Two dead wives, p.3
Two Dead Wives, page 3
Somehow the empty roads and pavements are more insidious now than when they teemed with disorder. Clements isn’t used to civil obedience on this sort of scale, she can’t quite trust it. Take Fiona, for example, so compliant and cooperative, readily giving them permission to search her house without a warrant, handing over her key at speed. Normally members of the public, no matter how innocent, are uppity about this sort of thing. They say stuff like “I know my rights” and start quoting from TV scripts, suggesting they don’t know their rights or much at all, actually. She just happened to have the keys to her country home on hand. Is that odd? Or is she, like most Londoners who can afford to, simply keeping her options open? Planning on bolting to her second home to see out lockdown despite entreaties to stay put.
“Did you see her face?” Clements asks Tanner. “Fiona’s?”
“Yeah.”
“When the kid asked if we had any news.”
“Right. It should have been her first question, shouldn’t it?” She takes her eyes off the road for a nanosecond and turns to Tanner. “As it was Seb’s. But instead she was justifying why she’s moved in with them.”
“She’s fast getting her feet under the table at her dead friend’s house, isn’t she?”
“Her missing friend,” Clements corrects, but without much enthusiasm or certainty.
“People in the States have started to call it ‘forming bubbles.’ For Christ’s sake. I hope that doesn’t catch on in the UK. Bubbles.” Tanner shakes his head in derision. “As if the middle classes need to be taken any further from reality. They’ve always lived in bubbles, with their sourdough bread bake-offs, their quinoa and kale juicing and what have you.” His disgust is palpable.
“It’s not just the middle classes that are forming bubbles,” Clements points out. “And I’d say Mark Fletcher and his boys have had quite the dose of reality these past couple of weeks. What with Kylie going missing, then discovering she’s been living a double life.”
“So you reckon it’s a good thing the best friend is keeping an eye on them?”
“Maybe,” Clements murmurs.
“Just saying it’s very cozy,” Tanner says, cocking his eyebrow, as he does to suggest suspicion. Clements wishes he wouldn’t. He looks like a little boy pretending to be a detective. It makes it hard to take him seriously; surely the opposite effect to the one he’s hoping for. However, the point he makes is valid.
“It is,” she admits.
“She’s everywhere, though, isn’t she? Living with Husband Number 1, casually shagging Husband Number 2.”
The same thought has entered the DC’s head, but she’s trying to stay open-minded. Look at the facts. Gather the evidence. Resist jumping to conclusions. The feminist in her wants to believe in the friendship between Kylie and Fiona. Twenty-three years they stretch back. “She wasn’t aware that Daan was married to Kylie when she was shagging him. Or at least she says she wasn’t.” Feminist or not, Clements is careful about how much trust she lends anyone. True to say Fiona has had her fair share of shocks recently too. Shocks can make people vulnerable. It’s possible she just wants to be around other people who love and miss Kylie; that she simply wants to be helpful and provide comfort. But shocks also make people angry, unpredictable. Dangerous. Clements recaps the facts. “She hooked up with Daan Janssen through a dating app, one that identified potential matches in close vicinity.”
“She bumped into him in his apartment block, right?” chips in Tanner, pleasing his boss by keeping up.
“Correct.”
“Remind me, why was she there in the first place?”
“She says she was there for work. She’s an interior decorator and was pitching to redesign Mr. and Mrs. Federova’s apartment.”
“Which just happens to be the apartment Kylie Gillingham was held captive in.”
“Yes.” The two officers share a look. Coincidences do happen. More often than people think. Some people believe in fate and destiny, Clements thinks both things can be explained away through coincidence. Even good and bad luck can be attributed to something akin. But she doubts a cluster of coincidences is a coincidence. A cluster of them is usually a crime. So she continues to count them up. “Fiona’s timeline, as she has presented it to us in her statement, is as follows. One, she finds out her boyfriend—Daan Janssen—is married. Two, she finishes the relationship. Three, her best friend goes missing. Four, she finds out her best friend is a bigamist. Five, she discovers her best friend’s second husband is the very man she’s been shagging.” She shakes her head slowly. Maybe letting the information settle, maybe doubting it. “Of course it may not have happened in that order,” she adds darkly.
“You mean...”
“One, she finds out her meaningless shag—Daan Janssen—is married to her best friend. Two, her best friend vanishes. She did admit to shagging him at least once after she knew he was married to her bestie. Said she was emotional and drunk. That she made a mistake.” The accusation lingers in the air. Jealousy, fury, revenge, all create a toxicity that leads to desperate acts. “Crimes of passion have been a thing since time began.”
“She had access to that apartment,” Tanner says excitedly. “Probably. She certainly knew it was standing empty, but there’s nothing at all to place her there, and Daan Janssen might have known it was empty too.”
Clements sighs. “Let’s see what we find in Dorset.”
Tanner sniffs and gazes out of the window, attention once again drawn toward the relentless emptiness. Then, to fill the silence and the void, he flicks on the radio.
They are still talking about the exhausted nurse who cried in a supermarket car park and begged people not to panic-buy because after her double shift in the critical care ward, she’d gone shopping and found the shelves empty. They are also reporting that someone has suggested that people stand outside their houses and clap to show their support and gratitude for NHS heroes. Clements wonders how it can be that people are clapping for the carers and simultaneously starving them.
The world is bloody mad. A journalist describes how walkers heading to beauty spots in the Peak District are being watched by a fleet of drones and reminded that rambling sixty miles from home does not constitute an “essential journey.” Clements wonders what this all means for Kylie. Is it easier or harder to hide in a lockdown?
Is it easier or harder to hide a body in a lockdown?
4
Mark
Mark can hear the police speaking to Fiona downstairs. He should possibly go and see what they are talking about.
But what is the point?
If they’ve found her, he’ll know soon enough. He hears Oli stomp up the stairs, his bedroom door slam closed behind him. The air in the house seems to quiver. There is no news. If there was, Oli would come and tell him. He rolls over and stares at the wall. He tells himself he’s not in bed, midmorning, just lying on it. Which isn’t the same. Getting into bed would suggest a level of defeatism. Depression, maybe. He’s not in bed. Mark cannot imagine a harsher agony. This is not a light claim to make. After all, he is a man who has been widowed, left with two small sons to bring up alone. He lost his first wife after six years of marriage. Frances fell down the stairs in their home and broke her neck.
He rarely admits that to anyone. For a number of reasons.
And now he is a man whose second wife is missing. Gone. Vanished into thin air. Something she’s done not once, but twice. The first time when she left their home, leaving him and the boys behind. Aching, angry. The second time she vanished was from the room she was being held captive in. It’s impossible not to be sardonic about this fact. It’s impossible not to think, “Well, Leigh likes doing things twice.” Marrying, for instance.
His wife is a bigamist.
Mark still shakes his head in disbelief when this fact punches its way into his mind. Who the hell does that? Who the hell marries two men and runs two lives concurrently? It’s a rhetorical question, though, because now he knows. Leigh does. Or did. It’s unclear which tense he should use.
So no, he can’t imagine a harsher agony than the one he is facing now.
He’s furious to have discovered he’s been betrayed so comprehensively, so unashamedly. And he’s terrified, heartbroken. When he discovered her bigamy, he wished all manner of vile things on her. They were just thoughts. Really they were. He doesn’t want her dead, cut up into tiny pieces and fed to someone’s dog. Of course not. It’s just something people say to themselves. He would cross the road to piss on her if she was on fire. Obviously.
The police have confirmed that there is evidence that Leigh—Kylie, as they call her—was in one of the apartments in Daan Janssen’s swanky apartment block. They have not said what the evidence is. DC Clements did let slip that she thought she had been in that room just hours before the police broke down the door. He wonders what makes her think this. What was the wisp of smoke coming from the burning cigarette that suggested recent occupancy, a chance just missed, a case nearly solved? Nearly resolved, but instead left raw and jagged, an open wound. He can’t work out if they think his wife escaped from that room or was taken from it. Further, if she was taken, is she already dead? They won’t tell him what they are thinking. They are staying very tight-lipped. Until there’s an arrest, he’s still a suspect, he supposes. Daan must be the prime suspect, since she was held captive on his property, but Mark has watched enough TV shows to know that he too must remain under suspicion for a little longer. It’s always the husband. Trickier when there are two.
He has his own thoughts on whether Leigh is dead or alive, and those thoughts fluctuate all the time, depending on his mood, the weather, the news, the boys’ moods. He’s normally a man who is fixed and solid, but this situation has left him amorphous, liquid. He keeps clicking his finger and thumb together. Just to hear the sound, just to check he is real and has agency. He feels nebulous, imprecise. Leigh has not only vanished herself; she’s made him vanish too, to an extent. He doesn’t know who he is anymore. He doesn’t know what he wants.
It was a mistake telling people that his first wife had died of cancer. Doing so made Frances’s already tragic and painful death into something else. He made it into a difficult, messy secret. One that is proving to have repercussions all these years later. One that might hurt him and his boys. He realizes that lying about something so big makes him appear untrustworthy.
Is he untrustworthy, or is he simply doing his best? He’s not sure himself anymore.
Frances did have cancer. That much is true. People were expecting her to die of it, and that was already enough of a thing at the nursery gate. People were in the habit of talking about him behind their hands, tipping their heads to one side when they caught his eye, a cartoon approximation of sympathy but really—he believed—ghoulish fascination. They pitied him, the landscape gardener, father of two, who had to soldier on as his wife got sick, got a diagnosis, got sicker, was operated on, got sicker still, underwent chemotherapy, got sick again. A woman in her early thirties dying of cancer is a tragedy. They stared at him with a look that clearly declared, “There but for the grace of God...” Some dodged and avoided him, as though he was infectious. Two or three women propositioned him. He was never sure if it was out of sympathy or perversion. Screwing the dying woman’s husband was possibly a turn-on for some really messed-up types. It’s a big, odd world.
So he didn’t need the drama when, weak with the disease and the attempts to treat it, Frances fell down the stairs and broke her neck. She was simply trying to cross the landing of their small home, a few steps from bedroom to bathroom. She just tripped and then fell down the stairs, but a fall might have turned the tragedy into a farce.
Or worse, a mystery. A murder mystery. Because people have fertile imaginations and fast, gossipy tongues.
He heard it happen. The clatter, the recurring thump, thump, thump, then a more violent smash. The exact sound stays with him. Haunts him in the dead of night. Or when he’s at work. Or playing football in the garden with the boys. Watching TV. Making dinner. It’s there. An insidious earworm in his head. Just can’t get it out, even all these years later. He was in the kitchen making a cup of tea when it happened. Dunking the tea bag in the boiling water. Dunk, dunk, dunk, stir. He knew instantly, at some deep level, that it was her conclusion. Her end. Thump, thump, thump, smash. Her body bouncing from one stair to another. Four bangs as she fell head over heels. Such a funny, antiquated expression. Usually associated with love. Of course she was not falling in love, but instead to her death. He ran to her immediately. Immediately wasn’t fast enough.
Because they were alone, the police asked lots of questions at the time. Naturally it was their job to do so. And there was an autopsy, an inquest. In the end, it was labeled accidental death. Still, Mark felt responsible. Frances’s sister, Paula, tried to comfort him. “It’s not your fault, Mark. You were doing your best. You were making her a cup of tea. You were trying to look after her.” Except he was making the tea for himself. He had offered Frances one, of course, but she’d said no. He’d decided to go to the kitchen and make tea anyway, because he needed space. He wasn’t even thirsty. Not really. He just needed a couple of moments away from the smell of his sick wife. Away from her gray skin and the slightly fusty bedsheets, which needed changing. Away from the responsibility of it. Why did he choose to do that? He should have stayed in the room, been with her around the clock. Then, when she felt the need to go to the toilet, she could have asked for his help. He would have been happy to help her. He had done so on dozens of occasions. Hundreds. Had she sensed his need to get away from her, even momentarily? Was that why she had struck out independently, if waddling to the bathroom on unsteady legs can be thought of in such vigorous terms?
So after it happened, he decided that when talking to acquaintances or to strangers, he wouldn’t admit that she’d died because of a fall, rather than cancer. He blamed himself and that was bad enough. He couldn’t stand the idea of the judgment of others. He just couldn’t carry it. There’s only so much one man can take on.
He’s never even told the boys the truth about how she died. At the time, they were too young for it to matter. The difficult bit was explaining that she’d gone away and wasn’t ever coming back.
“But don’t they have buses from heaven?” Oli had asked. “If they had buses, she could visit us. Or a train?”
Explaining the lack of public transport in the afterlife to a four-year-old was complicated enough. They already knew she was poorly, that she had an illness; they didn’t need to become scared of stairs, for God’s sake. What did it matter? What difference did it make? It was a long time ago, and it was his decision. His and no one else’s. Because there had been no one else at the time.
When Frances died, Mark remembers a vast, gnawing emptiness. A broad and deep gap. He didn’t sit in his depression. His father would have called that wallowing, even if his mother would have called it processing. Either way, he didn’t indulge in it. He couldn’t. Not just because he had the boys to deal with, it wasn’t just that. He was scared of it. He was scared of how dark it got. How everything trembled on a point where it might so easily become nothing. And it scares him again now. Now that Leigh is gone too.
It was a lot being left with two young sons. The weight of them. Obviously back then, aged four and eighteen months, they didn’t really weigh much, not physically, but by God, the weight of them. Ask any single parent. How much does that child weigh? That kid you owe everything to? That kid you are everything to? And they’ll tell you. Your shoulders will never be broad enough.
“Pick me up, Daddy! Carry me, carry me!”
“No, carry me! I want a piggyback.”
You bear the weight of the world on your shoulders. They are your world, which is frightening enough. You are theirs, which is outright terrifying.
Mark is worried that all this attention about his second wife’s disappearance will inevitably mean that the cause of death of his first wife will be brought into the spotlight once again. There will be more questions coming, if not from the police, then certainly from the press, from friends, from his sons. He ought to explain about their mother’s death before they read about it in the Evening Standard. How will they react? Will they be angry that he lied to them? Not only all those years ago, but consistently ever since. Or will they simply accept it as another weirdness in their already complicated and convoluted lives?
Mark sighs with the thought of it. The weight of it. It seems too late to tell them the truth now, all these years later. The tragedy of how their birth mother died is dwarfed in comparison to the tragedy of their vanished, most likely murdered, bigamist stepmother. A current nightmare.
It’s a mess. What was it that Fiona said? She mentioned a famous Oscar Wilde quote that might prove awkwardly relevant. Mark isn’t into poetry or plays and stuff. He doesn’t really know anything about Oscar Wilde except that he was gay and Irish. Fiona, however, was able to quote off the top of her head. “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
Two dead wives, what did that look like?
Trouble.
5
DC Clements
Fiona gave precise and detailed directions to her holiday home, which turns out to be helpful because the sat nav struggles to commit to a route once they are off the beaten track, and they are both city coppers, not used to venturing this far out.
“This is it,” remarks Tanner, already unclipping his seat belt, practically hanging out the door he’s in such a hurry. Clements is surprised as a nineties bungalow looms into sight; she was expecting something with more charm. Still, she feels her heart quicken a little. She wonders, might they open the door and find Kylie sitting there in front of a roaring log fire, perhaps holding a mug of coffee? Shamefaced—no, guilt-ridden—but alive. Alive is all that matters. Fiona mentioned that she hadn’t visited here since last autumn. She commented, “Wish I made more use of the place, to be honest. Hate to think of it standing empty.” Kylie would know the place was empty, wouldn’t she? There was a possibility that she could have bolted here.
