Woman with a Secret Read online

  “None whatsoever,” said the improbably named headmistress whose voice he could barely hear. Nastia Grekov was obviously of Russian ancestry, or something similar, though she sounded very English. Having a name that sounded identical to the word “nastier” when you worked in a school couldn’t be easy, thought Simon.

  “I’d never heard of him until I got your message,” she said. “Do you mind telling me what this is about? Do I need to worry about this man?”

  “No, not at all.” Having heard the answer, he was impatient to end the call. He was supposed to be meeting Hannah Blundy at her office five minutes ago, was standing outside it, and had been about to press the buzzer when his phone had started to ring.

  “You say ‘not at all’ and yet you’re a police detective, and you say he writes horror, so . . . I’m a little concerned,” said Mrs. Grekov. “What can you tell me to put my mind at rest? Has Mr. Tasker committed a crime? Is he suspected of a crime? I’m responsible for the welfare of several hundred—”

  “Your pupils aren’t in any danger,” Simon told her, hoping to God that he was right. A few more abstract reassurances and he was able to extract himself.

  Why did Reuben Tasker hate the school opposite his house so much? And only since Damon Blundy’s death, according to Gibbs, who had spoken to Tasker’s wife, Jane, about it. It surely must have something to do with the murder, but how could it possibly be connected?

  Simon pressed the buzzer. The “21” beside the door was so subtle that, even with the sun shining directly on it, Simon almost missed it. Hannah Blundy’s psychotherapy practice was obviously doing well if she could afford space in this large white stucco-fronted townhouse, the middle one of a wide, regal, terraced block of three on the riverfront in Silsford.

  “Yes?” a crackly voice emerged from the intercom on the wall. Hannah’s?

  “DC Simon Waterhouse, to see Hannah Blun—Hannah Yeatman.” At work, she called herself by her maiden name. Simon didn’t understand why anyone would allow themselves to end up in a situation where they had two names. Having one was bad enough; he’d always hated saying his own out loud.

  The crackly voice said something he couldn’t make out. It was followed by a deeper buzzing noise, which Simon took to mean that he should push his way in. He had to apply his full weight to the shiny black front door in order to get it to move.

  Inside, he expected to see a person, or something that hinted at the presence of a person or people nearby, but there was nothing—no visible reception area, no sound of voices or movement. Simon was standing in a wide, elegant hall with mustard-colored walls and one of those zigzag-patterned wooden floors, dark and shiny. Ahead of him were two doors, one on either side: one ajar and one closed.

  He moved forward and looked into the room that was open. It looked like a waiting room, waiting for people to wait within it. There was a display of glossy magazines on a rectangular table with wooden legs and a thick marble slab-like top, three armchairs that looked as if they’d been designed for a royal court, a backless pink sofa that reminded Simon of a rolled-out tongue, and two tall, rubbery-leafed plants in large terracotta pots.

  Surroundings so ostentatiously flawless made Simon suspicious. The inside of the building smelled of new paint and new carpet. He pictured waves of crimson blood flowing down the curved staircase in front of him, rushing toward him like a curling red ribbon.

  He shook his head to banish the image. “Hello?” he called out. “Anyone in? Hannah?”

  A pair of legs appeared at the top of the wide staircase in front of him. “Sorry!” It was Hannah’s voice.

  Simon was embarrassed by how relieved he was to hear it. The building had a bad vibe. He wouldn’t have liked to be in it alone.

  “Sorry,” Hannah said again. “I had a patient on the phone and couldn’t disentangle myself easily. Come on up.”

  Simon followed her to her office on the first floor and did a double take as he entered the room.

  Incredible. Someone had covered the whole floor with a painted Chinese landscape. It was mainly blue and white, with touches of pale green and pale pink here and there. Like an intricate china-teacup pattern, but on the floor.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” said Hannah. She was smiling, but her eyes were red and swollen, her face pale. “My friend did it for me. She’s a genius.”

  On the far wall, above a filing cabinet, there was a framed quote that must have been chosen for its psychological relevance:

  Deep-rooted fears—

  Should not fears have deep roots?—

  And terrifying love

  Send their pale shoots above

  The surface where no other growth appears.

  “Do have a seat there, near the water,” Hannah said.

  At first, Simon thought she meant the painted river on the floorboards. Then he saw the carafe on the table between the sofa and the window, with an upended glass resting on its neck, acting as a lid. He walked over to the sofa and sat down, trying not to mind that this was probably where Hannah’s patients sat. Or—even worse—lay.

  “I hope it wasn’t too inconvenient for you to meet me here.”

  “It’s fine. Are you back at work?”

  “No. I just . . . Being here’s preferable to being at home alone,” Hannah said. “Damon never came here, so . . . it’s just easier.”

  “So, you’re not seeing anybody? Apart from me, I mean—no appointments?”

  She shook her head.

  “Are you sure?” Simon tried to sound as relaxed as possible. “No one came to see you this morning? I don’t mean a patient, necessarily.”

  Hannah’s mouth tightened. “If you know—which you seem to—then why ask me?”

  “Could you answer, please?”

  “Paula Riddiough came to see me,” said Hannah quietly. “She’s obviously told you all about it.”

  Simon considered denying this, then realized that if he did, he’d have to explain. He’d worked out, ten minutes after Paula Riddiough had left his office yesterday, that the horological opposite of a meeting that begins at 10:10 A.M, ten minutes past the hour, is a meeting that ends at ten minutes to the hour. Appointments with psychotherapists were famous for ending at ten minutes to the hour. Not that Simon knew from personal experience, but he’d heard references to the fifty-minute hour.

  “Did you contact Paula to arrange this meeting, or did she contact you?” he asked.

  “She contacted me.”

  “And you agreed to see her?”

  “I was curious.”

  “And? What did she want?”

  Hannah flinched. Never had it been more obvious that someone didn’t want to talk about something. Why?

  “She wanted to tell me that she didn’t kill Damon. I told her I didn’t for a moment imagine she had. Without drawing breath, she asked me if I’d killed him.”

  Simon frowned. “She can’t have thought you’d tell her even if you had,” he said, more to himself than to Hannah.

  “You know, I think she did.” Hannah sounded angry. “Her tone was horrible. Kind of matey-confiding, as if she were saying, ‘Go on, admit you murdered your husband—it can be our little secret.’ I think she hated him so much she’d have liked to make a new friend of his murderer.”

  “Did Damon ever talk to you about Paula?” Simon asked.

  “Often. We had lots of fun badmouthing her. He thought she was a waste of space.”

  “Culver Valley East was her constituency when Damon moved from London to Spilling in November 2011.”

  Hannah recoiled.

  Feeling uneasy, and a little bit guilty without really understanding why, Simon asked, “Do you know why Damon decided to move to the Culver Valley?”

  “He was tired of London, I suppose,” Hannah said abruptly. “I’m not sure. Is this why you came, to ask me about Paula Riddiough?”

  “It’s not the only reason. Why are you so reluctant to talk about Paula?”

  Hannah said nothing. She st
ared at Simon as if it were his turn to speak and she were the one waiting.

  “Why did you lie when I first asked if you’d had any appointments?” he asked.

  “I didn’t lie. I . . . Look, Paula hated Damon and he hated her. I’d rather not think about her, discuss her, have her in this room. Can we change the subject, please?”

  “You don’t want to discuss her with me, but you were happy to badmouth her with Damon?” said Simon. “How come?”

  Hannah looked away.

  “Something’s changed, hasn’t it? Today. When Paula came to see you—”

  “Look, I don’t want to talk about Paula Riddiough, and I won’t talk about her,” said Hannah forcefully. “All right? If that’s the only topic you plan to cover, you can leave now. It wasn’t pleasant, being asked if I’d murdered Damon, in a tone that suggested she’d approve if I had.”

  “I can understand that, but—”

  “I can’t see why she’d care enough to insist on meeting me in person, but she did. I can’t think why Damon would make part of her name into his computer password, but he did. Now, do you have any questions for me that aren’t about Paula Riddiough?”

  She cared enough to want to meet you in person because she was in love with your husband. And he was in love with her, hence his password based on her name. And you know it, don’t you? You’re doing everything you can to avoid acknowledging the truth, but you know.

  After giving Hannah a few seconds to compose herself, Simon asked, “Does the name Nicki Clements mean anything to you?”

  “No. Who is she?”

  “A regular contributor to the comments threads beneath Damon’s columns online. It’s been suggested to us that she might have been obsessed with him. He never mentioned her name?”

  “No,” said Hannah.

  “I need to ask you something,” Simon said. “You’ll want to say no, but . . . I think it could be important. And I promise you, anything I see that’s not relevant to the investigation will go no further than me.”

  “Hold on,” Hannah cut him off. “What are we talking about here?”

  There was no point putting it off, though Simon was tempted. He hated asking questions to which he knew the answer would be no. “I’d like to look through your client files,” he said. “Do you make notes on what you talk to them about?”

  Hannah nodded. “I do. And I’m sorry, but there’s not a chance in hell that I’m going to let you see them.”

  “It’s possible that the person who killed Damon made an appointment to see you at some point. He or she might even be a regular client.”

  Hannah frowned. “That’s a strange assumption to make, isn’t it? What makes you think that?”

  Simon wasn’t prepared to tell her the truth, so he said nothing. He was certain he was right.

  “Sorry,” said Hannah. “Confidential. My work is pretty much all I’ve got now, so my professional integrity’s not up for grabs.”

  Simon struggled to suppress his mounting frustration. Somewhere in this room was the information he wanted . . . In that filing cabinet, probably. “Got any clients called Nicki?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Would she use her own name, though? “How about Melissa Redgate?”

  Hannah flinched. Her hand flew to her neck and started to make grasping motions, as if she were reaching for a necklace that wasn’t there. “Melissa,” she whispered. “Did she kill Damon? Oh my God. Oh my God!” Her eyes widened. “Those words, ‘He is no less dead’ . . .”

  “What? What, Hannah? You’ve thought of something—what is it?”

  She pressed her lips together and shook her head.

  “Hannah? You’ve got to tell me what you’ve—”

  “The filing cabinet.” She leaped to her feet, her face a mess of pink and white blotches. “Third drawer down. I’ve got to . . . I’m sorry, I need some air.”

  Simon didn’t follow her. He listened to her footsteps on the stairs. A few seconds later, he heard a door slam. Was he in the building alone? “Filing cabinet, third drawer down,” he repeated to himself.

  He is no less dead. Than what? A “less” implies a “than.” Was Simon about to find out the answer, from one of Hannah’s patient’s files?

  He opened the drawer and saw that it contained surnames “P to S.” He found the file with the name “Melissa Redgate” on it and pulled it out. Heart racing, he started to flick through it. When he got to the fourth page, he stopped and read more carefully.

  He swore under his breath. This was it. Here it was, all neatly written down.

  It made sense. Hannah’s shocked reaction, though . . . She hadn’t known, hadn’t made the connection, not until Simon had nudged her into thinking of her patient “Melissa Redgate” as a possible murderer.

  Simon read and reread the words. The identity of Damon Blundy’s killer was still a mystery to him, but he was getting closer. An important part of the solution to the overall puzzle had fallen into place. Simon now knew what Hannah knew, and what the woman whose file he was holding in his hands knew. He knew why Damon Blundy had been killed in the way that he had.

  CHARLIE FELT HER PHONE buzz in her pocket. She sighed to herself. This was going to be interesting. There was no point asking Fortunata to keep the noise down; Charlie had tried before and failed.

  “Hello?” she raised her voice.

  “You’re in Mario’s,” Simon said immediately.

  “Do you know any other cafés where the owner sings loud Italian arias all day long, making all the customers want to strangle her?”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “Waiting for Melissa Redgate. She refused to come to the station, for some reason.”

  “I want to ask you something,” said Simon. “About Liv and Gibbs.”

  “I’m trying not to think about them. How dare they sit there and tell us a barefaced lie about their stupid affair when we’ve spent years helping them bloody well get away with it? I bet Sellers knows the truth. He and Gibbs are blood brothers, aren’t they? Or, to be more accurate, sleaze brothers.”

  “They’re lying, but Gibbs doesn’t want to,” said Simon. “He hates it. Liv loves it, though—in the restaurant the other night, she’d have spent the whole evening talking about the pretend separation if we’d been willing to indulge her.”

  “We’re agreed they haven’t really split up, right? I mean, no way have they split. So why, suddenly, does Liv need us to believe they have?”

  “A new fantasy?” Simon suggested. “This is what I’m getting at. Liv enjoys making things up. She enjoys fantasy. Gibbs prefers the reality, which is why he’d rather tell us the truth, whatever it is.”

  “It’s the same as it always was. It must be: they’re sleeping together, and lying to their spouses.”

  “No, something must have changed between them to spark off this breakup story.”

  “I can hardly hear you,” Charlie said loudly in the hope that Fortunata would take the hint. “OK, so what’s the change? They’re not leaving Dom and Debbie, are they? What are the other possibilities?”

  “Who cares? I only care about the difference in their characters: fantasist, realist. Gibbs’d leave Debbie and move in with Liv at the drop of a hat, wouldn’t he? She’d only have to say the word.”

  “True,” Charlie agreed.

  “He wants a real life with her, but she doesn’t. She wants to preserve her real life with Dom, and have her secret life with Gibbs, and lie about it!”

  “So . . . what does that mean?” Charlie asked.

  “It means I’m starting to understand something I didn’t before.”

  “About Liv and Gibbs?”

  “No. Well, yes, but no. By the way, I know why Damon Blundy wasn’t stabbed.”

  The line went dead. Behind the counter, Fortunata switched from Madame Butterfly to Tosca. Charlie held her phone over her mug of tea and thought about dropping it in.

  “Sergeant Zailer?”

  She look
ed up. “Are you Melissa?”

  The woman nodded. She was short and plump, with dark-brown shoulder-length hair, big brown eyes and a pronounced dimple at the center of her chin. She had a handbag draped over her shoulder and was clutching an orange plastic bag with both hands. From the way she held it, Charlie deduced that it contained something important. It looked, through the semi-transparent bag, like books.

  “Have a seat. She’ll come over and take your order—in between the verse and the chorus.”

  Melissa didn’t sit down. She eyed Fortunata nervously, wincing when she hit a high note. “Shouldn’t we go somewhere quieter?”

  “How about the police station?”

  Melissa looked shocked, as if Charlie had suggested a brothel. “I told you, I don’t want to go there. Once was enough. I agreed to meet for a chat, not an official interview.”

  Charlie nodded. She had no idea what Melissa imagined the difference was, but she didn’t intend to set her straight—not before she’d found out what was in the orange bag. “Then here’s as good a place as any. And they do the best cakes,” she said, pointing at the crumbs on her plate.

  Melissa sat down opposite her, a defeated expression on her face. Charlie thought she recognized the personality type: obedient, afraid of authority, a tendency to repress resentment—something that grows ever harder, the more of it you do.

  “So, let’s start chatting straightaway. I hear you don’t have an alibi for last Monday morning.”

  “I do,” Melissa said. “I was working. At home. It’s not my fault that I work from home. Plenty of people do and they aren’t all murderers.”

  “Between eight thirty and ten thirty A.M. you had no phone calls, sent no emails, no texts?”

  “No, I didn’t. I was doing paperwork. Involving paper, not online. How do you know all this, anyway?”

  “From speaking to colleagues,” said Charlie. “Sorry, is this not the kind of chat you wanted to have? What did you want to talk about?”