Lily lets herself into the flat. She has not been here since she left on Sunday but it is clear the moment she walks in that he has been here. He has rearranged the cushions on the sofa. He has taken things from the wardrobes in the bedroom. His overnight case is gone. He has showered and rehung his bath towel in the very particular way in which he always used to hang his bath towel. His toothbrush is gone; the tap is shining extra brightly. He has eaten lots of the unhealthy food she bought last week and carefully disposed of the wrappings in the recycling bin. He has emptied the waste bin and put a clean bag in the container. He has taken the cash she left behind, about five hundred pounds, and he has taken his phone charger, his Puffa jacket and his walking boots.
And there, tucked into the frame of the mirror over the fake fireplace, is an envelope, with her name on it. She takes off her coat and hangs it in the hallway. Then she returns and plucks the envelope from the mirror. She sits and she opens it and she reads it, her heart pounding hard beneath her ribs.
Darling Lily,
I have had to go somewhere far away. I want you to know that I have not been away from you all this time out of choice. A man took me, tried to kill me, left me for dead. I wish I could explain to you what happened, but I can’t. It’s very complicated and it’s to do with things that happened a long time ago. I see my passport has gone. I assume the police needed it when you reported me missing? It is possible they may tell you something strange about my passport. Don’t pay any attention. I am Carl Monrose. I have always been Carl Monrose, the man you fell in love with, the man who fell in love with you. Whatever they try to tell you about other people, that’s not me. Carl Monrose is a good person, who has a good job and married a good woman. Anything else doesn’t matter.
I’ll try to call you – I don’t know when. It might be a long time. Please don’t look for me. You won’t be able to find me. And if a man called Graham Ross tries to get in contact with you, please don’t talk to him. He is mad and he is dangerous and he is a liar.
There is a small amount of money in our bank account, a few hundred. I’ve enclosed the card. The PIN is 6709. I’m sorry there’s not more. And I’m sorry I had to take the cash. Also, and this is hard to say, the flat is rented. I wasn’t entirely honest with you about that and I know I may have given you the impression that I owned it. So I’m afraid unless you can pay the next rent instalment, which is due on 13 May, you may need to find somewhere else to live. I’m sorry for this slip in my transparency with you. I just wanted you to feel secure.
Every minute I have spent with you has been perfect, Lily. I wish I had met you twenty years ago. Maybe none of this would have happened. I love you more than I have ever loved anyone or anything in my whole stupid life.
Stay amazing, my love, and forgive me,
Carl
Lily folds the note back into a rectangle and slides it into the envelope. She puts the cash card into her handbag and she sighs. A slip in my transparency. She could almost laugh out loud. Here he is, lying to her from beyond the mists of time. Or is he? Maybe her husband truly believed he was Carl Monrose, all-round good guy and enigmatic everyman. Maybe she had cured him of his badness, if only temporarily. She thinks of the poor woman in Scotland, with her teenage daughter, and how they must have felt locked in that room with Carl for all those hours. And then she realises that those people weren’t in a room with Carl Monrose, they were in a room with Mark Tate. And this comforts her.
She slides the note into the outside pocket of her handbag. She will give it to Beverly Traviss. She doesn’t want it, not even as a souvenir. Then quickly she packs a suitcase, with as much as she can squeeze into it. She can come back for the rest another day. She peers from the window in the living room and waves at Russ, sitting at the wheel of his people carrier, reading the Saturday papers. He waves back at her and she gives him the thumbs up.
She’s going to be Russ and Jo’s au pair. Russ had the idea on the way back from Ridinghouse, he said. Mooted it to Jo who, in a moment of sleep-deprived desperation, agreed to a trial few days, and Lily has been staying with them since leaving Yorkshire, while the police searched the flat for evidence. It is a ridiculous turn of events. She doesn’t even like babies. But, actually, Darcy is quite a pleasant baby. She didn’t even cry when Jo first put her in her arms, just stared at her as if to say: You look all right. Jo said, ‘She likes you!’ and then, ‘Did you know that babies are genetically programmed to prefer people with pretty faces? It’s because they look more like babies.’ Which Lily took to be a compliment. But it might not have been. Jo is perfectly nice, if a bit brittle. But more than that she is so very grateful to Lily because now she can go to the gym sometimes and have a little lie-down during the day and meet a friend for lunch every now and then. They will give her fifty pounds a week. That’s fine. And Russ has given her his old laptop so she can continue her distance-learning accountancy course. Also, Putney is lovely. Much nicer than Oxted. Eventually, hopefully, when she has graduated, she would like to have her own flat here. And maybe, one day – not yet – marry a nice Englishman. She likes Englishmen very much. The women, she is not so sure about, but she is getting used to them. Or maybe it is the other way round.
There is one more thing she needs to do before she leaves this flat. She opens her jewellery box in the bedroom and she searches through the tangle of tacky costume jewellery that she’d brought to England with her from the Ukraine in anticipation of the nights in ritzy nightclubs and celebrity-filled restaurants she’d foolishly imagined might be waiting for her over here. She pulls out a small suedette pouch and peers inside. There are the wedding rings she found in Carl’s filing cabinet. She knows whom they belong to now. They belong to a woman in Wales called Amanda Jones. She married Mark Tate in 2006 after a whirlwind four-week romance. He told her his name was Charles Moore. When she started asking him too many questions about who he was and where he came from, when she started going through his personal belongings trying to find clues to the man she married, he walked out, taking her rings from her finger and calling her a whore.
Amanda Jones recognised his picture from the newspaper reports and turned up at her local police station. She’s remarried now and has a small child. Lily will send her the rings. The money will come in useful for her, Lily is sure.
Then she takes one more look around the flat where she spent ten days of her life married to someone called Carl Monrose and she closes the door behind her.
As Russ pulls away from the car park, they drive past Wolf’s Hill Boulevard and Lily looks up at the flat on the first floor. The light is still flickering. She wonders again what it was about that light that had so troubled her in those days when she was here alone. And then she remembers sitting on the sofa, calling her husband’s phone, frantically, insanely, again and again, and then the sound of an animal roaring, so loud that she’d thought of the wolves that disturbed her sleep sometimes in Kiev. And then . . . silence. Her calls stopped going through. It was the sound, she now knew, not of a displaced wolf but of Graham Ross throwing her husband’s phone against the cooker hood, just before he tried to strangle him to death. It was the sound of a tortured man finally acknowledging his pain.
She’d heard it and she’d buried it, deep inside her subconscious.
A sign by the road says: ‘Central London 12’.
She turns to Russ, a kind man, and she smiles.