Liz Miller answered the phone after an excruciatingly long number of rings, though maybe it only seemed long to me in my desperation to have her location confirmed. Certainly it was time enough for me to consider hanging up, but I knew I would only end up calling again two minutes later, then over and over. I couldn’t afford that: if she was away overnight with Peter, I didn’t want her handset’s history to show a dozen missed calls from the same number: his home landline, where he lived with his wife.
‘Hello?’
Her tone was inquisitive when she finally responded. I wondered if she had been looking at an LED display and read this number before picking up.
‘Is that . . . Liz?’
‘Yes.’
So she was home in Dundee, not in Glasgow with Peter. But I had a lot more questions I’d like to ask her.
‘Em, sorry to disturb you. I’m calling because I need to talk to you about Peter Elphinstone.’
‘Oh.’
There was a long pause, which I was about to fill, but eventually she spoke again.
‘Has something happened?’
‘No, nothing like that. It’s just, I believe you were in a relationship with him a couple of years ago. Is that right?’
Her tone became more defensive.
‘Hang on, who is this?’
‘My name is Diana Jager. You don’t know me.’
‘How do you know Peter?’
‘I’m married to him.’
‘Oh. Oh. I see.’
She sounded as curious about me as I was about her. I don’t think either of us was prepared to talk about it over the phone, however, so we agreed to meet the next day.
I was called in for a couple of hours shortly after midnight: an emergency splenectomy. I doubted I was missing sleep through it. My mind was too busy to shut down. Sometime during the evening it had occurred to me that I had no reason to trust this Liz woman, nor to assume that she was in the clear regarding Peter’s deceit. Her phone could have been set to relay calls from her landline to her mobile when she was not home, like the phone in Peter’s office. That might have been the reason for the delay in her answering, so it was possible he was sitting right there with her when she spoke to me. Perhaps the reason she agreed to meet me the next day was in order to ascertain precisely how much I knew.
I drove to Dundee first thing on the Sunday morning, getting there around lunchtime. It took me about three hours.
She was waiting for me inside the café. I was hungry from the journey but I felt instinctively vulnerable at the notion of eating in front of her. Part of me didn’t want to look weak or awkward, though I couldn’t have told you why those things would have applied to having a fruit scone.
It felt important to look composed, to look dignified, and generally to look good. I didn’t acknowledge it to myself at the time, but I must have spent more time getting ready that morning than I ever did for a date with Peter.
She was wearing black jeans and a tight wool sweater with a white linen collar. I couldn’t decide whether it was sexy or frumpy: Japanese schoolgirl or ageing schoolmarm.
If she noticed me sizing her up as I introduced myself and took a seat, then she didn’t know the half of it. She was around my age, probably a little younger, with shoulder-length dyed blonde hair, but it was her build I was most interested in taking in. She was slim, I guessed an inch or two taller than me, and from the moment I laid eyes on her I began trying to imagine what she looked like naked as I considered whether she was the woman in the videos.
‘I looked up your phone number,’ she said, rolling a sachet of sugar between her fingers. ‘That area code is for Inverness. You’ve driven all the way down here on a Sunday morning.’
‘That’s right.’
‘To talk about Peter Elphinstone.’
‘Yes.’
‘Your husband.’
I nodded.
She was eyeing me with a look of intense scrutiny, as though sternly evaluating the honesty of my responses, a human polygraph. It was not quite as though she didn’t believe me; more like she was untrusting of my motives.
‘Of how long?’
‘About four months.’
She looked away briefly, the judge considering what she had been presented with so far.
‘And where is Peter today?’
I don’t know, I didn’t say. I was hoping you could tell me.
I knew I mustn’t show my hand at this stage, and that it might end the encounter right there if I came out and accused her.
‘He’s in Glasgow for the weekend.’
She nodded, evaluating this neutrally.
‘But he told me he was going to London.’
Our eyes locked across the table. If she was in on Peter’s deceit, then I knew I wasn’t divulging anything she couldn’t already assume simply from my being here, but by making it explicit I was changing the terms of engagement.
‘That’s a hell of a thing to admit to a stranger,’ she said.
She regarded me in silence for a long time, a very long time, her words hanging in the air all the while, demanding our mutual contemplation.
Then at last she spoke again.
‘Are you hungry? You must be hungry. All the way down from Inverness. Order something to eat. You can eat and I can talk. I’ll tell you about me and Peter.’