The Other Woman’s House (26 page)

‘And how does that change things for you? If she's real.'

‘How did my wife know she was dead?' Kit asks Grint angrily, as if all this is his fault. ‘There was no body on that virtual tour, I can promise you that. I looked at it seconds after Connie did, and there was nothing: an ordinary lounge, nothing more, nothing less. No dead woman, no blood. At the time I thought Con must have been seeing things – she was tired, stressed…'

‘She was stressed as a result of having found 11 Bentley Grove programmed into your SatNav as your home address? Correct?'

‘That's what I thought at the time, yes.'

Grint leans across the table. ‘And now you think?'

Kit groans. ‘I don't know why you're asking me. I don't
know
anything.'

‘But you suspect.'

‘He suspects I'm a killer,' I say helpfully.

‘Connie could have programmed the address in herself,' says Kit, refusing to look at me. He must be grateful Sam's sitting between us, even if Sam himself looks anything but glad to be where he is. Who can blame him? I wonder if ours is the worst marriage he's ever seen in action.

‘I didn't programme it in,' Kit says. ‘Connie must have done it. I've been kidding myself that it might have been someone else – someone in the shop that sold me the SatNav.' He laughs bitterly. ‘I suppose we believe what we want to believe, don't we?'

Some of us do. Others fail, however hard we try.

‘Connie's been a mess. For months,' Kit mutters.

Go on. Don't stop now
. In a way, it will be a relief to hear him say it. At least then I'll have something concrete to fight against.

‘There was no dead woman on the Roundthehouses website. Maybe Connie saw her in the flesh. In that house, in the lounge. Connie could have parked my car on Bentley Grove. She often drives my car, she's in Cambridge all the time…'

‘I've never driven there in your car,' I tell him. ‘Not once.'

‘Ask her,' Kit urges Grint. ‘Make her tell you the truth – she won't tell me.'

Ask away, DC Grint. As many questions as you want, and I'll tell you no lies.

‘Why do you think Connie goes to Cambridge?' Grint stays focused on Kit.

‘She told you why. Don't you listen? Why don't you tell us what's happened, what you know about this dead woman? Is there a dead woman?'

‘Why does Connie go to Cambridge so often? She doesn't live there, she doesn't work there…'

Kit slumps in his chair. ‘Like she said before: she's looking for me.'

‘
She
said that, yes, but what do you say? She claims she's trying to catch you out in an adulterous relationship. She claims she found 11 Bentley Grove as the home address in your SatNav – she says you programmed it in. If
she
programmed it in, as you're suggesting, then surely she would know you
didn't
. Why, then, would she hang around 11 Bentley Grove waiting for you to emerge on the arm of your bit on the side? Does that make any sense to you, Mr Bowskill?'

Kit says nothing.

‘Or did she put the address into your SatNav
because
she suspected you were having an affair with the woman that lived there? Was it her way of saying, “The game's up”?'

‘Kit?' Sam prompts.

‘I don't know. I don't know why! I don't know anything.' Kit makes a choking sound, covers his mouth with his fist. ‘Look, Connie's not evil, she's…I love her.'

I can't help jumping slightly, as the word ‘evil' joins us in the room.
Like a gust of cold air
.

‘Shall I take over?' I say briskly, trying to sound as impartial as I can. The only way to get through this is to be objective. Grint needs to know what Kit and I both think. Then maybe we can make some progress. ‘Kit thinks I murdered a woman. Or maybe I didn't murder her – maybe it was manslaughter or self-defence, since I'm not evil. Either way, I'm so guilty and
traumatised, I try to block it out. I succeed in banishing 11 Bentley Grove and the dead woman from my conscious mind, but my subconscious isn't so compliant. The guilt erupts, and causes trouble for me. Like Kit says, I'm a mess – that's definitely true, that's the one thing we agree on. I programme the address of the house where the murder took place into his SatNav. Maybe, deep down, I want to be caught and punished.'

‘Connie, stop,' Sam mutters, shifting in his seat. He really shouldn't work for the police if he can't cope with tense, unpleasant situations.

I ignore him and continue with my story. ‘When the house comes up for sale, the part of me that knows the truth is terrified that whoever buys it will find evidence of my crime. That's why I stay up all night looking at it on Roundthehouses, staring at the pictures of every room. The dead woman and the blood are long gone – I'd have made sure to remove all traces – but I'm paranoid, and, in my panic, I imagine I can see the crime scene exactly as it was: the body, the blood—'

‘Hold on a second,' Grint interrupts. ‘If you're looking at the house to check there are no traces of the murder you committed, then you haven't repressed the memory, have you? You know what you've done.'

‘No, I don't,' I say, impatient because he's missing the point and it's so obvious. ‘I only know it subliminally. I've blocked it out: the murder, putting the address into the SatNav – everything. As far as I'm aware, Kit must have programmed in the address. But he denies it, so, understandably, I'm suspicious. I start going to Cambridge nearly every Friday, trying to catch him red-handed.' I flinch as an image of bloodstained hands fills my head.
Streaked with red past the wrists, down to the elbows
.

‘Are you okay?' Sam asks me. ‘Would you like some water?'

‘No. I'm fine,' I lie. ‘One day – the Friday just gone – I see that 11 Bentley Grove has sprouted a “For Sale” sign in its garden. That night, I'm determined to have a nosy at the pictures on a property website, to see if I can spot anything that belongs to Kit in any of the rooms. I find nothing – not a scrap of proof. I almost go to bed feeling reassured: everything's under control. Up until this point, I've successfully repressed my awareness of what I've done, but having the pictures of the house there on the screen in front of me is too much – the memory flares up, and I see the…' I stop, swallow. ‘I see the death scene, as clearly as if it were on the website. I don't realise it's a mental projection; I believe I've seen it on my computer.'

Kit is openly crying now.

‘I'm only saying what I know you're thinking,' I tell him.

‘Let me see if I've got this right,' says Grint. ‘You kill a woman, and manage to conceal the memory from yourself, so that most of the time you have no idea you've done it. There are only two occasions when your guilty subconscious breaks the surface: once when you programme the address into the SatNav, and then again when you see a dead body that isn't there on the Roundthehouses website.'

‘That's what Kit thinks, yes.'

Grint pushes his chair away from the table, leans back. He kicks the heel of one shoe against the toe of the other. ‘So, when you look at 11 Bentley Grove on Roundthehouses, on a superficial level you're looking for evidence of your husband's presence in the house. Simultaneously, without allowing yourself to acknowledge it, you're actually looking for any evidence you might have left behind that could link you to the murder you committed.'

I force a smile. ‘Absurd, isn't it?'

‘Who is she, then, this dead lady? Why did you kill her?'

‘I didn't. Kit thinks I did. I'm hoping you're going to tell him that the scenario I've just described is the biggest load of rubbish you've ever heard.'

Grint drums his fingers on the arm of his chair. ‘Posttraumatic memory loss is a handy fictional device, but I've never come across it in real life,' he says, after a short pause. ‘Though I've met a fair few low-lifes pretending to be afflicted with it.'

‘What do you think?' I ask Sam.

‘You keep saying all this is what Kit believes…'

‘Oh, he believes it – look at him! Have you heard him deny it? Or rather, it's what he wants us all to
think
he believes. Most of all, he wants
me
to think he believes it – don't you? You want me to be terrified that I've lost control of my own mind – that I might have killed someone and buried the memory so deep that I don't know I've done it!'

Kit covers his face with his hands. ‘Can somebody make this stop?' he murmurs.

‘I think we should…' Sam tries to come to Kit's rescue, but Grint raises a finger to silence him. So it's Grint and me versus Sam and Kit, is it? Two of us want to hear the worst; two of us don't.

‘Course, Kit would tell you I've got a powerful subconscious,' I say with false brightness. As concisely as possible, but omitting none of the gory details, I tell Grint about my hair loss, the vomiting, the facial paralysis – how my assorted symptoms sabotaged our escape to Cambridge in 2003. ‘I've regretted not moving ever since. I've got a bit of a thing about Cambridge. I've built it up in my mind to be this…civilised beautiful
paradise, unreachable for the likes of me. Even being here, in a police station – I can't say I'm enjoying it, but I'd rather be under suspicion of murder here than anywhere else.' Silently, I congratulate myself on a fine performance; the person I'm pretending to be is shielding me from the pain I would otherwise be feeling. If Grint's a competent detective, he should be able to distinguish between insanity, eccentricity and a sense of humour.

‘I'll take that as a compliment,' he says.

‘Cambridge, for me, it's like…the one that got away, if that makes sense. Kit calls it my “land of lost content”. It's a quote from a poem.'

‘A E Housman,' Grint smiles. ‘“Into my heart an air that kills/From yon far country blows:/What are those blue remembered hills,/What spires, what farms are those?/That is the land of lost content,/I see it shining plain/The happy highways where I went/And cannot come again.”'

I start to laugh. I can't stop.

‘Connie.' Sam puts his hand on my arm.

‘What's funny?' Grint asks me.

‘Only in Cambridge would the cops quote poetry at you. You're reinforcing all my preconceived ideas.'

‘Will you shut up?' Kit snaps at me, looking at me for the first time since we got here. ‘You're embarrassing yourself.'

I turn on him. ‘I'm scaring you, you mean. I've seen through you, and you hate me for it. Look at you – you can barely be bothered to keep up the pretence any more! You've told so many lies, you're running out of energy. Little inconsistencies are creeping in – if I drove to Bentley Grove in your car, then that's my pink coat in the back window, isn't it? Why say it's a different pink?'

‘Mrs Bowskill—' Grint tries to cut in.

I raise my voice to block him, wanting only to hurt Kit, to inflict the deepest wound that I can. ‘Do you honestly think you can make me believe I'm suffering from some kind of multiple personality disorder, that Subconscious Me might have committed a crime that Conscious Me knows nothing about? It's fucking ludicrous! How stupid do you think I am, exactly?
You're
the one who should be embarrassed! Even on its own terms, it doesn't work. If I was suppressing the memory of having killed a woman, surely it'd come back to me now, when we're all discussing the possibility in great detail?'

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.'