Paula jumped up from her stool and moved over to the younger woman. ‘What on earth? Are you some sort of delusional…’ She put a hand to the side of her face as if she had just been slapped. ‘You need to leave. You need to leave right now.’ She’d barely slept after catching someone hacking into her computer, and then receiving yet another silent phone call. And now this outrageous statement. It was as if all around her the world was going mad.
Cara stepped away from her. ‘Listen, I know this isn’t an easy thing to hear…’
‘An easy thing to hear?’ Thomas a murderer? ‘I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my life.’ She tightened her robe around her waist and wished she was properly dressed. And that she had her makeup on. She was never without it. Concealer, foundation, blush, mascara and lipstick. And if she was meeting an actual person, eyeshadow and a further layer of mascara. But now she had nothing. No defence.
In just a few words, this young woman had thrown the shreds of her life in the air. Not only had she accused her husband of torture and murder, but she’d given her a version of Christopher’s death that ripped at her heart. Her baby was targeted? He’d been driven at deliberately?
Oh my God. She placed a trembling hand over her mouth. What had she just heard? The implications, if this was true were staggering. She imagined Christopher lying there, broken, at the side of the road. She screwed her eyes tight against the mental image. The police told her he’d died almost instantly. That was pretty much all they’d told her – their investigation had yielded little in the way of facts. No witnesses. Nothing to tell other than it was a hit-and-run; no description of the car or the drivers. Just that her boy had died when his head hit the kerb.
Paula gathered herself together. Or tried to. Her head was hurting. No, it was way more than that. Her skull was fractured. Her brain was reduced to mush. The bone between her eyes held a deep ache, a strong sense of wrong.
She looked at Cara properly for the first time. Quite tall for a girl … five eight or something? Long blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was wearing tight, black jeans; she was curvy but athletic and her sleeveless top displayed good muscle tone in her upper arms. She was an attractive young woman. Would Thomas have found her mix of vulnerability, looks and strength impossible to resist? Was all of this nonsense about Thomas and Christopher a weak and nasty ploy from a spurned lover? Did Thomas promise her all sorts of things, but his death now meant she came away from their affair with absolutely nothing?
Cara’s eyes held hers and she could read a mix of confidence and uncertainty.
Who was this girl? And why was she saying this stuff? And why now?
‘You have two minutes to get out of my house. Because that’s how long it will take me to find my…’ she cast her eyes around the room as if her mobile would just appear ‘…bloody phone and call the police.’
‘Mrs Gadd…’
‘You need to leave my house and you need to leave now.’
‘Paula, I’m telling you the truth. My brother stole a red Ford Focus and … God help me, but he ran over your son Chris, and then legged it.’
‘No, Cara, no.’
‘Then your husband caught up with him and made him pay.’
‘Cara, no. Please. Get out.’ Paula was on her feet, right arm rigid, pointing in the direction of the front door.
A chime rang out. Cara looked at her and Paula read a sense of real fear there.
‘Who’s that?’ Cara asked, immediately getting to her feet in a stance suggesting she was happy either to fight or flee.
‘I have no idea,’ Paula said and trudged in the direction of the front door. ‘But I’ll show you out while I’m at it,’ she aimed over her shoulder.
But when she reached the door she realised she was on her own. Cara hadn’t followed. She pulled it open to see a pair of elderly women, both of them as prim as a stack of freshly printed bibles. They were each wearing sensible coats and sensible skirts and their faces were geared to show their certainty in what they were doing.
‘May we interest you in the word of The Lord,’ one of them said while holding out a small piece of bright-yellow paper. Paula took it. Read the headline: God Chose Jesus To Rule the World. Paula handed it back to her.
‘Very nice,’ she said. And shut the door. She made sure the snib was in the locked position and then walked swiftly back down the hall to the kitchen. Cara was at the back door as if she was about to run. She opened her mouth to speak, but Paula beat her to it.
‘Right, what’s really going on here?’ She forced herself to calm down a little, while cursing the women who’d been at her door. She’d been working up a good head of steam, but somehow the interruption had dissipated the urge to throw the young woman out. And that had been replaced with a drive to know … and an unfathomable dread.
‘Our Sean,’ Cara began, then took a seat back up on the stool. ‘…You sure you don’t want to go and get some clothes on?’
‘I’m sure,’ Paula answered. ‘I’m sure I can be excused relaxing my standards for now.’ She waved a hand. ‘Carry on. You were saying…’
‘He died a couple of years ago. It took your husband a good while to track him down.’ Cara paused. Bit her lip. ‘Sean was doing well. Getting his life back on track.’ She looked at Paula, eyes pleading for understanding.
Paula gave her nothing back; she had nothing to give.
‘So, you claim this is when my husband, Thomas Gadd, tortured and killed him?’ Paula snorted, allowing a little of her fear and anger to leak through. ‘Don’t you hear how ridiculous that sounds? This isn’t some tawdry television crime series.’
‘No, it’s real life, Mrs Gadd,’ Cara retorted. Then, as if realising that showing attitude would not win her over, she dropped her shoulders and lowered her voice. ‘There’s stuff going on in this city that would frighten you.’
Paula crossed her arms, realising how defensive it looked. She leaned back against the worktop and said nothing, hoping her expression said ‘convince me’, but she feared instead it betrayed the sick terror of what she might hear.
‘Did anything happen in your life around two years ago? Did anything change? Did your husband start to act a little more strangely?’ Cara asked.
Paula’s lips tightened as the words hit. She felt a hiccup at her throat as if she was releasing a bubble of grief.
‘Can you think of something? Anything?’ asked Cara.
‘Something that would make him go and murder someone?’ Paula demanded, after taking a moment to get her emotions under control. ‘No. Absolutely not.’
‘Were you guys happy at that point?’
Paula drew herself up, tightening her arms around her. ‘Why on earth would I discuss my relationship with my husband with you?’
‘I met a guy.’ Cara looked at Paula and paused as if calculating how best to carry on.
‘You met a guy?’
‘I’m an advocacy worker. I support people … in one o’ the roughest parts of the city.’ She looked around herself. ‘Compared to here, it might as well be on the moon, as opposed to just a couple of miles down the road. Anyway. This guy. His weans were in trouble at school. His wife was refusin’ him access and unlike a lot o’ the wasters around there, he was actually keen to spend time with them.’
‘What has any of that got to do with Thomas? Or with me?’
Cara made a face, as if she was thinking, What a self-centred bitch. But then, to Paula’s surprise, she held out her hand. ‘Please, I’m getting there. But I have to put it into context or you won’t believe me.’
Paula slumped in her seat and shook her head, overtaken by weakness. ‘Okay. Sorry. Please, go on…’
This appeared to mollify Cara somewhat and she offered Paula a smile of truce before continuing. ‘When this guy heard my surname – Connolly – he got all funny. Asked me if I was Sean’s sister. Said he could see the resemblance.’ She bit her lip, as if forcing down a surge of emotion. ‘Then I remembered him, but the drugs had changed him so much I couldn’t match up the man with the boy in my head, you know? Anyway, he told me how it went down. He ran about wi’ Sean for ages. Was in the car that night Chris was run down. And he was there the night Sean was eventually tracked down by Tosh Gadd.’
Paula started at the name: Tosh.
Despite herself, she murmured, ‘His brother called Tom ‘Tosh’ when I first met him.’ She was almost speaking to herself. ‘Apparently that’s what they called him when they were kids.’
She looked up, to see Cara’s eyebrows were raised, her mouth turned down.
But Paula couldn’t have it. ‘Oh, for goodness sake,’ she said, rebelling. ‘What rubbish. An old name, a crackhead and you’re convinced about this unbelievable story? He probably told you all of that to try and win you over, so you’d help him.’
‘He told me all of that after I helped him. I already got him visits with his kids. There was nothing in it for him by then. He was telling me the truth, Mrs Gadd.’