Woman with a Secret Read online

  “You’re wasting your time on us, unless you’re just here to get background,” Abigail Meredith said. She was sitting sideways in a low-backed chair with her legs draped over its arm. “Vet was busy being a birth partner for a friend of hers on Monday morning—she got to cut the cord and everything. I was more boringly at work all day, surrounded by colleagues. I’d much rather have been murdering Damon.”

  “Abby,” said Verity authoritatively.

  “Sorry. It’s all just so horrible.” Abigail swung her legs around so that she was sitting straight in her chair. “I can’t stand the endless gloom of death. I mean, even after the death’s happened, the gloom just goes on and on! You know who’d agree with me? Damon! He’d laugh if he could hear me joking about murdering him.”

  “If I’d known he was going to be killed . . .” Verity’s lower lip shook. “I feel as if I’ve spoken ill of the dead, even though he wasn’t when I wrote the book.”

  A good reason never to speak, or publish, ill of anyone, Sam thought.

  “Why? It’s all true,” said Abigail. “Was then and is now. Damon said exactly what he wanted, when he wanted, and he approved of others doing the same. You should write another memoir, about losing him. I’ll cowrite it with you.”

  Losing him? Was Abigail referring to Damon’s murder? Hadn’t both women lost him when their respective marriages to him had ended?

  “So . . . you two are good friends, obviously,” Sam said.

  “Yes,” said Verity. “I couldn’t have gotten through these last few days without Abby. She’s held me together.”

  “We are friends, but that’s a by-product,” Abigail amended. “We started out as a very exclusive victim support group. We’re the only two victims of marriage to and divorce from Damon Blundy—the only two in the world. We always hoped Hannah might join and swell our ranks, but she can’t now. She’s Catherine Parr to our Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves.” Abigail made a violent neck-slicing gesture with her index finger, then shrieked with laughter.

  Both women looked and sounded less like victims than almost anybody Sam had ever met. They had the loud, expansive voices of people who took for granted that others would listen; they were both stylishly dressed and startlingly attractive in their different ways. Abigail had masses of blond curly hair, soft features, full lips and a flawless complexion. When she wasn’t laughing about beheadings or flinging her legs over pieces of furniture in a way that flashed rather a lot of bare leg, she looked angelic. Verity was tall and slim with short, glossy dark-brown hair, large green eyes and what Sam’s wife, Kate, would call “film-star cheekbones.” And someone had evidently interior-designed the living daylights out of her immaculate home. Bland person-height wooden sculptures of wavy rectangles, like sheets of paper bent by the wind, were strategically positioned in the large open-plan living-cum-dining room.

  Appearances could be deceptive, Sam knew. Perhaps beneath the shiny exteriors of these two women lurked spirits that had been crushed by Damon Blundy, but he doubted it.

  Doormat. Despot.

  “How long have you been staying here, Abigail?”

  “Since Tuesday night. Vet and I both had the same reaction to the news—we wanted to be together. We understand each other’s feelings in a way that no one else can.”

  “I don’t mean to pry, and I hope it’s not an insensitive question, but . . . how do you both feel?” Sam asked. “I mean, neither of you was married to Damon anymore . . .” He didn’t know how to finish, so he left the question dangling.

  “We’re devastated,” said Abigail. “Not straightforwardly-sad devastated—in some ways, that would be much easier. It’s so hard to describe if you haven’t been through it. I don’t suppose you’ve ever had a murdered former husband?”

  “I haven’t,” Sam confirmed.

  “You can’t grieve in a normal, healthy way if it’s someone you loved and then hated. The love you once felt springs back to life when they die.” Abigail frowned. “It’s as if death has canceled out the real Damon Blundy, the one I despised and would have done anything to be rid of, and who’s left to fill the space? Fantasy Damon, the one I first fell in love with—the charming, gorgeous, witty, entertaining, charismatic, intelligent . . . perfect love-object. Now that the real Damon’s gone, the superior version that made such a powerful impression on my imagination all those years ago is somehow . . . resurrected.”

  “That’s exactly it,” Verity agreed.

  “I know why it is!” Abigail announced triumphantly. “When someone dies—especially violently or tragically—you can’t help feeling sorry for them. What’s happened to them is . . . well, it’s just the worst thing ever, so much worse than whatever bad things they’ve done, and so you pity them, and once you pity someone, you have to forgive them—that’s the cunning trick death plays. I’m sure you know the story of Thomas Hardy and his first wife.”

  Sam tried to look as if he too was sure he did.

  “He’d come to loathe her, but then when she died, he fell in love with her all over again: ‘Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me / Saying that now you are not as you were / When you had changed from the one who was all to me . . .’”

  “‘But as at first, when our day was fair,’” Verity completed the verse.

  “So . . . Damon wasn’t all bad, then?” Sam asked. Damn, that sounded crass. Though not as crass as Please stop quoting poetry and going on about Thomas Hardy’s first marriage.

  “Damon was an amazing man,” said Verity. “That was the trouble. When he channeled his amazingness into making you feel good . . . wow. You’d do anything to have that experience again. But when the opposite happened, when you found yourself out of favor . . .” She broke off, shook her head. “I’m amazed Hannah was able to stand it for as long as she did.”

  “Damon and Hannah were married for less than two years,” said Sam, puzzled.

  Verity half smiled. Abigail laughed. A private joke. Sam waited to be included.

  “Two years would be hardly any time in normal circumstances,” said Abigail eventually. “In marriage-to-Damon terms . . . Guess how long I was able to stick it out? Four months. Vet did a bit better—seven months. Neither of us could believe it when Hannah got past the one-year mark.”

  Oddly shaped, unattractive Hannah Blundy. And yet, by her own account, Damon had never channeled his amazingness into making her feel bad, not even once. She had remained permanently in favor. Why? How?

  “Can I ask you both a strange question?” Sam said. “Could you imagine Damon ever being a consistently kind, loving husband? Could you see him marrying someone—the right person for him—and treating them well all the time?”

  “Fuck, no,” said Abigail. “Apart from anything else, Damon was volatile. He loved drama, so one minute everything would be fantastic, the next he’d be ranting and fuming. He wouldn’t be able to live with anyone for longer than a week without them getting a glimpse of his vicious streak.”

  “It’s hard to explain the power of his personality to someone who didn’t know him,” said Verity. “His hostility pushed you so far away . . .” She shuddered. “He was never physically violent, but he didn’t need to be. Why do you think I ended up here and Abby moved to Oakham? We both used to live in London.”

  “You moved because of Damon?” Sam asked.

  “Divorcing him and moving to a different part of London didn’t feel safe enough,” said Verity. “For either of us. We both felt so . . . destroyed by him, we had to get farther away. London felt as if it belonged to him.”

  “And then he moved to the Culver Valley!” Abigail said bitterly. “I nearly moved again at that point—to Inverness or Aberdeen or somewhere. But then I thought, ‘No, why should I?’ So I forced myself to stay put. I wasn’t prepared to let him win.”

  “It’s not that we hated him,” Verity explained. “We did in a way, or we told ourselves we did, but . . . at the same time, we both feared he’d decide he wanted us again, drag us back
into his life. He couldn’t be without a woman, Damon.” She looked at Abigail. “I couldn’t have held out. I’d have gone back if he’d pursued me hard enough. Let him destroy me all over again.”

  “Oh, me too,” said Abigail, as if Verity had said, I fancy a cup of tea. “We were saved by the fact that he no longer wanted us. And that’s not because we were deficient; it’s because Damon was a fanatic—a perfectionist of the most neurotic kind. No one could ever have been good enough for him.”

  “When we’d been married for just over a month, I found out he’d slept with another woman,” said Verity. “It took me three weeks to pluck up the courage to confront him about it. He was in a being-nice-to-me phase and I didn’t want to ruin it, but it was eating away at me. Daddy persuaded me that I had to say something, and thank goodness he did. If he hadn’t, I might have kept quiet. I might never have found out the truth about my own marriage. Damon . . .” She broke off, pinching her lower lip between her thumb and forefinger.

  Sam steeled himself. One of the less pleasant parts of his job was having to listen calmly to details of inhumane behavior. Every time he was told a new horror story, he had to resist the temptation to say, “Not really?” or, “You’re joking?” After everything he’d seen and heard in his years as a detective, he still couldn’t believe that his fellow human beings were capable of such depravity.

  “Damon said nothing at first,” Verity went on. “I thought he might deny it. I had proof, and was psyching myself up to produce it if necessary. Then, after a long silence, he shrugged and said, ‘Of course I screw other women. What do you expect? You can’t let me down in the way you have and expect me not to retaliate. You’re lucky I didn’t duck out of the wedding.’” Verity repeated her ex-husband’s words without emphasis or tone. Sam guessed they’d been delivered to her rather more forcefully.

  “I had no idea what he was talking about—not a clue. As far as I knew, I’d done nothing wrong. Damon had certainly never complained . . .”

  Sam waited.

  “It turned out he’d been trying to protect me from the devastating truth, but since I’d forced the issue, he decided I deserved to suffer. I wasn’t perfect. That was my crime: having imperfections. Hundreds of them. He started to list them, counting them off on his fingers as he went along: I was lax about shaving my legs and plucking my eyebrows; I kept clothes that were past their best and should have been tossed out long ago; I folded back corners of book pages instead of using a bookmark; I squeezed the toothpaste tube in the wrong place; I’d talked too much on this occasion, too little at that party. And those were the mild ones. It got worse: I drooled sometimes when I was asleep and made a mark on the pillowcase; the bathroom stank after I’d used it—not in the way that it would after anyone had used it, but . . . in an even worse way.”

  Verity walked over to the window, turned her back on the room. “He also said I had a funny smell about me when we had sex, that it put him off. Horrible, horrible things, interspersed with the stupid stuff, as if there were no difference: the time I threw away the recycling in the wrong bin, after he’d carefully rinsed out jars and bottles. It took him nearly two hours to get me up to speed with everything about me that fell short of his ideals, and the really chilling thing was, he didn’t have any of it written down. That would have been frightening in a different way, but . . . it was all there in his head, stored away. He came out with it so effortlessly.”

  “It’s all in Vet’s memoir,” Abigail told Sam. “Which, thanks to Damon, became a bestseller. He plugged it incessantly—told his readers it was definitely the best book of the year because it was the only one about him. Even though it portrayed him as a total shit. He could be . . . surprising like that.”

  “The man you’re describing sounds like a monster,” Sam said, feeling queasy. “You said before that you’d have gone back to him. Both of you said it. Is it really true?”

  “I hope not. I fear yes.” Abigail gave Sam a c’est-la-vie look.

  Verity nodded in confirmation.

  “Why?”

  “If he’d wanted us back—either of us—he’d have produced such a dazzling display of fresh-start, new-leaf high romance that we’d have ended up believing we’d never see his cruel streak again,” said Abigail. “Damon at his best was irresistible.”

  “Did he do the same to you?” Sam asked her. “Keep a list of everything you did that he disapproved of?”

  “I’m sure he did, but he never said so. Yes, I’m certain he did, thinking about it. I don’t think he could help himself. On the eve of our wedding, he told me that I was ‘verging on hefty’—those were his exact words—even though I’m actually not at all overweight and nor was I then. And he couldn’t bear it if my nail varnish was chipped.” Abigail waved her hands in the air. No chips in the pink that Sam could detect.

  “There was a morning on our honeymoon when I woke up and found him sitting beside me in bed, crying,” she said. “I was frantic, as you might imagine. He wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t explain what was wrong, however much I begged him to. He left the room without a word and disappeared for most of the day. I thought I must have talked in my sleep, declared undying love for one of my exes or something. When Damon finally turned up again, he told me that if I ever snored again the way I had the night before, he would leave me and never come back.”

  “Snored?” Sam could hardly believe what he was hearing.

  Abigail nodded. “Snoring—the antithesis of femininity, according to Damon. I’m a quick learner. I didn’t snore again, though I didn’t sleep properly either. Half of my brain had to stay awake, on the lookout. And I made sure my nail polish was always immaculate, but . . . once Vet and I became friends and she told me about the list of criticisms he threw at her, I realized that all my efforts were in vain. For every flaw of mine that Damon upbraided me for, there would have been at least another forty he silently resented.”

  “You’ve both described a man who couldn’t tolerate any kind of deviation from unrealistic perfection,” said Sam.

  “That’s true, but only of the women he fell in love with and put on pedestals,” said Abigail. “He liked his male friends to be as flawed as possible—outrageously so, ideally. Damon’s fantasy dinner party would consist of sociopathic, objectionable men and perfect, beautiful women.”

  “So what was he playing at with wife number three?” Verity said bitterly. She looked at Sam. “You’ve met the latest Mrs. Damon Blundy, I take it?”

  Sam nodded.

  “It’s out of the question that Damon would have loved a woman like that,” said Abigail. “What did he want with her? Why did he keep her so long?”

  “You asked before if we could imagine Damon being a consistently kind, loving husband,” said Verity. “Is that how Hannah described him?”

  Sam saw no reason why he shouldn’t answer honestly. “Yes, it was.”

  “Well, then either she’s lying or . . .” Verity broke off.

  “Or what?” Sam asked.

  “Or Damon was planning something,” said Abigail. “If I were you, I’d be wondering pretty hard about what that something was, and who might have found out about it and decided to stop him.”

  “IT SOUNDS WHINY TO say, ‘Why me?’ but I have wondered why me, many times,” Keiran Holland told Sellers. “I’d never written a word against Damon, never even mentioned him. Yes, I’d expressed opinions he disagreed with, and I know bullies like him need targets, and anyone will do, but he did seem to have a special antipathy toward me in particular.”

  They were in a room Holland had described without cracking a smile as “the drawing room” in the journalist’s home in Wandsworth. Holland’s wife, Iona Dennis, sat in a wing-backed armchair in the corner, apparently happy to let her husband do all the talking. She hadn’t spoken yet, and had greeted Sellers, when Holland had introduced him, with a silent smile. She had a book on her knee with her own name on the spine. Sellers assumed it was either by her or about her. The former seemed mor
e likely.

  “And Paula Riddiough,” he said. “Damon Blundy attacked her as often as he attacked you.” Seconds after mentioning Riddiough’s name, he regretted it. Holland looked stricken, and Iona turned her face away, as if the former MP’s name were a rock Sellers had lobbed at her.

  This is what cheating does to people. This is the reality. Say the wrong name in the wrong house and the whole house falls down.

  Sellers banished the disturbing thought from his mind.

  “Oh no he didn’t,” said Holland, once he’d recovered. “He didn’t savage her nearly as often—I’ve actually compiled the statistics: I can prove it to you. And even when he did go for Paula, it wasn’t with quite the same loathing that he reserved only for me. With most of Damon’s attacks on people, there was a sort of affection about them that you could just about detect around the edges of his hostility, but not with me. He unequivocally hated me—and, as I say, I have no idea why. I mean, it can’t have been snobbery—yes, I grew up on a northern council estate and my parents were a drain on the state, but . . .”

  Sellers waited for him to say, “. . . but I now have a drawing room.” Holland didn’t sound as if he had grown up on a northern council estate. Sellers came from exactly that background himself and had the accent to match, even after twenty years in the Culver Valley.