31

The next day came the call from Rashima.

I had just returned home from a walk in the freezing cold and was boiling water for green tea when my mobile buzzed.

“Hey, Jill.” I should have realized from the tone of her voice—straining high and nervous, without her usual warm singsong notes. “I was wondering if you’d like some tea. If you’d like to come over for some tea.”

Well, that was nothing if not clear. I started to invite her over instead, but she added that she was making a Swiss roll using Chetna’s recipe from the Great British Bake Off, and I could not resist a little stress eating. A Swiss roll might be exactly what the doctor ordered to take my mind off things, if only for a few blessed moments.

“I’ll be right over.”

“Give me ten more minutes to let the cake cool so I can frost it.”

It sounded just like a normal visit.

The cardamom, pistachio, and coffee Swiss roll was beyond perfection. Rashima knew that woman doesn’t live by bread alone: cake is what makes it all worthwhile. 

I’ll always remember her doing that, making the roll especially for me, to soften the blow. Not everyone in the village was up themselves. Rashima was one of the good people.

The sweet, lovely aroma hit me as I walked in the door. I sat at her kitchen island as she worked, flipping through one of her magazines (“Six Ways to Tell He’s Lying”; I dunno, is he breathing?) as she made the icing of double cream, sugar, instant coffee, and chopped pistachios. She didn’t talk as she worked, but she was an artist and I dared not disturb her.

Suddenly she put down the spreading knife, a look of dismay on her face.

“I forgot to make the little chocolate flowers to decorate.”

“Well, that’s it,” I said. “I’m leaving.” Rashima could be a bit literal-minded, so I was always careful to smile to make sure she knew I was kidding. She returned the smile but it was not her usual sunny offering. More like the smile you get when you’ve made a joke in poor taste. I wondered what could be the matter.

“I can never tell when you’re joking,” she said.

“No kidding.”

She cut two generous slices of cake and poured the tea before leading the way into her living room, where we settled on a sofa in front of a glass-topped bamboo coffee table. Her home was like a sanctuary, all light balsam wood and wicker, with plants on every surface. From one corner came the soothing drip of an outdoor fountain. The Khans’ place was a refuge from the relentlessly tartan-or-chintz-covered horsiness of the rest of the village.

“I think I can always tell when you’ve got something on your mind,” I prompted her.

“Please,” she said with a small laugh. “It’s bad enough being married to an all-seeing shrink. I don’t need one for a friend, too.” She hesitated, then said, “It’s because I’m your friend, you see, that I … ” She began to separate the icing from her slice, shoveling it with her fork to the edge of the plate. I supposed she was trying to save calories but what a waste.

“That you what?” I prompted.

She began stabbing at her slice of cake distractedly. I was busy discovering it was the most delicious Swiss roll ever made.

“I put myself in your shoes,” she answered obliquely in her honeyed voice. “If you knew something, something like what I know, something that affected your whole life, would you be obligated to tell? As a friend? Or would it be a true act of friendship never to let you know, and to hope the whole thing would blow over and you none the wiser?”

“Rashima, I—”

“Let me finish. If I don’t say this in my way, I’ll never get it said.”

I nodded solemnly. Reluctantly, I put down my fork.

“But now the situation is so serious. I mean, it was always serious, but … now there is a sort of—well, I can’t say a moral angle. There was always that.”

For God’s sake.

“With Anna dead, you see … I can’t not tell you. I can’t see a way to not telling you. And I can’t not tell the police.”

I thought I could see for sure now where this was going. “Will,” I said.

And her face crumbled into what I can best describe as a mashup of gratitude and wretched misery. Those theater masks depicting comedy and tragedy? Rashima managed to achieve both simultaneously. Gratitude that she hadn’t had to say the name of the villain aloud, or to spell out his crime. She knew I meant Will as in William, my husband. And I knew that she knew that I knew—and how she knew that, I don’t know. Except Rashima was one very savvy lady. It probably helped that I didn’t reel back in disbelief, that my shoulders sagged with unhappiness, and that there were tears at the corners of my eyes. There was that.

“Jillian—Jill—I am so sorry. How did you find out? When did you find out?”

I could have asked her the same questions, but I said, “Not long ago. Quite recently, in fact. I found some credit card charges that couldn’t be accounted for in the normal way.”

“For her?” I nodded. “He bought her presents?” This seemed to horrify her—to horrify her even more than the thought of my husband shagging Anna every spare moment God sent. The presents elevated it to the status of a love affair for the ages. Bless her simple little heart, she got it: that was the real betrayal. The whole time he was making small talk about the stock market, and giving me vague answers to inquiries as to how his day went, and putting celery in the vegetable drawer, he was probably fantasizing about how his life would have been better if only he’d met Anna first, his head stuck inside some porno fantasy only Anna could fulfill.

“Well, yeah. But not roses and perfume and books of poetry, at least not that I’m aware. He bought her some things from Intime.”

At that she, God bless her further, screwed up her little face into a moue of disgust.

“He bought her knickers?” She didn’t ask the question so much as spit it out. “What a creep. I’m sorry. Should I have said that? He is your husband, but—”

“For heaven’s sake, Rashima. He’s a dishonest, lying, sneaking fuck. Creep is probably one of the nicer terms you could use.”

She nodded, agreeing almost happily. Her husband would probably approve of the appropriate display of anger as a healthy release.

“How long?” she asked. “How long were they … ?”

“How long were they at it, my dear friend and dearer husband? I’m not actually sure. I only noticed the receipts about three months ago. It might have been going on a year or more—I can’t say without access to his account.”

“Wow,” she said. “That really sucks. I’m sorry.”

Anyone else saying that, I might have gone all prickly. I can’t bear to have anyone feeling sorry for me. I got my fill of that when my brother died, and my mother, and when my father married Tralee. But since it was Rashima, the empathy was like a balm. The tears began flowing in earnest now, on both sides. She went out of the room and returned with a box of tissues.

“Thanks. I thought I was all cried out, but … You’re so kind. Always so kind.”

“Never mind that,” she said, suddenly all business. “We have to decide what and when to tell the police.” Notice she didn’t say “if.” “I don’t want to push Will in front of a train,” she continued, “no matter how much he deserves it, but they will surely see this as important. They must, however, keep in mind that ‘unfaithful’ and ‘murderer’ are two different things.”

I felt I could debate that, but I let her go on.

“I just can’t, you know, withhold evidence.”

This was what I had been afraid of. While she was out of the room retrieving the tissue, I’d been busy thinking what to say to her. Rashima was the most ethical person I think I ever knew. God fearing, authority fearing, a believer that the police were just doing the best gosh-darn job they could in an evil world full of hijackers and terrorists. It was a wonder she hadn’t rung the station already; I knew only her sense of loyalty as a friend and neighbor had stopped her. As well as a certain fear of the unknown: there would be no way to stuff this particular genie back in the bottle.

“No,” I said. “You can’t. But you can let me tell them, in my own way.” Whatever that way was. I only knew that I would be shut out from the case entirely once the police knew how close to it I was—how the case was actually in my basement, in a manner of speaking: I had finally realized it was Anna’s perfume I had detected there on a few occasions.

I wasn’t ready to have all the avenues of information closed to me. Heck, they might decide I was a suspect in killing Anna—what more logical leap could they make, after all? Except the logical leap to Will’s having done it.

“How did you find out, by the way?” I asked.

She actually hung her head and would not meet my eye, as if she were ashamed for me of the dirty rutting scoundrel that was my husband.

“It was Dhir. Dhir saw them, you see.”

I sat back, the image of what Dhir must have seen splattering across me in a dark spray of tangled memories.

“Really?” Was there no end to the number of people who knew what my faithless husband got up to? Did the police know already? “When? When did he see them? Where? Come on. Spill, Rashima.”

“This is so awful. I am so sorry, Jill.”

“Never mind that,” I said, all business in my turn now. “Just tell me, okay? It can’t hurt any more than it does already.”

Well, it could, but I’m a great believer in pulling the plaster off in one rip.

“He saw them on the train together.”

“Really? Were they snogging or something? In public?”

“Yes, actually. And holding hands. I’m so, so—”

“Honestly, if you tell me again how sorry you are, Rashima, I will scream the house down around our heads.”

“Sorry.” She was crying—I’m furious, raging within and without, and she’s crying. Typical. But I softened my voice in case my anger made her retreat into silence. I needed to know what she knew, and, as she lived by some byzantine code of honor I could not for a moment begin to understand, I was afraid she’d clam up.

“What else did he see? What did Dhir see?”

“Will got off before she did. The train, I mean—oh, God, I didn’t mean … anyway: he got off the train at the station just before Weycombe. I don’t know how he got home—cabbed it, I guess. I suppose the idea was that they couldn’t be seen arriving in the village together.”

I didn’t give a shit how he got home, of course, but it was curious. Just a curious sidebar in the action-packed romance of Bond, James Bond.

“So,” I wondered aloud, “while Anna was busy owning her sexuality and being brought to fullness as a woman, where was her husband? Where was Alfie?”

“‘Owning her sexuality’?”

“It’s something I read in a women’s magazine. They must think we’re all morons.”

“Besides,” said Rashima, “maybe Alfie was looking for someone to bring him to fullness as a male.”

“Huh?”

“Haven’t you seen the way he looks at other women? I mean, like, all the time?”

“He never showed the slightest interest in me, so, no. And besides, he’s sick all the time.”

“Men have to be dead to stop being interested in sex.”

Well, yeah, there’s that.

“You’re not jealous,” she said. “Say it’s not so. Alfie had a roving eye, nothing blatant or creepy, but—oh, aware, somehow. You probably just didn’t notice. I’m sure he looked at you too.”

“Thanks. I guess.”

The next question was the hardest to ask, but I had to know.

“When?” Meaning, how long had these two, Dhir and Rashima, known and kept quiet? A corollary question was, of course, who else knew? In such a small place as Weycombe, the fact that Garvin hadn’t put a notice in the paper’s gossip column might be down to sheer forgetfulness on his part. “When did Dhir see them?”

“When? See them, erh … ?”

“Yes. Snogging, on the train. When did Dhir see them doing that?” That still got me. Will was not a kid anymore, and neither was Anna. Not even hardly. That they could not contain themselves, given the chance of being seen in public (a one hundred percent chance, as it turned out), spoke volumes for the lust propelling them into this idiotic display. Did Will actually think he was Lord Byron or something? I almost couldn’t credit him with it. It was so outside the staid, boring (yes, boring; boring as fuck) man he was, deep down. I suspected that the fact I knew how boring he was lay behind the infidelity. I knew too much. Or he had too much to prove.

“It was six months ago.” Off my look, she rushed to add: “I only just found out.”

Meaning, Dhir saw it as a guys-must-stick-together thing.

But, wow. Wow wow wow. So it predated Anna’s politico affair? Although maybe it ran parallel. I wouldn’t put it past her.

Rashima had been doing the same math I had.

“It was just before what we saw at the party. You know, at Macy’s party. Dhir sort of thought she’d moved on so no need to say anything to you.”

“Yes,” I said. “No doubt Anna thought our MP was a leg up on the power ladder.”

“A leg over, more like.”

I looked at her and despite it all, despite the anger ricocheting inside my head, I managed a smile. She returned it, soggy with tears though it was. Good old Rash.

“Exactly,” I said.

“You don’t think … ” she began. Her slice of cake was reduced to rubble, like a demolition site. I had absentmindedly hoovered up every bite of mine.

“Don’t think what?” I put my teacup on the table, a bit too late. Tea had sloshed all over the saucer during these revelations.

“You don’t think Will, um … ?”

Of course I knew what she was getting at but I wanted her to say it aloud. I needed her to say it for me.

“It’s just that, he was at that party, too. And if we saw, and we think Alfie saw, don’t you think Will saw, too?”

“It’s a thought,” I said neutrally. It gave Will one hell of a motive. I was sure he had seen Anna and her latest conquest. I hoped it cut like a knife. “You didn’t see?”

“See Will seeing them, you mean? No. No, I don’t think so … ” But her voice trailed off uncertainly.

Given time, her memory might improve. Me, I was busy remembering yet another party, one of my Court Cookouts, where I saw a smile pass between Will and Anna. This would have been in August, well over a year before. These events had grown to include nearly everyone in our circle. The village doctor, the woman who owned the flower shop, friends from work willing to make the trek out from London. As I recalled, Macy and Barry had been there; Frannie Pope had even closed up her shop for the occasion. All the usual suspects.

It was just a smile, I’d told myself, that was all. Innocent. You know, the way a baby smiles not because something’s funny but because it’s got gas. Okay, bad example, but you know what I mean. That kind of smile. An involuntary reflex. Someone smiles at us, we smile back. We humans have been doing that since we first swung down from the trees.

And yet … And yet. Didn’t their eyes meet and linger for just a moment? Yes, I knew they had: sort of locked, just holding the gaze a second too long. Hadn’t it been a meaningful glance, an exchange with notes of banked passion, passion delayed or denied?

Why was Anna smiling at my husband?

Smiling what looked like an invitation at my husband?

Stop it. Stop! I had ordered myself at the time. Their eyes met, the way your eyes will meet someone’s as you scan the room looking for the canapés, hoping for someone to talk to besides the software engineer you’re landed with at the moment. Will didn’t even like Anna. He’d said so often enough. Said he couldn’t stand pushy women like her. He’d been saying that since she sold us our house.

And yet, still … Wasn’t there in her eyes that sort of yearning—that same look I’d once had for him? And he for me? And he, didn’t he sort of stare coldly, in that way he had that struck fear into my heart? Until suddenly that stare would thaw into a smile, a very sexy smile and my heart would thump into life again.

Rashima tried picking up her own cup again with shaking hands and gave up the effort as hopeless. She clasped her hands tightly in her lap instead. Finally, she asked, “What will you do?”

“Rashima, I only wish I knew what in hell to do. I suppose I should be packing or something.”

“No, I meant, will you tell the police?”

I shrugged. “Now I’m trying to think what to say. I can only repeat what you told me. After that, they’ll want to hear it direct from your husband. From Dhir. Will he do that? I mean, Dhir really can’t not tell them.”

She looked a bit startled—this was moving fast, and I don’t think she’d thought much beyond putting me out of my misery by filling me in on the doings of my faithless husband. Of course she knew the police had to be told about their new suspect, but she probably hadn’t expected me to capitulate so readily to the idea.

Besides: “I think Dhir planned to tell them today,” she said. “Since there’s been no arrest, knowing all this started to make him uneasy.”

So that was that. It was out of my hands now.

Que sera, sera.