I Found You (34 page)

Lesley pours tea into delicate cups and eyes Lily intrusively.

‘So,’ she says, ‘tell me. What was it about Mark that you fell in love with?’

Lily shrugs. The question is not meant to be friendly. The question she is really asking is:
How could you
have chosen such a monster to be your husband?
‘I fell in love with him because he was kind. And handsome. And strong. Because he respected me. And my family. Because I could tell that he had hurt inside him and I wanted to help to fix it. I fell in love with him because he was everything I wanted a man to be.’

‘But did you never get any . . . I don’t know,
vibes
? That he wasn’t quite right? That he was hiding something?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Never. We were happy.’

‘So, I wonder why he hasn’t come for you?’

‘We do not know when he escaped,’ Lily replies primly. ‘He may have escaped last night, this morning. He may have been to the apartment, looking for me. And found me not there.’

‘Has he called?’

‘No.’

Lesley raises one eyebrow and looks at her pityingly.

‘He is trying to protect me,’ she says. ‘That is all.’

‘Well,’ says Lesley, ‘that may well be true.’ She selects one of the tiny sandwiches and eats it. Then she looks at Lily and says, ‘Eat.’

‘I am not hungry.’ This is a lie. She is starving.

‘Come on. We could be here for hours. And it’s delicious. Try one of these.’ She places a tiny sandwich on Lily’s plate. ‘Roast beef and horseradish. It’s gorgeous.’

‘Horse – radish?’

‘Horseradish, yes. It’s a root, like ginger, you know. Mixed with cream. Beautiful.’

Lily pushes the sandwich across the plate with her fingertips and sneers. ‘No. Thank you.’

‘Oh, well, just eat your bloody scone then.’

Lily fiddles with the rock bun thing, breaks a bit off and puts it in her mouth. It tastes of cement.

‘You need to put some clotted cream on it. And some jam.’

‘Clotted? Cream?’ Her lip curls.

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ Lesley passes her a small dish of crusty yellow stuff. ‘It’s just cream, for fuck’s sake. Christ. I mean surely you must eat all sorts of grim stuff in the Ukraine? This is just a bun and cream. It’s not going to bite you.’

Lily gingerly does as she’s told; she takes a scrape of crusty yellow cream, a scoop of jam. She puts it in her mouth and decides she likes it. She does not say this though.

‘What will you do?’ Lesley asks. ‘If they find him? If he goes to prison? Where will you go?’

Lily sighs. ‘I have not thought. I will probably have to go home. After all, my marriage certificate is not legal. I will not be allowed to stay.’

‘Do you want to stay?’

‘Yes. I think I do. I think I was ready to leave Kiev, ready to be somewhere else. I do not feel as though I
have had this experience yet. That I am not finished. But’ – she shrugs – ‘that is life.’

‘What are your qualifications?’ Lesley asks.

‘I’m training to be an accountant.’

Lesley raises her brow again, this time with surprise not scepticism. Clearly she does not think that Lily looks like an accountant. Maybe this is a good thing.

Lesley’s phone rings and once again she is shouting down the phone, telling people what to do. She takes her phone out on to the pavement and Lily watches her pacing the pavement, gesticulating. As she watches her, Lily has a strange thought, that maybe she would like to be like her, one day, when she is old.

Lily eats her scone and then investigates the other elements of this
cream tea
. By the time Lesley comes back she has had three small sandwiches and a cake with tiny purple sugar flowers on it. Lesley looks at the diminished spread and smiles knowingly.

‘I wonder what is happening?’ asks Lily.

‘Yes,’ says Lesley, sighing unhappily. ‘So do I.’

And as she says this, the little brass bell above the door jingles and they are there, Frank and Alice. They both look shocked and as though they have been crying. Alice helps Frank into a chair and orders them a pot of tea.

‘What?’ says Lily. ‘What is it? Did you find him?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘No. He’s not there and Kitty doesn’t know where he is. But he’s out there somewhere and he’s dangerous. Seriously dangerous.’

Lily narrows her eyes at her. ‘Dangerous?’ she says. ‘What do you mean?’

And then Alice patiently recounts a story that is so sad and so horrifying and so dark, yet so believable, that Lily almost forgets she is talking about the man she married. About halfway through, she already knows what she needs to do next. By the time Alice has finished the story she already has her phone in her hand. It is over. Her love affair. Her marriage. Her adventure. Her love for a man she never really knew. What was it her mother had said last week, something about onions? About how you needed to see the worst of a person before you could decide to share your life with them. She had not given herself the time to see the worst of Carl Monrose but now she has been shown it and no, she cannot love a man like that or share her life with a man like that. And neither can she let a man like that disappear into the ether, free to live his life.

She dials in WPC Beverly Traviss’s number and she says, ‘Hello. Mrs Traviss. This is Lily Monrose.’

She hears the familiar, forbearing intake of breath. ‘Ah, Mrs Monrose, good afternoon. I’m really sorry we weren’t in touch earlier. We’re still waiting for the—’

‘Please. Take some paper. Write this down. My husband’s real name is Mark Tate. He was reported as drowned in the town of Ridinghouse Bay in August 1993 when he was nineteen years old. He is responsible for – at the very least – the death of two people and a physical assault on one more. He changed his identity to Carl Monrose a few years ago and he was last seen on Tuesday the fourteenth of April at around seven p.m. in apartment number one, Wolf’s Hill Boulevard, London Road, Oxted. He is very dangerous. I and various other people will require protection while you search for him. Thank you.’

She listens to the silence on the other end of the line. She imagines Beverley Traviss’s pen suspended above her notepad, her jaw hanging slightly ajar.

‘Where are you?’ WPC Traviss asks, and Lily can hear an unfamiliar tone of concern in her voice.

Lily tells her.

‘Don’t move,’ says WPC Traviss. ‘Stay where you are. I’ll liaise with Yorkshire Constabulary. Get them to send a squad car right away.’

Lily hangs up and looks at the others.

‘There,’ she says, ‘it is done.’

She rests her phone on the table and feels her heart break in two.

Lily lets herself into the flat. She has not been here since she left on Sunday but it is clear the moment she walks in that he has been here. He has rearranged the cushions on the sofa. He has taken things from the wardrobes in the bedroom. His overnight case is gone. He has showered and rehung his bath towel in the very particular way in which he always used to hang his bath towel. His toothbrush is gone; the tap is shining extra brightly. He has eaten lots of the unhealthy food she bought last week and carefully disposed of the wrappings in the recycling bin. He has emptied the waste bin and put a clean bag in the container. He has taken the cash she left behind, about five hundred pounds, and he has taken his phone charger, his Puffa jacket and his walking boots.

And there, tucked into the frame of the mirror over the fake fireplace, is an envelope, with her name on it. She takes off her coat and hangs it in the hallway. Then she returns and plucks the envelope from the mirror. She sits and she opens it and she reads it, her heart pounding hard beneath her ribs.

Lily folds the note back into a rectangle and slides it into the envelope. She puts the cash card into her handbag and she sighs.
A slip in my transparency.
She could almost laugh out loud. Here he is, lying to her from beyond the mists of time. Or is he? Maybe her husband truly believed he was Carl Monrose, all-round good guy and enigmatic everyman. Maybe she had cured him of his badness, if only temporarily. She thinks of the poor woman in Scotland, with her teenage daughter, and how they must have felt locked in that room with Carl for all those hours. And then she realises that those
people weren’t in a room with Carl Monrose, they were in a room with Mark Tate. And this comforts her.

She slides the note into the outside pocket of her handbag. She will give it to Beverly Traviss. She doesn’t want it, not even as a souvenir. Then quickly she packs a suitcase, with as much as she can squeeze into it. She can come back for the rest another day. She peers from the window in the living room and waves at Russ, sitting at the wheel of his people carrier, reading the Saturday papers. He waves back at her and she gives him the thumbs up.