Back in the office in Canary Wharf the next day and right through the following week, Joanna tried to concentrate her mind on her work. And particularly on any developments in the e-mail murder case. She hardly dared contact either the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary or Scotland Yard on this one – she had become a bit of a pariah in those areas, particularly as far as Detective Superintendent Todd Mallett was concerned – so Tim Jones was on the case. And all he could do was assure her that the police had made no further progress at all.
They had, of course, gone back to Shifter’s house and searched it again. The only computer found had indeed been newly acquired and contained no hidden ‘contractor’ and ‘enforcer’ e-mail files and, in fact, nothing at all relating to Shifter’s dubious business.
Shifter was extensively interviewed all over again by the police, but refused to reveal any more information about either the Swiss bank accounts or the e-mail correspondence. He also continued to refuse to reveal which cyber café he had used, but diligent foot-slogging inquiries by officers carrying photographs of the distinctive Shifter resulted in the staff of a cyber café not far from Brown’s home admitting that they were almost sure Shifter had used their computers on several occasions to go on-line. However, they had unfortunately recently upgraded their stock.
‘The police are not going to be able to trace the stuff beyond the dealer the caff traded with, not without a miracle,’ Tim told her. ‘Chances are it’s already been sold on through one of those street markets like the one Shifter bought his rigs from. That’s what usually happens.’
Meanwhile Jo forced herself not to phone Fielding. She knew she should allow him to contact her in his own time. But after eight days she began to wonder if she would ever hear from him again.
On the evening of the ninth day after their tryst in the Taunton motel Fielding finally called.
Joanna felt that familiar physical lurch inside. She was just so relieved to hear from him. The sound of his voice still brought her up in goose bumps.
‘I’m sorry I was such a pig, sometimes everything seems to get on top of me,’ he told her at once.
She reassured him. ‘It’s fine, Mike, honestly.’
‘Look, I can swing a trip to town next week, that’s if you still want to …’ His voice tailed off.
‘Oh, yes, I want to,’ she replied quietly. And she did, too. Deep, deep inside she could already feel the dull ache of anticipation.
Their lovemaking seemed to become more and more urgent every time they were together. It was Fielding who took the lead. Again this time, once more in the downmarket Southampton Row hotel, he had no time for any niceties. There was no finesse. There were no preliminaries. He barely spoke to her and there was no foreplay. He just pushed her down on the bed, not even giving her time to undress properly, and entered her roughly without even taking his trousers off, just undoing his flies and thrusting straight into her. His eyes were fixed on the wall behind the bed, his teeth gritted in concentration, his features distorted in effort. And his face was coated in sweat. He held each of her wrists down above her head. He didn’t hurt her and yet there was a kind of cold brutality in his lovemaking. It couldn’t really have been called that. He just pummelled into her, apparently quite uninterested in how she might be taking it. Again he didn’t give her a chance, didn’t even seem to care. He did not pause until it was over for him.
When he had finished he rolled off her straight away. ‘I’m sorry, next time will be for you,’ he muttered haltingly, his breath coming in great gasps still.
He had never been quite like that before. She didn’t think she liked it very much. In fact, she was quite sure she didn’t like it. And yet – and maybe it was because of his desperation – she was immensely excited by it. Her desire, her need, seemed to increase with his disregard for it. And as in the motel in Taunton her own satisfaction, when he finally concentrated his attentions on her, seemed greater than ever. When she climaxed she thought she had never experienced quite such acute pleasure. Not even with him.
This time it was a snatched early evening meeting. He had a police dinner to go to that night. And he dressed and left her in bed again, although she had to leave shortly afterwards. She was glowing, almost burning inside, and she just wanted a few more minutes luxuriating in the feeling.
He came to the bed and kissed her firmly on the mouth before he left, tantalising her with his tongue. Making her whole body remember what it had just enjoyed. ‘It gets better every time,’ he told her with a smile, and he ran one hand down the entire length of her body lingering for just a few seconds over one breast and between her legs, before stepping back, shaking his head sorrowfully, turning and heading for the door.
At least their parting was more pleasant than the last time, she thought, as he shut the door behind him. He had always been a moody bugger, and his mood the last time they had met had been very disconcerting. As had been the sex they had just had.
Gradually the uneasiness that had been lurking ever since that afternoon at the Taunton motel overwhelmed her, forcing out all those nice warm feelings that came from great sexual satisfaction. She lay there thinking about the way these sea changes came over him, how he had shown that disturbing side of himself to her, and then she noticed his laptop computer on the small table by the window.
She couldn’t stop herself. She dragged the sheet off the bed, wrapping it around herself, grabbed the little machine, sat down on the room’s only chair and switched on. It was password-protected, of course, but she felt she had at least a chance of second-guessing him, given time, which she had a reasonable amount of. She checked her watch. It was just past 7.30. Fielding wouldn’t be back until after midnight, she was sure, and as long as she was at home in Richmond before ten she would easily be there before Paul.
However, she had been trying to break into the machine for only a couple of minutes when the door burst open.
Fielding hurried into the room. ‘I had to turn the taxi round, I forgot my damned phone …’ He saw then that she was working on his laptop and stopped dead. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he asked very quietly, his voice full of menace.
She felt a hot flush rise somewhere around the bottom of her neck, and spread across her throat and face until it reached her temples. She knew she must be bright red. She could think of nothing to say.
‘I asked you what the hell you thought you were doing?’ he enquired yet again, equally quietly.
‘I was just …’ Her mind was suddenly blank. She could think of no excuse. ‘Just looking for something …’ she finished lamely.
He strode across the room and snatched the laptop away from her. He glanced at it, taking in that she had failed to gain access, shut it down and closed the lid. He did it all very quickly. She remained sitting on the chair, still wrapped in the sheet.
He caught hold of her shoulder, his fingers digging into the flesh. ‘And what were you looking for?’
‘I don’t know …’ She stopped, shook her head.
‘C’mon, Joanna, what did you think you were going to find?’ The fingers dug harder into her shoulder. He made her eyes water for the second time that evening. ‘C’mon, Joanna,’ he repeated.
She had to tell him something. It might as well be the truth, she thought, in any case she didn’t have the wit at that moment to come up with anything else. ‘It’s the way you are about Angela Phillips and O’Donnell,’ she began. She saw his eyes narrow. His grip did not slacken. ‘All that stuff you told me the other night. You were right. I hadn’t understood. Not really. I hadn’t realised quite how strongly you felt about him, your job, all of it. Not until now. And I wondered … I wondered …’ Her voice tailed off.
‘You wondered what, Jo?’ he whispered, his lips very close to her ear.
She shook her head again and said no more.
‘You wondered perhaps if I felt strongly enough to do something about it all, is that it?’ He still spoke very quietly.
His grip tightened yet more. His fingers were digging into her so hard it felt as if they were going to meet in the middle. That was something else she had not ever been so aware of before about him – his tremendous physical strength. She had found him physically threatening just once before, in the Exeter motel room, but that was nothing compared with this. She nodded. There was no point in pretending.
‘You wondered if I had hired Shifter, didn’t you? You wondered if I were the mystery e-mailer. And you thought you’d have a sneaky look around in my laptop to see what you could find …’
There was real menace in him, but she supposed she could hardly blame him. She nodded once more.
He snatched his hand from her shoulder. Involuntarily she glanced down and put her own hand there, as if to take the soreness away. She saw that his fingernails had drawn blood.
He backed away from her, sat down abruptly on the edge of the bed and lowered his face into his hands. She still couldn’t think of anything more to say.
When he looked up he seemed more sad than angry. ‘I can’t believe you would think something like that of me,’ he told her.
She removed her hand from her shoulder and rested it against her forehead, took a deep breath and went for it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I started wondering about how far you would go to get O’Donnell. You’ve always been very determined, Mike, always been someone who wants to win. And this case, well, it’s always been the one, hasn’t it? Don’t they say that we all have one great love in life and a policeman has one great case? Good or bad. One case that overshadows all others. This was always yours, wasn’t it, Mike? And it’s always been a can of worms, hasn’t it? I just wondered how far you would go to close that can of worms, that’s all, I just wanted to know …’ she finished lamely again.
‘You could have asked me.’
‘I didn’t know how.’
He grunted derisively. ‘So what about you, then?’
‘What do you mean, what about me?’
He smiled humourlessly. ‘What about you, Joanna?’ he repeated. ‘This case got to you too, didn’t it, from the beginning, and in the end O’Donnell made a fool of you. He mocked you, didn’t he, humiliated you and that apology for a newspaper you work for. God knows, you don’t like being made a fool of. And in front of your peers …’
‘You’re being ridiculous Mike,’ she began.
‘Am I?’ he interrupted. ‘And you, I suppose, are not – ridiculous, offensive, insulting? I’m a police officer, for fuck’s sake.’
‘Yes, and a good one, always – but …’ The weak attempt at flattery proved to be a big mistake.
‘Save it,’ he said. ‘I really don’t want to know. If you can believe, even for an instant, that I’m evil enough to hire a fucking heavy to slice another man’s dick off and bury him alive then there’s not much point in anything any more, is there? Not between us, anyway.’
To her immense irritation she felt tears forming in her eyes. She was suddenly overcome with guilt and remorse. Now that he was talking to her like that, sitting in front of her, the whole thing seemed absurd. Fielding was impetuous, yes. Impatient. Sometimes too willing to cut corners. Over eager to get a conviction. All those things. But a cold, calculated killer, albeit at a distance? No, he couldn’t be that. It was just not possible. ‘I’m so sorry, Mike,’ she stumbled. ‘I don’t know where I was coming from, I really don’t.’
‘Neither do I, Jo. Now you’d better get dressed and go. I’m certainly not leaving you alone in my room again. If you want to go through my pockets you’ll just have to do it while I’m here.’
‘Mike, please!’
‘Just get dressed,’ he told her, in such a way that there could be no more argument, no more discussion. Perhaps, she thought fearfully, not ever. Perhaps this time it really would be over.
She drove home feeling thoroughly ashamed of herself. She had been cheating on her husband without compunction, she had been neglecting her daughter, maybe even endangering Emily’s secure future. She had been carried away by her affair with Fielding, it had taken over her life again just as it had done all those years ago. Hard as she fought against it, his fascination for her, which she had never been able to explain, had become all-consuming. And yet she was still able to believe that her lover could be guilty of arranging such a horrific crime. Able to suspect that of a man for whom she had been putting her marriage and her whole existence at risk.
Joanna’s emotions were in turmoil. She found herself consumed with guilt over her behaviour towards both her family and her lover. She could not wait to get home to Richmond and sneak a look at her hopefully sleeping daughter, and maybe even prepare a late supper for her husband, who she knew loved her – although she wished he wouldn’t always be so self-contained and controlled about it. At the same time she wished she could swing the car round, go back to Fielding, grovel her apologies and shag him rotten for the rest of the night.
She took one hand off the steering wheel and thumped the passenger seat in frustration. What was wrong with her? She had a damned good life, a damned good husband, a lovely daughter, a lovely home, plenty of money. She was indeed the woman with everything. And yet again she had let this bloody case and that bloody man Fielding put it all under threat. The biggest threat, she knew, came from within her own head and heart. Fielding was under her skin again and half of her sincerely did not want him there.
Her thoughts strayed to what he had said to her when she had more or less accused him of hiring Shifter Brown: ‘And what about you, Jo?’
Laughable, of course. But any more laughable than her accusing him? And Mike did have a point, she supposed. There was nothing in the world she hated so much as being made a fool of. Even after all these years it irked her ever to be beaten, to be in any situation which she felt gave the opposition, particularly her rival crime journalists, reason to be able to gloat over her.
She made herself focus on the case. That at least was a safer preoccupation than Fielding. For the umpteenth time she went over in her mind the list of people who might have wanted to take terminal revenge against James Martin O’Donnell.
She knew that Todd Mallett and his team had questioned the Phillipses and the O’Donnells all over again since her e-mail killing story. Modern farming is a highly complex operation and, like so many farmers these days, the Phillipses virtually ran their whole business on computer. Apparently all the family were reasonably computer-literate. But were they streetwise enough to have found a killer on the Net and to know how to cover their footprints? It was also fairly laughable even to consider them coming up with a user name like ‘contractor’. And, at the end of the day, devastated though they had been by all that had happened to them and their daughter, would they really take the law into their own hands in that way?
As for the O’Donnell family – would they hire a killer on the Net? Surely that wasn’t their style? For a start, they still had their own enforcers, didn’t they? Combo was dead, but his son, Little John, that chip off the old block, was, she knew, still in the employ of the O’Donnells. And indeed, would they have the know-how to do so? Tommy O’Donnell probably would, but he was the one trying to lead his family away from the old ways of hit men and the like. Joanna was pretty sure old Sam O’Donnell wouldn’t have a clue about using the Internet, certainly not at the required level.
Nonetheless she wondered about Sam the Man. Just how ruthless was he capable of being with his own flesh and blood? She knew he would have hated the sex angle and the DNA evidence concerning his son must surely have given even him proof of what he had always chosen to deny. Had he finally accepted the inevitable and taken action he would previously not have countenanced? She could not believe Sam would ever put out a contract against his own son, but you did have to consider it.
She knew she would not be welcome, but she decided that the next day she would at least try to get to see Sam the Man.
Emily was indeed already asleep when Jo arrived home and the au pair was in her room watching TV. Very carefully, Joanna opened the door to her daughter’s bedroom. The light from the landing was sufficient for her to be able to see Emily without waking her by switching on any more lights, but it took a moment for Jo’s eyes to adjust. Emily was lying curled on her side, in deep sleep looking younger than her almost twelve years. Jo always reckoned that their daughter resembled Paul more than her; she certainly had his eyes, but she had inherited her mother’s blond hair, straight and grown to well below shoulder-length, just like Jo’s at Emily’s age. At least – that was the way it had been when Jo had last seen her daughter at breakfast that morning. She took a step into the room for a closer look. Yes, she was right. Emily’s hair was now cropped short and spiky with a purple streak running right through it Mohican style – although mercifully not shaven on either side. My God, thought Jo, she really is growing up.
She was smiling when she left the room, which a few minutes earlier she would not have thought possible. Some mothers might freak out at the sight of their young daughter with purple-streaked hair. Jo found it mildly amusing. Perhaps this was the start of the kind of idiosyncratic teenage shenanigans she was so perversely rather looking forward to.
She considered pouring herself a drink, but then realised she was very tired, although, in her own home with her family around her, Jo did not like to think about what had tired her so. She decided to go straight to bed, fell asleep immediately and was not even aware of her husband returning. He must have crept quietly into the bed beside her. He had certainly made no attempt to wake her. He rarely did nowadays. In the morning there was little chance to talk even if either of them had wanted to. They were woken by the phone just after 7.30 a.m. It was the news desk for Paul. Situation normal. Shortly afterwards came the sports editor and then somebody else with a problem only Paul could deal with. She and her husband breakfasted only on tea and orange juice, consumed on the run. Emily always ate a large bowl of muesli with fresh fruit which, in her usual grown-up way, she prepared herself.
It was one of Jo’s days in the office, but she wanted to drive straight over to the O’Donnells so she declined Paul’s offer of a ride in his chauffeur-driven car.
He had raised his eyebrows at his daughter’s hair but said nothing about it at first. Well, he hated confrontation, but Jo knew he wouldn’t approve. Paul was very conventional about appearance. Eventually he reached across the table and touched Emily’s hand. ‘You used to have very beautiful hair,’ he told her mildly. ‘Until yesterday, in fact.’
Emily was not abashed. ‘Oh Dad, it was sooo boring,’ she said.
Paul smiled. ‘Oh, well, we can’t have that, can we?’
Emily shot him a quizzical look. Like her mother, she obviously found it difficult sometimes to work out what her father was actually thinking. She would have known he wouldn’t make a scene, though, and she was right.
Paul passed no further comment. He left just before Jo and kissed her absently on the cheek. He was polite and distant. Same as ever. She couldn’t help comparing him, so self-contained, so controlled, so successful, with the volatile, mixed-up, disappointed man she could not get out of her mind. Then she resolved that she would put Fielding out of her mind. She really would. This stupid affair was doing her no good. When it began again she had known she must regard it as just an occasional roll in the hay and in many ways it still wasn’t much more than that – nor could it be. But with Fielding there was always more to it than that. And, in the cold light of dawn, it just didn’t seem worth it. So maybe the previous day’s confrontation had not been such a bad thing after all. It had jolted her out of a kind of trance. She would not sit waiting for Fielding to call again. And neither would she call him. She truly didn’t want to go on like this, she told herself.
In any case, she had a tricky job to do today. And the guilt was really kicking in.
She offered to drive Emily to school, a duty normally undertaken by the au pair. She was aware of her daughter, still sitting at the kitchen table eating her muesli, glancing at her in mild surprise. Jo stood up and ruffled the remains of Emily’s hair. ‘Well, I quite like the new look,’ she said. She wasn’t at all sure that she did, even though she found it amusing, but she somehow desperately wanted to feel close to her daughter that morning. She might have realised, of course, that the vanity of adolescence, however misplaced, had arrived along with its new spiky purple hairdo.
Emily pushed her hand away. ‘Oh, don’t, Mum, don’t,’ she muttered with a frown.
However, later in the car, just as Jo pulled up outside her school, Emily surprised her mother by leaning across from the passenger seat to give her a big sloppy kiss on the cheek and ask, ‘You are all right, Mum, aren’t you? There’s nothing wrong, is there?’
Jo was inclined to forget that Emily was every bit as perceptive as her father and it made her panic momentarily as she wondered if Paul had also picked up on anything amiss in her behaviour lately. ‘I’m absolutely fine, darling,’ she said, kissing her daughter back and then forcing a big bright smile. ‘Go on. Off with you. And have a really good day.’
Damn, she thought, as she drove off in the direction of Dulwich. She really must stop putting her family at risk.
She arrived at Sam O’Donnell’s house, unannounced again, just before 10.30 a.m.
Tommy answered the door, as before. He stared at her coldly for a moment or two and she quite expected him to slam it in her face. ‘You gotta cheek, I’ll give you that,’ he said eventually.
‘Look, Tommy, I just want to talk.’
‘Yeah, your kind always do,’ he told her coldly. But to her surprise he opened the door and beckoned her in.
She crossed the threshold and stood uncertainly in a chintzy hallway, thick-pile richly patterned carpet, a gilt mirror on the wall to the left of an ornate mahogany hatstand. To the right a gallery of framed family photographs, almost all including Sam and his wife, at their wedding, with their newborn children, their two sons and their only daughter, and at their children’s weddings. It was her first time inside Sam’s home. She had been told that the house was a shrine to Tommy’s dead mother and that seemed about how it was. Apparently all the furnishings and decorations were kept the way Annie O’Donnell had had them. Sam allowed no change. On the wall opposite all the family photographs was a huge framed portrait, maybe four foot by three, of Annie.
‘Right,’ said Tommy. ‘Everything you see and hear in this house is off the record. All right?’
She hesitated. It wasn’t all right. She hated off the record. You never knew what you were going to get and all too often it was useless unless you could use it fully and attribute it.
‘It’s either that or out,’ said Tommy.
Jo sighed.
‘And when I say off the record I mean you can’t print anything. There is just something I want you to know. To be aware of. Yes or no?’
She said yes, of course, unhappy though she was about it.
Wordlessly he showed her into the sitting room. More chintz, patterned wallpaper, deep-pile carpet and family photographs. She barely took in any of it, though, such was the shock of her first sight of Sam the Man.
Arguably the most feared and respected villain in London, he was sitting slumped in a wheelchair in the middle of the room. One rheumy eye seemed to half focus on her. She wasn’t sure. The left side of his face was cruelly distorted and his left arm hung loosely over the arm of the chair. Sam was dribbling. He showed no reaction to her. He did not attempt to speak.
She gave a small involuntary gasp.
‘He had a stroke soon after Jimbo’s last trial,’ said Tommy. ‘Been like this ever since. His left arm and his left leg are paralysed. We don’t know what he can understand.’
Tommy walked across to the chair and stroked his father’s still abundant shock of white hair. More like father to son than son to father. But that’s the way all our parental relationships change in the end, Jo thought to herself.
‘Do we, Dad, eh?’ he murmured, his voice suddenly soft and ripe with affection. Then he patted the old man’s hand, but still Sam did not react.
Swiftly Tommy retreated to Jo’s side. ‘Right, that’s all you’re getting,’ he said, as he ushered her out into the hallway again. ‘I wanted you to see that,’ he went on, once he had closed the living-room door behind them. ‘We’ve kept Sam’s condition a secret. That’s why you can’t print anything. Dad would hate people to know that he had become a dribbling wreck. I mean, he’s still Sam the Man. As long as he’s alive he’ll always be that.’ Tommy spoke with quiet pride, reverence even.
Against her better judgement Jo found that she was moved. ‘I am very sorry, Tommy,’ she said. And in a strange way she meant it, too. She had no illusions about the villainy of Sam O’Donnell or what a nasty piece of work he could be, but there had always been something special about him. He had been big in every way, a character, one of the last of a dying breed. She knew better than to romanticise his sort but with Sam you just couldn’t help doing so just a bit.
Tommy was not interested. ‘I didn’t show you Dad to get your sympathy,’ he told her. ‘I wanted you to see what you’ve done, you and that bastard Fielding. You got that new trial staged against Jimbo and that was what did it. No doubt about it. Dad adored Jimbo. All that DNA stuff. He couldn’t take it. He was ill, really, right from when it all started again. He had a very slight stroke just before the hearing at Okehampton, that’s why you’ve seen him using a stick since then. But he was all right, in his head anyway, until after Jimbo disappeared. Then he had another stroke. And it was a big one. It was all just too much for him.’
Joanna felt suddenly irritated. ‘Tommy, you can hardly blame me and Mike Fielding. If you have to blame anybody you should blame your brother.’
Tommy shook his head stubbornly. Joanna knew that he was a bright, intelligent man, everyone knew of his determination to legitimise the O’Donnell family and how hard he had already worked towards it. The fresh prosecution against his brother couldn’t have helped with that. But apparently, in common with so many of these East End villains, when it came to family Tommy had all the old blind spots. ‘There was no call for it all to be dragged out again,’ he said frostily. ‘It was history. And it didn’t do anybody any good, did it? Not Angela Phillips’s family and not us. We’ve not only lost Jimbo, we’ve as good as lost Dad because of it too. He’s out of it. The only mercy is we don’t even think he knows Jimbo’s dead.’
‘Tommy, Angela Phillips died in the most horrific circumstances possible,’ Joanna responded tetchily, throwing caution to the wind. ‘Your brother killed her. The DNA proved it and if it had been available twenty years ago Jimbo would have gone down then. That’s what the new trial was about, that’s why it was all “dragged out”, as you put it, again. And if it weren’t for some bloody stupid anomaly of the law he would have been locked up and he wouldn’t be dead. He’d be safely behind bars. Where he belonged. He was a murderer and a rapist. You must accept that. I reckon your father did in the end and that’s probably what made him ill.’
‘I accept nothing. Jimbo’s dead, that’s all I know. And he was my brother.’
‘Look, do you mind if I ask you some questions while I am here?’ she ventured recklessly.
‘Yes, I fucking well do,’ he stormed at her. Then he repeated his earlier remark, but his voice was much louder and angrier now. ‘I just wanted you to see what you did to my father. And now you’ve seen it – get out.’ He didn’t take a step towards her. He said nothing that was specifically threatening. He didn’t need to. You don’t argue with an angry O’Donnell.
She opened the door to the house herself, shut it quietly behind her and hurried to her car, parked down the street.
When she put the key in the ignition she noticed that her hand was shaking.
Back in the office, she worked on her column through the afternoon. Just after five Paul called through and told her his deputy was editing that night. ‘I’m taking an early cut,’ he said. ‘If you’re clear, how about an evening at home? Maybe phone for a pizza or something.’
Joanna was pleasantly surprised. The Comet operated a system of duty editors at night. Either Paul, his deputy, or one of three assistant editors edited each night, staying in the office until well after the foreigns dropped, often until one in the morning and sometimes later. But Paul was a hands-on editor, as almost all of the good ones were. Except on Fridays, which was designated as a family evening, he would rarely leave Canary Wharf until ten or eleven even when somebody else was officially editing. She agreed with alacrity and told him she would give him a lift home if he liked and he could give his driver the night off.
They left the office soon after seven, the traffic was as amenable as it ever is at that time, and they made it to Richmond in just over an hour and a quarter. Paul was companionable enough, if a little distant. But she was used to that. It was the way things were. Indeed, he spent most of the journey home talking to the night desk on his mobile phone. That was the way things were, too. Always.
At home he settled down with Emily at the computer in her bedroom while Joanna made drinks and ordered a pizza. Emily was always excited to have Paul home and inclined to monopolise his time when he was there. Joanna didn’t blame her. She saw little enough of the father she idolised. The pizza arrived and all three sat down at the kitchen table together. That was rare enough, too, which was why Emily had been allowed to stay up and eat later than usual.
Paul teased her gently once or twice about the purple hair and Jo suspected from their daughter’s rather sheepish reaction that she might already be regretting whatever whim or peer pressure had led her into yesterday’s drastic hairdo. Paul had the knack of handling Emily, of bringing her round almost always to his way of thinking. He was very good with her, always had been. Indeed, they were like peas in a pod. Emily was a real chip off the old block. Joanna was inordinately proud of her, even if she did sometimes fear that she was old beyond her years. Apart from when it came to that hair!
In spite of the teasing Jo could tell how much their daughter was enjoying the family supper and vowed to try to make it happen more often. Paul promised to take her swimming at the weekend and Emily went to bed happily, although still reluctantly, around 9.45 p.m. Joanna poured the remains of the bottle of red wine she had earlier opened into her and Paul’s glasses, and asked him if he would like her to open another.
‘In a minute,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you. I’ve been waiting for us to have some time alone.’
She noticed that he was looking very serious. She had already stood up and was halfway to the wine rack in the corner. She turned around and walked back to the table. ‘Well?’
‘You should know that I am aware that you are once again having an affair with Mike Fielding,’ Paul announced in an expressionless voice.
Joanna sat down with a bit of a bump. That was the last thing she had expected to hear. Her first instinct was to lie. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about …’ she began.
Her husband interrupted her. ‘Don’t insult my intelligence, Joanna,’ he told her. ‘I said I know. I know about the hotel in Southampton Row; I know that he spent every night with you when you were covering the Shifter Brown hearing in Exeter; I even know about your sleazy trip down to Taunton to the motorway motel. If you would like any more details I can assure you that I do have them.’
She realised at once that he must have had her followed. It was somehow typical of Paul that he could do that over an extended period and actually be able to say nothing, just live with what was going on, until he was ready to make a move. Any normal man would have confronted her long ago, she thought. She had often, by way of attempting to justify her affair, blamed Paul’s absence of passion, his calculating businesslike approach to all aspects of his life and his complete lack of spontaneity, for leading her into another man’s arms. She knew, of course, that was really no justification for her behaviour. She didn’t speak.
Apparently he did not expect her to.
‘It goes without saying that you end this affair immediately,’ he went on. ‘If you do not I will divorce you. Naturally you will lose your job. You will also lose your daughter. I will get custody, I promise you. You may well get access of some kind but I will make sure that it is as little as possible. And I will do my absolute best to turn Emily against you. For ever. I do not envisage that would be too difficult.’
He opened his briefcase, which had been at his feet by the table, and took out a large manila envelope. He waved it at her. ‘This is a very full and detailed account of your recent activities. I think if I showed it to our daughter she would make up her own mind, don’t you?’
Joanna felt very cold. She believed absolutely that he would and could do all he said, including showing such a dreadful dossier to his only child. She knew just how ruthless he could be when it came to getting his own way. And yes, she also knew that Emily would be quite capable of forming her own judgement of her mother’s behaviour and that it would be a damning one. Emily loved her mother, but she was her father’s daughter. Nonetheless, she told him, ‘I can’t believe you’d do that.’
‘Yes you can and do, Joanna.’ He emptied some of the contents of the envelope on to the table. There were even photographs of her and Fielding entering the Taunton motel, albeit separately, and together both entering and leaving the Southampton Row place. She didn’t give her husband the satisfaction of picking them up for a closer look, but as far as she could see there were none of her and Fielding actually in bed. Paul and his representative had mercifully drawn the line at that, it seemed.
‘You have too good a life to allow it to be spoiled,’ he went on. ‘And it will be spoiled, totally, if you don’t do as I tell you. You will be swapping all that you have, all that we have, for life with a failed, near-alcoholic, mid-rank copper. I do not actually think you have any idea what that would be like, Joanna.’
That made Joanna wince. The description of Fielding was accurate enough. She supposed she probably didn’t have any idea what it would be like to live out in the sticks on a very limited income with a disappointed and often angry man who habitually drowned his miseries in alcohol. Nor was she ever likely to – not even without Paul’s ultimatum, as it happened. That was the final irony. At the end of the day she doubted if Fielding would ever have tried to make a life with her, in any circumstances. Such small likelihood as there had been of them being properly together had ended almost twenty years before. And after their last confrontation over her trying to hack into his laptop, there had been barely a chance of the affair continuing, even without external intervention. Strange that Paul had decided to make his move at that moment.
‘I’m sorry, Paul,’ she said. ‘I really didn’t mean for any of this to happen.’
‘And you think that makes it all right,’ he said flatly.
‘No, of course I don’t.’
‘You’ve let me down, your daughter down and yourself down. Do you realise that?’
She nodded. She wished he wouldn’t lecture her but she supposed she deserved it. And he was right, of course. Cool. Logical. Controlled as ever. He sounded more as if he were admonishing a member of staff for some professional misdemeanour or negotiating a business deal than confronting his wife with infidelity. He showed absolutely no emotion at all. But then, he never did.
‘Look, Paul, I think it’s over anyway between Mike and …’ she began to explain.
‘You think?’ He raised his voice almost imperceptibly. ‘Joanna, I will give you twenty-four hours in which to assure me that you know it is over. If you cannot do that then I shall ask you to leave this house and I shall start divorce proceedings immediately. The decision is yours. But do not for one moment think that you can carry on cheating on me. I shall know at once.’
She didn’t doubt it. And she couldn’t understand how she had thought she would ever get away with it in the first place. Not with Paul. He was just too clever. Too astute. She supposed the truth was that she hadn’t thought at all.
Paul had started speaking again. ‘I shall sleep in the spare bedroom tonight,’ he told her almost conversationally.
She found herself once again comparing him with Fielding, that infuriating, emotionally confusing man whom, she had to admit, she had probably half loved for over twenty years. Fielding would have screamed and shouted, ranted and raved, wept, maybe even hit her. He had never actually done that but she had seen his temper, always suspected him capable of violence if sufficiently provoked. He would have confronted her, probably while drunk, the moment he had any suspicion that she had cheated on him. He would have been irrational and illogical and very, very human. He was always that. Human.
Her husband, on the other hand, seemed to be as cold and as matter-of-fact as ever. His behaviour towards her indicated on one level that he loved her very much. The very fact that he was fighting to keep her in the way that he was, that he would be prepared even to keep her in the circumstances, demonstrated that, she supposed. And yet, as ever, there was something about the way he went about things which was barely human at all. Jo would have preferred an explosive no-holds-barred row. Much preferred that. Come to think of it, they had never had one of those throughout their marriage.
She felt overwhelmed with a deep, abiding sorrow. She couldn’t help questioning Paul’s motives, which was terrible. After all, she was the one at fault. Paul wouldn’t want a scandal, of course. His impending knighthood was almost certainly a factor in his determination to keep her.
Her head ached. She did feel guilty about having deceived Paul, but not as guilty as she suspected she should. She did not even know whether she still loved him. In fact, she was not sure whether she had ever loved him, not really, certainly not in the way in which she had loved Fielding. But her husband had left her with no choice. ‘It’s all right, Paul, I don’t need twenty-four hours,’ she said. ‘I will end it tomorrow.’
He watched her leave the room and head upstairs for bed, then he went to the drinks cupboard and poured himself a stiff whisky, which he carried into the garden, shutting and locking the kitchen door behind him. He walked across the lawn, past the copse of young fruit trees, to a small wooden shed at the far end. The night was brightly moonlit and he was able to see his way quite clearly. Inside the shed, however, it was pitch-black. A single electric light bulb hung from the wood-panelled ceiling, but he did not switch it on. He did not need to, and he welcomed the blackness which enveloped him when he closed the door. Paul knew where everything was in this shed. It was as orderly as everything in his mind, in his office, in his home, indeed in his life. The mower was to the left, alongside a couple of neatly folded garden chairs and on the right, carefully stacked, were sacks of fertiliser, plant pots and all manner of other gardening paraphernalia. He felt his way to the little wooden stool he kept in the right-hand corner and sat down.
He was as far away from his house and from the neighbouring houses as it was possible to be. The shed was solid, made of two skins of wood and without windows. He could not be seen and it was reasonable to assume that he could not be heard. He took a sip of his whisky, then lowered his glass to the floor. He threw back his head and let out a kind of howl of anguish. With it came the tears.
He wept and howled, and howled and wept, his arms wrapped round his torso as if he were hugging himself, until he ached from the sheer physical effort of the sobs which racked his body. The tears coursed down his face, burning hot. His throat hurt. But he could not stop, not until he had allowed all the anguish that was inside him to be released.
It was not the first time he had used the shed for this purpose, creeping there in the dead of night. But this was the worst, the very worst.
It was almost twenty minutes before he felt the spasms begin to lessen.
Eventually the howling ceased and so did the tears. When he gave in to these outbursts it was the only time in his life that he did not have total control. He reached down with a trembling hand for the whisky and took a deep drink.
He was not sure he felt any better. How could he, with the knowledge he now had of what Joanna had done? But he was at last beginning to calm down. He wished he had been able to tell her, in the depths of his despair, how much she had hurt him. But that wasn’t his way. His sister, with whom he had long ceased to have any contact, had once informed him that he was emotionally dysfunctional. Maybe he was. But it was more than that. How could he tell Joanna how much she meant to him? How could he, when he knew that he felt so much more for her than she had ever felt for him? He had no illusions. He had been able to make everything happen for him and Joanna. Everything except make her love him. The way he loved her.
He finished the whisky, rose from the stool, left the shed, locking it carefully behind him, and walked back to the house.
He would carry on as usual, of course. He also had too much to lose. Joanna remained the perfect wife for him, from the outside at any rate, as long as she behaved. And he knew he could make sure that she did so. Then there were both their careers. And, most vital, the knighthood. As Joanna had suspected, he didn’t intend to let anything queer his pitch there.
Life was never perfect, but he rather liked the idea that his appeared to be.
Most importantly, he could not imagine even existing without Joanna at his side.
By the time Paul Potter had unlocked and opened the kitchen door and stepped inside his house the episode of the garden shed was over. The moment had passed. It was almost as if it had not happened.