The Woman He Loved Before (13 page)

I nod again, not opening my eyes. I tense at the sound of the clippers being started, the buzz filling the fragile silence with such foreboding. I try not to recoil, force myself not to scream as the cold metal shears touch my head. It doesn’t take long for her to remove the rest of my hair.

But it takes a lifetime for me to open my eyes.

To look in the mirror and see the woman I have become.

jack

My heart stops when I see her. She is bald, the only things on her scalp are the line of the scar and the stitches holding it together.

She stands in the hallway anxiously and nervously picking at her fingers, looking so much like a little girl who has been caught doing something naughty and is awaiting punishment.

‘Your hair,’ I say, ‘it’s gone.’

She nods, and then the tears fill her eyes. I stride down the hall to her and rest my hands on her shoulders. ‘I’d rather have nothing than a bit that’s all right,’ she says.

‘I think it looks fantastic,’ I say, and she blinks at me in surprise.

‘Really?’ she asks.

‘Yes. There are very few women out there who can pull off something like this, and you’re one of them.’

‘Really?’ she asks again, her body sagging in relief.

‘Yes. And the most wonderful thing is, I can see all of your beautiful face.’

‘So I don’t look awful?’ she asks.

‘No, you could never look awful,’ I say, then pull her close.

Her words rattle in my ears:
I’d rather have nothing than a bit that’s all right.

I hope that’s not true. I hope with all my heart that’s not true.

libby

‘Mrs Britcham, we won’t keep you long,’ the policewoman says. She’s plain clothes and has a plain-clothes officer with her that she hasn’t bothered to introduce. It’s all a bit much for giving a statement about a ‘normal’ accident.

And I really don’t like them being here.

I wanted to keep all the crash stuff away from the house, but no one seemed interested in asking for my version of events during that week I was laid up in hospital with nothing else to do but answer questions, even though they’d talked to Jack. Now, at home, when I’m trying to do that thing called ‘moving on’ they’re here, dragging me back. I feel as if I am being interrogated, as if I have done something wrong by wantonly sitting in a car that got hit. Jack is on the other side of the room, leaning against the dining table, even though the police officer asked him to leave. He looked like he was going to unquestioningly do it until I’d asked, ‘Why does Jack need to leave?’ She didn’t have an answer so had said if he had to stay, then could he please not interfere in the questioning. If I didn’t know otherwise, I would have thought I was being interrogated for some crime, not being asked to recount for the record what happened.

‘Can you tell us, in your own time, what occured on the day
of your “accident”?’ she asks. She adds a strange weight to the word accident that ignites a niggle inside.

‘I don’t remember much,’ I reply as the male officer scribbles on a notepad. ‘I remember Jack and I were talking and then we were hit and I remember seeing the wall and lamppost coming towards me. And then I was talking to a fireman. That’s it.’

‘And what was your husband doing at the time you were hit?’ she asks.

‘Apart from driving the car?’ I sound facetious, but I don’t really understand the point of the question.

‘Was he driving erratically, too fast? That sort of thing.’

I close my eyes, try to remember what was happening before that moment. I open my eyes. ‘We were talking, and then the car hit us.’

‘Talking, not arguing?’ she asks.

‘If we were arguing, I would have said we were arguing.’

She looks pointedly at Jack. ‘As we both know, it’s not always easy to say what we mean if we feel under pressure.’

‘I don’t feel under pressure, and Jack and I don’t really argue,’ I reply. Which is true. We generally don’t have anything to argue about – our main bone of contention is Eve and we simply don’t talk about her, and if we try we end up not talking at all.

‘Not at all?’ The police officer, Detective Sergeant Morgan, asks.

‘No, not really. We don’t have anything to argue about.’

She nods sceptically and makes a note in her notebook for the first time. She’s trying to talk to me woman-to-woman, but it’s not working because I get the impression she does not like women. Or men, for that matter. But there’s something unconventional in all of this. My eyes go to Jack, to the way his rigid body language and unblinking glare are directed at her, and then my eyes go back to the policewoman. Jack and Detective Sergeant Morgan know each other. How though? She doesn’t look like the sort of person whom Jack would have had enough of a connection with to seduce, but then things might have been
different when they met. There might have been a spark between them.

I reassess her, now that she might have slept with my husband. She doesn’t make the most of herself. She’s done her make-up all wrong: that brown lipstick does not go with her natural colouring. If I was talking to her, I’d advise her to go for a foundation a little less orange-beige and little more bluey-pink in undertone. On her lips I’d advise a stronger red lipstick – not bright red, but maybe burgundy red, then on her eyes with one coat of black mascara during the day, and two coats in the evening. Her current make-up job makes her seem mean. But then maybe I am being generous – maybe it isn’t the make-up, maybe she looks mean because she is mean. Jack wouldn’t have slept with her, I decide. She’s far too unpleasant a person. So why does she have an axe to grind with him? Because she clearly has one.

‘What were you talking about before the crash?’ she asks.

‘About what it was like when Jack and I first met. I think I was saying that he wasn’t irresistible to all women, thankfully, and he was asking me why thankfully, and as I was about to reply we got hit.’

‘So he’d asked you a question? Did he look at you while asking it?’

‘Not that I remember,’ I reply.

Like a hungry dog thrown a bone, she leaps on this statement like the piece of evidence that she’s been waiting for: ‘Are you saying you’re not sure if his eyes were on the road when the accident occurred?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand the point of these questions,’ I say to her, redoing her make-up as I stare at her. Maybe she’s doing the same to me, maybe she’s visually removing my scar and putting hair on my head. ‘Wasn’t it the other driver who was breaking the law by being on his mobile phone and trying to turn out onto a busy road without concentrating? I was looking in the direction the car came from and I didn’t see it, how would Jack? And if he did, what would he have been able to do?’

Detective Sergeant Morgan’s plain brown eyes stare at me as if I have sworn at her. Then she starts calculating how to get to me, how to upset me. The axe that needs grinding has clearly been extended to me.

‘Maybe we should move on,’ she says, diplomatically. ‘What do you know about the death of the first Mrs Britcham?’

I draw back inside, wondering where this has come from.
Is this how she plans to get at me? To accuse me in the death of Eve?

‘Nothing,’ I reply, quickly, in case she takes any hesitancy as me trying to conjure up an alibi. ‘Nothing at all. Why, do you think I had something to do with her death? Because I didn’t know her and I didn’t know Jack at the time.’

‘But you did know that the airbag was faulty in your husband’s car, didn’t you?’

A sickness is starting to whirl around my stomach. What is going on? ‘Is that illegal?’ I ask. ‘Should I have not got into a car that I knew had a faulty airbag? Am I going to get arrested for that?’

‘No, no, I’m not saying that at all.’

‘Then what are you saying?’ I ask.

She throws a look in Jack’s direction, obviously wishing he wasn’t there. This is all too much. I’ve had enough already of people talking to the right side of me, of them avoiding my scar with their looks and their conversations, of them avoiding my hairlessness in the same way. I don’t need it from a random stranger who is trying to blame me for something I couldn’t have stopped.

‘Can I ask you something?’ I ask her, and before she can answer, I continue, ‘Why are you asking me these questions? What has Eve got to do with anything? For that matter, what has our conversation before the crash got to do with it? The other man went into us. I want to know why you’re being like this.’

Detective Sergeant Morgan sighs, a bit too dramatically for someone as unemotional as she is. ‘Mrs Britcham, I don’t like doing this kind of thing,’ she says, when she clearly does, ‘but I
have to investigate when a second person close to a murder suspect is hurt in suspicious circumstances. And I’m sorry to point this out, but your husband nearly killed you.’

My heart grows cold. ‘Did he?’ I’m alarmed and it shows. ‘When?’

I’m wracking my memories, trying to work out when he tried to do that. I look at Jack, who is glaring at her like he did before. If he did try to kill me, then he’s being very languid about it.

‘With the crash,’ Ms Morgan replies.

I frown at her. ‘But someone went into us.’

‘I know,’ another of her dramatic sighs, ‘but you were most hurt because your airbag didn’t deploy.’ Oh, that’s who she is. She’s the police officer who questioned him when Eve died. She must be.

‘So you think Jack was driving around hoping someone would crash into us and I’d be killed when the airbag didn’t work?’ I ask, trying not to sound patronising. ‘
Really
?’

‘It’s just as plausible as asking us to believe that Eve Britcham died from simply falling down the stairs.’

‘Oh, right,’ I reply, because I do not know what to say.

The silence in the room stretches and stretches, and I’m supposed to end it, I think. But I’m not inclined to do so. What am I to say to this half-baked accusation and unnecessary line of questioning?

‘I’m sorry I had to put that thought in your head,’ Detective Sergeant Morgan says.

‘No, you’re not,’ I reply quietly. ‘You want me to be upset; you want me to be suspicious of Jack. What I don’t understand is why.’

‘I don’t want you to be suspicious of Mr Britcham, I simply want you to know what you’re dealing with. There is a reason why we haven’t closed the case on the death of Eve Britcham and why the coroner recorded an open verdict.’

‘And there’s a reason why you had to release him without charge,’ I reply.

‘It’s not that simple, Mrs Britcham. When we were investigating the background of Eve Britcham, or Eve Quennox as she was known before her marriage, we came across a lot of information that made us suspicious of Mr Britcham. Let me put it this way: if my husband found out some of those things about me, I wouldn’t be surprised if he snapped my neck and threw me down the stairs to hide it.’

My gaze shifts to Jack, and my stomach flips to find he is no longer glaring at Detective Sergeant Morgan with all the resentment he must feel towards her – instead he is staring at the ground, his arms folded tightly across his body, his hair falling forwards, his body language like a weeping willow, reaching towards the ground for comfort and relief. He’s not angry; he’s holding himself together. He is trying not to crumble.

‘Things like what?’ I ask, returning my focus to her. I hate that she’s got my attention, and that Jack seems to be falling apart at this. What has she said that would do this to him?

‘That’s not for me to tell you,’ she replies, satisfied now that she has finally managed to needle me and awaken my curiosity. Because both of those things lead to being suspicious of Jack, which is clearly what she wanted all along. ‘I just want you to be careful. I’d hate for you to have another accident.’

If I had another ‘accident’ – preferably a fatal one – she’d be on cloud nine. She’d be right there waiting for me to be declared dead so she could slap handcuffs on Jack. She is more than a mean person – she is nasty, conniving and cruel. I curl my lips into my mouth to stop myself from telling her what I think of her. And from telling her that if I didn’t know for a fact that Jack didn’t kill Eve then she could easily have destroyed me with what she has done today.

‘Can you leave now, please?’ I ask Detective Sergeant Morgan.

‘Of course,’ she says, solicitously, clearly happy that she’s got to me.

‘I have to put cream on my wounds and take my painkillers,’ I add. ‘That’s what I have to do now. I’d show you out, but I find
walking really difficult as my left leg was very badly bruised, as were a lot of my internal organs. The doctor who took the stitches out of my head said I should try to avoid stress or upset, so you’ll understand why I’m not that keen on thinking about having another accident.’ Ms Morgan swallows and I can see a tiny flash of guilt in her eye. Her unnamed companion eyes her up with distaste, obviously not impressed with her timing, either. ‘But it’s OK, now that you’ve done your best to put the idea into my head that my husband’s probably a killer, and told me you’d hate for me to be hurt – or possibly even killed – I’m sure I’ll be fine. I’m sure this won’t set back my recovery at all.’

She says nothing as she leaves, but the policeman gives me a sad smile and I know that he doesn’t agree with what she has done, nor does he believe Jack is a killer.