My journey seemed to be taking forever, although I knew I was making good progress. There was hardly any traffic around – not that it would have bothered me – and the pavements were deserted save for some lonely nightworker or two or revelled-out revellers. I had no idea at all of the time, but I could see that most of the houses and all of the shops and offices were in darkness.
I remembered the number of times I’d chastized Andrea for leaving a window, upstairs or downstairs, slightly ajar, or the back door locked but unbolted, and I prayed that my absence would spur her to take proper precautions. She must be feeling vulnerable without me and that thought only emphasized how useless I would be to her now.
At last – at long, long last – I was gliding up the road leading home. And despite the late hour, the lights were still on.
I paused at the gate. Oliver’s silver BMW was parked at the kerbside and I didn’t know whether to feel elated or angry. At least Andrea and Prim were not alone. But why should Oliver be here at this hour?
Maybe Moker would do me a favour and murder him.
I quickly pushed such worthless thoughts from my mind. Even if Oliver had killed me, pretending it was the work of another, he would be able to protect my wife and daughter. And it was my daughter I cared about most.
I passed through the gate and went up the path to the front door. I took a deep and unnecessary breath before moving through it.
I could hear their voices coming from the lounge – Oliver’s and Andrea’s – speaking low so all I could hear from where I waited in the hall were murmurings. The lounge door was open and, foolishly, I was tempted to linger outside and eavesdrop, as if I might be seen should I enter the room. I rebuked myself before slipping through the doorway.
They were together on the sofa. My best friend and my wife. Close, inclined towards each other, knees almost touching, Oliver with a casual arm over the back of the sofa, Andrea leaning sideways towards him, her hand on his knee. She was gazing into his face, but his eyes were cast downwards, focused on the small space between them.
Andrea wore one of my old high-necked FCUK coffee-coloured cardigans, unzipped over a black exercise vest and charcoal grey sweatpants. Her feet were bare on the plush carpet.14 Oliver was dressed as if having only just returned from the office: light twill trousers, loose beige jacket over a burgundy sweatshirt. His brown ankle boots were suede.
Anger boiled inside me, but I had the sudden urge to see Primrose, check on her, make sure she was safe and sound. I left the room and took to the stairs, climbing them as if I were a normal human being rather than a lost spectre.
The door to her bedroom was partially open – we never closed Prim’s bedroom door at night in case she should call out, stirred by some threatening dream. We also listened for wheezy breaths, a sign that one of her asthma attacks was about to start. I slid through the gap and foolishly tiptoed towards her narrow bunk bed as if I still had the power to disturb.
Her flower-patterned duvet was down almost to her waist, a sign of restless sleep or that the room was too warm. One little arm was bent so that her hand, and particularly her thumb, was near to her face; the other arm stretched down her side, the hand on top of a ruffled sheet. Her hair was curled around her cheek, almost hiding her profile. How I longed to lie down beside her and cuddle her.
A soft nightlight – a happy pink elephant lit up from inside – threw its comforting but limited glow into the room and, as if by habit, I checked the small gaily painted cabinet that stood next to the bed. Beneath the Winnie the Pooh lamp was her puffer. I remembered when the family doctor had first prescribed the Ventolin inhaler for Prim’s asthma, and how it broke my heart to watch her place it within easy reach on the bedside cabinet every night, as comforting to her – no, more so – as the white teddy bear, Snowy. You know, all children are precious, but your own are beyond value. To watch them suffer illness from time to time is a torment that most parents have to endure, but to know that the illness could be life-threatening, well, that’s sheer torture. Even the fact that asthma was a common malady among children these days – at least three other kids in her class were afflicted by it – made it no more tolerable.
I bent down to kiss her cheek, wishing I could draw back her curls with my fingers and, although I made no physical contact, she stirred in her sleep. Her head turned and her eyelids flickered for a moment, but never opened. The movement surprised me and I pulled back a few inches so that I could observe her. The restlessness did not last long; she soon returned to deep slumber, her narrow chest rising and sinking evenly. Her movement though had disturbed the blankets and the top half of a coloured photograph still in its frame was uncovered.
I closed my eyes to hold back the tears. Even though in the photo only my head and shoulders and the top of Prim’s head were in view, I knew which one it was. Andrea had taken the shot at least four years ago when I was pushing my daughter on a playground swing. I was laughing as I held the swing’s seat in which Prim was locked, ready to give it another almighty push so that she would sail ‘high into sky’, as she put it. Although most of her face remained concealed, I knew that she was laughing happily, only a tiny bit of fear – no, it was more excited apprehension – in her eyes, a long strand of hair – red in the sunshine – loose down her face, almost bisecting it. My increased sadness was both because I would never live such wonderful moments again and because Prim felt the need to have my picture in bed with her, like the inhaler, close at hand.
But then rage began to override my emotions. Oliver was to blame for my death; Oliver was the one who had lost my daughter her daddy; Oliver was the ‘friend’ who’d stolen my wife. I stood up, blinded by tears that brimmed unshed in my incorporeal eyes, raging at the duplicity of it all. Oliver. We’d shared so many good times together, hard times too, building up the business, bouncing off each other with creative ideas, sharing either celebratory or consolatory drinks depending on whether accounts were won or lost. At times we’d been like brothers – no, probably closer than brothers, because there was no sibling rivalry between us – and we complemented each other as a team, he the garrulous but smooth and convincing talker who could charm clients as easily as he could charm women, and I, the quiet but plain-speaking one who was just a little shy in front of both clients and women. A great team with no jealousy between us, not a common thing where copywriter and art director are concerned, when invariably the politics of protectionism (towards ideas as well as status) raises its ugly head. Or so I had believed.
All those years, those good exciting years, he must have envied me for winning Andrea as my wife, even though he, himself, had ruined their previous relationship. Envied me so much that he had plotted to take her back for himself. All those years of deceit . . .
These black thoughts swept through me as I stood at my daughter’s bedside, the melancholy of a few moments ago overwhelmed by a boiling hatred against someone who had taken not only my wife, but my life also. With one last look at Prim, feeling a love for her that softened only the edges of my anger, I stole back out onto the landing. I heard Andrea’s voice as I came down the stairs.
‘What do you expect of me, Oliver?’ she was saying. ‘Jim has been dead for no more than a week and you think I can just dismiss him from my life?’
‘I’m not suggesting you should, or even could, do that.’ Oliver was talking in low, reasonable tones, the way he used to persuade clients our ad or campaign was great even if they themselves were not quite swept away by it. ‘But I want to end the deceit, Andrea. I want us to be together all the time.’
Oh, he wanted to end the deceit. Well that would be easy enough with me out of the way.
Andrea again, rising frustration in her voice. ‘You don’t understand how much I loved him, how I miss him now!’
Loved me? That was hard to get my head around. How could she betray me if she loved me so much?
‘You loved us both, I accept that, Andrea. But be honest with yourself – you love me more. Y
ou always have.’
‘You never made it easy for me. You would never leave me alone.’
‘Jim and I had a thriving business partnership. I couldn’t just clear out, it wouldn’t have been fair to him.’
‘Did you hear what you just said? You were screwing his wife and you thought it would be unfair to split up your business partnership? I can’t believe you ever saw things that way.’
Nor could I. Oliver wanted it all ways. He wanted my wife and he also wanted the success and revenue that our partnership brought him. Unbelievable.
‘I couldn’t leave you, Andrea. I tried, I tried to forget about you and all we had together, but it wasn’t possible. I loved you too much then and I love you too much now!’
‘Keep your voice down. I don’t want Prim to wake up. She’s been through enough already.’
Oliver spoke in a whisper, but by then I was close enough to hear. I was just outside the door.
‘It’s because of Prim that we have to be together again,’ he said.
His words were followed by a silence. I waited.
‘It isn’t right for you to bring that up. Not now, not when I’m going through so much pain.’ Andrea’s voice was quiet, but it wasn’t a whisper. I heard the sofa creak, as if one of them had changed position.
Oliver’s voice again, still in a whisper, but an edge of . . . what? Regret? Humility? Neither was really his style, yet there was a new tone to his words. Could have been sadness. ‘I know it’s too soon, but I do have a right. You know that.’
Another silence, longer this time and, still rooted to the spot outside the door, I imagined Andrea searching his face. Perhaps she, too, wondered what he was implying.
After a while, she said, equally as quietly: ‘It was the cruellest thing we did to Jim.’
Pointlessly, I held my breath. What could be more cruel than cheating on me all these years?
‘It would have destroyed him if he’d known,’ Oliver replied.
I began to feel that dreadful inner chill again. Where the hell were they going with this? What did Oliver mean? Surely nothing could hurt me more than their betrayal?
‘You’re talking nonsense, Oliver. Even we don’t know for sure.’
‘Stop kidding yourself. We checked out the dates a million times. Jim was overseas on a photographic job when she was conceived. The timing works out perfectly, but Jim just thought you’d given birth a little prematurely.’
What? What was he saying?
‘We still can’t be certain.’ It was a defensive protest.
‘We’ve always known. Look at her hair – it’s the same shade of brown as mine. She’s even got my freckles around the side of her nose. Mine have faded over time, but a few are still there.’
It was true: Oliver had a small spattering of light freckles on his face, so light, in fact, that they were almost unnoticeable.
‘But it’s her eyes that give her away. Oh, they’re like yours, but they’re more like mine. Each passing year she gets to resemble me more and more.’
‘Stop it. I won’t listen! Now’s not the time.’
‘The time has never been right, has it, Andrea? It was never the right time to tell Jim the truth.’
‘I would never have left him. I would never have let it ruin our marriage.’
‘Eventually you would have had no choice. And then Jim would have despised you.’
I heard Andrea sob. I half-collapsed against the wall, my shoulder sinking into it.
‘Please don’t say any more.’ Andrea’s sob escaped her.
‘You – we – both have to face what has always been there between us, and it goes beyond mere love. It means responsibility, Andrea. Primrose is my daughter, and now I want to be a proper father to her.’
I was stunned. No, I was shocked, shattered. Completely. Nothing had ever hit me so hard. Not even when I discovered Andrea had been unfaithful to me all these years, or when I discovered my best friend was suspected of killing me. Even finding my own dead and mutilated body had not hit me in quite this way. Nothing that had gone before – in my whole life – had ever touched me like this. It wrenched the heart from me.
I sagged against the hall wall, broken, bent by the deepest despair I’d ever known. Next door, their conversation continued, but I was too numbed to take it in any more, my mind filling with images of my little Primrose, the one person in this world who gave me unconditional love, the light that countered all darkness, my daughter whom I loved above all others, above life itself. I sank to my knees and gave out a long moaning wail that no one could hear. If my tears had been a reality, they would have dampened the wall I rested my cheek against; if my strength had been real, I would have seriously harmed, if not killed, the man sitting beside my wife and speaking of the worst betrayal of all.
I don’t know how much time went by before their words began to register with me again, but eventually, they infiltrated the great fog of confusion and pain that had engulfed me.
Andrea was speaking. ‘Why do the police think you murdered Jim? Why you, Oliver?’
‘Because I was the last person to see him alive. That person is usually the prime suspect in murder investigations especially when the police can cook up a motive. The Press certainly had a field day when I was taken in for questioning.’
‘But why didn’t you tell the police?’
‘What, that I came straight here after my argument with Jim at the hotel? That I was here making love to you?’
‘That you were screwing me while my husband lay dead in a hotel room?’
‘Making love, Andrea. Please don’t use that kind of language about what we have. And we were making love, the two of us, together. It’s always been mutual, hasn’t it?’
A brief silence followed before Oliver spoke again. ‘Besides, being here doesn’t mean I couldn’t have committed the crime beforehand, or I couldn’t have gone back to the hotel and killed him. I didn’t stay long, remember? You were worried Prim might wake up and find us both down here. Now I wish I had stayed, but the point is, I didn’t want to involve you in any scandal.’
‘My husband was hacked to pieces and you were concerned about tarnishing my reputation?’
I heard a short humourless laugh from Andrea.
‘Something like that,’ said Oliver. ‘I don’t want to use you as an alibi either, especially as it might not help my case anyway. In fact, it might make it worse for me. I love you, Andrea. Surely you understand my reasons.’
The faint sound of weeping.
‘And you love me.’ It was a simple statement from Oliver. ‘You always have. You never stopped loving me, but you didn’t want to hurt Jim.’
‘No, I didn’t want to hurt him, but I kept on seeing you.’ She sounded bitter and cynical.
‘Even when you married him nothing really changed between us.’
‘I tried, I tried to forget about you. You were such a bastard to me and Jim was so caring.’
‘I did my best to forget about us too, Andrea. I honestly wanted to stop loving you. Unfortunately, I couldn’t pretend for very long. I gave in to my true feelings. And eventually, so did you.’
‘I couldn’t help myself. I missed you so much, despite your cruelty. I thought my love for you would fade in time, but it never did. I could only cope with my life by seeing you again. I should have been happy with Jim, and then Primrose, but it was never complete. Part of me was missing.’
‘Then don’t let guilt spoil everything now.’
‘Now that we’re both free? You honestly believe I can put my feelings to one side just because he’s gone? It isn’t possible. He was a good man, a loving husband and a wonderful father. He deserved more than that.’
‘You have the right to be happy again, Andrea.’ Ollie’s sincere client voice again.
‘I would have been happy with Jim. I was happy with him.’
‘But a moment ago you said something was missing from your life . . .’
‘Because I still loved y
ou? That was the missing ingredient I could have managed, Oliver. I’d have got by if only you’d kept away from me.’
‘All those wonderful times we had together. You can’t ignore them, you can’t pretend they didn’t happen.’
‘In hotel rooms, your car? In your flat? Sneaking around, telling lies. I despise them.’
‘You gave yourself to me completely. You wanted me as much as I—’
‘No!’
‘—as much as I wanted you. We’re still in love with each other, don’t you see that?’
For a while there was no response. Then: ‘How can you be so callous? How can you say these things knowing my husband – your best friend – was brutally murdered only days ago?’
‘Because I’m speaking honestly and you have to listen to me. Okay, we can give it a while, that’s probably for the best anyway. But I’m not going to let you get away from me again. We don’t have to live a lie anymore, we – me, you, Primrose – can become a real family.’
‘I had a real family.’