The Telling Error (31 page)

An hour later, I’m sitting outside a pub – the first one I came to after my escape from Kate’s street – with a double gin and tonic, and my phone on the table in front of me. I can’t think, can’t do anything, can’t stop crying. The only advantage to being in the state I’m in is that no one wants to share my table, so I’ve got plenty of space.

Kate was supposed to listen to my long, weird story and tell me what to do. I was relying on her. It’s a danger, when you can’t rely on anyone close to you – you tend to get desperate and pick random strangers instead, put them on pedestals they haven’t earned and decide to rely on them.

Most people don’t do that, though. Only idiots like you.

OK, think, Nicki. You have no one to turn to apart from your own stupid self. What are you going to do?

As far as I can see, one of two people must have murdered Damon Blundy – his wife, Hannah, or King Edward. Except that adds up to more than two possible people, since King Edward could be anyone.

What if King Edward is Adam?

No, that’s absurd. Adam was at work when Damon Blundy was murdered. Wasn’t he? Just because he’s an IT genius and he defends my parents, that doesn’t mean anything. He likes to give people the benefit of the doubt – that’s a good thing. He’s a good man, one who wouldn’t fake an online affair lasting more than two years with his own wife. In order for him to have answered my Intimate Links ad in 2010, Melissa would have had to have told him I’d mentioned the site to her, and that she was suspicious. No, she wouldn’t have done that. Not then. She still felt too guilty then about moving in with Lee.

Adam could have grown suspicious all by himself, I suppose. All the time I spent on my computer and on my phone …

Where was Lee when Damon was murdered? Was he at work, like Adam?

I shove the thought violently out of my mind. My brother is not King Edward.
Unthinkable.

Melissa’s ruled out, since King Edward I know – knew – is unambiguously a man.

What if he was a man hired and instructed by a woman? By Melissa. A man with a blue BMW and blond streaks in his hair, who maybe didn’t follow a hired car all the way from Spilling to Highgate but knew Melissa’s address anyway …

My stomach heaves like a fragile ship on a churning, storm-tossed sea, threatening to overturn.

I mustn’t let myself speculate in all directions. It will drive me crazy.

Craz
ier
.

If I ring Adam’s work and try to find out if he was there on Monday morning or not, what does that say about me?

The blindfold
. I’ve been assuming it was so that I wouldn’t see his face and say, ‘But you’re not Damon Blundy.’ It never occurred to me that it might have been to stop me saying more than that: ‘You’re not Damon Blundy. You’re …’

Who?

I pick up my phone and start to draft an email. There’s a voice in my head telling me not to, that it’s the worst thing I could possibly do, but it’s not a persuasive voice. It’s panicky, insecure, reciting lines it learned by rote a long time ago that have since become meaningless.

I have a close relationship with somebody who knows the truth – someone whose real name I don’t know, true, but still: a man I shared my honest thoughts and feelings with for years. He
was
a man. He wasn’t Melissa – how could I suspect that, even for a second? He shared his thoughts and feelings with me too, in a way that neither of us ever has with anyone else.

He cares about you. He’s a killer, but he loves you. He’s obsessed, and when you’re obsessed, you’ll do anything.

You’ll do anything, also, when nothing matters to you more than finding out the truth.

I touch the letter keys on my phone’s screen with the tip of my index finger. ‘Dear Gavin/King Edward,’ I write. ‘We need to talk. Can we meet, as soon as possible? N x’

I press ‘send’.

The man you were with at the Chancery Hotel … it wasn’t me, or anyone you know. He was a stranger.

Words that will hurt for the rest of my life. Hurt of a kind that most people never feel.

I managed to remain coherent in order to find out as much as I could. I emailed back immediately. ‘What do you mean, he was a stranger? If you sent an acquaintance of yours to have sex with me – a process he failed to see through to its logical conclusion, incidentally – then you must know his name. I’d like to know it too.’

As I pressed ‘send’, I was thinking, ‘I could ring the police. I’ve been raped. This is rape, what’s happened to me. Even though …’ And then I remembered myself on that bed, and how I’d felt at the time. I realised how pointless it would be to think in terms of the police. They’d probably never find him – King Edward would protect him – and even if they did, he’d be sure to mention in court how much I’d enjoyed it. And Adam would find out, and my children would find out … No, it was unthinkable.

Another email arrived from King Edward within five minutes. ‘Nicki, are you crazy?’ it said. ‘You honestly think I’d send a stranger – a real stranger? You think I’d do that to you? Wow, I’m pretty cut up about that. KE7.’

‘You told me he was a stranger,’ was the most I could manage in response.

‘You’re right, I did,’ King Edward wrote back. ‘Please forgive me – I’m not thinking clearly at the moment. I’m all over the place, to be honest. Nicki, it was me. Of course it was me. The man you’ve been writing to since June 2010 and the man in that hotel room are one and the same. KE7.’

‘Then what did you mean when you said he was a stranger?’ I had detached myself by this point. I knew what my next logical move was each time, and I made it, but I’d switched off my feelings. I knew, though, that when I switched them back on, I would find that nothing King Edward had said or would say, or could ever say, would make me feel any better.

His next email nearly stopped my heart. ‘I am not, and have never been, Damon Blundy. That’s what I meant by the stranger line. You’ve believed that you’ve been having a love affair with Damon Blundy. You haven’t. The man in that room was me – a man whose name you still don’t know, a man who’s still hiding from you. A stranger. I was being melodramatic. Of course I’m not really a stranger.’

I didn’t believe a single word he said, and knew I never would again. I remember going through the possibilities in my head:

1. King Edward was Damon Blundy, but the man at the Chancery Hotel wasn’t.
   
2. King Edward was the man at the Chancery, but he wasn’t Damon Blundy.
   
3. King Edward was neither Blundy nor the man at the Chancery.
   
4. King Edward was Blundy and the man at the Chancery.
   

There were probably more options to choose from, but I decided I’d rather run a deep bath and drown myself than try to figure them out.

Another email arrived, when I failed to respond to the last one. ‘I lied to you, Nicki. I’m so, so sorry. I know you won’t forgive me. That’s why I couldn’t email you for days afterwards. I felt too guilty, if you want the truth. I hate myself as much as you must hate me. Please believe that. I don’t know why I ever thought it was a good idea to pretend to be someone I’m not. Please be reassured that everything else I’ve ever written to you has been sincere and heartfelt. As for our time together in the hotel, I’m sorry about not seeing things through to their logical conclusion. You know my code – I tried to explain it to you. Quaint though it might sound, I don’t want to cross my line in the sand and be fully unfaithful to my wife in terms of all things physical. I need to be able to live with myself. I hope you understand. I suffer from poor impulse control, and if I cut myself too much slack, I’m afraid of what might happen. KE7.’

‘Fully unfaithful’ – that was the phrase that made me want to stab him in both eyes. And that was when I wrote back and said it: the stupid, ridiculous, reckless thing that led to Damon Blundy’s murder.

He is no less dead
…

That, also – that same angry email – was when I told King Edward never to contact me again. If what he’d done to me was love, then I was going to find the opposite of love, I said. I’d go straight back to Intimate Links and answer an ad that wanted nothing more than sex, nothing more than a body to use; it would be less soul-destroying.

And so King Edward created Gavin.

If I’d only ignored his last email, there’d have been no Gavin, no humiliating encounter with a policeman in a supermarket car park, no involvement in a murder case.

No murder at all?

Very possibly.

It serves me right that I’ve been dragged into the police investigation. If it weren’t for that last email I sent King Edward in February, Damon Blundy might well still be alive.

My phone buzzes on the table. I grab it.

A new message.

I gasp when I see the name in my inbox. I wrote to Gavin’s address – [email protected] – but it’s King Edward who’s replied from the address that’s been engraved in my mind since 2010: [email protected]. Same subject heading as in my email to Gavin: ‘Meet?’

Should I have been suspicious because they both wrote to me from Hushmail accounts? I assumed the majority of cyber-sex sinners used Hushmail as a matter of course. From the name, it sounds as if it was set up for that sole purpose.

My heart hammers in my chest. I drop my phone, pick it up again.

You knew Gavin was King Edward.

Of course I knew, but now the last sliver of doubt is gone.

I open the message.

Hi Nicki,

It would be unreasonable of me to refuse your request, wouldn’t it? After everything I’ve put you through. Am I unreasonable? Not to that extent, no. Yes, we can meet as soon as possible. At the Chancery Hotel again. Make the arrangements and tell me when. Like last time, I will arrive at the appointed hour. You’ll be waiting for me, as you were last time. In **all** respects, as you were last time. Yes, even the blindfold, which, once again, you must promise not to remove at any point during our meeting. You must also promise, like last time, not to speak a single word.

You said in your message, ‘We need to meet and talk.’ I will talk. You will listen. I’m confident that, once you’ve heard everything I have to say, you will know what you want and need to know. You will know who killed Damon Blundy. (I know you think it was me. You’re wrong.)

Am I unreasonable? I suppose I am. Those are my conditions. I hope you will agree to them.

Trust me, Nicki, I won’t harm you. I love you.

KE7