Woman with a Secret (41 page)

Tasker doesn’t look at her. He keeps his eyes on me. “She’s never read any of my books,” he says. “Can’t stand violence. Even the misery memoirs she reads, she skips the nasty bits—don’t you, wifey? Pretty pointless, really, when the nasty bits are the whole point of that particular genre.”

I watch Jane. She’s frozen. Her skin is gray.
A Pompeii volcanic-ash woman
.

Adam and I went to Sorrento for our honeymoon. We went on a day trip to Pompeii. The coach was too hot, and we didn’t take enough water, and all the shops had sold out—there were too many tourists. We wished we’d stayed in Sorrento, lounging by the swimming pool.

I’m going to see Adam again. If Tasker were intending to kill me, he’d have done it by now. He doesn’t want to hurt me; he wants to talk. I’ll talk to him for as long as it takes, until I think of a way out of this room.

“I didn’t think I’d be able to kill a man, because of the violence involved,” said Jane quietly. “Reuben’s right—I can’t read about it. In books, it’s presented in a way to make you care, though, isn’t it? Books make you feel
upset
about violence. In real life, there’s no one in charge behind the scenes steering your feelings in a particular direction. You just do it, and it . . . it’s not so bad.”

“Remember your ad, Nicki?” Reuben asks. “‘I Want a Secret’? You said you wanted someone who would leave no stone unturned in his determination to find out every secret thing there is to know about you. You promised to reciprocate.”

“Yes. I remember.”

“That’s how I knew you were the one for me. You’d have read my novels—every one, cover to cover. How can you claim to love someone who puts their whole heart and soul into their work and completely ignore that work? How can you think that any amount of admin and cooking and cleaning and
fucking
can compensate for such a blatant lack of interest in the person you’re married to?” His anger’s building again.

“Why didn’t you say something?” asks Jane. It’s strange: she doesn’t seem to be scared anymore. “If I’d known it mattered to you that much—”

“But you didn’t, did you, darling wifey? I didn’t
say something
because if you don’t do it of your own accord, it’s worthless. What’s
the point? Nicki read what Damon Blundy wrote, didn’t you, Nicki? She commented on it on the
Daily Herald
’s website. Religiously. That’s love, Jane. Nicki knows how to do it properly.”

He turns to face her finally, scissors still in his hand, pointing at her. “I should kill you now, save you a life prison term.”

“Do it if you want to,” Jane says quietly. “I don’t care.”

He takes a step toward her. Raises his hand above his head.

“No! You murdering . . .” I leap up and throw myself across the room at him. We land in a pile on the carpet, by Jane’s feet.
Brown shoes
. I struggle to push Tasker off me, but he’s too strong. He’s on top of me, crushing me. His eyes are glazed, then manic.

“Looking for a secret,” he says. “Tell me a secret, Nicki.”

“I haven’t got any that you don’t know.”

“Not true. Tell me a secret.”

“You
are
my fucking secret! There’s nothing else.”

“Tell me a secret. You might as well. I’m going to have to kill us all—me, you, Jane. Why wouldn’t I? What have I got to look forward to?”

“All right, I’ll tell you a secret,” I say quickly, my mouth dry.
Dry as a day in Pompeii
. “But if I do, you don’t kill anyone. Promise.”

He laughs. I can hardly breathe with the weight of him pressing down on my chest. “Hope to
die
,” he whispers in my ear. “Tell me your secret, Nicki.”

“My brother,” I say. “He spied on me, all through my childhood. From when he was about nine until I left home.”

Tell him the worst part. All children tell tales. That’s nothing special. Tell him the part that you’ve numbed yourself into never thinking about because it was the only way to stop the wound bleeding forever
.

“He did it for money,” I say. “It was a business venture for him. My parents paid him. Every time he found out about something I’d done wrong, he’d tell them and they’d pay him more or less, depending on how serious it was, what I’d done.” Bile rises in my throat. I swallow it. “He used to write them all down in notebooks, with the
date next to each one and how much he’d earned, always in pennies. He’d stick gold star stickers and draw smiley faces next to the particularly large amounts. I never suspected. I used to wonder how my parents managed to catch me out so often. I used to talk on the phone in front of Lee, when they were at work, when it was just me, Lee and the au pair of the moment. It never occurred to me that he’d tell. He was my little brother, just a sweet little boy. I loved him, and he loved me—I
know
he did. He wasn’t pretending. And then one day, I found these weird notebooks in his bedroom—he’d left them out by mistake. I asked him about it and he . . .” I break off. I’ve said enough. Tasker wanted a secret and I gave him one. The most agonizing secret of all.

“He what?” Tasker holds the scissors under my chin. Touches my neck. Cold metal. “He what, Nicki?”

“He told me. About being an informant for my parents. And he cried. Cried and cried and cried. I ended up having to comfort him. When I was a student, he sent me a check. No covering note. He didn’t need to explain. I knew what it was. All the money he’d earned from snitching on me. He wanted to settle the debt.”

“That’s a good stor—” Tasker stops. I feel his body tense on top of mine. “What’s that?” he says. “I heard something.”

I’m about to tell him I heard nothing when the door swings open with a metallic click. Two women stand in the doorway, with a man behind them. That’s . . . It’s Flash Dad, but with no streaks—with black cropped hair, like . . . Oh my God, like Mr. Uskalis, the boring man at reception earlier. They’re the same person. I was looking out for someone following me; I didn’t notice Uskalis because he rudely pushed in front of me.
Clever
.

I recognize one of the women too: Sergeant Zailer, from Spilling Police Station. She’s holding some handcuffs. Putting them on Tasker. She’s saying the best words I’ve ever heard: “Reuben Tasker, I’m arresting you for the murder of Damon Blundy . . .”

She won’t tell Adam. Or that awful DC Waterhouse. I can explain
everything, persuade her. She’s understanding, Sergeant Zailer. She’ll listen to me. I’ll tell her: I will never, ever cheat on Adam again. Not physically, not online, not in any way. I’ve learned my lesson this time—how could I not?

I will be good. I was good for more than three weeks, so I know I can do it, but only if Adam doesn’t find out any more than he already knows.

The best of both worlds—that’s what I need. Usually when someone wants the best of both worlds, it’s some kind of con, but this isn’t. I don’t want to keep Adam in the dark so that I can continue to deceive him. I want to be so much better from now on—a good wife and mother. How can I do that if I have to live with a man who looks at me every day with eyes full of memories of Bad Nicki and everything she did wrong?

I need the best of both worlds.
Please
. For the best of reasons. Sergeant Zailer will understand. I’ll make her understand.

“WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL
me you’d hired someone to follow Nicki Clements?” Simon asked Paula Riddiough.

“Jared Uskalis, my slavishly devoted private detective?” She smiled.

They were in the Rose Lounge at the Sofitel St. James in London. It was the only place Paula had been willing to meet him, the place where she and Damon Blundy had first met. She’d also flirtatiously insisted on meeting at twelve minutes past twelve rather than twelve o’clock. Simon hadn’t been happy about her attempt to embarrass him by recreating the exact conditions of the beginning of her and Blundy’s affair, but he’d had no choice. He needed to talk to her, to hear her tell him that his theory about her and Blundy was right. His ego needed it, after he’d been wrong about Reuben Tasker. No matter how many times Charlie said, “But it
was
Tasker! It was his idea. He planned it and ordered his slave wife to do it!” Simon’s despair was left untouched. For the first time in his professional life, he’d told his team the name of the killer and that person had turned out not to have committed the murder. All the pointers had seemed to point to Tasker, and Simon had allowed himself to be seduced by the neatness of it. He’d forgotten to think about the things that didn’t quite fit: Gibbs waiting outside on the pavement because Reuben Tasker, for some reason, couldn’t or
wouldn’t come down and let him in. No, it was his wife, Jane, who had to put herself out to open the door . . .

Jane Tasker: the wife Gibbs had described as being like a servant working for a man who didn’t need or want one. Waiting to do Reuben Tasker’s bidding, as if nothing else could give her a purpose in life. Terrified when she found out she owned a memoir by Damon Blundy’s ex-wife in case Tasker was furious. Giving him an alibi, or so it had seemed. Simon had even thought,
Oh, she obviously lied about that
, without thinking that Jane too might have been involved in the murder, let alone that she’d done it herself, while Reuben stayed at home and wrote Chapter Fourteen of his latest novel.

It was the minutest details that stung the most.

Simon had been wrong about something else too: he’d assumed the cryptic crime scene was the killer’s way of communicating with the police. With him, specifically—the great Simon Waterhouse. Instead, all the clues had been for the benefit of Nicki Clements. Reuben Tasker had taken for granted that the details of how Damon Blundy had been killed would appear in the press and that Nicki would realize who must have killed him.

Simon had been so sure that the message was for him. Humiliating though it was to admit it to himself, he now felt ignored and irrelevant.

“I didn’t tell you I’d hired Uskalis to follow Nicki because I couldn’t,” said Paula. “Not without revealing a suspicious level of interest in a woman I didn’t know.”

“Yet
now
you’re willing to reveal the suspicious interest that you took in Nicki Clements,” said Simon.

“Yes, I am.” Paula flashed him a “lucky you” smile. “As I told you before, Nicki’s comments on Damon’s columns made it clear she was in love with him. I wondered if they were having an affair. Since I’m rich, I could afford to find out.”

“You wondered because you were jealous,” said Simon. “You were Damon’s other woman, and you hated the thought of him having someone else on the go at the same time.”

“Actually, no,” said Paula, sipping her tea. Unlike Simon, she’d spilled none in her saucer. Not a drop. “I wanted to dig up dirt on Damon, so that I could publicly embarrass him. Not with an affair—in itself, that wouldn’t have made a dent—but . . . well, as far as I could tell, Nicki Clements was just a nonentity housewife. She’s hardly A-list. Damon wouldn’t have wanted to be caught screwing a nobody.”

Simon narrowed his eyes at her. “Very good,” he said. “That’s my cue to say, ‘Didn’t you once hope to be the first female Labour prime minister?’ and get distracted by the hypocrisy of champagne socialism—talking about equality while secretly sneering at ordinary people. I’m sure you are a snob, but you’re playing it up to distract me from the lies.”

Paula’s smile remained static.

“You offered me a deal when you came to the police station: if I’d agree not to tell Hannah Blundy, you’d tell me everything. I’m ready to take you up on that deal.”

The frozen smile turned into a broad grin. “Really? A wise decision. All right, then, scratch what I just said. You’re right. I was lying.”

It seemed too easy. “You admit to the affair with Blundy?” Simon asked.

“Yes.”

“And you trust me to keep my side of the bargain and not tell Hannah—just like that?”

“Yes. You won’t tell her. You wouldn’t want to destroy her, and from what you’ve told me, it’s clear Damon’s and my affair had nothing to do with his murder.”

Simon gulped down the rest of his tea. Drips from the bottom of his cup fell onto his shirt and tie, which was partly why he was keen to be finished drinking from it. Every time he splashed himself with tea, he noticed Paula making an effort not to laugh. “You had Nicki followed because you thought she was in love with Damon,” he started again. “You knew she was because you were. Her comments on his columns were
exactly what you’d have written
. Uncannily
identical. You spotted that it wasn’t just any old defense Nicki was providing but a defense motivated by love.”

“Yes,” said Paula. “Correct. I trusted Damon one hundred percent not to cheat on me, but . . . sometimes reading Nicki’s comments was like reading the contents of my own heart. It was spooky. So, yes, a
teensy
bit of doubt crept in. Plus in December last year, she moved to Spilling—that gave me a bit of a jump. I knew because she changed her location on her
Herald
comments profile. And, as I say, I’ve got plenty of money, so there was no reason not to put my mind at rest by having someone tail her for a while. It reassured me enormously: it became clear that Nicki and Damon never went anywhere near one another. I came to the conclusion she was just an obsessive fan. And then she stopped commenting—”

“But you kept up the surveillance.”

“Yes.” Another bright, brittle smile from Paula.

She doesn’t mind feeling embarrassed as long as she doesn’t look it. Doesn’t mind being eaten up by grief as long as the world can’t see it
.

“Essentially, I was paying for peace of mind,” she said. “I didn’t want to have to start worrying again. I’d have called off my dogs eventually, I promise. In my defense . . . once she moved to Spilling, Nicki’s drive to her children’s school took her past Damon’s front door twice a day. I wasn’t only worried that they were getting it on behind my back; I was also afraid she might firebomb his house or something. That level of obsession?” Paula made an exaggerated
Oh, help
face. “Anything can happen, can’t it?”

“So you and Damon were enemies in public, lovers in private?”

“Yes. Before we met, we were genuine enemies, but when we clapped eyes on each other in the flesh . . .” She giggled. “Well, that rather put paid to all the hate. It wasn’t long before we were making love not war.”

“And that’s the truth that would devastate Hannah Blundy?” Simon asked, making no attempt to hide his skepticism.

“Yes,” said Paula.

“There’s nothing else?”

“What else could there be?”

“You and Damon carried on attacking each other in public. Why? As a smokescreen?”

“Yes, a brilliant one that fooled the world.” Paula laughed. “I slipped up only once—I tweeted something to him thinking it was a private message, but it was public.”

“‘I was lost, I was scared, but a Tory led me home again’?” Simon quoted.

For a second, Paula’s smile slipped. Her eyes shone, and she blinked hard a few times. Then she pulled her face back into the right order.

“That’s right,” she said. “It’s a line from—”

“I know what it is. Damon replied, didn’t he? Did he also believe it was a private exchange, or didn’t he care? I think you were the one who insisted on the secrecy, the one who came up with the plan that would devastate Hannah if I told her about it.”

Paula said nothing.

“When you deleted your incriminating tweets, Damon followed suit and deleted his, but he wouldn’t have done if you hadn’t. He wanted to marry you, didn’t he? When the two of you first met in October 2011—here, in this room—you and Richard Crumlish were on the verge of officially separating. Damon was single. There was nothing to stop the two of you getting together—openly, not illicitly. Damon wanted to. You didn’t.”

“Carry on,” said Paula. “I’m enjoying this shaggy dog story.”

“I know another couple who are having an affair, in a similar situation,” Simon told her. “He’d leave his wife for her like a shot, but she won’t leave her husband. She’s always claimed it was because she didn’t want to hurt anyone, but it’s not that—it’s a strong preference for fantasy over reality. He, the man, wants a happier reality. He’s practical, a realist. She’s a big kid at heart, with her head in the clouds, and wants to keep it there. Whether she realizes it or not, she believes that if you let your ideal, fantasy man become your day-to-day
reality, it’ll spoil the fantasy. The only way to keep the fantasy alive forever is to get yourself fixed up with a less inspiring reality from which you’ll regularly want to escape.”

And then you pretend to split up and you announce your separation . . . why?
Simon didn’t have even the stirrings of a theory in relation to Liv and Gibbs’s fake breakup. Perhaps the mistake was to assume it was fake. Could it be true: they’d stopped sleeping together, reinvented themselves as platonic best friends? Charlie said definitely not.

Dragging his mind away from the puzzle, Simon said to Paula, “I think you’re similar to her, this other woman I know. You prefer fantasy to reality. You want to keep what you value most highly
out
of your real, everyday life. Hence Hannah for Damon, and Fergus Preece for you. That’s the devastating truth you’re determined to keep from Hannah: not that her husband was sleeping with you, not boring old normal adultery,
but that he was using her to please you from the second he laid eyes on her
. He needed a wife in place in order to satisfy the requirements of the woman he really loved: you.”

“Have you finished?”

“No,” said Simon. “Damon met Hannah in late November 2011, less than two months after he first met you, and he appeared to fall in love with her immediately. He married her in March 2012. You were strict with him, weren’t you? I bet you refused to let him lay a finger on you until he’d found himself someone to marry. You said, ‘Find a wife and make her happy, so that you stay married to her, and
then
I’ll be your . . . other woman.’”

Paula laughed. “You make it sound so delightfully
quaint
,” she said.

“It took you slightly longer to find Fergus. There was probably a list of characteristics the two spouse stooges needed to have. You and Damon drew it up together. I’m trying to think what Hannah Blundy and Fergus Preece have in common. Fergus owns all that land, but Hannah’s not a landowner, she’s not rich—”

“You’re a cynical sod, aren’t you?” said Paula, smiling. She took
another sip of tea. “Well, I suppose I’ll have to give you ten out of ten. You’re basically right, though
not
about the criteria we used to choose a husband for me and a wife for Damon.” She sighed. “Look, we knew what we were planning was grossly unfair to whichever man and woman we picked. Neither of us had any illusions about our moral rectitude. Damon hated hypocrisy more than anything and . . . well, I’ve come to hate it too. But we didn’t want to do any more harm than we needed to in order to protect our relationship. I knew our perfect love—and it
was
perfect—would only survive if we remained separated by circumstances. You can’t still be someone’s perfect woman once they’ve pulled strands of your hair out of the shower drain enough times! Even
I
can’t, and look at me.” She pointed at her face. “I’m the most beautiful woman I know, but so what? The second time I met Damon—our all-the-elevens date, when we stopped skirting around the issue and admitted we were soulmates—he told me he’d divorced his second wife for snoring. Between you, me and the gatepost, DC Waterhouse . . .
I
snore. You see what I’m saying?”

She leaned forward in her chair. “Damon was as madly in love with me on the day he died as he was on November 11, 2011.” Her eyes were shining again. “That’s only because I stood my ground and said no—no marriage, no living together, no sex till he was safely married to someone else. Even after that, when we had our trysts, I’d never agree to share a room with him overnight. You can’t risk it if you really care about making a good impression. Morning breath, stinky armpits . . .”

Stinky way of looking at the world
, thought Simon.

“Judge me all you like,” said Paula, “but I bet you’ve never been in love with someone who’d divorce you for snoring. And before you conclude that Damon was a monster and I was his brainwashed victim . . . well, it actually worked both ways. Damon was a perfectionist, but I’m very easily hurt. I find it difficult to recover from any kind of wound. I told Damon; I was very upfront about it. I said, ‘If I’m ever hurt by you, we’re done for.’ When I first met Crummy—my
ex-husband, Richard Crumlish—he promised me the earth and more. I thought he was wonderful; he thought I was a goddess. Everything seemed perfect. And then he hurt me in a relatively minor way and that was it for me. I pretended to forgive him, but secretly, from that moment, I was keeping my eyes peeled for someone new.”

“What was the hurt?” Simon asked.

“I needed a lift home from Central London late at night. He told me to get a cab—he couldn’t be bothered to get dressed and come out. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t afford a cab, but he’d always been happy to give me lifts before. I thought, ‘So, that’s it, then. You care about me less tonight than you did last time I needed a ride home. The golden age is over.’ And, frankly, who wants to bother with the dull beige age, which is where all marriages can’t help ending up, however hard they try.”