Back at home, Caitlyn found the conversation with Nicholas echoing in her mind. Patrick had invited her to go through his most private world when he gave her his passwords. She had thought it was simply a practical step, so that she could access bank accounts, administrative info and the apps that ran their home. Perhaps it was more than that. She remembered the treasure hunts he used to set for her. He would always tell her to keep her eye open for clues, and to stay alert.
‘Sometimes you’re too blinkered,’ he would scold her. ‘Always think about what you’re seeing and why.’
I’m missing something. I’ll look again.
After Max was in bed, Caitlyn went to her bag and took out Patrick’s tablet. She typed in the password. The tablet sprang into life, the screen glowing blue, its neat rows of apps like little doors promising entry into other worlds. She ran her finger over the display, scrolling through the screens. There were the standard applications – nothing mysterious about those. She noticed again the backgammon app that he used to play in the cinema while they waited for the main film to start. He hated adverts but he also had to arrive early, so he needed the distraction. There were other games too: a fantasy cricket game, spider solitaire and snake, the old-fashioned computer version where the snake is made to eat apples, growing longer with each bite so the challenge is to avoid it meeting its own tail. There were his favourite news apps, his stocks tracker, his Spotify.
Caitlyn went back to his email account. It gave her a horrible sick sensation to see the last one he sent, on the afternoon of the day he died. It can’t have been that long before he decided to call her. It was to Stacey in his chambers, reminding her to bill a client for Patrick’s hours.
Caitlyn thought of those last moments again, picturing Patrick in the back of the taxi, talking in the darkness, not expecting the lorry speeding towards him. She thought of the impact. Patrick’s inquest had gone into detail about his injuries and the way his body had torn and shattered under the force of the crash. She believed them when they said it must have been instantaneous: a moment of surprise and then doused, like a candle snuffed. From light to dark, in one violent second. He would have been dead before he felt any pain, and that was a comfort. She thought of his telephone that had connected them both at that moment of elemental transition. It was amazing really that his phone was not more damaged. Perhaps it flew out of his hand and landed under a seat where it was protected from the crushing of the lorry.
As she thought this, Caitlyn got up and went upstairs to the spare room. Almost mechanically she opened the box of Patrick’s electronics and saw his phone lying there, chipped and scratched with a long hairline crack across the screen, but otherwise intact.
Why didn’t I think of looking here before?
She tried to switch it on but, just as the tablet had been, it was completely out of power after months of disuse, so she took it downstairs, searched about for her own charger and plugged it in. A few minutes later, it was ready to access. She found the paper with Patrick’s codes and passwords and tapped in the pin. The screen popped into life in a mini version of Patrick’s tablet, and she wondered why he needed so many of the same thing.
Caitlyn held the phone lightly in her hand, feeling its roughened surface. It had been the last thing Patrick had touched when he was alive. She went to the telephone icon at the bottom of the screen and tapped it. Up came his contacts list. There would be no surprises there. She tapped on the ‘recent calls’ icon at the base of that screen. There it was – the list of his very last calls. The final one was, of course, to her. One and a half minutes. Was that all it had been? It had seemed so much longer. She would have said five minutes at least. And at what point did the lorry driver take out his phone and start texting? Twenty seconds before the impact? Thirty? At some point while they were talking, Patrick’s death had been set in motion, and they’d not realised that every moment took them closer to the final severance, when death would part them forever.
Now his life was here, on this phone, on the tablet, frozen forever, kept in a permanent limbo. Present and yet not present.
Then she saw that the call before hers was a long one. Twenty minutes. It had started almost exactly twenty-one minutes before Patrick had called her. It was to someone she had never heard of.
Allegra.
She stared at it, her heart thudding. Who is Allegra?
Patrick had made his last call to her, his wife, but it was to warn her that Sara had something to tell her. So who was Allegra? The name echoed through her mind, reminding her that she had heard the word recently, but not as a person. It was . . . she grasped at the thought, screwing up her face with the effort of concentration, and then it came to her. On Patrick’s bank statements. A lot of money went to Allegra Communications. A flood of ideas came into her mind as things began to link together. This must be the key she had been looking for, the one that would unlock Patrick’s hidden life.
Allegra.
If she was right, then Allegra was Sara, and in the course of her conversation with Patrick, she had said something that meant Patrick felt it was time to tell Caitlyn the truth. It was something important, something that might threaten . . . what? Caitlyn herself? Her life with Patrick?
She wanted to tell me they were at it and he wanted to get in first, for all the good that would have done.
There was still the sliver of doubt, though. The call was evidence but it wasn’t conclusive. She got up and walked around the room thinking, the phone still in her hand. Then, on a whim, she went to the contacts in Patrick’s phone. She looked up Allegra and there it was, almost the first name in his contacts list. Then she looked up Sara, and she was listed under her full name. The two telephone numbers were different as well.
But Patrick had called her specifically to warn her about Sara. Not some other person. Sara. Unless Allegra was a friend or . . . someone else entirely?
She gasped at the sudden idea that Allegra was someone Patrick was having an affair with, and Sara had found out and was going to tell her, Caitlyn, unless Patrick did.
But that makes no sense. Because it’s Sara who had the flowers and the hotel. And it’s Sara who keeps insinuating that she and Patrick were more than friends. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that Sara has two phones, after all.
She thought suddenly of Nicholas’s suggestion that Patrick might have been hiding sexual content on his devices. Immediately, she went to tap on the phone’s photo storage icon, her fingertips trembling as she did. There could be photos here that weren’t on the tablet. As she watched, the albums came to life in their little stack. At the bottom there it was: an album entitled Allegra.
‘Oh God,’ Caitlyn said out loud. Her heart began racing and her breath was suddenly short. She tapped on it, expecting an array of photographs inside – perhaps obscene, perhaps romantic. Romantic would be infinitely worse, she felt. But there were only two, and one was of a person. She tapped rapidly to select and it exploded into life. It was a photograph of a woman’s naked back cinched in at the waist by a tightly drawn corset. Pink stockings encased her legs as far as they could be seen, attached to the corset by silky straps.
It was not possible to see much of the woman’s head. But trailing down the naked back was a long russet-red curl.
Caitlyn felt sick. So at last she’d found the proof. It was Sara. It had to be. Who else had long red hair like this, the kind that fell in auburn corkscrews? Had Patrick taken this shot? She looked more closely and realised that it was in fact a selfie, taken in a mirror, the phone held up in one of the woman’s hands like a small dead slab.
It had been sent to him.
Her head whirled with an unpleasant giddiness. She had wanted to know the truth and here it was. Sara had sent a near-naked picture of herself to Patrick, and he had filed it away to keep under her pseudonym. It was pretty conclusive.
‘No, no . . .’ she muttered, and then, hearing the pain in her own voice, she realised how much she had been hoping that, after all her suspicions, she’d been wrong and Patrick had not betrayed her with Sara.
Numb with hurt, Caitlyn went back to the album screen and selected the other photograph. It came up as a black screen with a message on it written in red capital letters.
Look for the snake in the grass.
Caitlyn drew in a sharp breath. It was as though she had just heard Patrick’s voice in her head. The snake in the grass? Was this a message for her?
This is how I used to feel during the treasure hunts – never quite sure what was a clue and what wasn’t. But why would he want me to know about his affair?
Patrick loved his games. But surely he would not be so cruel as to turn an affair into the same sort of game as his treasure hunt.
On impulse she went back to his email and looked at the folders. She had not paid much attention to them before; they had the names of his clients and had seemed to be full of work correspondence. She had ignored the one named Allegra Communications, but now it jumped out at her, setting off another flood of adrenaline as she opened it. There was only one email there, but it contained three threads. The first was sent from Patrick to Allegra. It said, You know what to do.
After it came a message from Allegra, without text, containing only the photograph Caitlyn had seen in the album. In response to the photo was another message sent from Patrick. This one said, Well done.
‘What the hell is going on?’ she shouted out loud. ‘What game are you both playing?’
Caitlyn stood, shaking, looking at the picture and the messages as though they would begin to reveal more, and give her the answers she wanted.
There is one way to find out.
She went back to Patrick’s contacts list. All the innocent names and numbers, accumulated over the years, and hidden in amongst them, one poisonous name.
Allegra.
Her finger hovered over the number. Her mouth went dry and her breath shortened. Then she pressed down and the phone began to make contact.
She heard the ringing tone. It went on and on, neither picked up nor sent to the answer service.
She was just about to give up when the ringing tone stopped abruptly, and a voice on the other end, slurring with drink, said tearfully, ‘Oh my God, Patrick, is that you? Please say it’s you. Oh Patrick.’ It began to sob. ‘I miss you!’
‘You know it’s not Patrick!’ Caitlyn yelled. ‘You know who it is.’
‘I just want him back so badly,’ Sara moaned. ‘I loved him more than you ever could.’
Caitlyn hung up and threw the phone across the room.