The next few seconds are a blank.
All I do remember is hurtling down the corridor in a bathrobe, my feet bare, and jabbing wildly at the elevator call button until it arrives to take me to the floor where Jim’s room is. Then hammering hard on his door, shouting his name.
The door is snatched open and Jim stands there, eyes wide in alarm.
‘He’s alive!’ I hiss.
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Dominic! The body in the coffin… it can’t have been him.’
Jim leads me into the room and pushes me down into an armchair.
‘Slow down, slow down… are you all right? Is the baby all right? No one’s tried to hurt you?’
I shake my head, then hold out my wedding ring with trembling fingers. Jim takes it from me.
‘I took this off and put it in the coffin, that day I visited the funeral home. And someone just left it outside my room. He can’t be dead; he must have got away from the crash somehow and flown out here to Australia. And now he’s trying to mess with my head. He probably still wants to kill me.’
‘Whoa, whoa, slow down…’ Jim stands up and pours me a glass of water. ‘The brother who did the identification confirmed it wasn’t the real Dominic Gill, but you also said the dead body was definitely the man you married.’
‘I know but—’
‘You saw him in the mortuary too. You had no doubts then. The police pulled that body from your husband’s car.’ Jim’s tone is even, but I can see a glimmer of alarm in his eyes.
‘But I was in shock; I wasn’t thinking straight. Did I only see what I was told I was seeing?’ My heart is lurching in my chest, and the baby squirms inside me, sensing my panic. ‘There were injuries to his face, remember? Maybe I got it wrong. I went to the funeral home to make sure it was him, but maybe the delayed shock was making my mind play tricks on me. Maybe that body belonged to someone else and he was alive all along. How else could my wedding ring be here?’
Jim paces the room, rubbing his chin with his left hand, the wedding ring still in his right. ‘Okay, okay… this is what I’m going to do. I’ll check with the staff downstairs at reception, and then I’ll go and see the police. It’s time to share what we know with them.’
‘But they won’t know either way. They won’t know if Dominic – or Gregory, or whatever he’s calling himself – is still alive or not.’
‘Even so, telling them has got to be our starting point. In case he is.’
I sigh. ‘Okay. Just give me five minutes to get dressed.’
Jim is shaking his head. ‘No way. You’re not coming with me. You promised the hospital staff you’d rest.’
‘But I can’t stay here.’ I stare up at him, shaking my head. ‘Not now he’s found me. He might come back.’
‘You can stay in my room,’ Jim says firmly. ‘Keep the door locked and the chain on and don’t let anyone in. I’ll be back as quickly as I can.’
I reach over to his desk and pick up Holly’s iPad, which the Galeas allowed us to take away with us. ‘You’d better show them this.’
Every minute of the ninety minutes Jim is gone feels like an hour. I pace restlessly around his hotel room, picking up his clothes and folding them just for something to do, burying my face in them to inhale the reassuring scent of him. I have to keep moving, because if I’m still, the pounding of my heart becomes overwhelming.
A tap on the door makes me jump out of my skin. Someone tries to open the door, prevented from doing so by the chain. But then a female voice says, ‘Housekeeping’. I ignore it and eventually she goes away.
When Jim returns, I can tell straight away that he has news, simply from the set of his mouth.
‘What is it?’ I ask, lowering myself onto the edge of the bed. ‘You may as well tell me. It’s not like there can be any more shocks in store. Not now.’
Jim takes a whisky miniature from the minibar and opens a packet of crisps. I realise it has been many hours since either of us has had a meal. ‘Okay… four things.’ He holds up four fingers as he tips a handful of crisps into his mouth. ‘First, I spoke to a Detective Kelly from the International Ops team at the Australian Federal Police. They’re a bit like the NCA in the UK, I suppose, and they work directly with Interpol. Anyway, he said that after Pearl Liu’s death back in 2015, Greg Henderson took off – abandoned his job and disappeared. They tracked him on a flight to Berlin in Germany, and a team of officers headed out there, but the trail had gone cold, and they couldn’t find him anywhere in Germany. Using the information from Holly Galea’s note, they just ran a check with the UK border agency and, sure enough, a Ben MacAlister arrived in the UK at around that time. He had what appeared to be a legit UK passport and so didn’t attract any attention at customs. And, of course, soon after that…’
‘He became Dominic Gill.’ I say flatly.
‘Exactly.’
‘Anyway, they’re now going to liaise with the Met in London about Holly’s murder, to try and tie the whole thing together. So…’ He moves on from the crisps to the grapes in the fruit basket, offering them to me first. I shake my head. There’s no way I could eat now: my mouth feels as though it’s lined with cotton wool. ‘That’s the first thing. How are you doing? Ticker okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ I say. ‘Go on.’
‘Okay, after I’d been to the AFP and given them the iPad, I went back to the New South Wales Registry. The family historian had indeed found a birth record for Ellen Henderson, dated 11 May 1981. Her only child, born when she was forty: a son called Gregory Douglas Henderson.’
I shrug again. ‘We’d more or less figured that out, thanks to Holly.’
‘I know. That was the second thing. Now the third.’ He pauses a beat. ‘The staff at the hotel front desk went through their security camera footage, and they found this. I downloaded a copy.’
I feel a sickening lurch rise up in my core. ‘Was it him?’ I manage to whisper.
Jim reaches forward with his phone. He’s shaking his head. ‘Take a look.’
The grainy black-and-white footage shows a figure approaching the door of my hotel room and stopping to prop the envelope against it. A woman my height and build, with similar hair.
Reading my mind, Jim says, ‘I thought at first it was you, and that you’d been sleepwalking or something. But I don’t remember ever seeing you in a dress like that. And, if you watch as she walks away, you see she’s not pregnant.’
‘But where on earth did she get my wedding ring from? Who is she?’
‘I’m coming to that. That’s number four. When I saw the registrar, she gave me another certificate too. A marriage certificate.’
It takes me a few seconds to articulate my jaw and my tongue into speech. ‘Show me,’ I croak.
Jim reaches into his jacket pocket and hands me a slip of paper and I scan it. Gregory Douglas Henderson and Zoey Ann Daley married on 29 October 2011.
‘So he’d been married before,’ I say, glancing up at Jim. ‘That’s not a necessarily a surprise, given his age.’
Jim gives me a strange look, before reaching into his pocket again. ‘Which brings me to this…’ He hands me my ring. ‘Take a closer look. Look at the inscription.’
I do as I’m told, and a cold shiver of shock runs down the length of my spine.
‘To the love of my life’, the writing inside the ring reads. Followed by a heart, then ‘29 October, 2011’.
There’s a tiny metallic clatter as it drops to the ground and rolls away. ‘It’s not—’
‘Exactly. It’s another woman’s wedding ring.’