It’s been over two weeks since Carrie and Henry were arrested and charged. They were both denied bail and are remanded in prison until their trials, which will take months to come to court. The thought of them behind bars haunts me. It’s not fair, and I’m still not convinced that I’m doing the right thing testifying for the prosecution. For now, the drama has dissipated and life has chugged back to some form of normality. Jeremy has continued to decline, physically and mentally, and has fallen into a deep depression since Monika died. He sleeps downstairs most nights. I wake him in the morning with a strong coffee, and he climbs the stairs wearily to our bed, where he stays for the rest of the day. He has begun to display signs of alcohol dementia. Experts also call it wet brain because his grey matter is literally soaked to death.
This morning, he went to put a bottle of milk away and opened the oven, where croissants were baking, and placed it in there, melting the plastic and causing a catastrophe, which I cleaned up. There are other times he’ll stop mid-sentence and look blankly at one of the children, as if seeking clarity for where he is.
The disease is underdiagnosed, because it presents the same as Alzheimer’s, but I’ve lived with Jeremy for thirty years and I’ve seen the steady decline to full-blown aphasia, apraxia and agnosia. It’s a living hell for the rest of us. Unless he’s asleep, which he is now.
The house is quiet. Lydia is at a therapy session and it takes me all my strength not to get involved because she’s being treated by an amateur. Ewan is at school. The sensational press interest over the death of Brandon Stand continues to cause a stench in the corridors. The headmaster retired early on health grounds. James comes and goes, like my faith in the system.
My dealings with DI Hunt are sporadic. He struts around, triumphant and masterful, promoted on the back of my clients, which I delivered to him. Ewan was spared a police interrogation. His friends entered plea arrangements against Henry, and Hunt informed me that their testimony clinched him as the instigator of Brandon Stand’s death too. He’s looking at manslaughter, plus murder, in separate trials, if he makes it to them. I know intimately how Henry will fare in prison for a second time. Carrie is facing an accessory charge. As a witness for the prosecution, I cannot find out how they are holding up on remand.
Tony has been more than generous. He was dismissed as a suspect. I’ve seen a practice in Windsor that I like. My plans don’t involve Jeremy.
I follow the news closely. The last photos I saw of Henry and Carrie, on the front pages, were shocking. The disintegration of their bodies and their reputations have stripped them of everything they had. But I also have to be able to believe that the two of them could have planned this all along, using me as a testing ground for their stories. My ego should be wounded. I will say on the stand that I counselled both but didn’t spot their delinquency.
Hunt’s evidence is convincing. But my testimony is important. So is Grace’s. It isn’t personal. Henry was the last person to see Monika alive, and his car, phone and own testimony put him at the scene. His injured hand wasn’t a coincidental accident after all. The cleaning of the body proved premeditation; and dysfunctional adults, plagued with childhood misfortune as a result of maltreatment, are more likely to be capable of the cold-heartedness associated with such acts. Both the accused scored seven out of ten on the ACE (adverse childhood experiences) scale. It doesn’t mean they necessarily committed the crimes; just that they’re more likely to have done. Circumstantially, Hunt’s on thinner ice. The prosecution will argue that Monika had become clingy and fixated on Henry Nelson, and thus inconvenient to him. Then there was the knife found under Carrie’s bed, proving she’d be willing to commit criminal acts for her lover. They’ll say Henry is a narcissist who is obsessed with unavailable women, especially married ones. They’ll say that Carrie is a sociopath and a control freak who had violent intentions towards women because of her mother. Together, they’re a couple who acted out their damaged backgrounds by inflicting pain on others.
The press can’t yet report them as Monika’s killers, just the suspects as charged, but already their characters have been destroyed. But every night when I see Ewan’s face, I forgive myself a little bit more.
I try to concentrate on the job at hand, to distract me from my racing mind. I’m looking for something. I’ve never employed an accountant – they’re overrated – but every year, when I file my tax return, I regret it. I’m rifling through receipts, trying to sort them into date order. I detest the task. I work through my diary chronologically. The big stuff, the clients’ fees and the bills, are already entered onto spreadsheets and filed, by Dora. It’s the detritus of one’s life, the day-to-day running of one’s own business that makes all the difference to my turnover. Everything is saved, even the kids’ receipts from places like Tesco and WH Smith. We’ve got into a habit of throwing them into a bowl in the kitchen, and from there, they get chucked into a box, in my study, to be sorted in late summer.
I come to the receipts for July and stop at one. It’s from 15 July. It puts my daily business of buying notepads and staples into perspective, and I see Monika’s skull being bashed in. A few more receipts have the same date and it makes my hands tremble. I calm myself and allow the banality of the task to refocus myself. Two items stand out, and I have to cross reference them with my bank account on my Mac.
One is a carwash facility, which I match with a card transaction on the joint account. The other isn’t a receipt at all. It’s a queue number docket for the recycling dump, downtown. Both are dated Wednesday 15 July.
I stare at the screen, and then to the photograph of my children on my desk. Ewan’s smiling face beams back at me and I realise that no matter how much money Tony gives me, and regardless of how much I continue to protect them, I won’t find peace until I’ve done the right thing.
I go back to the queue docket and the carwash receipt, and I relive the morning of 15 July. Jeremy was proud that he’d performed a domestic chore and he wanted praise for getting my car valeted. I call the number of the recycling plant, which is on the slip. It’s answered on the fifth ring by a breathless man with a gruff voice. I garble something about tracing equipment, asking if they have CCTV.
‘Head office has it, it’s all digital. I can access it on the computer here, but, love, we’re crazy busy at the moment, a dickhead just dumped a truckload of hard-core rubble in the wrong skip. Are you police?’ the voice asked.
‘Yes,’ I cough.
‘Good, it’s only ever police who want it. More thieving?’
‘Yes, lots of it going round, I’m afraid. Can you send it to the usual email?’ I ask him, impressed by own capacity for smoothness.
‘I have no idea what that is, my love,’ he says.
I give him an email address, trying to be as breezy as possible. It works and I stare at the phone in my hand. The blind trust of law-abiding citizens is truly beautiful. I give him the date of the docket and we hang up. Seconds later, an email pops into my inbox and I stare at it.
I open it breathlessly; it’s an easy-to-work Mpeg and I navigate around it quickly. An image appears on my screen and I press play. I note the date and time of the footage. The guy has sent me the recording for the whole day and so I forward to when the ticket says Jeremy was there. The voucher says he was in the queue at nine o’clock in the morning: before he had my car valeted.
Then I see him.
I watch Jeremy, in my car, pull in and park. I recognise his clothes. I’ve washed them for three decades, and I know every fibre of them. He gets out of the car and goes to the boot, taking out something large. I identify it straight away, and I know it’s the blue wooden coat stand that I ordered from a bespoke company in France. Once, it had complemented my nod to the hedonism of the seventeenth century, with which I chose to decorate the new pool changing rooms. There are gold mirrors in there and padded seats, and a chaise longue. Silly really, now I think about it, but Monika loved it.
I return to the footage and watch Jeremy throw it nonchalantly into a skip. Then he goes back to the boot and lifts something else out. It’s another piece of the coat stand, and I recall the argument we had over it. I accused him of blacking out and falling over it, probably breaking it in temper. He said I must’ve moved it. The argument was never resolved.
I close my computer and I know that I must tell Hunt. Reasonable doubt only takes one person to stand up for the accused, and present new evidence, which could force the whole case to be reviewed.
I sit back and sigh. Allowing a spouse access to a private computer is like sharing a bank account: never a good idea. He’s regularly accessed my client files, to glean ideas, presumably. I know his passwords, and he’s lazy so he never changes them. I retrieve his files, which I’ve been collating over the last couple of weeks – preparation is key if you want to be the victor in divorce proceedings – and begin organising them into one, for Hunt. The dozens of photos of Monika stare back at me. He believed I’d never find them, or the paper he was working on. In one of his fantasist and addled stupors, he’d called it ‘Chosen Suspects in a Murder Case, by Doctor Jeremy Moore, BSc, PhD, APA Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology’. Jeremy has never been awarded anything by the American Psychological Association.