The Other Woman’s House Page 20

  Grint rises to his feet. ‘Why don’t I tell you why you’re here?’ he says.

  I hear a long sigh. I’m not sure if it came from Kit or Sam.

  ‘I’ve got a woman called Jackie Napier in an interview room one floor down. That name mean anything to either of you?’

  ‘No,’ I say. Kit shakes his head. Maybe making him hate me is the way forward; when he no longer cares that he might destroy me, perhaps he’ll tell me the truth.

  ‘Jackie logged onto the Roundthehouses website at almost exactly the same time you did, early hours of Saturday morning.’ Grint watches me, waits for a reaction. I try to keep up, to process what he’s saying. As far as I’m concerned, there are only four people in my nightmare: me, Kit, Selina Gane and the dead woman. There’s no Jackie. ‘She brought up the page for 11 Bentley Grove,’ Grint goes on. ‘Like you, she clicked on the virtual tour button. Guess what she saw?’

  Bile fills my throat. I press my mouth shut, afraid I’m going to be sick.

  ‘She saw what you saw, Connie,’ says Sam. He sounds relieved, as if he’s been wanting to tell me this for a long time.

  ‘Her description was interchangeable with yours,’ Grint says. ‘Copious amounts of blood on the carpet, dark woman in a patterned dress, face down, hair fanned out around her head, as if she’d fallen. But d’you know what struck me most? She said – and so did you, from what Sam here tells me – that the blood was darkest next to the woman’s stomach.’

  I close my eyes and see it all again. ‘You should have told us straight away,’ I manage to say.

  ‘D’you think?’ says Grint. ‘I disagree. If I’d told you when you first walked in here, I’d have been telling strangers.’

  What’s that supposed to mean?

  ‘Jackie couldn’t stand to look at it, she said. She shut down the tour, went to pour herself a large G&T. She thought about phoning her best mate, but didn’t want to wake her up. Ten minutes later, once she’d calmed down a bit, she went and looked again. Second time round, there was no woman’s body.’

  ‘So…’ Kit’s sitting up straight now. ‘If this Jackie woman saw what Connie saw…’

  ‘There’s more.’ Grint walks over to the window, loops his fingers around the wire grid. ‘I spoke to someone at Roundthehouses. The virtual tour of 11 Bentley Grove’s nothing to do with them – it’s the agent selling the property that provides all the material – photos, tours, room dimensions, everything.’

  ‘Lorraine Turner,’ I say, remembering her name from Sam’s story about the previous owners and their Christmas tree, the stain on the carpet.

  ‘Right.’ Grint smiles. He looks inappropriately happy. I hope it’s only his power over us all that he’s enjoying, not the prospect of a woman dead from a stomach wound. ‘Lorraine Turner’s the agent selling 11 Bentley Grove, but she has nothing to do with the IT side of things. How much do you know about computer hacking?’

  ‘There’s nothing about computers that Kit doesn’t know,’ I say.

  ‘I’m not a hacker.’

  ‘But you understand how hacking works.’ It’s not so much a rhetorical question as a statement of fact. Grint turns to me. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Not a clue.’

  ‘Then I’ll ditch the technical waffle and keep it simple. One of the estate agent’s IT guys rang me back about half an hour before you got here. Someone hacked into their website just before 1 a.m. on Saturday. Looks like they substituted one virtual tour for another – the one with the woman’s body for the official version.’

  ‘That makes no sense,’ says Kit, grey-faced. ‘When I looked, there was no dead body, no blood.’

  ‘At 1.23 a.m., the hacker did his stuff again,’ says Grint. ‘Or her stuff, I suppose I should say, since it could have been either. The original tour was reinstated.’

  ‘It wasn’t as late as 1.23 when I looked,’ says Kit. ‘I remember seeing the time on the computer, thinking “What the fuck am I doing up so late?” It was 1.20, exactly. And I didn’t hit the virtual tour button again – I looked at Connie’s tour, the one she’d started. It was on a repeating loop. Why didn’t I see what she saw?’ Kit’s eyes dart round the room, not settling on anything or anyone.

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘In the hacker’s version, he arranged it so that the picture of the dead woman only came up once in every twenty loops, or once in every fifty.’ Haven’t I explained this already? Why has Kit chosen to forget?

  ‘Would that be possible?’ Grint asks him. Because Kit’s the computer expert here, or because Grint thinks he’s the one who tampered with the virtual tour?

  ‘Anything’s possible.’ Kit shrugs. He lets out a long, slow breath. ‘So I guess that’s me off the hook. Think about it, Connie. Where was I, just before 1 a.m.? In bed, next to you. I was reading – you were asleep. Pretending to be asleep,’ he corrects himself. ‘Where was I at 1.23 a.m.? Back in bed – awake and wishing I wasn’t. Wondering whether to put up with your paranoid delusions for another six months, or pack a bag and get the hell out first thing in the morning.’

  He’s right. I see Grint register the look of defeat on my face. He must think I want my husband to be guilty of computer hacking, or bigamy.

  Or murder.

  What I want – all I want – is to understand. To know. At this precise moment, I don’t care what the explanation is, as long as there is one. If Kit didn’t hack into the estate agent’s website…

  ‘What are you doing about this?’ I ask Grint. ‘Have you got – forensic people looking at the carpet? Have you interviewed Selina Gane?’

  He ignores my questions, points his finger first at me, then at Kit. With his thumb raised, it looks as if he’s miming a gun. ‘Don’t go anywhere. Sam and I are going to talk to Jackie Napier, then we’ll be back.’ Sam leaps up, on cue. I don’t think he realised his presence would be required, but he’s not going to quibble; he’s going to follow the leader.

  As soon as they’ve gone, I stand up and head for the door.

  ‘Con, wait…’ Kit reaches out his hand.

  ‘No,’ I tell him. ‘I won’t wait. I’ve waited too long already.’

  Outside the police station, I run. My head pounds, too full of blood, as I turn a corner, then another, then another. The pavement tilts. I blink, breathe in as much air as I can. My legs feel wobbly, unconnected to the rest of me. I sink down in a heap on the pavement, prop myself up against a wall. A woman walks past with two small boys behind her, both on push-along scooters that look like strange, angular dogs. One of them says, ‘Mummy, why’s that lady sitting on the road?’ I must look deranged, clutching my bag to my chest – as if I’m afraid someone’s going to mug me.

  When you know there’s a threat, but you don’t know where it’s coming from, it makes sense to be scared of everything. I don’t suppose the boys’ well-turned-out mother has ever bothered to explain that to them.

  Once I’ve got my breath back, I pull out my phone, ring 118118, and ask for the names of any hotels in Cambridge that begin with ‘D’ or ‘Du’. Sam said yesterday that Selina Gane was staying in a hotel; there has to be a good chance she’ll still be there. She wanted to talk to me once before, and I ran away. Maybe if I hadn’t, I’d have found out the truth a lot sooner.

  ‘There’s the Doubletree by Hilton Garden House hotel on Granta Place. Is that the one you want?’

  It could be.

  ‘It’s the only hotel listed in central Cambridge that begins with “D”.’

  ‘Put me through,’ I say. She won’t be there. She’ll be at work. I stay on the line. Even if she’s out, I want to find out if it’s the right hotel.

  Why? Are you planning to pay her a visit?

  I listen to the automated voice’s instructions: 1 for meetings and events, 2 for group reservations, 3 for hotel bedroom prices and individual reservations, 4 for directions and any other enquiries. I press 4 and get through to a human being, a woman. She sounds French. I ask if there’s a Dr Selina Ga
ne staying at the hotel, expecting a one-word answer: yes or no.

  ‘Putting you through now,’ says the receptionist. My heart starts to race. I will myself not to black out again. The only thing stopping me from pressing the end-call button is my certainty that Selina Gane won’t be in her room at two thirty on a Tuesday afternoon. She might have recorded her own voicemail greeting; some hotels I’ve stayed in allow you to do that. I wait, wondering if I’m about to hear her voice. Wondering what it might say.

  Please leave a message after the tone, and, yes, I am having an affair with your husband.

  ‘Hello?’

  Oh, God. Fuck, fuck, fuck. What do I do now?

  You want to talk to her, don’t you?

  ‘Is that Selina Gane?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  I can’t do this. Can’t. Have to.

  ‘It’s me. Connie Bowskill. I’m the one who’s been…’ I stop. What have I been doing, exactly? ‘I’m the woman who—’

  ‘I know who you are,’ she cuts me off. ‘How did you find out where I’m staying? How did you get a key to my house?’

  ‘I haven’t—’

  ‘Leave me alone! You’re sick! I don’t know what’s wrong with you, or what your game is, and I don’t want to know. I’m phoning the police.’

  There’s a click, then the line goes dead.

  I start to shiver, suddenly ice-cold in the pit of my stomach. When I try to subdue the shaking, it gets worse. My first impulse is to ring Sam, to get to the police before Selina Gane does and tell them it’s not true – I haven’t got a key to her house, I don’t know what she’s talking about. I can’t think straight. If the dead woman was real, am I about to be accused of her murder? How can that be, when I’ve done nothing, when I know nothing? Maybe Selina Gane’s not lying deliberately; maybe it’s a mistake. I need to explain…

  No. Think, Connie. If you ring Sam, he’ll persuade you to go back to the police station, back to Grint. And Grint won’t take you where you want to go.

  I need to get into that house. It’s the only way. I’ve looked at the pictures again and again and I still can’t bring to mind the missing detail, the shadow that moves out of sight whenever I try to focus on it. I need to be there in person – stand in that lounge myself, however much I don’t want to, however sick I feel at the prospect. Maybe then the missing piece will slot into place.

  I wish I did have a key to 11 Bentley Grove. If I did, I wouldn’t need to make the call I’m about to make. I fumble in my bag, pull out an old Sainsbury’s receipt. There’s a phone number written on the back of it: 0843 315 6792. I saw it on Grint’s computer screen about an hour and a half ago, wondered why I hadn’t noticed it before on Roundthehouses: the number to ring to arrange a viewing of 11 Bentley Grove, or to ask for further information. While Grint, Sam and Kit were busy staring at the blurred black car, I excused myself to go to the bathroom and wrote it down.

  I key in the number and press dial.

  ‘Connie!’

  Kit is sprinting towards me. There’s no time to run away. I curl into a ball, wrap my arm around my knees and tighten my grip on my phone. He’s not going to stop me from doing this.

  ‘Thank God. I thought you’d—’

  ‘Quiet.’

  ‘Who are you phoning?’

  ‘I said be quiet.’ Pick up. Pick up.

  ‘Who are you phoning, Connie?’

  ‘Lorraine Turner,’ I say, my voice hard. ‘She’s got a house to sell. I’m going to arrange a viewing.’

  Kit hisses an obscenity under his breath, shakes his head. I try to hear only the ringing, preferring it to the sound of my husband’s disgust. Pick up. Please.

  ‘You think they’re going to be showing people round? A woman gets murdered there, and the police don’t think to tell the agent to hold off on viewings? What the fuck’s wrong with you? Look at you, crouched on the pavement like a…Do you actually have any idea what you’re doing?’

  He’s right. I didn’t think. Of course Grint will have told them not to show anyone round 11 Bentley Grove; it must be full of police. ‘You don’t know anything,’ I say, keeping my phone clamped to my ear. I won’t give up, not while Kit’s watching me.

  The ringing stops. Someone’s picked up. A woman’s voice says, ‘Lasting damage.’

  I can’t speak. The breath in my throat has set, turned to concrete.

  ‘Lasting damage,’ she repeats, louder this time. Sing-song. As if she’s taunting me.

  Do you actually have any idea what you’re doing?

  Lasting damage. Lasting damage. Lasting damage.

  I cry out, throw my phone into the road. I don’t want it anywhere near me.

  ‘Con, what’s wrong?’ Kit crouches down beside me. ‘What happened?’

  ‘She said…’ I shake my head. It can’t be true. It must be. I heard it, twice. ‘She said, “Lasting damage”, the woman who answered the phone. Why would she say that to me?’

  I see my confusion reflected in Kit’s eyes: blank incomprehension. Then he breathes in sharply and his face changes. ‘She didn’t say, “Lasting damage”, Connie. She said, “Lancing Damisz” – it’s the name of the agency.’

  I wrap my arms around myself, rocking back and forth to make it go away. ‘She said, “Lasting damage”.’ I know what I heard.

  ‘Connie…Connie! Lancing Damisz is the estate agent that’s selling 11 Bentley Grove. It’s the company Lorraine Turner works for: Lancing Damisz.’

  Lasting damage. Lancing Damisz. I’m not sure how many times Kit says the name before I allow myself to hear it. ‘How do you know? How do you know what the estate agent’s called?’

  He closes his eyes, waits a few seconds before answering. ‘I can’t believe you don’t know. The logo’s on the Roundthehouses page. Just above where it says, “11 Bentley Grove, Cambridge”. Can’t you picture it? We’ve just spent half an hour staring at it, with Grint and Sam. All in upper case, with the D hanging off the L, looped over it. I noticed it because it’s an unusual name. I thought, “They must be new – there was no Lancing Damisz in 2003, when we were looking at houses.”’

  The D hanging off the L. Yes: navy blue letters. I didn’t take in the name because I wasn’t interested in which estate agent was selling 11 Bentley Grove; I was too busy looking for my husband in the photographs.

  ‘Are…are you sure?’ I ask Kit. How could I not know the name? I’ve phoned the estate agent before – last Friday, when I first saw the ‘For Sale’ sign in the garden. I asked if anyone was available immediately to show me round. No one was.

  ‘Ring them back.’ Kit glances at my shattered phone lying in pieces in the road, then tries to pass me his. ‘Don’t take the word of someone you don’t trust.’

  ‘No, I…’

  ‘Ring them!’ He waves it in my face. ‘Prove it to yourself. Maybe then you’ll realise you need help – proper medical help, not some crappy quack homeopath who knows a gullible idiot when she sees one.’

  What about you, Kit? Do you know a gullible idiot when you see one?

  I find the Sainsbury’s receipt again, key in the number. Drops of water fall on the phone’s screen. Tears. I wipe them away.

  This time someone answers after only one ring. ‘Lancing Damisz.’

  It’s the same voice, same woman. Same words. How could I have misheard it? I pass the phone back to Kit, who is waiting for me to admit my mistake and apologise.

  What’s the point? What’s the point of Kit and me saying anything to one another, when neither of us can be trusted?

  14

  20/7/2010

  ‘It was only two days,’ Jackie Napier answered Sam’s question with her eyes on Ian Grint. ‘Two days isn’t a long time. I saw it on Saturday, and I phoned the police first thing Monday morning. I explained to you why.’

  ‘Could you explain it to me?’ Sam asked. Jackie tore her eyes away from Grint to scowl at him. She had taken out one of her gold sleeper earrings and was using the end of it
to scrape underneath her pink-painted fingernails. Odd behaviour for someone so well turned out, Sam thought; the immaculate presentation and the rather unsavoury public grooming seemed to contradict one another. Jackie’s make-up looked as if it had been applied by a professional, and her bobbed dark hair had been styled with architectural precision. Sam didn’t see how it was possible to achieve that rigid triangular look – not without scaffolding and an RSJ, at any rate.

  He couldn’t pin down Jackie’s age in the way that he could most people’s – she might have been anything from twenty to forty-five. She had a round childlike face, but her bare legs were covered with a tracery of prominent blue veins, like a much older woman’s. Or maybe it had nothing to do with age. If Sam’s wife Kate were here, she would say, ‘The legs might not be her fault, but the skirt is. Trousers were invented for a reason.’ Or words to that effect. Strange things offended Kate, things Sam didn’t give a toss about: people wearing clothes that didn’t suit them, clocks in public places that showed the wrong time, houses with brown window-frames, hot-air hand dryers.

  Sam had the impression that Jackie Napier had been expecting Grint to take the lead, and resented this hijacking of proceedings by a newcomer who wasn’t even local, but Grint had decided Sam should direct the interview and had so far contributed nothing. He was sitting in the far corner of the room, using a radiator as a footstool. Sam thought his disaffected schoolboy posture was inappropriate, and would have preferred him to put his feet on the floor, but he had no illusions about who was in charge. Wherever I go, someone else turns out to be in charge, he thought. It worried him only indirectly: he spent a lot of time wondering if he ought to try to assert himself more, and always ended up concluding that he’d rather not have power over others, not if he could help it. What he would have liked was for those with power to behave as he would if he were them.

  ‘I’m not criticising you,’ he told Jackie. ‘You’ve given us some very useful information, and, as you say, two days isn’t a long time.’