Early on a Wednesday morning in September, not long past midnight, Stephen Forsyth sat in the office in the eaves of his two-million-pound house – perfectly located close to the common and just five minutes’ walk from his favourite (Michelin-starred, no less) restaurant on Bellevue Road – with his own newspaper’s site open on the twenty-seven-inch iMac that graced his vintage Danish desk. His wife lay passed out on the bed in the luxurious guest room below. Although Stephen was ridiculously drunk, he could still just about focus on the text. The next day’s stories had been published two minutes earlier. It was the fourth one, on this, the day after the inquest, which attracted his attention. ‘Mother who abandoned her son for love’ was the headline. ‘Loner Kingston’, ran the copy, enthusiastically endorsed by Barry a couple of hours earlier, ‘developed a deeply entrenched distrust, verging on hatred, of women after his own mother Eileen walked out on him, according to an unnamed source. Terry Kingston, who quite sensationally is the secret half-brother of this paper’s editor, Stephen Forsyth, who is currently suspended (Barry must have had that bit put in, Stephen fumed), was the prime suspect in the initial inquiry into the death of Siobhan Benson, 44. Kingston’s mother left the family home when her son was just two years old to move in with her former next-door neighbour, a mere half a mile away, and she soon bore a new child, Stephen. According to our source, Terry Kingston never forgave her.’ Stephen finished reading, put his head in his hands and sobbed snottily, like a toddler.
Ten or so hours later, Juliette and Stephen sat sullenly opposite each other across the solid oak table, which he noticed was badly scratched in one place (had one of the kids been scribbling again, did she ever fucking supervise them?) in their large German-manufactured kitchen. Its white high-gloss finish was sparkling, the surfaces unusually clear of the normal detritus associated with a household made up of a (before now) largely absent father, sluttish mother and three unruly children. The housekeeper had been so titillatingly embarrassed by the revelations of the Daily Mail when she’d arrived that morning it had given her a rare flare of energy, and she had taken to the kitchen as if to a human catastrophe clear-up – an earthquake perhaps, or maybe a hurricane. She had donned her pale-blue housecoat and pink Marigolds and whipped through the room, emptying the dishwasher, piling all the clean stuff onto the island (making the place look temporarily worse), putting away the cutlery with dangerous efficiency: large knives deftly dispensed to the magnetic rack on the wall, knife-thrower-like; forks and table knives and spoons and teaspoons tossed into the appropriate sections of the cutlery drawer expertly, like quoits at the fair; ladles and serving spoons zealfully attached to hooks like hanging victims.
Mrs Redfern had then turned her attention to all the crap on the draining board: dinner plates stacked up, still full of leftovers; two wine glasses, one smeared with gash-red lipstick; three (three!) empty wine bottles; an assortment of dirty bone-china mugs from Heals and Harrods and various unheard-of stately homes; half-full tumblers of orange juice and water; flattened individual smoothie cartons oozing gunk; a lone squashed pear with a single bite out of it. It’s an absolute bloomin’ disgrace this house, she’d thought, as she picked bills and colour supplements out of slimy puddles on the counter-tops, shook sticky unidentifiable drips and burned crumbs off them onto the work surface, scraped the resulting mess off the counter into her rubber-gloved hand to be dispatched into the bin, dunked the dishcloth in hot soapy water and cleaned the Corian (whatever that is, she harrumphed, all that money and you’re not allowed to use Flash on it, I ask you) surfaces so they shone. She’d then vacuumed and mopped the floor like a maniac before whirling upstairs, uncharacteristic energy not yet spent, to attend to the children’s rooms – on her way stomping noisily past the firmly shut door to the master bedroom in the hope that someone might come out; sneaking a hopeful peek into the spare room, where she tantalisingly saw a pair of beautiful bare feet hanging over the end of the bed; listening fruitlessly at the bottom of the stairs up to the office in the eaves.
Stephen and Juliette were not appreciative of Mrs Redfern’s earlier efforts as they sat at the table nursing monumental hangovers – in fact they didn’t even notice that the kitchen was tidy for a change. Juliette probably wouldn’t have done anyway, even on a good day, and Stephen was too wrapped up in the horror of his apparently imploding life. It was disastrous. The press was still getting tremendous mileage out of the body in the lake story, especially Stephen Forsyth’s involvement, there were just so many angles. And now on top of all the damage that had already been done to Stephen’s reputation, this week the Sun had taken delight in the unveiling of Juliette’s affair (as it turned out it was bloody true, the whore – and not just with anyone, but with that fucking snake Alistair Smart!). Stephen felt sick to his stomach. That wasn’t even the half of it, it got way worse than that. Last night with his wife, in their drunken, violent shouting match (Juliette had gone for him first, he hadn’t meant to catch her eye, he’d just been defending himself, for fuck’s sake), she’d told him that Siobhan had claimed he’d been to blame for Nigel’s death in Sardinia, and that when she’d blurted it out Renée had gone nuts and started calling him a murderer. Stephen was terrified – he knew he wasn’t guilty of murdering Nigel, but he must admit he’d always felt slightly responsible, and if it got out he definitely could be accused of fraud, or perverting the course of justice or something – or maybe even manslaughter, he didn’t know the Italian law on that.
How the fuck would Siobhan have known about the socket though? He thought he’d dealt with all that. Sissy must have known somehow, and must have told her. He tried to clear his head, ignore his wife as she sat half-dead across the table from him. OK, he’d known he’d done up the apartment on the cheap, even been aware that the electrics were faulty, but he hadn’t meant to kill anyone, and it’s not like he had wired the sodding plugs himself. And he had felt terrible about Nigel, killed off by electricity, not cancer, in the end, and after everything he’d been through. But really, Stephen told himself yet again, as if saying it often enough would make it true, Nigel had been lucky to be alive anyway, he’d been read the last rites ten years beforehand, no-one ever thought he was going to pull through. The cancer would probably have come back anyway, it usually did, and Nigel had had ten good bonus years. And at least the kids’ screams at discovering Nigel had alerted the neighbours, so they’d managed to get Sissy to hospital in time; they hadn’t been left as orphans, thank Christ. They could so easily have lost their mother, might well have done save for the accident, if all Nigel had been doing for her severe heatstroke was plugging in a fucking fan. Surely it was better for them to have had their father die rather than their mother?
As Stephen sat with his head in his hands, he remembered how much he’d panicked when he’d first got the call about Nigel’s death, had known he had to do something – you never knew with the Italian authorities, it definitely could have got nasty. So he’d contacted Terry’s brother-in-law, Gianfranco, as soon as he could, just in case the police did end up getting involved, and Gianfranco had sorted it all out, had had the socket repaired by someone who knew what they were doing – Stephen’s offer had been far too attractive for him not to.
Stephen had always thought that would be the end of it, but it turned out Sissy had somehow known what he’d done all along. And now, thanks to Siobhan, apparently so did the rest of Juliette’s friends. He was fucked, especially as someone had already leaked it – even if the press hadn’t actually implicated him yet there’d still been a story about someone dying in his holiday apartment. What if some dogged reporter decided to check it out further? He couldn’t go down for murder though, he told himself, he definitely wasn’t a murderer … it had been an accident. He hadn’t wanted Nigel to die, he’d quite liked the bloke. How dare anyone call him a murderer?
As Juliette slumped further into her chair, Stephen thought of all her fucking bombshells last night, all the revelations, the other rumours circling – and he didn’t know what the hell he was going to do about any of them, now they were surfacing, rotten and stinking like Siobhan’s bloated corpse. He was finished, surely.
Stephen let out a howl, and it sounded villainous, comedic, although in truth it was desperate. (Juliette barely looked up, it was like she’d been drugged or something.) He’d been humiliated, abandoned, well and truly shafted. His life was being picked over as if by vultures on a stinking rubbish dump, and although he tried not to acknowledge it, Stephen realised it was what they call comeuppance, retribution. He thought about Nigel, Juliette, Renée, and he felt defeated, ready to succumb, penitent even. He deserved what was coming to him.
As Stephen continued to look across the table at his ghost-like wife, whom he had adored once as an example of what he could become, he thought of the hateful, damning things they had screamed at each other last night, and he wondered whether the children or, worse, the neighbours had heard, resulting in yet more ways for damaging stories to get out. And as he stared at the puffiness around his wife’s left eye, Stephen wondered where a rope or some kind of lead was, so he could go out to the garage now, before he had to face anyone.