The Sleeper (21 page)

‘His pattern?’

She turned and looked me in the eye. Every line on her face spoke of a woman holding herself together by willpower.

‘I’ve been married to Guy for over twenty years. Was married, I should say. We’re forty-seven years old, both of us, and we know each other inside out. His affair with Lara Finch was, depressingly, absolutely in character for him, though everything that’s been in the papers about them living together in London during the week and effectively having double lives makes him even more of a fucking bastard than I’d suspected.

‘They’re saying she killed him because he wouldn’t leave me. That doesn’t make sense to me, because to judge by everything the papers have unearthed, he probably was building up to leaving. I can hear the words he’d have said. “Di. There’s something I need to talk to you about.” He’d have hated every moment of the conversation. Sometimes I felt he was leading up to it. I’d see the look on his face and everything in me would contract with dread. And then he wouldn’t say it. But who knows? Maybe he
was
refusing to leave. Maybe she wanted him to. It sounds that way, you know.

‘That woman from the train, Ellen, who the kids and I met once by the way and who knew exactly what was going on, so that’s nice. She seems very convinced that Lara was going to leave her poor husband and that Guy was offering to do the same. Happy ever after. Maybe he was losing his nerve. I don’t know anything any more. It would only take a moment of madness. People do psychotic things.’

The kettle started screeching. I watched Diana turn the gas off and spoon tea leaves into the teapot.

‘I use proper tea leaves too,’ I told her. ‘Hardly anyone else does. It’s much nicer.’

She smiled at this, and her entire face changed for a fraction of a second.

‘Isn’t it? My mother insists on it, and because I was brought up that way, I do too. It’s a different drink from tea-bag tea.’

‘Like the difference between proper and instant coffee.’

‘Yes! Very few people understand that. Everyone’s snobby or apologetic about instant coffee, but tea bags are entirely socially acceptable. I’m glad you appreciate that.’

I watched as reality descended back on her like smog, crumpling and crinkling her face.

‘I really don’t think she did it,’ I told her. ‘Lara. I mean, who am I to say, obviously, but I cannot believe it of her for a single moment. I think something else went on.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, yes. I don’t know. Someone else. Maybe she witnessed it. Maybe she’s dead too.’

‘They’d have found her by now.’

‘In a lake or something? Or maybe the killer forced her off the train with him? She could have been taken somewhere. I’m sure there’s more to it than the things we know.’

Diana said nothing. She poured milk, then tea, into two matching mugs. They were proper farmhouse mugs: cream, with roses on the sides. A cat walked silently into the room and rubbed itself against my legs. Diana slumped down next to me on the sofa.

‘Oh Christ. I have no idea. I’m not set on the idea that it was exactly the way it looks – how would I know? I’m just trying to get my head round reality. You know? You kind of have your life story in your head – you get married and have kids and come to live in Cornwall, and you think it goes “Guy wasn’t the greatest of husbands and I was a bit of a doormat, but we got on all right, and the kids left home and my mother wasn’t around for ever, and we got old together with some ups and downs but in a mainly happy and companionable way.” That was how my future was going to be until last week. Now I keep having to remind myself that it goes “And when I was forty-seven my husband was murdered and I …” I have no idea how it goes after that. At first you just don’t believe it, and wake up every morning expecting him to be there, or to come back on the train. And then you remember. And then, slowly, you realise that this is actually how it’s going to be from now on. The grim, banal reality.’

‘God, you poor thing.’

She forced a little smile. ‘Yes. So, how is Sam Finch? They didn’t have children. How’s he coping?’

I sighed. ‘I have no idea how he’s going to get through this.’

‘Yes.’ She nodded and stared at something far away. ‘The same as me, but different. His wife. My husband. Both gone. Fucking hell.’ She tried to smile. ‘I never swear, by the way. I’m not the type. So tell me about her. How do you know her? What was her life like before she decided to help herself to my husband? And did you genuinely not know? Because I won’t hold it against you if you did, my dear. I honestly won’t. I’m so far beyond. We’ve all supported girlfriends in unconscionable behaviour. God knows, I have.’

I shifted on my chair. ‘I didn’t know. But I did have an inkling that she wasn’t completely happy with Sam. I met her on the ferry …’

We settled in for the afternoon, and I told Guy’s widow everything I knew about the woman everyone thought was his killer.

chapter seventeen

The press pack ran after me when I left, but Diana had warned me they would. She said that all you had to do was to be firm and keep going. ‘They’ll tire of us soon enough,’ she said. ‘Here’s hoping, anyway.’

‘How’s Di doing?’ yelled a woman, right up close to me.

I ignored her and grabbed my bike, grateful that none of them had stolen it. Diana was right: despite their youth, they did not, on the whole, look like cyclists.

‘How is she? How’s Diana?’ called others. I got on it and tried to leave. They were blocking me in, the whole intimidating crowd of them. I decided just to go and hope they got out of the way. If I were a car, after all, they would. I pulled my helmet down over my forehead, feeling it right across my eyebrows, and put my foot on the pedal. Then I set off, wobbling slowly at first. There was a man in front of me, quite a good-looking one. He was smirking in my face, blocking my path. I rode towards him and he declined to get out of the way.

It was the slowest of slow-motion crashes. I kept riding, though I was lurching a bit as I had had no time to get any speed up to balance myself. He was standing in my path. I could not go round him because people were in the way there too, so I just rode straight into him. He did not perform the necessary side-step. My tyre hit his leg, and I had to put my foot back on the ground.

He burst out laughing.

‘She biked right into me!’ He was addressing the crowd. He had the unmistakable accent of a local, and I wondered whether he was from one of the Cornish papers.

‘You were supposed to get out of the way,’ I told him. ‘You would have done if I were a car.’

‘True. I would. But you’re on a fucking pushbike!’

‘Am I meant to say sorry here? Because I’m not going to. All I’m trying to do is leave. Let you get on with your relentless harassment of a grieving widow.’

‘Nah. I’m probably meant to say sorry to you, but I’m not going to either. All I’m trying to do is get you to talk to me.’

‘Oh, shut up and let me go home.’

‘Seriously, though.’ His voice was lower, solemn. ‘Off the record. How is she?’

‘No you don’t.’

His cheeks were red with the cold and he looked about twenty-five. That made him more than a decade younger than me.

‘Oh bloody Christ,’ he complained. ‘Why do people have this thing about not being able to talk to the press? Like we’re Hitler or something. I’m from the
Western Morning News
, not the freaking
Daily Star
. Though obviously some of these guys are from the tabs. All you have to do is say “She’s … whatever” and we’ll all be able to say “Friends said that Mrs Thomas was … whatever.” Then we won’t have to stand here, freezing, trying to get half a sentence to put in the paper.’

‘But surely you just say “Friends said that Mrs Thomas was … whatever” anyway? You make it up.’

He sighed. ‘It would be better if it bore some resemblance to the truth, don’t you think?’

I got ready to pedal away, then paused.

‘OK,’ I told him, impulsively composing something in my head. The rest of them were gathered around, ready to pounce on whatever I said. ‘She’s a very strong woman, and she’s doing as well as she could be, considering. Her children are her priority, and she’d appreciate it if you guys would leave her alone. She’s not going to come out and cry for your cameras, so in fact you might as well bugger off.’

‘Who are you?’ yelled the crowd. ‘What’s your name?’

As I started to cycle off, the young man reached over and dropped something into the pocket of my duffel coat. I stopped at once.

‘What was that?’ I demanded.

‘My card. Just in case you think of anything else you want to say.’

At that, the rest of them started surging forward with their cards too. I rode off as fast as I could, down the lane, past their little cars parked in the ditch, past the van and down the hill. All of a sudden the world opened out again, and I was able to look at the open spaces, the rocks, the slatey line of the distant Atlantic. The air was fresh, the winter sun occasionally emerging from behind a cloud. I freewheeled down hills, took blind corners faster than I should have done, pedalled frantically in a low gear until I felt my cheeks flush, warmed from the inside but still cold on the outside. My legs began to ache and I was free again.

There was something inside me, unfurling and demanding attention. Lara did not do this. Someone else had been on the train. Somebody had killed Guy and set Lara up. I could imagine her having the affair, I told myself once again, as I sped through a hamlet that was half bungalows, half stone cottages. Sam was intense and needy, though I only really knew him since his faithless wife had vanished without a trace, so that was not a fair assessment. All the same, he had devoted his life to waiting for her to come back from London, and I could see how stifling that would have been.

I could see her leaving him. He would have been devastated, yet, as Diana had said, it was not exactly an untrampled path. Marriages ended.

I wondered whether to call Laurie and say I would be back soon. He would not expect it. He was used to waiting for me. I wondered what he would think if I ventured further afield. He had not forgiven me for drinking wine with Alex. I was pushing the boundaries.

As I chained my bike up outside a Penzance pasty shop, I found that I could not stop looking at the people around me, just in case. There was the slimmest of chances that she was here, in the town at the end of the line. She could have got off the train at Penzance and slipped away.

She had not, of course. Penzance was not a place in which anyone could disappear. If she were in Penzance she would have been found days ago.

People walked past, their breath making clouds around them. The sky had lowered since I left Diana, and now it was only just overhead, black with the promise of imminent freezing rain.

The pasty shop was empty. I knew that I could have gone into any restaurant I wanted for lunch, but I wanted a pasty. The secret money in my bank account, the fact that I never needed to worry about my finances again, seemed so unlikely that I mainly lived as though it were not there. If I spent three pounds on a pasty and a can of Diet Coke, things were reassuringly normal.

At home I cooked the most lovely meals I could for the two of us, considering my small budget. I made soups with local vegetables, and baked bread. I ate well and exercised and was healthy and boring. I could not do anything extravagant at home, because I had not told him about the money. If I told him now, I would have to explain why I hadn’t mentioned it before. It became increasingly impossible.

As I walked along the seafront, past the outdoor, seawater Jubilee Pool, feeling the first drops of rain on my face and licking flakes of pastry off my fingers, I scanned the faces I passed. It was instantly obvious as soon as a figure appeared in the distance that it was not Lara. Everybody was too old, or too young, or too fat or too tall; and anyway, if she were alive, she would be miles and miles away from here, the town in which Guy’s body had been discovered.

The coastline stretched away in both directions, crinkled and craggy. The sea was wild, the wind getting up. I turned my back on Newlyn and changed direction, heading instead towards the castle of St Michael’s Mount, cut off from land by the high tide, pushing my bike back to the station.

I fed the cats, made us both a cup of tea, and went online with Laurie, moody and suspicious, at my side. I looked up everything I could possibly find about Lara (there was nothing new, though a couple of newspaper sites were already bearing photographs of me clambering over that gate, and I hoped no one I had ever met would see them). I called Penzance police, to the annoyance of the man who answered the phone.

‘But,’ I told him, ‘I think there was someone else involved. You should be looking at all the passengers, tracking every one of them down. One of them did it, not Lara.’

He was almost polite.

‘We are of course pursuing every angle and talking to every passenger,’ he said. Then he made me get off the phone, quietly but ruthlessly, and I knew he saw me as a nuisance caller who was one of the hazards of answering the phone at the police station.

The press and the internet were interested in Lara and Guy for now, but soon the next story would come along. Lara’s body would be found, or she would be caught, or she would never be found. Those were the only three possible outcomes.

‘I want her to be all right,’ I told Laurie.

‘She’s not, though.’ His voice was flat. ‘And you know it. Whether she did it or not.’

‘I know. Shall I open some wine?’

He laughed. ‘Oh! Drink with
me
for a change. That’s good of you, my darling.’

‘Look, Laurie. There’s something I’m thinking about doing.’

‘What?’ The anxiety in his voice made me backtrack instantly, as I had known it would.

‘Oh, it’s nothing really. Look. Let’s have a drink. There’s some of that soup left over, too.’

He did not reply. I could not meet his gaze. There was only one bottle of wine in the house, and because I had drunk the nice one with Alex, it tasted rough. I could remember buying it: it had cost me £3.49, and it tasted cheaper than that.