Woman with a Secret (35 page)

“You used the expression ‘head over heels’ to describe Nicki Clements,” said Simon. “That phrase refers to romantic love.”

Paula laughed. “Er . . . well, yes, obviously. I think it’s a fairly well-known expression.”

“How do you know Nicki Clements had romantic feelings for Damon? Couldn’t she have been an ardent supporter of his writing and his opinions, without there being any more to it?”

“Trust me, she was in love with him,” Paula said.

Offhand, Simon couldn’t think of many people he’d met that he’d trusted less. “How do you know? Is there any proof of that?”

“Read her comments!”

“I have. She was undeniably a fan of Blundy, but I’ve read nothing that suggests love.”

“Oh, come on! The protective tone, the hurt when people misjudge him . . .”

“Protectiveness can take a platonic form,” said Simon. “People want to protect friends as well as . . . Don’t they?”

“She was in love with him,” Paula said flatly. “I can’t believe you can’t see it.”

“I can’t see it, no,” said Simon, feeling at last that he was on firmer ground. “But I believe that you can.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Simon looked pointedly at the clock on the wall.
Tick, tick, tick . . .

It was the perfect moment to end the interview.

“AND THEN I PRESSED
‘Post advertisement’ and the deed was done,” Charlie told Simon, Liv and Gibbs. She decided not to mention that so far she’d had not one single reply that wasn’t spam of one kind or another.

Simon, who had heard the story already, was furious. “You’re telling more people?” he said. “Do you want to get sacked?”

“Liv and Gibbs won’t say anything, will they? Morally compromised as they are. As we
all
are.”

The four of them were having dinner at Passaparola. These days, Charlie and Simon had dinner with Liv and Gibbs more often than with Liv and Dom. Charlie had never been keen on her official brother-in-law, and increasingly Dom, a lawyer with a thick skin and a high opinion of himself, seemed to need to be the center of attention. He’d taken to prefacing nearly all of his I-know-better
pronouncements with the words “Here’s the thing,” followed by an audible colon.

“For once, nothing’s leaked out to the press,” said Simon. “
Nothing
—and you go and do this.”

“And still nothing’s been leaked to the press,” said Charlie. “So. Relax.”

Liv clinked her fork against her glass. “Chris and I have something important to tell you,” she said.

Charlie held her breath.

“Now,
please
don’t be sad for us because we’re
absolutely fine
. OK? We’ve decided that from now on, we’re going to proceed on a new basis: just very good friends.
Best
friends!” She beamed. “It won’t change anything as far as you’re concerned. We can still all meet for dinner. But . . . we’ve decided not to continue with the romantic side of our relationship.”

“You’re splitting up?” Charlie had dreamed of this day for years. Now that it had come, she felt oddly deflated. But . . . Gibbs had been sucking up to her like mad, and Simon had said he’d been the same with him. Charlie had been sure a large favor was about to be asked of them. Why would you butter people up in order to tell them your relationship was over? It made no sense.

“We’re no longer an item in that sense, no, but we’ll still see each other just as often,” said Liv. “Won’t we, Chris?”

Gibbs sighed. “If you say so,” he muttered. Charlie turned her attention to him, away from her sister. He looked embarrassed and slightly impatient. Not distraught, not in shock . . . Charlie glanced at Simon, who shook his head almost imperceptibly to let her know he agreed with her: something here didn’t add up.

Whatever they were playing at, it was Liv’s idea, Liv’s crazy plan, and Gibbs was going along with it.

“Why are you going to see each other just as often?” Charlie asked. “Isn’t the one advantage of a breakup that you can finally be rid of the person?”

“Chris and I love each other,” said Liv. “We’ll always be part of one another’s lives, just in a different way.” She reached over and squeezed Gibbs’s hand.

“I don’t believe you,” said Charlie. “You’re lying. What I can’t work out is why.” She turned to Simon. “What do they have to gain by pretending they’re not sleeping together anymore?”

“Dunno.” He shrugged. “I suppose they’ll tell us if and when they want us to know. In the meantime, we can talk about something else. Charlie spoke to another real estate agent today,” he said to Gibbs. “From Bateman Yoke.”

Gibbs stared down at the table.

“We’re not lying!” Liv insisted.

“I don’t think Simon’s that interested,” Charlie told her. It was a good tactic. Deprived of the attention she’d been counting on, Liv might be forced into revealing the truth. “He’d be very interested to hear what’s
really
going on with you and Gibbs, though, and so would I,” Charlie said, ramming the point home.

“I’ve told you what’s going on—we’ve broken up, but we’re still best friends.”

“Liv, if they want to change the subject, there’s nothing you can do,” said Gibbs. “We’ve done our bit. Right?”

She pursed her lips. “Well, I just thought . . . No, you’re right. We’ve told them. It’s . . . fine!”

Charlie watched the complex sequence of eye signals that passed between them. At that moment, she’d have given her right arm and perhaps a few toes too to know what the hell was going on.

“Tell me about this real estate agent from Bateman Yoke,” Gibbs said.

Charlie opened her mouth, but Simon beat her to it. “He wasn’t one of the ones Nicki Clements asked to find her a house near Elmhirst Road last year—which is probably why she contacted him on March seventh this year and asked him what price she should ask for her Bartholomew Gardens house if she wanted to sell it as quickly as
possible. She sounded upset, he said, and she didn’t seem to care about making a loss—just seemed desperate to get out of Spilling as soon as she could. The guy said he’d go around and do a valuation, but before he had a chance, Nicki had called him back and said she’d changed her mind and didn’t want to move. She canceled him.”

“Are you thinking the first call was immediately after she broke up with Damon Blundy?” Gibbs asked.

“That’s my guess,” said Charlie. “They had an affair; it went wrong; she wanted to get away from him, having only moved to the Culver Valley to be near him. Then a day or so later, her mood changed—she started to feel stronger and realized it was bad enough that she’d moved for him once. Twice would be pathetic.”

“So Damon Blundy and this Nicki woman were having an affair, and they’d split up by March seventh?” Liv said. “That sounds about right.”

“What? What do you know about it?” Charlie asked her.
You manipulative liar
.

“I know that by April this year Damon Blundy was having an affair with Paula Riddiough.” It was a few seconds before Liv noticed the effect her words had had. “What? Why are you all staring at me weirdly? Oh, come on,
everyone
knows about Damon Blundy and Paula Privilege!”

“Whatever you know, why the fuck haven’t you told me?” said Gibbs, red in the face.

“I’ve been preoccupied. We both have, with our . . .” Liv stopped and bit her lip.

“With your fake breakup?” Charlie suggested helpfully.

“Let’s not get sidetracked,” said Simon. “Liv, tell us.”

“I’m sorry, I thought we all knew,” she said shakily. “All my Twitter friends know. Blundy and Paula had a big row on Twitter after Margaret Thatcher died—insulting and mocking each other in rhyming couplets, copying the exact metrical structure of
The Gruffalo
by Julia Donaldson.”

“And
Tiddler,
” said Simon.

Liv looked shocked, then giggled. “How do you know about
Tiddler
?”

“I didn’t until recently. Until I read the Twitter argument between Paula Riddiough and Damon Blundy.”

“He likes to be thorough in his research,” said Charlie. “Plus, he loves books about fish.”

Simon’s face tightened, as she’d known it would. “
Moby Dick
’s not about a fish,” he said. “A whale isn’t a fish.”

“Tiddler’s
heavenly,
” Liv gushed. She was in a remarkably sunny mood for someone who had recently terminated a passionate love affair. “Morally, it’s the opposite of ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf.’ Making up stories isn’t bad—it’s the only thing that can save you. That’s the message.”

“Interesting that your idea of ‘heavenly’ is a book that makes the case for lying,” Charlie muttered.

“Can we get back to Blundy and Riddiough?” Gibbs snapped.

“If you followed their Thatcher witch fight, you can’t have failed to notice how it ended. Don’t you remember?” Liv asked Simon.

“Not word for word, no.”

“We don’t all spend our days browsing Twitter,” said Charlie.

“There’s a bit in
Tiddler
, near the end, where Tiddler says, ‘I was lost, I was scared, but a story led me home again.’ The other fish all say, ‘Oh no, it didn’t,’ and Tiddler says, ‘Oh yes, it did.’ Immediately after their spat on Twitter—maybe ten minutes later—Paula Riddiough tweeted Damon Blundy and said, ‘I was lost, I was scared, but a Tory led me home again.’ Blundy tweeted back, ‘Oh no, he didn’t,’ to which she replied, ‘Oh yes, he did!’” Liv looked at Gibbs, who was staring at her open-mouthed. “I read that and I thought, ‘They
must
be having an affair.’”

“It’s not there anymore,” Simon said to Gibbs in the voice Charlie feared, the one that always signaled his failure to notice she was alive for the foreseeable future. “Is it? Am I going senile?”

“Of course it’s not there
now,
” said Liv. “The incriminating tweets vanished seconds after they appeared.”

“You sure about this, Liv?” Gibbs asked her. “You didn’t imagine it, or . . . misremember?”

“One hundred and fifty percent positive. I follow both of them. I watched those tweets as they happened. I’ve still got DMs from that day, probably—friends who saw it too. I was suspicious even
before
the nicey-nicey bit at the end. Damon Blundy had no kids and regularly wrote about how he couldn’t stand children and everything relating to them—how did he know
The Gruffalo
and
Tiddler
well enough to be able to parody them at such speed, unless he was involved with Paula Riddiough? Everyone knows they’re her favorite books—well, everyone who follows her tweets, like I do. And then, when the row was followed by that lovey-dovey bit, it seemed obvious. I waited for it to blow up into a huge thing—screengrabs, the works—but no one said anything, not on general Twitter. I think a hell of a lot of people’d be scared to antagonize Damon Blundy, knowing how he goes after anyone he’s got it in for.”

A waiter was approaching. “No,” Simon barked at him without looking in his direction. “Not now.” The waiter retreated, looking grateful to have been warned away from a potentially toxic area of the restaurant.

“Oh, and there was a smiley face too,” said Liv.

“What?” Simon and Gibbs both pounced at the same time.

“Yes, after what I’ve already said—‘Oh no, he didn’t,’ ‘Oh yes, he did!’ et cetera—Blundy sent her a tweet that was just a smiley face. No words.” Liv paused for dramatic effect. She was starting to enjoy the expert-witness role. “And . . . I’m not absolutely sure, but I
think
the face might even have been winking,” she said.

THE CHANCERY HOTEL HASN’T
changed since I was last here in February. I expected it to be different. I wanted it to be. Or maybe I only want me to be different—no longer the same fool who arrived here full of hope and excitement five months ago, thinking she was about to consummate her illicit love affair with one of the UK’s most famous newspaper columnists.

Still the same.

The gray and red lobby decor, the flower photographs on the walls . . . Separated from reception by a glass partition, there’s the same skinny rectangle of a bar, where you’d be foolish to sit and have a drink if you didn’t want the bar staff to overhear your entire conversation, not to mention the ticking and squelching of your internal organs. The room can’t be more than three feet wide. No one’s in there today; I can’t imagine that anyone ever sits at the bar, on one of the twelve high red-topped stools arranged in a perfectly straight line. Who would want to be stared at by people like me, waiting to be checked in?

There’s only one receptionist on duty, and the most tedious man in the world is in front of me. He seems determined to ask about everything a guest at a hotel might conceivably ask about: Wi-Fi, breakfast times, gym times, the business center, newspapers, alarm calls, does
his room have a minibar. I suppress the urge to scream at him, “How can you want and need so much?” He even has an annoying name that he has to spell out letter by letter because it’s so unusual. U-s-k-a-l-i-s. He pushed in front of me on the hotel steps and actually jogged to reception in order to get there before me, the creep.

While I wait, I keep turning around to see if anyone walks through the hotel’s main door. All the way here from King’s Cross Station—a fifteen-minute walk—I sensed that someone was following me, but there was no sign of anyone. No streaked-haired man, no blue BMW, no one who stopped walking when I did and lowered their eyes.

I tell myself I’m being paranoid. No one’s followed me here. No one knows where I am and what I’m doing apart from King Edward. I told Adam I was going to London to try and sort things out with Melissa. I even told him which hotel I’d be staying in and that I didn’t know exactly when I’d be back; perhaps I’d need to stay overnight. “I’m not going to her house,” I said. “I want to be absolutely sure I don’t run into Lee. I want to invite Melissa to
my
territory to talk, instead of being on hers like I usually am—where she can kick me out whenever it suits her. This time, I’m going to set the agenda and do any kicking out that needs to be done.”

Adam believed me. I believed myself. It sounded plausible because it’s the truth. I’m going to make it true. When I get to my room—if I ever get there, if Mr. Uskalis ever stops wittering on—the first thing I’m going to do is call Melissa and invite her to meet me and talk, but only if she’s willing to pack a suitcase and leave Lee at the same time, having told him she wants a divorce. She will, of course, refuse. I can then text Adam and tell him she’s refused to meet me, but that I’m going to stay at the hotel and have another try later.

I am a truly great liar. Legendary.

Finally, the tedious guy has released the receptionist. “I’ve reserved a room,” I tell her.

“Thank you for your patience. Sorry I kept you waiting. Name?”

“Kate Zilber. Z-i-l-b-e-r.” I think about Gavin’s—King Edward’s—
disdain for Damon Blundy, his suggestion that Blundy was evil. Is that why he chose his name to hide behind when he was behaving badly, for the same reason I’ve chosen Kate’s? As a kind of revenge? I’ve given the Chancery Hotel all of Kate’s details and none of my own.

“Yes, we’ve got you here,” the receptionist says. “Superior Double for one night?”

“That’s right.” When I hand over my credit card as an advance against my minibar costs, she doesn’t look at the name on it, just hands me the machine to key in my PIN.

I sign where I’m told to sign—Kate’s name—and I’m given the key to room 419. The hotel elevator is nearly as narrow as the bar: it would accommodate no more than two people. Its four mirrored walls don’t make it look any bigger, only crazier: dozens of clones of a hollow-eyed, paranoid woman with unbrushed hair.

I didn’t bring a hairbrush, makeup, perfume. I didn’t even have a shower this morning. I don’t care what I look like or how I smell. I’m not here for romantic or sexual reasons, not this time.

Once I’ve called Melissa and texted Adam, I will email King Edward and give him my room number and a time, as agreed. I look at my watch: 12:50
P.M
. Yesterday, he said anytime after two. I’ll tell him three o’clock. That will give me enough time.

To leave the door slightly ajar with the “Do not disturb” sign displayed. To take off my clothes, climb into the bed, tie the blindfold securely in place and wait
.

He’s not going to kill me. He wouldn’t do that. He’s done terrible things to me, and he’s maybe killed Damon Blundy, but he wouldn’t kill me.

Tomorrow evening, I’ll be at home again, with Sophie and Ethan. And Adam. If I can just get home safely, I’ll never cheat on him again—never. I won’t flirt, won’t look on Intimate Links, won’t do anything I have to lie to anybody about.

The elevator doors open at the fourth floor. I pull my phone out of my bag as I walk along the corridor to room 419, suddenly feeling
an urgent need to remove any trace of myself from the Intimate Links website. Deleting my “I Want a Secret” ad won’t undo anything that’s happened, but symbolically it will help me, make me feel I’ve disconnected from something horrible.

Will my advert still be there, buried beneath all the more recent ones? Maybe they delete them automatically after a year or so.

In my room—also red and gray—I throw my knapsack on the bed, trying not to think about the bed itself. I’ve brought nothing with me apart from my phone, the blindfold, spare underwear and a toothbrush and toothpaste.

I’m not going to have sex with him. He won’t insist on it. He could easily make it a condition of his telling me the truth about Damon Blundy’s murder, but he won’t. I don’t care if he wants me not to utter a word, like last time. He’ll soon find out that I intend to speak as much as I want to.

He cares about me, about what I want.

Then why has he deceived you twice, in such a damaging way?

All right: I’ve no idea if he cares or not, or what caring even means to a man like King Edward. Do I trust him? No. But I want something from him: information.

If I have to have sex with him in order to find out who killed Damon Blundy, I’ll do it. I’ve had sex I didn’t want plenty of times—never against my will, always by choice, to make the other person happy. This time, it would be for my own satisfaction, because I need to understand how exactly my life ended up entangled in a murder investigation.

On my phone’s screen, I bring up the Intimate Links site and go to “Personals.” In the search box, I type, “Secret.” There’s no way it’ll still be there after all these years.

Several results appear. None of them’s my advert. They’re all too recent. I click on the most recent one, from July 4, last Thursday. It’s headed, “Looking for a Woman with a Secret.” I start to read it, at first because I find it puzzling. The writer claims to want neither a long-term relationship nor casual sex.

I gasp when I see the words “pale blue and brown jukebox.” Damon Blundy had a blue and brown jukebox. He wrote a column about it, and mentioned it in a couple of his other columns. What’s . . .

Oh God. Oh fuck.

This isn’t a personal ad; it’s a description of Damon’s murder. A knife—sharp, sharpened at the scene, but he wasn’t stabbed . . .

Oh Jesus Christ
.

I wish I hadn’t read it, wish I didn’t know how precisely Damon Blundy was killed, because now that I know how, I know why.

You knew already. Don’t lie to yourself. Lie to other people if necessary, but not to yourself
.

As soon as you worked out what “He is no less dead” meant, you knew . . .

A man’s been murdered because of something I said.

I almost know who killed Damon.
Almost
. Trouble is, there’s more than one person it might be. The likelihood of the police working it out, any of it, is zero unless I tell them everything I know.

I can’t do it. Or rather, I could, but I know I never will. If there were a murder trial, it would all come out, be made public. It would be in all the papers. No, I can’t let that happen, no matter what.

I reread the “Looking for a Woman with a Secret” advert five times to check that I haven’t missed anything. Beads of cold sweat have appeared on my upper lip. I feel as if I might faint.

It’s for me. This ad is directed at me. It must be—there’s no one else who could make any sense of it. Its author has been waiting for a response for five days.

I press “reply.”