The Other Woman’s House (49 page)

‘You stuck to me like glue when I got home, all evening, right until we went to bed. I remember thinking it was odd that you didn't do any of the things you normally do: watch the Channel 4 news headlines, go for a quick pint before dinner. All you seemed to want to do was talk to me. I wasn't suspicious – I was flattered.'
After six months of not trusting you, I still loved you
. ‘When we went to bed, you read your book for ages – much longer than usual. Did you agree a time with Jackie, beforehand?'

Through my hair, against the back of my head, I feel Kit nod. I wait for him to say something. All I hear is ragged breathing.

‘You needed it to be late at night,' I say, thinking out loud. ‘You needed the body and the blood to appear and disappear quickly – I was supposed to be the only one who saw them.' My mind snags on something, but I force it out of the way. ‘Jackie hacked into the website and put the new tour up just before one. You gave her step-by-step instructions how to do it. She wouldn't have needed to hack in, except it had to look as if an outsider had done it. At one o'clock, you pretended to fall asleep, knowing exactly what I'd do and exactly what I'd see.' Rage flares up inside me, breaks through the fear. ‘How did it feel, to know so much when I knew nothing?'

The knife swerves towards me, nicks the skin on my neck. I feel a trickle – thin, like a tear.

Is that the best you can do?

If he wants to silence me, he'll have to kill me. ‘Did you lie in bed waiting for my scream?' I can't remember, now, whether I screamed or not. I hope I didn't, if that was what Kit was
waiting for. I hope I disappointed him. ‘You knew I'd wake you up as soon as I'd seen it. I wouldn't want to be alone with…
that
, in the middle of the night – of course I'd wake you. Must have been a fairly safe bet for you that I wouldn't want to go anywhere near my computer afterwards, that I'd send you in there on your own to look, so that I didn't have to see it again.'

‘I knew only you…that you'd only come in once I'd told you there was nothing there,' Kit whispers. He stumbles over the words, struggling with what must feel like a second language to him and not his mother tongue: the language of rationality.

‘You went in, closed down my tour, clicked on yours on the desktop screen and started it playing,' I say, numb inside. ‘You called out to me that you were looking at the picture of the lounge and there was no dead woman in it.'

‘Stop,' says Kit. There's a hollow tiredness in his voice. ‘None of this is my fault,' he says. ‘Or yours, or Jackie's.'

If I tried to struggle free, would I stand a chance? No. Not yet. Kit's arm is still pinning me against him. Maybe later, when he's held the position for even longer and his muscles are aching. If I try and fail now, I might not get another chance – Kit might decide to hurry things along.

How long was he here with Jackie before he killed her?

‘Why have the original tour waiting on the desktop? Why not just text Jackie and tell her to change it back?' I'm asking myself, not Kit. I'm asking the person I trust. When the answer presents itself, I feel as if I've cheated and it must be the wrong one. How can I know, if I didn't know before?

I hear Alice's voice in my head:
Usually what we're seeking comes to us. It's just a matter of how long it takes to reach us.

‘You
did
text Jackie,' I say. ‘You heard me scream, or you heard the sound of glass smashing when I knocked Nulli's certificate off the wall – either way, you knew I'd seen what I was supposed to see and you texted her then. But you couldn't bank on her being able to change the tour back to the original quickly enough, could you? And you couldn't risk me seeing the woman's body more than once.'

‘Stop, Con.'

I recognise begging when I hear it. But there's no need for Kit to beg. He's the one with the power, the one with the knife. I ignore him. ‘Any more than once and it wouldn't have been so easy to make everyone believe that I imagined it: a split-second visual delusion, gone in the blink of an eye. That's what you wanted them all to think – the police, my family, Alice. You wanted me to feel that the whole world was against me, that no one believed me…but…' I stop, aware of the flaw in what I'm saying. ‘Jackie. She came forward. She said she'd seen it too. Ian Grint only took my story seriously because of her.' It makes no sense. If Kit and Jackie wanted me not to be believed…

‘Stop!' Kit shouts, finding his energy. He's moving, dragging me with him. I try to make a big enough noise to immobilise him as he pulls me towards the stairs, but terror steals the sound, and all that's left is a long, low moan. Did I think I could keep him at bay for ever? That if I carried on talking, I could make time stand still? I reach out, close my fingers around the top of the newel post, the white death button, but Kit pulls me away, yanking me roughly up the steps, one at a time. My arms and legs feel floppy and uncoordinated, like a rag doll's.

Does he have a plan for what happens next, or did his plan
run out a long time ago? Is he going to do it in one of the bedrooms? A bitter liquid fills my throat. I haven't got the strength to swallow; I can hardly breathe.

On the landing, the bad smell gets stronger. Kit starts to panic. I can feel it, like electrical charges all over his body, pulsing through to mine.
He doesn't want to be up here
. He can't keep still. The blade of the knife keeps touching my face; each time, I jerk my head away. Kit mumbles apologies, one after another.
Sorry, sorry, sorry
. I'm too frightened to speak, unable to tell him that no amount of sorrys will ever be enough. ‘It's not your fault, any of this,' he says. ‘I'll show you whose fault it is.'

He moves us towards the only closed door on the landing; all the others are slightly ajar.

‘No,' I manage to say. ‘Please, I don't…no, don't…'
This is the room. He's going to kill me in this room
.

Using the tip of the knife, Kit pushes hard near the handle and the door swings open with a click. He tightens his arm around my waist. I try to focus on the idea of breathing easily, without restriction. Kit yelps like an animal in a trap as he forces me over the threshold.
He doesn't want to do this. He hates everything he's doing
. The stench of putrefaction in the room makes me gag. I notice nothing but the black humming, the double bed in front of me, and on top of the bed…

No. No. Nopleasenopleasepleaseno.

Four large plastic parcels, each one several feet long, with brown parcel tape wound around them and sealing the ends. Four stinking cocoons, with a cloud of black flies buzzing around them – three lying side by side, and the fourth, the smallest, nestling in a groove made by the curved sides of the two biggest. Through the transparent plastic, I see material – a pattern of flowers and leaves, a paisley pattern…

‘We had to wrap them like mummies,' says Kit. ‘Stop them smelling, stop the flies getting in – that's what Jackie said. See how well it worked? This is her idea of the flies not getting in.'

Now
. Now's when I should run, but my body is boneless and limp. Kit bends down, taking me with him. There's a roll of brown parcel tape on the floor, by the leg of the bed. ‘Pick it up,' he says, freeing one of my arms. ‘Tape your mouth shut, then wind the tape twice round your head, so that your mouth's properly covered.' The knife blade slices into the air in front of my eyes. One inch more and it would cut my eyeball in half.

I feel something pouring down my legs. I try to deny to myself what this must mean, but the knowledge is there and I can't get away from it.
I've wet myself
. I try to turn my head so that I don't have to watch my shame soak into the carpet. Whoever finds my body will know that I died terrified and humiliated.

‘Pick up the tape,' Kit says again, as if he can't understand why the thing he wants to happen isn't already happening. ‘Tape your mouth shut, then wind the tape twice around your head.'

But I can't do anything, nothing at all. I can't comply and I can't resist. ‘Just kill me,' I say, sobbing. ‘Get it over with.'

‘Plenty of Cambridge students stay on after they finish their degrees,' said Charlie. ‘Why didn't Kit Bowskill, if he was so in love with the place?' She was sitting in the back of Simon's car, having abandoned her own outside the Granta pub. The traffic was heavy; Sam had already suggested once that they get out and walk. Charlie was starting to think he might have a point. The car had been in the full glare of the sun all the time that they'd been in the pub, and so far the air-conditioning hadn't had much effect. The back of Charlie's top was wet with sweat.

‘You're looking at it the wrong way,' said Simon. ‘Don't think of Bowskill as an ordinary bloke who sets out to achieve something, succeeds, then pats himself on the back for a job well done. Think of him as a wanting machine, programmed to do nothing but enhance its wanting skills. He's spent his whole life practising. He can want longer and harder and deeper now than he could five years ago. He's so good at wanting that no amount of getting can ever be enough for him.'

‘So he avoids the things he wants so that he can do more wanting?' Sam said.

‘Basically, yeah,' said Simon. ‘Though if I was being picky, I'd say that there's no such thing as “the thing he wants”. Charlie's right – if living in Cambridge was what he wanted, he could have stayed after he finished his degree. That might
have involved taking any old job, though, and living in a shithole for a while, which for Bowskill wouldn't have been an option. It'd have been too much of a comedown for him, after three years as one of the city's elite – accommodation in historic college buildings, studying at one of the world's best universities. Not that he'd have been happy during his student years either. He wouldn't have been able to relax enough to enjoy any of it, knowing it was temporary.'

Charlie shook her head. ‘I still don't see how taking a job in Rawndesley would move him any closer to his—'

‘I do,' Simon cut her off. ‘I can guess what his strategy was: get a job with a reputable firm, one with good promotion prospects and branches all over the country – specifically, one with a branch in Cambridge – and wait for the opportunity to transfer. Meanwhile, you might be living in Rawndesley, but you've got a plan to get back to where you want to be. And you can start working your way up the corporate ladder, so that when you
do
transfer to Cambridge you can afford a decent house there. For as long as you're living in Rawndesley, it's easy to accept that your current life is a compromise – Rawndesley's a compromise kind of place. What Bowskill was unwilling to do was compromise in Cambridge – to him, Cambridge represents perfection, and he's only willing to be there when the conditions are perfect. In the unlikely event of that ever happening, he'd find he felt worse than ever – big shock to his system. The day Kit Bowskill's forced to admit that no detail of his life could be improved – that's a dangerous day for him. He'd have to recognise that the problem's internal – that's
he's
the detail he needs to change. Probably at that point he'd have a breakdown.'

‘So…before applying for a job at Deloitte Rawndesley, he'd have applied to Deloitte Cambridge?' said Charlie.

‘Yeah – and all the other firms he'd decided were worthy of him,' said Simon. ‘He could probably have coped with an entry-level salary and a tiny flat if he'd had a job he was proud of, and could see a clear way to the top. Maybe there were no openings, or maybe he had interviews and lost out to other people – either way, Deloitte Rawndesley was the best he could do. He might have set himself a deadline: transfer to the Cambridge branch within two years, five years, whatever.'

‘Clearly he failed,' said Charlie.

‘No. You still don't get the way his mind works. Someone like Bowskill never fails. He's always en route to realising his master plan. Success and victory are always just round the corner.'

Charlie made a face at the back of Simon's headrest. If she wasn't entirely familiar with every nuance of Kit Bowskill's dysfunctional psyche, that could be because she'd never met the man. Simon had only met him once, yet he seemed to be an expert on Bowskill's particular brand of unquenchable dissatisfaction. Charlie wondered if this was something she ought to worry about.

‘Whatever Bowskill's transfer-to-Cambridge plan was, he changed it when he met Connie,' said Simon. ‘From the second he met her, moving to Cambridge without her would have felt like a terrible failure.'

‘You're saying he fell in love with her?' Charlie enjoyed trying to make Simon say the word ‘love'.

He neatly avoided it. ‘I doubt he's capable of normal emotions,' he said. ‘Everything he feels is couched in terms of a want. He'll have decided he wanted Connie as much as he wanted Cambridge, but she had strong roots in Silsford – she was a Monk before she married Bowskill, as in Monk & Sons. Her
family's lived in Little Holling for generations. It won't have taken Bowskill long to realise that prising Connie out of the Culver Valley was going to be hard. Connie told me herself: the whole ethos of no one ever leaving is woven into the fabric of her family. There was a glimmer of hope for Bowskill, though – he quickly saw that Connie's parents drove her insane. She was desperate to get away from them. Cleverly, he didn't put any pressure on her or try to persuade her. He encouraged her to spend time with her parents, telling her what a great thing a close family was – he said that all the time, Connie told me. He was relying on her getting so sick of the Monks that
she'd
suggest moving away. He probably had to wait longer than he'd initially hoped, but it happened eventually – one night they went out for dinner and Connie told him how bored of the Culver Valley she was. Bowskill wasted no time in telling her he'd been offered a job by Deloitte Cambridge, a promotion—'