Woman with a Secret (14 page)

It doesn’t work. I tried all the way here, in my rented car. Push the thoughts away and the numb horror is still there. Worrying away at it intellectually is probably better for me: questioning, trying to recall as many details as I can. At least it feels like doing something. But not now, not here. I have to force myself to stop.

Focus. You’re here to sort out the side-mirror problem
.

“It’s me, in Adele mode,” I say to Melissa, blinking back tears. “Hate to turn up out of the blue, uninvited, but . . . I need to talk to you. Can I come in?”

“What’s Adele mode?”

“‘I hate to turn up out of the blue, uninvited’—Adele’s most famous lyric. You do know who Adele is? The singer?” Melissa probably doesn’t listen to pop music anymore. Lee doesn’t much like any kind of music—he never has. Noise of any sort agitates him.

When we were teenagers living on the same street in Wimbledon, Melissa and I used to call around at each other’s houses unannounced all the time. Since she’s lived with my brother, she prefers to see me by arrangement only. I’ve become something she likes to be warned of in advance.

As she stands aside to let me in, her eyes are full of something more complicated than “hello and welcome.” It’s the same mix of emotions that I see in Lee’s eyes when he greets me, and in my parents’: vigilance, nervousness and, the dominant note, hope: that everything will be all right even though Nicki is here and Nicki is trouble.

Melissa is so much more a member of the Redgate family than I am; she’s the anxious, obedient daughter my parents should have had.

“Lee back yet?” I ask.

“No.”

“Good. I need to talk to you alone.”

Melissa rolls her eyes. “Oh, not this again, Nicki. If you’re going to beg me not to tell Lee—”

“Lee’s the last thing on my mind at the moment.” Beg? Is that how she sees me: permanently on my knees in her saintly presence? “It’s the police I need you not to tell. I wouldn’t ask, but it’s kind of an emergency.”

She stops. If she’s having second thoughts about letting me get as far as the kitchen, it wouldn’t be the first time. She holds up her hands, flat, fingers stiff and extended. As if she’s trying to push something away. “The police? Again?”

I flinch. “Forget last time. The only thing I hoped you’d do then was listen. I needed to talk to someone and you wouldn’t let me tell you—”

“Oh, so you
are
dragging this up again?” Melissa says angrily. “Can’t you let it go? It’s my choice. You should respect it.”

I wish she’d at least offer me a comfy chair before starting with the shoulds and shouldn’ts. We’re still in the hall, which is as perfectly smooth and rectangular as every other space in Melissa and Lee’s house. There’s not a curve in sight—not a cornice or alcove anywhere to disrupt the lines. Each story is a rectangle made up of rectangles, and so is the building as a whole. So are the four identical houses attached to it; together, the five form an uber-rectangle that looks as if it’s serious about subjugating, if not flat-out annihilating, all the circles, squares, ovals and triangles in the Greater London area.

Adam said to me once, “Nicki,
all
houses are made up of straight lines. Don’t you think you might be . . . projecting slightly?”

“I don’t want to get into our usual argument again,” I say to Melissa. “I’ve got a favor to ask you. You can say no if you want, but at least make me a cup of tea and let me ask.” I gesture toward the kitchen.

Melissa stays where she is. “And I can tell Lee?”

Her question makes me gasp. I must look like what I am—someone whose life has been blasted apart, again, after an email correspondence
with a man I don’t know, again—and all Melissa cares about is whether she has my permission to report back to my brother about me.

“Tell Lee twenty times if you want to,” I say. “Have you got a Dictaphone? Record my request and your refusal so that you can play it back to him later.”

Melissa nods. I have said the right thing, albeit snidely, and am now allowed access to the second stage of conditional welcome: refreshments—in theory, at least. I’d be foolish to take anything for granted until I’ve got a mug of PG Tips in my hand. I’ve got through to kitchen level on a couple of previous occasions and then been ordered to leave before the kettle’s boiled.

I follow Melissa down the hall, clamping my arms against my sides as I pass the shelf of meticulously aligned ornaments: a clear glass heart-shaped paperweight, a white ceramic angel and a wooden boat. They’re precisely spaced so that the one in the middle is equidistant from the other two. Whenever I’m within touching distance, I imagine sweeping them off the shelf with my elbow and sending them crashing to the ground. One day, the fantasy might not be enough for me.

Not safe yet
. Just outside the kitchen door, there’s a framed studio photograph of Lee and Melissa beaming joyously, like people who have never met either Lee or Melissa, with their heads touching in a way that suggests they’d ideally like to be conjoined twins.

These are the kind of horrible thoughts I can’t help having when I’m inside the rectangle of rectangles. Hard edges, straight lines and sharp corners—in this house, that’s how you blend in, how you survive. Even when you stare down at the varnished wooden floor because you can’t bear to look anywhere else, the floorboards remind you:
straight edges, hard lines . . .

I manage to walk past the conjoined-twins photograph without pulling it off its hook and stamping on it, but I can’t help tormenting myself by looking at it for longer than I need to.

The gleam of teeth from matching smiles
. . .

I’ve never believed it when people say that married couples start
to resemble one another physically, but since Melissa and Lee got together, she has taken on several aspects of his style. She’s still as dark and olive-skinned as he is blond and pale, but her once-unruly long hair is now short and tidy, and she wears only plain, solid colors, never patterns anymore.

I can remember Lee becoming hysterical at age five, when Mum tried to put a stripy cardigan on him. “It’s messy!” he screamed. “There are things on it! Take it off!” Mum did, straightaway. Everything that frightened Lee as a toddler was immediately removed by our parents: patterned clothes, bananas, books with scary pictures in them, the cuddly penguin in his bedroom that apparently shrieked at him at night while everyone else was asleep, the bicycle he fell off and couldn’t forgive.

Mum and Dad would have performed a similar life-improving service for me if they’d been able to, except in my case it was trickier. I didn’t mind what I wore or ate and wasn’t scared of any of my toys or books. I wasn’t a fussy, high-maintenance child like Lee. Nothing made me unhappy apart from the other members of my family, and Mum and Dad could hardly remove themselves from my orbit. They didn’t realize they needed to; they thought I was the problem.

Perhaps they were right.

I sit down at the glass-topped table in Melissa’s kitchen, my least favorite room in her house. It looks as I imagine a morgue would look if morgues had yellow jars labeled “Tea,” “Coffee” and “Sugar” on their windowsills: white tiles on the floor and on the walls; stainless-steel appliances, sink and taps; chairs with thin metal legs that make me think of insects from science-fiction films and scrape horribly against the floor if you shift in your seat even slightly. There’s a clock on the wall that’s past its best; its tick sounds louder and more intrusive every time I visit, like the string of an instrument being plucked hard and then left to settle.

I always sit facing away from the clock so that I can see out of the window. Still I can’t escape the geriatric ticking and always half
expect Melissa to place an exam paper down on the table in front of me. I would fail, of course.

Being here makes me long for my own kitchen. For both my kitchens: the one in Enfys Road that I left behind, and the one in Bartholomew Gardens where Adam is now, preparing his and the children’s supper. I can see him clearly, even though I can’t see him at all. He’s taken off his jacket and shirt and put on a T-shirt, probably his Rolling Stones one. He’ll have the radio on, and he’ll keep muttering about how boring each station’s offering is and changing the channel at the same time he’s holding an uncooked meatball, which he’ll squash accidentally and blame on whichever pompous presenter or inane DJ has annoyed him most recently. This will lead to not-entirely-serious grumbling about the BBC having no right to be government-funded when it’s so blatantly substandard.

If I were with Adam now—and I long to be—I would bury my face in his dark wavy hair and he’d put his arms around me without thinking, still moaning about the radio, and I would know that I don’t need any other man in my life apart from him.

I don’t. Not after today’s shocks. I just want to feel safe, whether or not I deserve to.

You know exactly what you deserve. And you keep getting it, don’t you? From King Edward, from Gavin . . .

He is no less dead . . .

My breath catches in my throat. I freeze. What was it, the thought that flashed in my mind before disappearing? It was there and felt huge, but it’s gone now. For a fraction of a second, I knew something . . . and then I didn’t. Something about Gavin and the words “He is no less dead”? Did I have the answer and lose it, or is my mind playing tricks on me?

There
.

Gone
.

Melissa fills the kettle. “Well?” she says. “What’s this request you think I’m going to refuse?”

Her voice cuts through me like iced wire. For a split second, I see everything clearly. I think,
It’s you. You’re the danger to my family, you and Lee. I wouldn’t be in the mess I’m in now if it weren’t for you two
. A moment later, though the words linger as vividly in my mind as letters inscribed by burning sparklers on a black night, I have no idea what they meant to me when I was so sure they were the truth.

I make an effort to compose myself. “It’s about the Sunday we went to the auction,” I say. “There’s a chance a detective from Spilling Police might get in touch with you and ask you if my car was missing a mirror that day. A side mirror.”

Listening to my rehearsed introduction, I have a better idea than the one I arrived with. I was planning to ask Melissa to lie for me and tell the police that my mirror was missing when it wasn’t.
Stupid
. I ought to know from depressing experience that she cares more about her principles than about me. Why be kind when you can be right?—that’s her motto. Which means I must be more devious.

“If you’re asked, can you
please, please
tell the police my car had both its mirrors when I drove you to and from the auction?” I say.
Now
I’m begging: a little treat for Melissa’s ego. I hope she enjoys it, since it’s unlikely to happen again. “I know it was irresponsible of me to drive to London, then Grantham, then back to London with a missing side mirror. It’s not something I make a habit of doing, and, honestly, I’ll never do it again if you’ll help me get the cops off my back just this once.” I put on my best desperate-sinner-praying-for-mercy face. It’s probably indistinguishable from my normal everyday expression, come to think of it.

“No. No.” Melissa’s shaking her head as she pours milk into a mug for me. She looks scared, as if she thinks I might be able to force her to agree. “I’m not lying to the police for you, Nicki. No way. It might only be a minor driving offense, but—”

“Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Have you heard about Damon Blundy?” A name I haven’t mentioned in Melissa’s presence for a while . . .

She drops the teaspoon she’s holding. It lands with a bang on the white granite work surface. “What about him?”

“He’s dead. He lived on Elmhirst Road in Spilling. Near me.”

“Yes, I knew that.”

“Really?” This strikes me as unlikely, yet I can’t see why she’d lie about it.

“Not the road name, but I knew he lived in Spilling. I read his column about how he had to leave London because there were too many ugly people in it. Of all the places he’d ever visited, the Culver Valley contained the most attractive women, so he was moving there.” Melissa spins around to face me. “And that’s why you moved there, isn’t it?” she asks with a tremor in her voice.

“So that I could meet attractive women? No.” I laugh to disguise my discomfort.

“What’s Damon Blundy got to do with your side mirror?” Melissa asks as she puts my mug of tea down on the corner of the table farthest away from me. I have to stand to reach it.

“He’s been murdered. Elmhirst Road, where he lived, is on my route to the kids’ school. It was full of police yesterday. They spotted my car, asked me how long I’d been driving without a side mirror. I told them it had only just been snapped off that morning.” Who’d have guessed it was possible to come up with so many variations on the same lie? “I thought that’d be it, but they got all serious on me, wanting to know if anyone could back up my story, asking who’d been in my car and how recently—”

“And you mentioned me? Thanks a lot.”

“I didn’t want to mention anyone, but I panicked! I didn’t feel comfortable lying once I realized I’d brushed up against a murder investigation. Don’t . . .” I raise a hand to stop Melissa from stating the obvious. “I knew I’d lied already, about the mirror. That’s why I didn’t want to make it worse. I wish I’d told them the truth from the start.”

“Then why don’t you? You still could.”

“Or I could stick to my story and you could back me up?” I offer
her what I hope is a winning smile with lowlights of appropriate humility. “If the police believe I genuinely lost my mirror only a few minutes before they saw my car on Elmhirst Road, I’m pretty sure they’ll let me off. I told them I was going to take the car to the garage as soon as I’d dropped off Ethan’s gym bag at school, and look.” I pull the keys to my rental car out of my handbag and wave them in the air. “I rented a car to drive here, like a good responsible citizen.”

“How can you live like this, Nicki?” Melissa squints at me, as if I’m forcing her to look at something gruesome she’d like to turn away from.