37

I settled back into my chair, feeling about a hundred years old. I had wanted to be surer of my ground first, but hey. There would never be a better time.

I poured Milo more coffee and said, “I think I should come clean about something. I saw Will the day Frannie died, here in the village. Not just Jason—Will, too. And he wasn’t supposed to be here. He should have been at his offices in London. I knew it would look bad for him, so I didn’t—I couldn’t just toss him in like that. After all, he’s my husband. I wanted to give him a chance to explain.”

“And did he?” Milo wanted to know. “Did he explain?”

I shook my head, the picture of misery. “I chickened out, didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know.”

“Most people do that.”

“Do they? It runs big in my family, that’s for sure. It’s like a giant hole in the brain where we hide things, where we hide the fact that everything’s coming unstuck.”

“Did you really think he had anything to do with Frannie’s death?”

I shook my head, but my expression was full of doubt. It was important he understand that I was at best a reluctant witness. “Not really,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. I just couldn’t figure out what he was doing there, otherwise. Why he was even in the village. Or even why he seemed so friendly with Frannie at the wake for Anna. I couldn’t make sense of it and until I did, I didn’t want to make wild accusations. Especially against my husband. I just didn’t want to be that person.” I jutted out my chin. This he had to get straight. “I am not that person.”

Milo did not look much concerned about my ethics or my moral quandary. But he did look sympathetic, his face creased with concern. He pushed aside his coffee mug.

“Where is your husband now?”

We’d arrived there at last. I shook my head. “He left early this morning. He didn’t say where he was going. Just ‘out of town.’”

That earned me a look.

“Did you notice if the envelope was there when he left?” Milo asked.

“No. I had no reason to go into the hallway until later.”

“So the real mail might have landed on top of it. He might have left the envelope there as he was leaving.”

I shrugged. I guess so. “It was underneath the regular mail, yes. I think it was.”

“Your husband. He travels a lot.” Again the look of unease. I imagined he was wondering why I put up with Will’s absences and disappearances, his happy hours. I couldn’t say. You sort of get worn down. You get used to it.

Will’s travels used to suit me, or they did for a long while. He’d go to Berlin or somewhere for days at a time and I’d stock up on gelato and queue up the On Demand service with all my Breaking Bads, my Better Call Sauls, some BM: London, plus a movie or two from the girl channel. I wish I could say I used my time wisely, reading the great philosophers, but this sort of film fest was my escape. I’d open a bottle of wine and sometimes the contents just seemed to disappear.

So I didn’t mind the absences, at least not at first. But slowly, something changed. His disappearances in the evenings became a different story. One night he said he was going to the Bull for a drink with Gideon’s father on some pretext of important business to discuss. He may have used that excuse one time too often, and that night curiosity and boredom got the better of me. I wandered over to the pub on my own.

He wasn’t there. Duh. I looked in the nooks and crannies where he might be and finally I sat at the bar and had a drink alone, like this was what I’d planned to do all along. The knowing looks, particularly the bartender’s, said it was obvious I was checking up on my husband. Those looks of pity were enough to ensure I never did that again. It wasn’t until later I wondered if they’d all already known what it took me so long to tumble to.

Now I sat with Milo thinking about marriages, especially the arranged kind like Dhir and Rashima’s, and feeling bereft, cut loose, adrift—all the words we use to mean nothing much matters to us anymore. I realized that of all my family, only my grandmother would have had the intelligence, the emotional IQ they talk about, to pick someone compatible for me. Someone, as no doubt she would have put it, who could see through my nonsense. Whether that would have worked for me and Will is anybody’s guess. If it were left to his mother to play matchmaker he’d certainly be with Clarice now.

Milo sat quietly, waiting for the dark clouds to pass. He said at last, “I’ll put a watch on the house. And I’ll have them keep a lookout for his car, just so we know where he is. But to be honest, we’re stretched thin and I can’t have the house watched all the time. Could you go away until this settles down? Stay at a hotel, perhaps?”

I shook my head. “No. When will it settle? Next year? Next decade? Hey, life goes on. I’m staying here in my own home, even with the doors and windows locked, and sleeping with one eye open.”

From his resigned expression, he knew I’d say that.

“Don’t let anyone in. No one. Do not open the door to anyone.”

“Including Will?”

“Especially Will. Of course Will.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“And get the locks changed. I can recommend a bloke who can get them fixed today.”

I hesitated. This was all moving so fast.

“Your husband is violent,” he said. “Do you think I don’t see cases like this every day? Putting aside the question of murder, he’s violent toward you. Did you really expect me to believe your story about that shiner of yours? And now he’s abandoned you.”

I was shaken by his words. More than I wanted to let on. The thought of a pissed-off Will popping back in without warning unsettled me now. But I said, “That’s overkill, isn’t it? I mean, excuse the expression, but somehow I doubt he’ll be back. Knowing Will, if he thinks you’re looking for him he’ll turn himself in at the station. With his solicitor.”

“Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. But he’s gone off and not said where or when he’s coming back. You’ve every legal right to secure your house. Whether he had anything to do with these killings is another issue—we’ve no proof.”

“No,” I said. “No proof at all.”

He looked at me for a very long time. Then: “We could get proof,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Would you be willing to wear a wire?”

“Get him to confess?”

He nodded. “To the affair. To the killings, if he did them. Yes.”

I shook my head doubtfully. Not convinced, me. But clearly excited by the challenge: “Do you really think it would work? He’s not dumb.”

“You’d be surprised. There is a certain … mentality at work sometimes. A certain caliber of man who can’t keep quiet about what he’s done.”

Milo didn’t leave for ages that day. My, but tongues would wag now, particularly over at Hacienda de Heather. Milo was trying to prepare me, taking extra care to let me know what I was letting myself in for. And wanting to make sure I would stay the course. That I wouldn’t freak out or freeze up or in any way disrupt the plan to get the goods on Will, if goods there were to be had.

He said something odd just before he left. I thought he was talking about Attwater but maybe he meant himself: “The thing with being police, there’s no one to stop you if you go to the bad. That’s when they circle the wagons—isn’t that your expression? To protect the team. To protect themselves.”

I just looked at him like I knew what he was trying to say. I didn’t suppose it mattered.

Once he left, I wandered into Will’s office, the one room I hadn’t purged in my frenzy of cleaning that morning. Will had long since reverted to the halcyon days when a scout at Oxford would clean up after him. I was now, presumably, the scout. But the police wanted him sent down for good—another of their charming euphemisms. You aren’t expelled for criminal misdeeds, you’re sent down. It all sounds so much nicer that way.

Could I really do this, I wondered?

I must, I answered. Not just for my safety. For my sanity.

I decided I’d bin his stuff tomorrow, once I’d had a good search through the drawers and pockets. I looked first for the gun I knew he’d inherited, a Browning his grandfather had smuggled back from service in Cypress. Will kept it in a locked drawer—technically it was illegal to have it without a firearms certificate. That drawer was unlocked. And there was no gun.

This didn’t particularly alarm or surprise me. He liked to keep the gun with him when he traveled by car, in case he was set upon by motorway bandits.

I would have pitied Will if I didn’t loathe him so much for getting us into this mess. For hitting this replay button of my father and Tralee, making me relive all that. Those memories were what had had me pacing the halls and stairways of the house for weeks—and walking, walking, walking along that river—trying to exhaust myself to sleep. Booze and the occasional pill weren’t helping anymore.

Anna and her enormous self-regard, her reckless disregard for anyone’s happiness but her own. Couldn’t Will see it? Tralee at least had her fascinating medical complaints. For my father to have cheated on my mother, there had to be some touching human component, you see, some justification for the bad behavior. It couldn’t just be about sex. Oh, no. That would be too ordinary, too common. Theirs was a love to last the ages. Right.

I realized Anna had probably made Alfie’s condition her pity play—not pity for Alfie, of course, but for what his illness had done to her.

I went to have a look in the attic for Will’s favorite suitcase. It wasn’t there. I hadn’t really expected it to be.

I decided after all that I’d start binning his stuff in bags right away. I wouldn’t even bother setting some of it aside for Oxfam.

Clean sweep.