‘When are they going to arrest her?’
‘She’s still unconscious. I don’t know.’ Matthew collapsed into the other kitchen chair, opposite Becky. His mind was still playing catch-up.
‘I wonder how we can prove that she knew who my mother was and that she was responsible for her parents’ deaths.’
‘Can we prove that? Is it true?’
Becky cast a withering stare Matthew’s way. ‘Whether it’s true or not, we can give them evidence that proves it.’
He shook his head, confused. ‘That doesn’t make sense.’
Her expression turned to one of despair; a look that yelled ‘Keep up.’ She often looked at him that way. It really annoyed him. He wasn’t stupid, he just wasn’t scheming. The things that seemed to come to her in a flash took longer to occur to him. That wasn’t a bad thing.
‘I can create a browsing history on her laptop that suggests she’s been looking into her parents’ deaths and into my mum. We could plant evidence linking Mum to the vandalism of the graves; the red paint is here in her flat, we just need the police to find it,’ said Becky. She’d stopped crying.
‘But your mum didn’t vandalise the graves. I saw you there.’
‘Yeah, that one was me, but I don’t think we need to be too squeamish about who did what at this stage. We both know Mum pushed Emma off the ladder. Once the police are sure that she was the one harassing Emma, it will be an easy jump to think that Emma found out, and then discovered my mum had murdered hers and wanted revenge. It all works beautifully. I couldn’t have planned it better myself.’ She looked relieved. No, more than that, she looked satisfied.
‘But why bother?’ Matthew asked. ‘Why would we create evidence to show that Emma wanted to kill your mother? If she has done it deliberately, that will come out without us having to interfere.’
‘Yes, well, maybe, but we can’t count on it.’
‘If she didn’t mean to kill your mother it would be terrible for her to go down for a crime she didn’t commit.’
‘It happens. Besides, do we want Emma to be carefully investigated, or do we want this sorted in a hurry? The police will be pleased to get an open-and-shut case. You don’t want them looking into all of this too closely. Not considering everything that has happened recently.’
Everything that has happened recently.
He supposed that was a euphemism for their sustained campaign to drive Emma mad, a campaign that meant Emma’s property had been damaged, her peace of mind destroyed and finally her body broken. It made him uncomfortable thinking about it. He knew he was part of it, but he really didn’t like admitting that, even to himself. It had all got out of hand. They’d done a terrible, extreme thing. He wanted to put distance between himself and that mess. It had escalated. It had gone too far, and now it appeared Becky wanted to take it further still. He had been bamboozled into accepting whatever it was she wanted, but there had to come a point when he called time. If Emma was sent to prison for something she had done, that was one thing, but shouldn’t they just leave this to the police and the justice system? ‘You want to falsify evidence? On top of everything.’
‘Mattie, she killed my mother.’
‘Yes, but I really think it was an accident. I don’t think she knew your mother had killed her parents. She would have told me otherwise.’
‘What, like you told her everything? Get real, Mattie. People don’t tell their partners everything.’
But he thought Emma did. She’d even told him she believed in ghosts. That took some trust, didn’t it? To appear so vulnerable. That demonstrated her faith and confidence in him. Although it was misguided. The thought shamed him. ‘Emma was driving injured,’ he pointed out. He didn’t add that she was terrified, that he’d chased her out of the house himself. ‘It was dark and wet. No one would expect a pedestrian on that bend. What was your mother doing on the road at night anyway? Obviously up to something. This could have been a genuine accident.’
‘Maybe it was, but you don’t go to jail for accidental death. Think about it, Mattie, if Emma is in jail, then you are free.’ Becky was smiling now, her face shining like a child’s in rude health, the shadow of grief fallen from her. She added, ‘You know what, we can’t lose. If she stays in a coma, Woodview is ours to use as we please, you’ll get control of her finances and we can start the renovation of the Old Schoolhouse. If she goes to prison for murder, no one will doubt your right to divorce her. You’ll get a healthy settlement.’
Matthew stared at her, horrified but also wiser. Becky was mad. It was strange to think such a thing. To know it. Especially as they had spent the past couple of months trying to send Emma mad, or at least make her look so. But Emma wasn’t the crazy one. Becky was. Perhaps it was the grief or shock of losing her mother; perhaps it was the years of abuse and neglect as a child, or poverty and degradation as an adult. Whatever it was, she was too damaged and greedy to see clearly any more. The ideas tumbling out of her mouth were insane. It was up to him to steer the ship. Morally, emotionally, physically, he had to take charge. He tried to process exactly what this meant for him. How exposed he might be if Becky followed this plan she was suggesting, which she most likely would, with or without his agreement. That much was clear. However, before his thoughts could fully settle, his phone rang. He answered.
‘Hello … I see, right, well, yes. Thank you.’ He hit the red button and turned to Becky.
‘Who was that? What is it?’
‘It was the hospital. Emma is awake.’
43
It had been a very long day. The longest he’d known perhaps. He couldn’t remember exactly how many hours he’d been awake; enough for everything to have changed. His world was irrevocably altered. He’d woken up at Woodview, then gone to the hospital, the police station, the Fox and Crown, Woodview, the hospital again and then back to Woodview. He felt like a hamster running on one of those wheels, achieving little, going nowhere. He was exhausted.
He had rarely been alone in the house; Becky made sure that she was here for almost every minute that Emma wasn’t. It was strange to spend time here without either of them, but he quickly found it to be healing. Emma was always going on about the energy of the house, and Becky was always going on about the luxury. He was enjoying the silence, the solitariness. He didn’t feel lonely, he felt relieved. Perhaps he’d go so far as to say unshackled. He padded about in bare feet, allowing the warmth of the underfloor heating to ooze through his soles, up his ankles and calves. He listened to some piano music at low volume. It was soothing. He didn’t know much about classical music, but he liked it. He rarely listened to it when anyone else was around. Emma would have wanted to talk about his curation, because she was interested in everything about him, which was cool, but he didn’t want to admit to her that his selection was simply the result of him searching ‘relaxing classical piano music’ on Spotify and being furnished with a basic playlist of tunes he largely recognised from adverts and movies.
That was the problem with meeting someone as an adult: they expected you to be fully formed and impressive. He was not what Emma believed him to be. He was not a thoughtful, deep man, touched by loss and desperate to seize the day; he did not have a particular interest in new exhibitions at galleries, or a desire to taste jellied eels, or a compunction to hike mountains. Those were all Becky’s ideas, Becky’s invention. He didn’t know who he was. Emma’s eternal intellectualising and scrutinising meant he lived under a constant threat of being exposed as duller or more ordinary than she thought him to be. That was excruciating. Maybe he was just a pretty face.
If he’d ever listened to classical music in front of Becky, she would have howled with derision and called him pretentious. That was the problem with being with someone since you were very young: they sometimes didn’t allow you to grow or change. At least that was the case with him and Becky. They had roles and they stuck to them. He was the Neanderthal who struggled to finish tasks; she was the one with ambition and drive who would take them places. Maybe other couples handled things better, maybe other couples encouraged one another. Grew together.
He listened to the classical music while he took a long shower. The hot water drilled onto his back. It massaged some of the stress out of his muscles, washed away some of the filth of the day from his mind.
After he had received the call from the hospital this morning, he had walked back from the pub to Woodview, and from there he’d ordered an Uber so he could return to the hospital. He had to be so careful. This wasn’t a game; this was an investigation. Not that he’d ever thought it was a game as such, it was just that all the events of these past few months had an unreal quality to them. Surreal, sometimes dreamlike. Sex with a new woman, sanctioned by his existing one, frequent visits to stunning hotels and incredibly expensive restaurants, even a trip to the Maldives had all created an other-worldly, illusory element to his life. It had been possible to tell himself it wasn’t absolutely real.
He liked Emma, he hadn’t anticipated that. He liked her a lot. She was good, kind, clever, fit, and even though she was eleven years older than he was, she didn’t patronise him or admonish him the way Becky did. She seemed to enjoy his company, value his thoughts, respect his talent as a photographer. She didn’t see him as a failed broke actor. Of course not, she had no idea about any of that. The sex was good, very good. He had been so scared these last couple of days. Terrified that she wouldn’t come round, that she wouldn’t survive. Terrified of what would happen if she did. Both thoughts had scared him to his core, but he had wanted her to live.
Was that love? Even before this, he had started to wonder did he love her?
He wasn’t in love with her exactly. He wasn’t even sure what that meant any more. The dizzy, can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t think of anyone other than your lover thing had happened with him and Becky. They’d climbed all over each other for months, they’d wanted to know every atom of one another, inside and out. That first year or so, they’d fucked so hard and so frequently that they’d often thought they might drop with exhaustion, but that was a long time ago and look where it had got him. They were young when they met. Kids. That feeling doesn’t last. He couldn’t imagine feeling as embroiled with anyone now as he had once been with Becky; it was infantile to hope for it. Like wanting to still believe in Father Christmas.
He and Becky still turned each other on, though. Even after sixteen years. They knew their way around one another, knew the quickest way to make sex satisfying. You might say it was efficient. He was still exploring Emma, which was fun. He did have feelings for her. He respected her, admired her. Yeah, maybe he did love her.
What did he feel for Becky now? He didn’t know. Love, lust, hate, disgust? Pity, embarrassment, fear, anger? He had felt all of those just today. And right now, in this exact moment, as the water from the shower drilled into him, he felt none of them. He felt nothing.
And that was worse.
Becky had walked with him from the pub to Woodview. He’d asked her not to, said it was a risk them being seen together and that she should stay in the flat, but she had ignored him. She was becoming sloppy, not so committed to the detail of the scam or remaining undetected. It was probably because she thought the finish line was in sight. She’d talked non-stop as they walked, a stream of consciousness. It had been hard to remain tuned in to what she was saying. Most of it was self-preservation stuff. She wondered what Emma might say now she was awake, what she might remember, whether she still believed in ghosts. Had there been alcohol in her system when she crashed? What might she be charged with?
As the Uber pulled up, he told Becky once again to go back to the pub, to lie low, to wait. She said she would, but he’d doubted it. He knew she would hack Emma’s computer and follow her plan to falsify evidence. She would create searches that indicated Emma was obsessed with the death of her parents and had discovered Susan Morden was responsible so had deliberately set out to kill her in revenge. Becky would use her skills to manipulate search history records so that it looked as though Emma had been plotting this for months. She would do a thorough job. He had specifically asked her not to frame Emma. He’d said she should leave things alone, that they had done enough damage, but he knew she wouldn’t listen to him. She always did what she wanted. He could see that now. He wondered why it had taken him so long to work it out. To admit it to himself.
