean page in her book and again dramatically raises her pen. ‘Go on, Jack, hit me with it.’

Behind her, I see the surgeon who talked to me briefly before he went in to operate on Libby coming towards me. He still has a surgical cap around his head and a mask around his chin, and his look is troubled. My heart feels like it has jumped out of a plane without a parachute and is freefalling from a great height.

I gather up my courage and step around the policewoman to go to meet him. ‘Mr Britcham,’ he says. I didn’t realise until I heard him say my name that I have already braced myself for the worst.

libby

April, 2009

‘Tell me about Eve.’

Since we’d officially decided to get married forty-eight hours ago, we had slept in the same bed twice. Curled up, facing each other, holding hands or stroking each other, our legs entangled. We touched, and held without the pressure or need to do anything more. We were currently in my bed, at my little flat, so I felt safe to ask. I could not have asked at her house, in her bed, reclining on the sheets that she probably chose.

‘What do you want to know?’ he asked, evenly, although every muscle in his body had tensed and he stopped stroking the length of my body with the flat of his hand.

‘What was she like; how did you meet; were you happy? How did she die?’ I shrugged, suddenly realising what a big subject I’d started on. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know what to ask. It’s just that I should probably know stuff.’

‘Well, I don’t know what I should and shouldn’t tell you, so you’ll have to give me a clue. Ask me questions and I’ll try to answer them.’

‘OK.’ I nestled into the pillow, ready to watch him carefully for the answers to these questions even though part of me wanted to pretend she hadn’t existed. I’d told him what there was to tell
about me, and that wasn’t very much – I had no one in my past that still held claim to my heart. That was why I wanted to pretend Eve had never existed, so Jack and I were starting this on an equal footing, both of us giving our hearts to each other knowing we’d never fully done that before.

Jack sat up, pulling the duvet to his waist, and resting back on the wrought iron headboard. His face was already drawing in, his eyebrows knitting together slightly as his eyes searched the mid-distance.

‘How did she – Eve – die?’ I’d taken a deep breath before asking that. It was the start of this new part of our relationship, and the end of the fun we’d been having. Reality had just entered our world.

He ran his hand through the blond-brown stands of his hair, his face drawing in tighter as he turned to look at me and forced a small smile upon his lips. ‘You don’t start with the small stuff, do you?’ he said mirthlessly. He inhaled deeply, his whole upper body expanding with the movement, then deflating as he pushed the air nosily out of his mouth. ‘She … No one knows for sure. I found her at the foot of the stairs in our house. Looked like she tripped on the bottom of her trousers and broke her neck on the way down.’

I placed a hand on his forearm, feeling at once the horror of that.

‘No one knows for sure because I didn’t realise I wasn’t supposed to touch her. I was meant to leave her exactly as she was so the forensics team could come along and have a proper look and measure all their distances and go through all scenarios about how she fell, and how her legs were, and how her arms were, and what distance she was from the last step, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.’ He was gesticulating as he spoke. ‘I didn’t know this so, stupid me, upon finding my wife at the bottom of the stairs, I take her in my arms and I try to make her wake up and I talk to her, and I beg her not to do this to me, and I promise her anything if she’ll just wake up. Then I beg God to let her live
and I’ll do anything, I’ll even offer up my own worthless life if He just lets her live. Then I remember my mobile phone and call an ambulance and tell them to hurry because I think they can save her, all the while cradling her in my arms and imagining I can feel the warmth – the life – returning to her body. I didn’t realise what I was actually doing was tampering with a crime scene.’