Christine Poulson has a PhD in History of Art, and has written widely on nineteenth-century art and literature. She worked as a curator of ceramics at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, has taught for the Open University and was a lecturer in Art History at Cambridge. Her latest novel is Invisible.
‘Soon be over,’ Frank said.
‘Thank God.’ Sheila exchanged a wry glance with her husband.
Before the party he hadn’t seen the need to hire an entertainer. ‘How hard can it be to keep a few kids occupied for a couple of hours,’ he’d said. Sheila knew better. It had to be planned like a military campaign, every minute accounted for.
The woman had those kids in the palm of her hand. She was a passable ventriloquist and the fluffy white toy rabbit under her arm was singing, ‘Happy Birthday to you, Squashed tomatoes and stew.’
Shrieks of mirth went up from the four-year-olds sitting cross-legged on the floor.
‘Whatever we’re paying her it’s not enough,’ Frank conceded.
Sheila taught Year 6 at primary school, a job-share since she’d had Harry, but controlling a bunch of four-year-olds was a very different matter. And perhaps because she was an older parent – she and Frank had been over forty when Harry was born – she did find it a strain being responsible for so many little ones. Once again she counted heads. Yes, all present and correct. She could relax. Everything was under control. The birthday tea was over. Frank’s mum was in the kitchen, putting slices of birthday cake in the party bags. No one had been sick, no one had hurt themselves, hardly anyone had cried. And looking at Harry, who was actually holding his sides laughing, she knew it had all been worthwhile. But thank God she wouldn’t have to organise another children’s party for a whole year.
After the entertainer there was time for two more games, pass the parcel with Frank carefully manipulating the breaks in the music so that everyone would get a little gift, and then ‘What’s the Time, Mr Wolf?’ That was Harry’s favourite. He adored being the wolf and shouting ‘Dinner-time’. There was lots of shrieking and everyone got thoroughly over-excited, but it didn’t matter, because by then the parents were beginning to arrive. One by one, prompted by mums and dads, the children said, ‘Thank you for having me,’ and off they went. The party dwindled until there was only Harry left and one other child.
‘Where’s Evan’s mummy?’ Harry asked.
‘Oh, she’ll be here in a minute,’ Sheila said.
It was odd all the same. It was half an hour past pick-up time and it was parental etiquette to be prompt on these occasions. She settled the children down in front of a DVD of Shaun the Sheep. Evan wasn’t making a fuss. He was a serious little boy, rather pale, with shadows under his eyes as if he didn’t get enough sleep.
‘Shall I ring her mobile?’ Frank asked.
She nodded. Thank goodness he had thought to take contact numbers.
She watched him tap in Jennifer’s mobile number. He listened and shook his head. No one was answering.
‘Do you know where she lives?’ he said.
‘Somewhere out towards Ely?’ she hazarded. Jennifer and her husband had only recently moved into the area and she didn’t know her that well. ‘She’s probably got muddled up about the time, that’s all. There’s sure to be a simple explanation.’
‘Of course. Wires crossed somewhere. Bound to be.’
But half an hour later Jennifer still hadn’t arrived and she still wasn’t answering her mobile. She hadn’t left a landline number. Sheila rang round the other mothers and managed to find out where she lived.
‘We’d better drive over,’ Frank decided.
‘Shall we take Evan?’ Sheila asked.
‘Better leave him here with Mum. Jennifer or her husband might arrive while we’re gone. If they do, Mum can ring us.’
They looked up Jennifer’s address on Googlemaps. Sheila printed out the map on the other side of the sheet of paper with the phone numbers.
Frank got the car out and they set off.
They drove in silence on long straight roads that cut across ploughed fields, ready for their winter crops. Pigeons pecked the dark, chocolately earth.
Sheila pieced together what she knew about Jennifer. Not much; they’d only exchanged the odd ‘hello’ at the nursery gate. Jennifer was always dauntingly well turned out, always carefully made-up in contrast to Sheila’s old jeans and barely brushed hair. And though Sheila knew she shouldn’t judge, she felt a bit sorry for Evan who seemed to be at the nursery all day every day.
‘Maybe Jennifer thought her husband was collecting Evan,’ Sheila said.
‘And he thought she was. Very likely,’ Frank agreed.
It wasn’t only dusk that was darkening the vast Fenland sky. Grey cumulus clouds were advancing, dragging curtains of rain.
Sheila shivered and leaned forward to switch on the car heater. She looked at her watch. Six o’clock and the party had finished at four.
‘Or maybe she’s had an accident. She could be lying injured somewhere. Maybe we should ring the police.’
‘We’ll try the house first.’
It was a nineteenth-century farmhouse, some way from the nearest village, and set back from the road behind a windbreak of trees. As Sheila got out of the car a gust of wind lifted her hair. Dry leaves rattled on the trees and it was suddenly colder. Even before they reached the door, big drops of rain began to fall and they ran to shelter in the porch. Sheila was looking round for a bell, when she noticed that the door was ajar. Frank saw it at the same time and they exchanged glances.
Frank ran the bell and they waited in silence. When no one came, he pushed open the door and called out, ‘Hello?’
There was still no answer.
‘Should we go in?’ Sheila asked.
Frank nodded.
Inside it was very quiet and darkness was gathering in the corners of the hall. When Sheila saw the bloodstains on the wall she gasped and grabbed Frank’s arm. He reached for the light and switched it on. The stain wasn’t red, but brown, and there was a sweet, pungent smell. It triggered off a memory, something elusive that slipped away before she could grasp it. It was something unpleasant that she’d rather not remember, she knew that.
Frank said, ‘That’s cough medicine. Look, there are bits of glass, too, on the floor.’
They moved on further into the house, glancing in at rooms as they passed. The place was immaculate, all chintz and pale, thick carpets. It was exactly the kind of place where Sheila would have expected Jennifer to live. But how did she manage to keep it like this with a four-year-old? At the end of the hall they found themselves in a kitchen that was all of a piece with the rest of the house: exposed beams and gleaming copper pans. Frank went across and pushed open a door that led into the conservatory. Sheila looked around. There wasn’t a thing out of place except … on the scrubbed oak table lay the body of little tabby cat. Sheila exclaimed and moved towards it, placed a hand on the furry flank. It was cold. A dent on the side of the head suggested a fractured skull.
Sheila was startled when Jennifer appeared from the hall, pushing back wet hair with one hand. The rain drumming on the glass roof of the conservatory must have masked the sound of a car driving up.
Jennifer looked amazed to see Sheila.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘You didn’t come to collect Evan, so—’
‘Didn’t I say? Barry was coming for him.’ Realisation was dawning and with it, alarm. ‘You mean – he didn’t?’
Sheila hastened to reassure her. ‘Evan’s fine. Frank’s mum—’
‘Sheila.’ Frank’s voice was hoarse.
She turned to see him standing in the doorway of the conservatory. His face was white.
‘Better call the police. And an ambulance.’
It’s a strange experience, reading about yourself in the news, actually more like reading about someone else, Sheila thought, as she scanned the headlines on the BBC website.
‘Yesterday the body of banker Barry Brunswick’ – no wonder they could afford that house – ‘was discovered by Sheila Cumming, 45’ – how on earth had they managed to get hold of her age? – ‘and her husband Frank after Mr Brunswick failed to collect his four-year-old son from a birthday party at their home.’ There was a photo of Jennifer, looking haggard under her make-up, carrying Evan who had his arms around her neck. The article reported that she had been out walking with a friend and had returned home to find her husband dead from a single stab wound to the heart.
Sheila was supposed to be teaching today, but Frank had persuaded her to call in sick. She had scarcely slept the previous night. She couldn’t stop thinking of Cluedo: Colonel Mustard and a dagger in the conservatory. It was one of those awful inappropriate mental tics. She must be suffering from shock.
The phone rang yet again, another journalist probably. Sheila waited for Frank to pick up the phone on the extension. He was screening their calls.
A few moments later he put his head round the door. ‘Elaine.’
Sheila picked up the phone. Elaine was one of her oldest and best friends. They’d been at school together. It was one of those friendships that survives against the odds. Sheila was quiet and reflective. Elaine, who had become a leading theatrical designer, was not. But that was what Sheila liked about her. There was no pussy-footing around. With Elaine what you saw was what you got.
‘Sweetie! I’ve just seen the news, you poor darling. How are you? Tell me all about it.’
Sheila told her.
‘Now, you won’t believe this,’ Elaine said, ‘but I know Jennifer too. They used to live a few doors down.’
‘No, really?’
‘Well, that might be pitching it a bit high. They kept themselves to themselves. I didn’t like her at first, thought she was a stuck-up bitch, then I realised that she was just terribly shy.’
Sheila couldn’t help smiling. She could just imagine. Conversations with Elaine tended to be overwhelming until you learned just to sit back and let it wash over you.
Elaine went on: ‘She was such a mouse of a woman. You know, brown hair, brown clothes … But judging from this photo that I’m looking at on the screen, she must have bucked up her ideas a bit. I wonder …’
‘Yes?’
‘He was so good-looking. You know, one of those men who’s almost too good-looking? I took against him after I saw him in a restaurant looking into another woman’s eyes. I’m sure he was having an affair. I wondered, when they moved to the country – maybe a new start and all that? Oh Lord, is that the time? I’ve got to be at the theatre. See you very soon, my sweet. Kiss kiss. Big hug.’
And she was gone. Sheila always felt better for a phone call from Elaine: perhaps it was the sheer energy she exuded. But she was perceptive too. She might be right and Jennifer’s aloofness was really shyness, her reliance on make-up and smart clothes, a sign of insecurity.
‘Are you alright, love?’ She looked up to see Frank hovering over her anxiously.
‘I just can’t help thinking about that poor woman. And they’d just moved in, too, she hardly knows anybody.’
The doorbell rang.
‘That’s them, now, the police,’ Frank said.
The police inspector was overweight, his belly straining the buttons on his shirt and his tie was slightly crooked. For all that Sheila got a sense of a keen intelligence as he took them through the events that had led up to the discovery of the body. Just when she thought he’d finished and was about to leave, he flipped back through the pages of his notebook.
‘If we could just go back to when Mrs Brunswick arrived to drop off her little boy. Three o’clock, you said? Pretty hard to be certain about the exact time when you were busy getting ready for a party. Could it have been somewhat after three? Or even before?’
‘Do you have children, inspector?’
‘A boy and a girl.’
‘Then you’ll know that a children’s party isn’t like a cocktail party. People don’t arrive fashionably late. They arrive on the dot. I looked at my watch at ten to three, wondering when the first one was going to arrive. And by five past they were all there, including Evan. I remember thinking we’d better get going on the first game. I’d got it all organised more or less down to the minute.’
‘So how did that go, exactly? Mrs Brunswick drove up …’
‘A whole load of them arrived at once, and she was one of them. The kids ran in together, and Frank’s mother took them off to join the others. The parents handed over birthday presents, we took their mobile numbers, including hers, and off they went.’
‘So she definitely dropped her son between ten to three and five minutes past?’
‘That’s right.’
‘How did she seem? Did she say or do anything out of the ordinary?’
Sheila tried to picture the scene. ‘I’m not sure that she said anything at all. I wasn’t really noticing.’ All the same something was tugging at her memory. She appealed to Frank. ‘Can you remember, love?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s all a bit of a blur to be honest.’
The inspector nodded and shut up his notebook.
After he’d gone, Frank said, ‘I suppose he was eliminating her from their enquiries. The husband or wife’s always the first to be suspected.’
‘As if it wasn’t bad enough for her to have lost her husband!’
Frank put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed. She leaned into him. Darling Frank. With the almost-telepathy of a happy marriage, she knew that he was thinking about her first husband and his death in a climbing accident.
‘Well,’ Frank went on, ‘let’s hope we’ve supplied her with an alibi.’
‘That poor, poor woman. I’ll give her a ring. At the very least I can offer to take Evan off her hands for a few hours.’
‘I still can’t believe it,’ Jennifer said. ‘It just seems … unreal.’
It was two days later and Sheila had finally managed to get through to her.
Sheila had stopped thinking about Cluedo, but now her thoughts were returning obsessively to the broken bottle of cough mixture and the dead cat. There was something so strange – almost surreal – about finding them in that house where nothing else was out of place. Of course she couldn’t ask.
Instead she said, ‘Have the police let you go back to the house?’
‘Just to collect clothes and things. My friend, Annie, the one I was out walking with, we’re staying with her. I can’t ever live there again. And we’d been looking forward so much to moving to the country, thought it would be safer than the city, a good place for Evan to grow up.’
Perhaps Sheila had misjudged Jennifer. After all, she was just another mother, wanting to do the best for her child. The old freemasonry of motherhood was kicking in.
‘How is Evan?’ Sheila asked.
‘He thinks Barry’s away for work and keeps asking when he’s coming back. I know I’ll have to tell him soon. But he’s already so upset about Tabitha.’
‘Tabitha?’
‘Our poor little cat. She got hit by a car. We were going to bury her that afternoon. We got her for Evan when we moved in.’
So that explained that, now there was only the cough medicine. Sheila reproved herself for her flippancy.
Jennifer was saying, ‘I can’t help thinking … a friend rang the house around three o’clock and spoke to Barry so he was still alive then. If I’d gone straight home instead of going walking with Annie, then everything might have been different.’
Yes, Sheila thought, you might be dead too, but she didn’t say that, just murmured a sympathetic response.
Jennifer said, ‘The police think it was someone wanting money for drugs. That’s all they took. Just money and some of my jewellery. Our bedroom had been ransacked.’ Sheila could tell she was on the verge of tears.
‘Anything I can do to help,’ Sheila said. ‘If you’d like me to have Evan …?’
‘You’re so kind. Oh, I almost forgot to ask. I can’t find Evan’s coat anywhere. I know he had it when I dropped him off for the party. I was wondering …’
‘I don’t think it’s here, but let me just check.’
Sheila put down the phone and went to look in the hall, but the coat wasn’t there.
She returned to the phone. ‘I’m sorry, no.’
Jennifer said, ‘The worst of it is, it had a little teddy bear in the pocket. Evan won’t go to bed without it. I’ll just have to try to get a new one from somewhere.’
Sheila was at a party and it was for grown-ups, but they were playing ‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’ She didn’t know who was playing Mr Wolf, and she was afraid to find out. Yet she was compelled to move stealthily forward. She was only two steps away, when someone called out ‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’ and the figure began to turn. She knew that what she would see was a real wolf’s head. She wrenched herself out of the dream, and woke up, shuddering.
She lay quietly in the dark, letting her breathing settle. Two weeks had passed since they had discovered Barry’s body, but she hadn’t recovered from the shock of it. It had shaken things loose, had brought to the surface memories that she usually managed to suppress. Was the figure Kevin? Her first marriage hadn’t been happy, and no one knew – not even Frank – quite how bad it had been.
But that was all over. She was safe now. And how lucky she was, how amazingly lucky, to have gentle Frank asleep beside her and dear little Harry in the next room.
She wondered how Jennifer and Evan were getting on. Jennifer had taken Evan out of the nursery and she hadn’t been in touch. Perhaps Sheila should ring her again.
It was later that morning as she was getting ready to go out with Harry that she discovered Evan’s coat in the hall closet. Frank must have thought it was Harry’s, and put it away. The little teddy was still in the pocket. She was intending to go to Ely anyway. It wouldn’t be much of a detour to go past Jennifer’s house.
As she drove up, she saw that a ‘for sale’ sign was already up. A car was parked outside. She tucked her own car in behind it.
‘Mummy,’ Harry said. ‘I want a wee.’
She reached over and undid his seatbelt. ‘Come on then. We’ll see if anyone’s there.’
She stepped into the porch and rang the doorbell. She was beginning to think the house was empty, when she heard footsteps, the door opened and there was Jennifer. Sheila held up Evan’s coat. ‘I found this just today, I’m so sorry—’
Harry interrupted her. ‘Mummy, mummy.’ He was clutching his crotch and squirming.
‘Harry’s desperate for the loo,’ Sheila explained.
‘Oh, come in, come in,’ Jennifer said, ushering them through the door. ‘There’s one just here.’
Harry darted in.
Sheila’s eyes strayed to the brown stain on the wall. It looked almost as though the bottle had been thrown against the wall. Washing wouldn’t be enough. That would have to be painted over. Jennifer caught her looking and Sheila looked away, embarrassed. There was an awkward silence. It was broken by Evan appearing at the sitting-room door.
‘Is Harry here?’ he asked. ‘Can we play?’
He looked different, more animated, and there was some colour in his cheeks. Jennifer put a hand on his shoulder and drew him close. ‘Have you got time, Sheila? Can you stay for a cup of tea?’
Harry emerged from the loo. Without a word, the two little boys disappeared into the sitting room.
The two women smiled at each other.
‘Thanks, I’d love one,’ Sheila said.
The kitchen seemed different, not untidy exactly, but more things left out on the counter, more homely. Sheila watched Jennifer fill the kettle. She was as immaculate as ever. Her honey-coloured hair was cut in a long smooth bob and not a hair was out of place. The eyeliner had surely been copied from the Duchess of Cambridge and she must have used a lip-brush to get that outline. Was that what had delayed her coming to the door?
Jennifer said, ‘It was lucky you caught me. I’ve just come to start packing things up.’
As she talked, she was getting out mugs, looking for milk in the fridge.
Sheila felt uneasy. Of course it wasn’t surprising, given what had happened the last time she was here, but it was more than that. Something wasn’t right …
There were footsteps in the hall and a woman’s voice called, ‘Jenny!’
Jennifer said, ‘In here! I’ve got a visitor.’ It sounded almost like a warning.
A woman appeared in the doorway. She was slim, dressed in jeans and a sweater, with smooth hair tied back in a short pony-tail.
‘I wasn’t expecting you so soon,’ Jennifer said. ‘This is Sheila. Sheila, this is my friend, Annie.’
Sheila stood up and offered her hand. Annie shook it. Her grip was firm and she had a pleasant smile. Yet Sheila’s sense of discomfort was increasing. She wondered if she could make an excuse and leave.
On the kitchen table Jennifer’s mobile began to buzz and vibrate.
‘That’ll be the estate agent,’ she said. ‘Can you pour the tea, Annie, when it’s brewed?’
‘I’ll just check on Harry,’ Sheila murmured.
She went into the hall and put her head round the sitting-room door. When she said, ‘Five minutes, Harry,’ he didn’t even look up. He and Evan had their heads together and Lego was scattered all over the floor.
Back in the kitchen, Jennifer was sitting at the table with her organiser open. ‘So tomorrow at three o’clock then,’ she was saying.
She wrote down the appointment.
That was when Sheila knew what was wrong. Jennifer had her pen in her right hand. But when she’d dropped Evan off at the party, she’d written down her phone number with her left hand. Sheila was left-handed herself and she’d been trained to notice it in the children she taught. In her mind’s eye she could see Jennifer curling her hand round in that awkward way that some left-handers have.
She looked at Annie, who was pouring out the tea. With her left hand. And she was wearing her watch on her right hand, just like Sheila did. That must have been what had bothered Sheila earlier. Annie glanced round and saw Sheila standing transfixed. Sheila saw her look back at the hand on the teapot and realise her mistake.
Sheila felt giddy. She reached for a chair and lowered herself into it. She closed her eyes. Absurdly, she found herself thinking, what’s the time, Mr Wolf? Three o’clock! But it wasn’t so absurd after all, because timing was the key to it all.
When she opened her eyes, Annie had moved to stand between her and the door. Both women were staring at her. Her thoughts flew to Harry. No one knew they were here. She got to her feet. Her mouth was dry.
The silence was electric. It was broken by brmm-brmm noises. Out in the hall Harry and Evan were playing with cars on the tiled floor.
Jennifer got up and closed the door. She came back and sat down at the table. ‘It’s alright,’ she said. ‘You’re quite safe, you and Harry.’
‘Why did you …?’ Sheila asked.
Annie took a seat next to Jennifer. ‘Barry was a monster,’ she said. ‘A sadistic brute and a bully. Show her, Jenny.’
Jennifer grimaced, but she pulled up her jumper to show a midriff dotted with small, round scars.
‘Cigarette burns,’ Annie said. ‘I’d been working abroad, wondered why I hadn’t heard from Jenny, and when I got back, I understood why. Jenny didn’t have friends any more. Barry didn’t like it. He didn’t want people getting too close in case they guessed what was going on. I told her that she had to get out. I could see what it was doing to Evan.’
Jennifer said, ‘Barry told me he’d kill me if I tried to leave. And Evan, too.’
Sheila didn’t say, why didn’t you go to the police? She had tried that with Kevin and it hadn’t worked. The police couldn’t lock someone away forever or protect you for the rest of your life. She remembered the relief that had flooded through her when the police broke the news that Kevin – ever the risk-taker – had died on a climbing holiday in the French Alps. It had been all she could do not to dance round the room.
‘But then Barry decided that we were going to move to the country, and that was when …’ Jennifer hesitated, glanced sideways at Annie.
‘Yes,’ Annie said. She put her hand over Jennifer’s. ‘It was my idea to pass myself off as Jenny. We used to swap clothes all the time when we were students. People thought we were sisters. But it had to happen before people got to know her, when all they really saw was the distinctive make-up and the expensive clothes and the haircut.’
Sheila thought of what Elaine had said about Jennifer’s mousy appearance: so that had been the reason for the make-over.
‘I didn’t think it would work and I really didn’t think I’d be able to, well, you know, I didn’t think I could do it,’ Jennifer said. ‘The day of the party – that was supposed to be an experiment. I pretended that Harry’s party was an hour earlier than it really was. I dropped Evan off at Annie’s and came home. And when I got back—’ She put her head in her hands.
‘Tell her what that bastard did to the cat,’ Annie said grimly.
‘So she wasn’t run over,’ Sheila said.
Jennifer shook her head. ‘He lost his temper when she got under his feet and tripped him up. He picked her up by the back legs and swung her against the wall. That was what did it, I didn’t see red or anything like that, it was more as if I was somehow standing outside myself. I saw myself going into the kitchen and getting the knife …’ Her voice trailed off.
Annie squeezed her arm.
Jennifer cleared her voice and went on, her voice stronger.
‘By the time Annie rang after she’d dropped Evan off, Barry was dead. Annie told me she thought she’d pulled it off and that you hadn’t realised.’
‘I wasn’t really looking for Jennifer as a separate person, I just saw Evan’s mum,’ Sheila admitted.
‘I don’t suppose we could leave it like that?’ Annie said. ‘That it was Evan’s mum you saw?’
Sheila said slowly, ‘I suppose there isn’t any real evidence. At least nothing a halfway decent barrister couldn’t demolish. I was so distracted by the children and the party and everyone arriving at once. And eyewitness testimony’s notoriously unreliable. Although …’ she was struck by a thought. Was this the coat she had been wearing? Yes … She fumbled in the pocket and brought out a folded sheet of paper with the contact numbers from the party on one side and the directions to Jennifer’s house on the other. Would a handwriting expert be able to tell that it was Annie who had written the phone number? Better not risk it.
She handed the piece of paper to Jennifer.
‘Here, have this,’ she said. ‘I should burn it if I were you.’
They lingered in the garden, reluctant to say goodbye.
‘Where will you go?’ Sheila asked.
‘The States, I think,’ Jennifer said. ‘Annie’s been offered a job in Denver. We’ll go with her at least for a while.’
‘That’ll be best,’ Sheila agreed. ‘Send me a postcard. Let me know how Evan’s getting on.’
‘I will.’
Sheila strapped Harry into his child seat and got behind the wheel.
She had pulled away and waved goodbye when she remembered something. She braked, told Harry she’d only be a moment, and got out of the car.
Jennifer came part of the way to meet her.
‘There’s just one thing I have to know,’ Sheila said.
‘Yes?’
‘The cough medicine. How did it get on the wall?’
‘I found it like that when I got home. Barry had smashed it on purpose so that he could order me to clear it up.’
Sheila nodded, satisfied. ‘I thought that was it.’
With Kevin it had been a bottle of maple syrup.
Even after all these years the smell of it still made her gag.