Woman with a Secret (32 page)

Gibbs waited.

Eventually, Tasker said, “But . . . well, when you read enough tweets and online comments and letters about how you’re a drug addict, it’s kind of hard to avoid the conclusion that you’re a drug addict and that maybe that’s not ideal. Jane had been worried about my health, and my concentration, for a while—I’d always told her I was fine and not to be stupid, before. Obviously, I knew I smoked weed every day—I used to tell myself it made my books better, which was bullshit. I mean, I’m writing a book now and it’s no worse off for the lack of skunk.” Tasker smiled. “It’s probably better. I can think more clearly. Truth is, I was a drug addict who wanted to spend all day every day stoned and I came up with a convenient justification: I needed it for the words to flow—because, conveniently, I happened to be a writer too. It was bullshit.”

“And now, thanks to Damon Blundy, you’re drug-free,” said Gibbs.

Tasker’s smile turned to a grimace. “Yeah, well . . . let’s not give him too much credit. He wouldn’t have cared if I’d died in a ditch with a syringe hanging out of my arm. All he cared about was scoring points against Keiran Holland.”

Gibbs wanted to turn the conversation back to Tasker’s relationship with Jane, though he wasn’t sure why. He hoped he wasn’t becoming obsessed with marriages at the stranger end of the spectrum. “So when you gave up the drugs, your wife must have . . . supported that decision.”

Tasker looked momentarily confused. “Yeah, I suppose so,” he said.

“You don’t sound sure.”

“Jane’s supportive whatever I do. She was just as supportive when I was caning it fourteen hours a day. She’s a stand-by-your-man kind of woman.”

“Is that a bad thing? You sound as if you’re criticizing her.”

“No,” said Tasker in a listless voice. He clearly didn’t want to talk about his wife. Gibbs knew the feeling.

“Why didn’t you open the door when I rang the bell?” he asked. “And why the black paper on the window?”

“Oh, that.” Tasker shook his head as if he’d remembered an annoying detail.

“It’s that fucking school across the road. When I’m writing, I look out of the window a lot. Well, I’d like to—in an ideal world. But I don’t like looking at that school.”

“Why not?”

“Noisy, bratty kids everywhere—would you want to see that?”

No. Gibbs wouldn’t have bought a house that was opposite a school. Tasker, however, had. “Do you hate children?”
Is that why you have none of your own?

“No,” said Tasker. “I don’t hate schools either. Only the one across the road. Jane and I are thinking of moving so that I don’t have to look at it anymore.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” said Gibbs diplomatically.

“
I’m
sure you
don’t
understand,” Tasker said accusingly, staring over Gibbs’s shoulder at the window. “The black paper makes no difference. I can’t see out, but I know what’s there.”

“Why wouldn’t you let me in before?” Gibbs asked.

“I did. I called Jane. She came and let you in.”

“You know what I’m asking. Are you going to answer or not?”

Tasker made a helpless gesture with his hands. “I’ve been judged by every newspaper in the land, thanks to Damon Blundy. I’ve had hate-mail. I had one death threat. There are a lot of crazy people out there, looking for a convenient target. How do I know whoever’s at the door isn’t going to chuck acid in my face?”

“You’d rather risk your wife’s face?” Gibbs asked.

There was a knock at the door of the attic room. Unbelievably, Tasker nodded at Gibbs as if to say, “You can let her in.”

It was easier to do it than to object. Gibbs opened the door to Jane Tasker, praying she hadn’t overheard the last part of the conversation. “Can I come in?” she asked.

“It’s your house,” said Gibbs.

She stayed where she was, on the top step, outside the room.

“You can come in,” Tasker called out to her.

She started to move at the sound of his voice, like a remote-controlled device at the press of a button.

“What do you want?” he asked her. He looked confused, as if her being there puzzled him. As if he’d rather not deal with it, but recognized that he had no choice.

“I just wondered if the two of you wanted a cup of tea?” Jane blushed as she asked the question, and slid the palm of her right hand over the palm of her left as if trying to wipe something off it. “DC Gibbs?”

“No, thanks.” Jane had offered him a cup of tea when he’d first arrived, before he and Tasker had come up to the attic.

“Not for me,” said Tasker.

“OK, but . . .” Jane didn’t move. Now she looked flustered, while Tasker was acting as if she’d already left the room. Gibbs had watched as his eyes slid off her and over to the black squares on the window. Jane was peering at him, as if trying to guess what he might want her to say next. Eventually, she said, “What about . . . something else? Can I get you anything? Water, maybe?”

“No, thanks,” Gibbs said again. “I’m fine.”

“No.” Tasker was distracted. “Maybe later. Thanks.”

“Oh! All right, later.” Was that excitement in her voice, at the prospect of being able to bring refreshments in the near future? Impossible. Wasn’t it?

“Well, then . . . shall I go?” Jane asked. “Will you call me when you’re ready for a drink?”

No response from Tasker. Gibbs felt awkward. It wasn’t up to him to answer. The silence around him thickened.

“Reuben?” said Jane hopefully.

Still nothing.

“Mr. Tasker,” Gibbs prompted him.

“Pardon? Sorry, I was just . . .”

Yeah, I know. You were staring at some sheets of black paper that you stuck to your window earlier
.

“Did you want something, Jane?”

“Shall I go downstairs, and you’ll call me when you’re ready for hot drinks?” asked his wife. “Or shall I wait here?”

Tasker looked uneasy. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s up to you.” He sighed. “I mean . . . go downstairs. If we want a drink, we’ll come and sort ourselves out.”

Jane looked bereft.

Gibbs watched in horrified amazement, trying to work out how he’d explain this scene to Simon later.

She acts like the faithful servant of a man who doesn’t realize he has a servant, and doesn’t want one
.

“Tell you what,” said Gibbs. “I’d quite like a cup of tea. I’ll come with you to make it.” He moved forward so that he was standing between Jane and her husband, so that she had no choice but to turn and head downstairs. “Back in a minute or two,” Gibbs told Tasker.

“Do you really want tea, or do you want to get my wife alone and ask her if I’m a murderer?”

“Both,” said Gibbs.

“Reuben didn’t kill anyone,” Jane said vehemently. “He and I were here on the day Damon Blundy died. Together, all the time. Why would Reuben kill the man who was responsible for his book sales tripling? You can’t buy publicity of the kind Blundy created for Reuben. Have you read Reuben’s books?”

“Jane, stop.”

“The
Scotsman
called his latest ‘unforgettable.’”

“Why would I kill the man responsible for tripling my sales?” said Tasker angrily. “Let’s see—because he kept saying my work was shit, perhaps? I didn’t kill him, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have had a valid motive if I had.”

“Of course,” Jane agreed eagerly, as if she hadn’t less than a minute ago suggested that her husband ought to be grateful to Damon Blundy. “Right.” She clapped her hands together, making Gibbs jump. “Tea!”

He followed her down the stairs. In the kitchen, there was a lopsided blue bookcase next to a red Aga that looked as if it had seen better days. Gibbs spotted a copy of Verity Hewson’s memoir,
A Hole in the Stone,
alongside biographies of more famous people: Julie Andrews, Margaret Thatcher, Stephen Fry. “I see you’ve read Damon Blundy’s ex-wife’s book,” he said. “Well, maybe you haven’t read it, but you’ve got it.”

“Hmm?” Jane filled the kettle with water. She seemed more relaxed now than she had upstairs.

“This one.” Gibbs pulled it off the shelf. “Verity Hewson was Blundy’s first wife. This is about their marriage.”

The effect upon Jane was remarkable. She gasped, put her right hand in her mouth and bit down on her index finger. Gibbs watched the skin whiten around her teeth. Even when she spoke, she kept her hand close to her face, as if protecting it. “The writer of that book was . . . Oh my gosh. I’ve had that book for years. Since long before Damon Blundy first wrote about Reuben. I never read it. Normally, I’ll gulp down any biography, but that one was just too . . . nasty.” She started to shake her head. “Oh blimey. I never made the connection. I’d better . . .”

She moved to take the book from Gibbs, then stepped back. Her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

Do? Gibbs didn’t understand. “Why is it such a shock?” he asked. “What does it matter that you’ve got a book by Damon Blundy’s ex-wife and haven’t read it?”

“Reuben’ll be angry.”

“Don’t be daft. Why would he be?”

“He’d
hate
the thought of me having a book about Damon Blundy—even just owning it and not reading it. He hates the books I read anyway. Lowest common denominator, he calls them. Affectionately, but he means it. I tried to read
Middlemarch
once, so that he wouldn’t think I was stupid, and he told me not to bother—I wouldn’t enjoy it. It wasn’t ‘my’ sort of book. Look, can you . . . ?” Jane froze, her face twisted in anxiety.

“What?” Gibbs asked her. He wanted to get out of this house and away from the Taskers. He felt as if something cold had passed through his soul. Was this how his and Debbie’s guests felt when they visited?

“Will you take the book away with you and get rid of it?” Jane asked him. “I don’t want it. If it stays here, I’ll have to tell Reuben about it—I can’t lie to him—and then he’ll be even more disappointed in me than usual.”

“He’s usually disappointed in you? Why?”

Jane glanced up toward the ceiling. “I shouldn’t talk about it,” she said. “I feel disloyal.”

Gibbs was wondering how best to encourage her to confide a bit more when she said, “I don’t
know
why. I do everything I can to make him happy. I don’t see what more I can do! Nothing works.”

“Were the two of you really here together for the whole of Monday morning?”

“Yes. And that’s the truth.”

“Why does Reuben hate the school across the road?”

Jane’s eyes widened. “You know about that? He told you?” She
sighed. “I don’t know why. I can’t work it out. He never used to hate it. It’s recent.”

“How recent?” asked Gibbs.

“This year. January, February . . . Early this year—that’s when he started complaining about it, but this sudden
hatred
that just makes no sense—that’s really
very
recent.”

“When did it start?” Gibbs asked her.

“The first time he said he couldn’t bear it anymore and we were going to have to move was . . .” Jane stopped. Her pink face reddened. “Oh,” she said. “I’ve only just realized.”

“What?”

“It was last Monday lunchtime that he said it. Just after we’d seen on the news that Damon Blundy had been murdered.”

I CLOSE THE DOOR
of the spare room behind me, lean against it and exhale slowly, until there’s no air left in my lungs to expel. Even then I try to squeeze out some more, until I start to feel faint. Only then do I allow myself to breathe in.

Alone in a room, at last
. I told Adam and the children not to disturb me, that I won’t be able to concentrate on emailing Ethan’s class teacher if they do. I felt sick saying it. It’s so much harder to lie when you’re known to have lied. To people you love, anyway. You feel as if your false words are shining in neon all around you.

I never found it hard to lie to my parents. That felt good—like killing a monster.

And now there’s a different monster trying to wipe out my new family—the family I love without reservation, the one Adam and I have made together—and I’m too afraid to kill it. I can’t destroy it without destroying myself, because it’s inside me. It’s part of me: the part that’s whispering,
Email King Edward. Tell him yes. Agree to the blindfold and the silence and everything—all his conditions. You need to find out who killed Damon Blundy, don’t you? How else will you find out? The police will never work it out—they can’t possibly.
They don’t know what you know, and you’ll never tell them. What you told them already was hard enough
.

If only I could resign myself to not knowing . . . I would vow never to email King Edward again, never to be unfaithful again. To save my family. That’s what I want to do. It’s what I
must
do.

In my right hand, I’m clutching the piece of paper that’s my official reason for being in this room: Ethan’s failed test from school, for which he got zero out of a possible ten marks. I’m supposed to be drafting an email to his teacher about it, asking her to explain to him where he went wrong, and reassure him that he mustn’t worry about having misunderstood.

Do that first. Something normal, domestic. That’ll make you feel better
.

Adam wasn’t suspicious when I announced that I needed to lock myself away upstairs to draft a letter to Miss Stefanowicz. He genuinely seems to have forgiven me—incredible in itself—but also to trust me, which is even more surprising. I wouldn’t trust me. I
don’t
trust me. I never have; it’s just that I trust most other people even less.

All weekend, I’ve waited for Adam to lose his temper with me, or turn silent and moody. It hasn’t happened.

Can it really be that easy?

“It wasn’t real, Nicki,” he said to me last night, when I asked him for the two hundredth time how he was able to be so calm about my betrayal. “It was a fantasy—involving another person, but still a fantasy.”

Not real
.

Adam doesn’t think Gavin—King Edward—matters, but he mattered to me. And my heartfelt confession was so small a portion of the truth that it was no better than any lie I’ve ever told.

What if Adam finds out the full story? Would he forgive me again? Would that be enough to kill his trust in me? Perhaps he doesn’t care if I’m faithful to him or not. He loves me, I know that, but perhaps not passionately enough anymore to be thrown into a
state of anguish by the idea of me sending photographs of my body to another man.

How can he bear knowing that I did that? How can I bear him being able to bear it?

Maybe King Edward loves you more
.

A killer
.

No. He says he didn’t kill Damon Blundy. He knows who did. It wasn’t him.

And you believe him?

I sit down, switch on the computer, put Ethan’s test paper down next to the mouse pad. When the home screen appears, I go straight to Yahoo Mail—my good-wife-and-mother email account.

I’m about to open a box for a new message when the phone beside the computer starts to ring. I pick it up quickly, before Adam can get to the downstairs extension. When you lie a lot, you learn to get to the phone and the mailbox first, always, just in case.

“Hello?”

“Nicki, it’s me.”

Melissa. My hand, holding the phone, starts to shake. I want to hang up.

“Nicki? Are you still there?”

“What do you want?”
Yes, I’m still. I’m deathly still, listening to the voice of treachery. Alarmingly, it sounds exactly the same as the voice of my once best friend
.

“I’m sorry I had to talk to the police. I hope you understand that I did
have
to.”

First Kate Zilber, now Melissa . . . Who will be the next betrayer to beg me to understand how hard it was for them?

King Edward, if you let him
.

“Are you calling for a reason?” I ask Melissa.

She says nothing. I’ve known her long enough to be able to read her mind. She’s weighing up whether to return to the subject of whether I can understand and forgive her. In the end, she decides she
might get a better result if she moves on. “Lee and I spent the weekend at your parents’ house.”

“My condolences.”

I don’t want to be speaking to Melissa, so I tune out and look at Ethan’s failed test instead. There are five questions on the sheet of paper. The first four are straightforward, almost impossible to get wrong: what is your name? How old are you? Where do you live? When is your birthday? Ethan has answered all these questions correctly. The fifth question isn’t a question; it’s an order followed by a threat. It says, “Do not answer any of the above questions. If you follow this instruction, you will get ten marks. If you do not follow this instruction, you will get zero marks.” At the top of the sheet, there’s another order: “Make sure to read through all the questions before answering them.”

“Nicki? Are you listening?”

“Yep.”
Not very attentively, no. Something about a reservoir and beautiful scenery. I don’t care that you went walking with my parents and my brother. I don’t care that you had a lovely time
.

Ethan’s failed test I care about. Because it’s not fair that he got no marks. Even if he’d done as he was told and read through all the questions before he started, there is nothing on this sheet to indicate that question five carries more weight than the other four. Nowhere does it say, “The final question is the one you must pay the most attention to.” Faced with four questions that demand answers versus one that isn’t even a question and says, “Ignore all the other questions,” how is a child supposed to know that number five takes precedence? There’s no indication that it does, or should. If anything, the weight of evidence is strongly on the side of answering questions one to four, since they’re in the majority.

Ridiculous bloody idiot teacher
.

“I . . . I found something.” Melissa sounds nervous. I’ve missed part of what she said.
Good
.

“Hmm?” I open a new “Compose Email” box, for the purpose of
writing a letter of protest to Miss Stefanowicz. Ethan should get eight out of ten marks—two each for numbers one to four and none for number five—and I’m going to see that he gets them. And an apology. With one hand I start to type, “Dear Miss Stef . . .”

“At your parents’ house,” Melissa is saying insistently, “I found two books.”

“Yes, Mum and Dad can read. That’s one thing that can be said in their favor. They like books.”

A message flashes up on the computer screen, in a box, then disappears before I can read it properly. “Request to the server,” I think it said, or something like that.

I look over my shoulder, my heart thumping, half expecting to see the man with streaked hair. Mercifully, he’s not here. No one is watching me.

No one’s watching you in this room. What if someone’s using your computer to watch you?

“Request to the server”—what could it mean? Nothing like that’s ever happened before. Has Adam hacked into my Yahoo account? Has anyone?

“No, not published books,” Melissa says. “Two notebooks. Lee’s handwriting. They were with your things, in—”

“No. Shut up.” Melissa’s words have dragged me from my state of paranoid dread to an even worse horror. “I don’t want to talk about those notebooks.” I can’t bear to remember. I haven’t thought about those notebooks for years.

I feel as if I might throw up.

“Nicki, I’m worried. Why—”

“I’m not discussing those . . . things. If you say another word about them, I’ll hang up.”

“All right!” Melissa sounds as panicky as I feel. Is she crying? “Nicki, why didn’t you tell me the lunatic asylum story ever? Why did I hear it first from Lee? We were best friends, and you bitched about your parents all the time.”

“I had a strange premonition you’d one day ask not to be confided in,” I say in a brittle voice.

“Lee told me it was horrible for him, but . . . well, it must have been pretty horrible for you too. I can understand why you might not have wanted to talk about it.”

Interesting. For the first time since getting involved with my brother, Melissa cares about how I feel.

Because she’s seen the notebooks. And she’s wondering . . .

It’s too late. I’ve wanted to talk to her, about everything, for so long, but not anymore. I can’t.

“I’m sorry, I have to go,” I say, and hang up before she can answer.

On the computer, I open a new tab and go to my Hushmail account. I’ve still got all the emails I sent to King Edward, and his to me. He’s the only person who knows the lunatic asylum story, the only person I’ve ever felt able to tell—because of the distance between us, probably, and the degree of anonymity. Even then, I sent it to him as a story, and told it through Lee’s eyes, making sure I wasn’t the emotional focus of the story.

Feeling things is too hard. I’d rather be a body without sensations, without consciousness. Living, dead—who cares?

Stop it, Nicki. Be strong. You have a husband and two children downstairs who need you. And—

I cut off the thought in my mind, but it springs back: it’s not only my family who need me. Damon Blundy needs me too. For a while, I thought I loved him. I thought the man I loved was him. Is that a good enough reason for me to be determined to do all I can to bring his killer to justice?

I don’t care. I’m determined, whether I should be or not. Whoever murdered Damon will pay—I’m going to make sure of that.

I find the old email I sent King Edward and open the attachment: my story, the one I wrote specially for him before I knew he was lying to me about his identity. I wrote it, but I’ve never read it—not even before I sent it. Writing it was hard enough.

If I can make it all the way through to the end, I can handle anything.

I start to read.

Once upon a time, there was a twelve-year-old boy who had a seventeen-year-old sister. The sister lied to their parents all the time, about almost everything. If she hadn’t, they would have allowed her no privacy. They’d have forced their way into her soul, and whatever they found in there, they’d have torn it to shreds in their determination to improve her character.

Despite her best efforts to deceive her parents, the boy’s sister usually ended up getting caught in her various lies. This resulted in daily rows that the boy had to listen to whether he wanted to or not. Even if he went into his bedroom and closed the door, he could hear his father yelling, sometimes for hours, and his sister crying. The noise always came from the same place: his father’s games room, in which he played snooker and table football and darts. The games room was across the hall from the boy’s bedroom, no more than a few feet away. His father always made sure to close the games room door, but, at that distance, even twenty closed doors wouldn’t have protected the boy from the sound of the fighting.

His sister would always cry and say sorry to her father for lying, but she didn’t mean it, because she would then lie again the next day, and get found out, and then there would be another row, and more yelling and weeping. After a few years of listening to these episodes, the boy decided that his sister’s distress was genuine, but had nothing to do with contrition. Rather, it was that she found it unpleasant to be shouted at for hours at a time about how she’d let herself and her family down. Her father didn’t restrict his shouting to the subject of his daughter’s lies. He also yelled at her for wearing too much makeup, not spending enough time on her homework, making too many phone calls, getting up too late at weekends, liking the wrong music, having the wrong opinion about every subject, wearing the wrong jewelry, choosing the wrong boyfriends, the wrong clothes, the wrong friends, putting the wrong posters on her walls and many other things. Every choice the daughter made was the wrong choice, and every opinion she expressed was the wrong opinion.

The boy found his father’s tirades distressing to listen to. They made him shake. Sometimes he would press himself against the far wall of his bedroom, beneath the window. Sometimes, though he was always terrified to open his door while an episode was in progress, he would force himself to do it so that he could escape downstairs. His father’s shouting and his sister’s crying could still be heard clearly from downstairs, but it wasn’t quite as deafening. However, downstairs there was other crying to contend with: the boy’s mother’s crying, which usually took place in the kitchen.

The boy couldn’t understand why his mother always stayed as far away from the trouble as possible. Surely as a grown-up she could do something to make the noise stop? Yet she never did. As soon as the shouting started, she behaved as if her husband and daughter were members of a different family. She wouldn’t even go upstairs if she needed something from her bedroom, not until the yelling had stopped and her husband had finally accepted her daughter’s ninety-seventh apology. Then and only then would she wash her face at the kitchen sink, dry it with a tea towel, put on a bright smile and wade back into family life as if nothing had happened.

The boy tried not to blame his mother because he could see that she was weak like him, and scared like him. He didn’t blame his father either, because his father, as he kept telling the rest of the family, was a man of high principle who couldn’t help it if lies made him angry. The boy learned that lying was the worst thing ever. It made sense to blame his sister, who couldn’t possibly have failed to notice that she rarely got away with her attempted deceptions. Why did she bother? Why didn’t she admit defeat and start telling the truth?