“I’ll be fine. I’ll try to arrange to meet him for lunch in Exeter, then we’ll be in a public place.”
“All right, but be careful.”
We head toward a taxi stand, where Damian hands me money for a cab. I’m going to have to replace virtually the entire contents of my handbag, from house keys to bank cards. The thought fills me with exhaustion.
“So, you promise you’ll be careful when you talk to Julia’s brother?” Damian looks at me with real concern in his eyes.
“I promise.”
“Okay, then.” Damian hesitates. “Don’t forget to use the fact that he liked you once, maybe still does.”
His words echo in my ear as I watch him head off to Aces High. I take a steadying breath, then call Robbie.
He answers straightaway, sounding delighted to hear from me. “I was so hoping you’d call back.”
“Call back?” For a moment I’m thrown. Then I remember the phone call he made just before I found Julia’s ring a few days ago. “Right.” I’m about to suggest meeting up later, but before I can formulate the sentence, Robbie asks me to meet him right now for coffee.
“I have to be at the hotel for work in an hour, but I could slip out now if you fancy it? Could you meet me in ten minutes? Wendy won’t notice.”
He’s speaking so fast, with such enthusiasm, that I can barely follow what he’s saying, but that reference to his wife at the end makes it sound, worryingly, as if he is proposing some kind of secret rendezvous.
“Shall I come to the hotel?” I say, determined to make it clear my own intentions are entirely aboveboard.
“God no,” Robbie says with feeling. “Don’t want to get to work before I have to. There’s bound to be some problem to sort out. I’ll get roped in straightaway. How about Top Tiffin?”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Great little café about five minutes from the cathedral. Could you meet me there now?”
I reluctantly agree. I’d wanted to go home to Heavitree first to change—plus I seriously don’t like the idea that Robbie is sneaking out to see me behind his wife’s back. However, I don’t want to put the meeting off, so I head straight for the café he’s suggested.
He’s already there when I arrive, his head buried in a book, his fingers tapping nervously on the table. I glance at the cover—Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. I stand, watching him for a moment. After a few seconds, Robbie looks up with an anxious glance at the door. He spots me and beams.
I head over, feeling decidedly unsettled. Robbie makes a show of switching off his cell phone before asking what I want. I say I’d like a cappuccino and switch my own mobile off too.
Robbie goes over to the counter and orders our drinks. He smiles at me again as he comes back and sits down. “It’s so great to see you, Livy. You look gorgeous. I thought so when you turned up at Mum’s the other day. I can’t tell you how pleased I am you called me. I was scared that, after Mum accused you of taking that ring—”
I flush, suddenly remembering where the ring turned up. I stare at Robbie’s open face. Does he know? Is this somehow a trick? I’d completely forgotten until this minute that when Will took the ring from me, he definitely said he was going to return it to Robbie the next day. Has he done so?
“What’s the matter?” Robbie asks. He self-consciously smooths down the hair that curls over the back of his neck. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you by—”
“You haven’t.” I touch his arm.
Robbie blushes. I glance outside. Despite the heat, the sky is overcast. A dark cloud looms in the distance.
“I’m sorry if I’ve disturbed, er, your plans.” I pause.
“Don’t be sorry.” Robbie is still smiling at me. “I’m not sorry.”
The atmosphere shifts and tightens. I’m suddenly very aware of the lustful glint in Robbie’s eyes. I draw away, feeling uncomfortable. Better to get straight to the point. “Actually, I wanted to ask you about something,” I say. “I found … an e-mail Julia wrote. I think she sent it to you just before she died. She’s angry. It’s about, well, I’m not sure, but—” I stop, unwilling to come right out and say that the e-mail implies Robbie was threatening his sister.
His face tenses, a tiny involuntary movement of the muscles. “I’m sorry, Livy, but Julia hadn’t e-mailed me for years.” And it’s there, in the way his voice rises slightly at the end of the sentence: He’s lying.
I keep my gaze on his face, trying to work out what to say, how to draw him out. “Well, she sent an e-mail, and she sounded furious in it.”
Robbie looks uncomfortable. “Livy, I have no idea what outrageous, angry, manipulative things Julia might have written down in a random e-mail, but I wouldn’t pay it too much attention.” He frowns. “How come you’ve seen it?”
I sit back in my chair, unsure what to say. The waiter comes over with our coffees. He sets them both down on the table. Two black coffees with a jug of hot milk.
I’m about to point out that I’d asked for a cappuccino when Robbie leans across the table and takes my hand. “I ordered Americanos with hot milk. That’s what we drank on our first, our only date, remember?” He smiles.
I stare at him. Is he serious? “Blimey, Robbie, that was eighteen years ago.”
“I know, but I remember as if it were yesterday.”
His hand is still on mine, his palm heavy and damp on my fingers. It takes all I’ve got not to pull away, but somehow I resist. The café hums about us as I stare at the steam rising off our coffees.
Julia’s cutting words from years ago echo in my head: My dickweasel of a brother worships you big-time. Couldn’t you talk to him, Liv? Get him to swap rooms with me at home? Mum let him have the big room and I got rammed into this fucking broom closet. Go on, he’d do anything for you.
I wonder. Damian’s suggestion that I should use the fact that Robbie likes me flits through my head. I look up. Robbie is gazing at me, his expression barely short of adoring. I gulp, then gaze back, trying to make my eyes soft and interested. “Actually, I remember too,” I say, “I just can’t believe that you…” I look down at our hands. Robbie squeezes my fingers, encouraging me to say more. “I can’t believe that you feel the same way I do, that is … if you do?” My face is burning. I’m useless at this. I’m acting like a bloody honey trap agent, and I feel awkward and guilty. Do the women at Honey Hearts ever feel like this, I wonder? Or do they see what they do as a job?
Robbie grips my hand tighter and I make myself look up, into his eyes.
“I often think about that time,” he says with feeling.
I squeeze his hand gently back. I’m playing with fire here, but I can’t stop. I have to get him to trust me, to open up, to tell me what he knows.
“Sometimes I wonder if we didn’t take what we had back then for granted,” Robbie goes on in a low voice. “I feel that … maybe I let you go too easily. Sometimes we don’t realize what we’ve lost until it’s too late. Do you know what I mean?”
I glance away. “Yes,” I whisper.
Oh, Jesus.
“Sometimes I wish we could turn back the clock … before Wendy, before Will,” Robbie says. I can feel him gazing at me, waiting for my response.
I take a deep breath and squeeze his hand again. “I know,” I say softly. “Of course, however far we go back, there’s always Julia.”
Robbie sighs. “Yeah, Julia. Everyone loved Julia, but honestly, Livy, if you knew her like I did … she was such a bitch.”
My mouth drops open. Even though I heard him at the funeral, I’m not prepared for this.
“A bitch?” My voice sounds hollow.
“Said things for effect most of the time. Nothing behind them at all,” Robbie says bitterly. “She liked to taunt me. She was hateful to me and Mum, so manipulative, always.”
I stare at him. It’s true that Julia was dismissive of her family, right from when I first met her. She hardly ever went home, even when her dad died and even t
hough Joanie only lived an hour’s drive away. But surely she wasn’t as bad as Robbie says. Okay, so she used to call her mother “an emotional vampire” and refer to her brother as “dickweasel,” but Julia was often harsh in the way she expressed herself. And it wasn’t as if Joanie and Robbie were angels themselves. Julia was always full of stories about how they had sneered at her. It’s everything, Livy, she once told me, how I look, how I dress, my work, my love life. Mum and Robbie act like I’m a total loser.
I draw my hand from Robbie’s at last and sip at my coffee. “I didn’t realize you felt like that.”
“Well, it’s the truth.” He looks at me anxiously. “I know you were her friend and I know she was good at making out like she was a nice, normal person, but she wasn’t. She was mean and cruel, and she never let people get close to her. She didn’t really care about anyone.”
I shake my head. That isn’t true. I was close to Julia. She told me all the things that mattered.
A little voice mutters in my head: Yeah, except that she’d been looking for Kara’s killer for years, that she had hired a honey trap agent using Will as part of some cover story, and that she’d fallen in love with Damian despite claiming he was just another fling.
“Julia was a good friend,” I insist.
“Really? If she was such a good friend, why didn’t she tell you she was planning to leave all her money to her boyfriend, Damian something or other?”
“What?” I stare at him. “How do you know she was?” My pulse quickens.
Robbie’s voice is terse. “Look, I’m going to tell you the truth, Livy, because I don’t want to start anything with any dishonesty between us. I did get an e-mail from Julia a few days before she died, and she was angry with me.”
“Why … what was it about?”
Robbie rolled his eyes. “I’d just told her she was being a bitch.”
I frown. “I don’t—”
“Mum needs money,” Robbie says. “The house she lives in costs far more than her pension. I help out as much as I can, but Wendy and I are stretched with our mortgage and the kids.… Mum has been struggling ever since Dad died, and in the last year, with the cutbacks and interest rates being garbage and everything, things have got worse. She’s desperate to stay in that house, but she’s got no money. So a month or so ago, I suggested to Julia that she might consider selling that cottage she was left in Lympstone and using what she made to buy part of Mum’s house.”
My mind flashes to the cottage. And to the fire. Robbie leans forward, intent on his explanation.
“It wasn’t unreasonable. Julia would get her money back when Mum died, so it’s not like we were asking for handouts, but Julia went berserk.”
“Did she?” My chest feels tight. Julia didn’t mention any of this to me.
“She shouted at me. Said I was a bully. Called me names. Horrible names. Honestly, Livy, she was like a woman possessed. And afterwards, she sent the most vicious e-mail, accusing me of threatening her, saying not only would she not consider helping Mum out, but that she was going to write a new will and leave everything to her damn boyfriend. She actually said that she hoped Mum lost her house. And that she was going to make sure Mum and me and my kids—her nephews, Livy—that none of us ever got a penny from her.”
My heart thunders in my ears. I don’t know what to think. Or say. “Julia often—her bark was worse than—”
“Don’t defend her.” Robbie takes a gulp of coffee, then sets the cup down in the saucer with an angry clatter. “She’d known this Damian only a few months. She’d never have stuck with him. She was incapable of loving anyone properly. She was a psycho, Livy. A fucking psycho.”
I draw back, my breath catching in my throat. “So you burned her computer and her papers in case she had made a new will?”
“Oh, she’d done it, all right. I found the file straightaway. It was written, but she hadn’t gotten around to registering it anywhere, so we were in time. I was just trying to help Mum. Why should some boy toy she barely knew get that money? Mum and Dad worked hard for me and my sister all their lives, but to hear Julia talk about them, you’d think they’d spent our entire childhood abusing her.”
“She never said anything like that,” I insist, my mind still racing. Did Damian know Julia had wanted to leave him everything? If he did, it puts his desire to search through her files in a completely different light, not to mention giving him a motive for killing her.
“She did to me. Look, please understand—I loved my sister no matter what vile nonsense came out of her mouth.” Robbie takes my hand again. His eyes bore into me, beseeching me. “I’m not being vindictive, but like I said, I don’t want to lie to you. I want … I’d like to see you again. Like this. Or dinner, maybe?…”
“What about Wendy?” I take my hand away.
“Wendy and I … that’s just for show. We have an understanding, together for the kids and all that. But it’s not, it hasn’t been a proper relationship for a long time.”
The words slip off his tongue so easily. In fact, he exudes sincerity and purpose. He wants me. He is making it clear. Is this what Will sounds like when he seduces someone? Is this what he said when he first flirted with Catrina?
Robbie gulps at his coffee. I take another sip of mine. It’s cold.
“Plus there’s Will,” I say.
Robbie tilts his head to one side. “You don’t trust him,” he says. “And for good reason.”
My mouth falls open.
“Julia told me about his affair a few years ago,” Robbie goes on. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but it was another one of her rants.”
I close my mouth. I feel numb. “What do you mean?”
“Julia told me as a taunt. You know … ‘Your wife is such a bitch, Dickweasel. You only stay with her because you’re a pathetic coward and you’d never be able to persuade anyone else to sleep with you anyway.…’ That kind of thing.” He sighs. “She actually said: ‘At least Will is man enough to go after what he wants.’”
“No.” I feel sick. Robbie is making this up. Julia was always fond of Will—but totally on my side over the affair. “That’s not what Julia really thought.”
“Who knows what she really thought,” Robbie says. “That’s my point. You know, when we were younger, she used to tell people I was gay. I mean there’s nothing wrong with being gay, but I wasn’t, so it hurt.” He runs his hand over his hair. “She probably told you I was, didn’t she?”
I sit back in my chair, a long-forgotten memory surging to the front of my mind. Before I met Robbie, Julia did tell me he was gay. I’d thought I came to that conclusion on my own, but now I remember Julia said it first. And she reinforced the idea a few weeks later, after it was obvious that he liked me, insisting his big crush on me was some kind of displacement activity:
“He totally adores you, but for him, it’s like you’re a goddess … untouchable. Underneath, he’s totally gay. Seriously, Liv, I’ve seen what he looks at online.”
“You mean he’s in the closet.” I’d made a face, wondering why anyone our age felt the need to hide their sexual orientation.
“Honeypie, Robbie is so far inside the closet, he’s practically reached Narnia.”
It didn’t occur to me that she was lying. I wonder whether her words had an impact on me. Did the fact that I believed he was gay influence me when Robbie asked me out? I don’t remember now.
“She did tell you that, didn’t she?” Robbie says bitterly. “Just think, Livy—Julia kept us apart.”
“No.” I drain my cold coffee. It’s time to put a stop to this litany of accusations. “Julia did say stuff that maybe she shouldn’t have, but I don’t believe she meant to be cruel. And I don’t think I would have gone out with you back then anyway.” I catch my breath, worrying I’ve sounded unkind.
Robbie gives me a small, unhappy look. “But what about what you said before … just now?”
I gulp. “It wasn’t you that was the problem,” I say, knowing
this is only half true. “I was in no state to go out with anyone at that point, just after Kara had died.”
“Of course.” He falls silent.
We’ve both finished our coffees. My head is aching. I want to get out of here and think about everything he’s told me. Have I really been so wrong about Julia? And if Robbie is right about the terms of her will, does that put Damian’s interest in finding out what happened to her into a different light? Can I trust Damian—or his motives? He’s already admitted he’s an ex-thief. Of course, if Damian had wanted to kill Julia, then surely he would have waited until she’d made her will official. Still, my nagging doubts remain.
“I have to go,” I say.
“When will I see you again, Livy?” Robbie stands as I do. There’s a bright smile on his face, but his voice is low and almost threatening to my ears. I shiver, despite the heat of the day and the warmth of the café.
“I don’t know,” I say, feeling awkward. I try to think of a formal function that we both might attend as a way of putting our relationship back on its proper footing. “Maybe when your mother decides what to do with Julia’s ashes?”
Robbie’s face falls. “Oh, Livy, I’m so sorry, but Mum already sorted them. Well, she left them, actually … in an urn at the crematorium.” He leans forward with a look of concern. “I could go with you to visit if you like, though it’s not much of a date.” He laughs.
I gulp, my head spinning with the news that Julia’s final remains have been so unceremoniously dealt with.
“Er, no, that’s okay. Well, I’m sure I’ll see you soon, anyway.”
“Absolutely.” Robbie smiles with relief. “Don’t worry about the coffees—I’ll pay,” he says.
“Thank you.” I hold my hand up in a sort of wave, but before I can stop him, Robbie has lurched forward and planted a clumsy kiss on my cheek.
“Bye.” I’m flushing, embarrassed as I turn and rush out of the café.
I switch my phone on as I walk along the street. The sky is heavy with dark, low clouds, and central Exeter full of Saturday-morning shoppers and sightseers. My clothes feel sticky against my skin.