The Other Woman’s House (31 page)

So, no superior garaging and sunnier gardens for the Frenches, Sam thought, not if Jackie could help it. Hadn't she described herself as loyal, at the beginning of the interview? In Sam's experience, people who extolled their own loyalty often sought to impose reciprocity, by coercion if necessary. Almost always, there was an unspoken caveat:
but if you cross me, or let me down…

‘I was left standing there like a spare part, with Selina Gane threatening to ring the police. I managed to calm her down, at least enough to explain what had happened. She was in a state – who wouldn't be? So was I, to be honest. I mean, it wasn't like anything bad had happened to me, but it freaks you out a bit, thinking you've been tricked by some weirdo and you don't even know why. What I don't get is, what was the point of it all, from the dark-haired woman's point of view?
She must have known what'd happen: I'd turn up to show people round the house, and I'd meet the real Dr Gane. Eventually that was bound to happen, wasn't it?'

Sam wondered if the point had been to scare Selina Gane out of her senses. To make her think, ‘If my lover's wife is capable of this, what else might she be capable of?'

‘I don't suppose Selina Gane said anything about who the dark woman might be?'

‘She wasn't making much sense. At first when I asked her who'd do a thing like that, she said, “I know who did it.” I waited for her to say more, but she started yapping on about changing the locks. She grabbed the
Yellow Pages
and started looking up locksmiths, and then she threw the book on the floor, burst into tears and said how could she stay in the house after this? “If she can get a copy of my front door key once, she can do it again,” she said. I told her she ought to contact the police.'

‘She took your advice,' said Grint. He aimed his next comment at Sam. ‘She made a statement on Thursday 8 July. In it, she said that she was aware of a dark-haired woman who'd been following her – she had no idea who she was, but this woman had been hanging around, behaving oddly. From her statement, there was no way of us working out who this person was, but then…' Grint turned back to Jackie. ‘There have been some developments, recently.'

Grint couldn't have known about this statement yesterday morning, Sam thought, or else he would have sounded far more interested than he had the first time Sam had spoken to him about 11 Bentley Grove and Connie Bowskill's disappearing dead woman.

‘I had to ask her,' said Jackie. ‘I wanted to know who she
thought had done it. She said, “I don't know who she is.” But a few minutes before, she'd said she
did
know who it was. She mustn't have wanted to talk about it.'

Grint and Sam exchanged a look. Grint said, ‘I think what she meant was that she suspected the woman who'd been following her was responsible – she knew she had a stalker, but didn't know the stalker's identity.'

‘Right,' said Jackie. ‘Yeah, I suppose so. I didn't think of that.'

‘So you threw the brochures in the bin, took 11 Bentley Grove off the website…' said Sam.

‘Deleted the photos I'd taken, explained to my boss what had happened.' Jackie sounded bitter. ‘I got a right bollocking for not checking the passport properly.' She gave Sam a look that said,
I know whose side you're on
. ‘Then, just before I went to New Zealand, I got a call from Dr Gane – the real Dr Gane. I checked.'

Sam wondered how rigorous the checking process had been, over the telephone.
Are you really Selina Gane this time? Yes. Oh, okay, great
.

‘I recognised her voice,' Jackie snapped at him.

‘Fair enough,' Sam said evenly.

‘She rang me because she said I'd been kind and understanding, that day with the Frenches.' There was an unmistakeable ‘
So there
' on Jackie's face, as if Sam had called her essential goodness into question. ‘She wanted to sell her house, wanted me to take care of it. Said the house didn't feel like hers any more. I could see where she was coming from – I'd have felt the same way in her shoes, to be honest. She said, “If that woman got in once, she might have got in a hundred times. I can't live here knowing she's violated my space. She might have slept
in my bed, spent nights here while I've been away.” I told her I couldn't deal with it, I was off on holiday, and I'd ask Lorraine to ring her. She was okay with that – she knew Lorraine, from when she bought the house – it was Lorraine that sold it to her. Lorraine went round, took new photos…'

‘Hold on,' Sam stopped her. ‘When I spoke to Lorraine Turner, she said nothing about anyone impersonating Selina Gane and putting her house up for sale without her knowledge.'

‘I didn't tell her,' said Jackie. ‘Dr Gane asked me not to.'

‘She didn't want anyone to know what had happened who didn't need to,' Grint told Sam. ‘She found it distressing and embarrassing, didn't want people asking her about it.'

Sam was still thinking about Lorraine Turner, whose relationship with 11 Bentley Grove went further back than Selina's, Jackie's, Connie's. Lorraine had sold 11 Bentley Grove to Selina on behalf of the Christmas tree couple, Mr and Mrs Beater. Did she also sell the house
to
the Beaters, when it was first built, or had the developers done that themselves?

‘I told Lorraine she'd have to meet Dr Gane at Addenbrooke's or at her hotel to collect the key,' Jackie went on. ‘I was thinking, “Don't bother asking her to meet you at Bentley Grove – she won't go near the place.” She said to me she wasn't going back to that house ever again.'

Grint was moving towards the door of the interview room. ‘Let's go and meet Selina Gane's stalker, shall we?' he said. Jackie rose to her feet. A more sensitive person might have been nervous, Sam thought; he certainly was. He tried to imagine Connie Bowskill admitting it, and couldn't. Couldn't imagine her denying it either – how could she, if Jackie pointed the finger in no uncertain terms? As Connie had said herself, it was difficult to maintain a state of denial when what you
were trying to deny was laid out before you and you were forced to confront it head-on.

If it
was
denial
. It occurred to Sam that Connie might be cannier than she seemed. How good an actress was she? Her painful-to-watch attack on her husband had been inconsistent, lurching from one accusation to another; Sam had put this down to confusion and panic at the time, but now he wasn't so sure. At first Connie had seemed convinced that Kit thought she was a killer, and terrified that he might be right. She'd wanted Grint to say that for her to have killed a woman and then repressed the memory was impossible – she'd virtually put the words in his mouth. Then she'd changed tack: Kit didn't really think she'd killed anybody, but he wanted her to think that was what he believed – wanted to plant in her mind the fear that she might have committed a murder of which she now had no memory.

Listening, Sam had wondered how she could harbour these two suspicions simultaneously. He'd concluded that she was most afraid of not being in control of her own behaviour; she preferred to think that her husband was a monster.

After talking to Jackie Napier, Sam had a different theory. It was no accident that he'd been left wondering which of the two it was: Kit the liar, Kit the killer, messing with his wife's head in the hope that he could make her collude in his framing of her for a crime she didn't commit – or Connie the unfortunate victim of a mental breakdown whose psychological disintegration was so severe that she couldn't be held responsible for her actions. It was no accident that a choice had been set up between these two possibilities and no other. Sam's attention, and Grint's, had been skilfully diverted away from a third possibility: that Connie had knowingly and deliberately
killed a woman. That the anguished on-the-edge persona she presented to the world was a carefully constructed lie.

Sam was torn. Part of him would have liked to take Grint to one side and ask him what was happening on the forensic front, what Selina Gane had said when Grint had interviewed her, as Sam assumed he must have. He'd have liked to know if the former owners of the house, Mr and Mrs Beater, had identified the stain on the carpet as being the same one made by their Christmas tree, or if Grint was content to take Lorraine Turner's word for it. Sam wouldn't have been; a couple of times he'd opened his mouth to tell Grint as much, then changed his mind. Not his patch, not his problem.

It was time to extricate himself and return to his own far duller caseload. The more he discussed 11 Bentley Grove's disappearing dead woman with Grint, the deeper he'd be drawn in. Interviewing Jackie Napier had been a step too far; he should have refused.
Why didn't you, then?
his wife Kate would say – the most pointless question ever to be formulated, and one Kate asked regularly.

I didn't because I didn't.

As he followed Grint and Jackie up a narrow flight of grey stairs, Sam admitted to himself that he had no choice but to put Grint in touch with Simon, who, if nothing else, would be able to confirm that Connie had told the truth about the conversations she'd had with him. Simon would have formed an impression of her character, positive or negative. He wouldn't be afraid to take a position, or several: reliable or dishonest, crazy or sane, victim or victim-maker.
Good or evil
. Simon dealt in larger concepts than Sam felt comfortable with, and trusted his own judgement; he was the help Grint needed.
Someone who didn't constantly equivocate
. It often seemed to
Sam that, while most people's minds were like manifestos, foregrounding their beliefs and commitments, his own was more of a suggestion box, with every side of every argument stuffed into it, all clamouring for attention, each demanding equal consideration; Sam's only role was to sort through the competing claims as impartially as possible. Maybe that was why he felt tired nearly all the time.

He'd have to contact Simon in Spain and warn him that Grint would be in touch; it was only fair.
Great
. Offhand, Sam couldn't think of anything he wanted to do less than interrupt a honeymoon, especially not one that belonged to Charlie Zailer. Charlie wasn't known for her forgiving nature.

Sam got a shock when Grint opened the interview room door and he saw the Bowskills. Both seemed out of breath. Connie looked as if she'd been crying non-stop for the whole time she'd been alone with her husband. There were grey streaks on her trousers that hadn't been there before. What the hell had happened? An unpleasant, sour smell hung in the air, one Sam could neither describe to himself, nor match to anything he'd smelled before.

‘Sam?' Connie's voice was thick. Her eyes were on Jackie Napier, but there was nothing to suggest she recognised her. ‘What's going on? Is this the woman who saw what I saw?'

If she's lying, Sam thought, then by now the lie is as necessary for her survival as her heart and lungs are; she'll cling to it no matter what, because she can't envisage a life without it. Most of the liars Sam's work brought him into contact with favoured the disposable variety – they'd put a story together and trot it out in the hope that it might net them a lighter sentence, but they knew they were talking rubbish; that was how they defined it to themselves. They weren't emotionally
attached to their invented scenarios; when you pointed out to them that you could prove they weren't where they said they were at a particular time, they normally shrugged and said, ‘Worth a try, wasn't it?'

Sam steeled himself for confrontation. He sensed a powerful latent aggression in Jackie Napier, always on the lookout for a legitimate outlet. That she would lay into Connie Bowskill, verbally if not physically, seemed beyond doubt. So why the delay? Why was she staring at the Bowskills, saying nothing?

Jackie turned to Grint, her mouth a knot of impatience. ‘Who's
this
?' She gestured towards Connie.

Grint took a second or two to answer. ‘This isn't the woman who showed you Selina Gane's passport?'

‘I did
what
?' said Connie.

‘What the fuck are you talking about?' Kit turned to Sam. ‘What does he mean?'

‘No,' Jackie Napier said irritably. ‘I don't know where you got her from, but you can put her back. I've never seen her before in my life.'

 

POLICE EXHIBIT REF: CB13345/432/24IG