JEN
We are standing outside Laurence’s house. It’s already dark even though it’s only just after four in the afternoon. After the scene down by Tate Modern and on the bridge, Bex managed to calm me down, but only just. Wherever I looked I seemed to see Laurence’s face staring back at me. I would spot him amongst the crowds, convinced he was there. I’d rush forward, almost feel as though I could smell him, reach out and touch him, only to be met by the shocked face of a stranger. Each encounter was like a little death, a small stab in the heart.
Bex had led me away, back across the Thames to St Paul’s. She bought me some water and made me sit on the steps of the cathedral. She kept telling me to take deep breaths, that she would help me, that she would be by my side no matter what. I tried to talk about the messages, repeating fragments from them, wondering how Laurence could be so cruel. What was he trying to do? Drive me insane? I’ve read numerous thrillers and watched countless films in which a man tries to gaslight his wife or girlfriend. This was not happening to me, I told myself, it couldn’t be happening to me.
‘What the fuck is Laurence playing at?’ I said.
Bex went silent before she said, ‘Are you sure it’s him? I mean—’
‘What are you even saying?’ I interrupted. ‘Of course it’s him, who else could it be?’
‘I know, I know, but just listen,’ she said.
‘You’re kidding me, aren’t you?’ I stood up in a small act of protest, as if I intended to storm off, even though I had no intention of doing so.
‘Just sit down and let me explain,’ she said, taking hold of my hand and pulling me back down. ‘I know it seems as though Laurence is behind all of this, but you said yourself we need some kind of proof.’
‘What kind of proof?’
‘Just something that links him to this. Something on his phone or in his house.’
‘And how do you expect to get that? I doubt turning up on his doorstep and asking him to surrender his phone would work somehow. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m not his favourite person at the moment.’
There was a mischievous glint in Bex’s eyes that I recognised as a sign of trouble. She reached into her pocket and took out a key.
‘I may not have mentioned that I have … this – the key to Laurence’s house,’ she said, holding it up as a kind of miniature trophy.
‘Bex – where the hell did you get that?’
‘Let’s just say that I don’t always give things back.’
‘I thought he’d changed the locks after I moved out.’
‘He did … but I managed to get hold of a new one.’
‘How?’
‘Once when he was away on a work trip he asked me to check on the house. I kept one of the spare keys, thinking one day it might come in useful.’
‘So what do you think we should do?’
‘We should go and have a look around, just to make sure that it is Laurence who is messing with you.’
‘Don’t you think we should go to the police?’ I asked.
‘You could do, but what would that solve? I mean, all they will do is give him a caution, at the most. And he’ll be there, free to walk the streets, free to spy on you from a distance. You never know how it might escalate or what he might be capable of.’
I stared at Bex, certain that she could see the uncertainty in my face.
‘Don’t look so worried, nothing bad is going to happen to you. I’ll be there.’
‘You promise?’
‘Of course – I’m hardly going to send you into Laurence’s house by yourself, am I? And this way we may be able to find some kind of evidence, that we can take to the police.’
I had dozens of doubts – the phrase inadmissible evidence came into my mind – but Bex told me that it wouldn’t be like a burglary, because I had once lived there and, if I was stopped by one of his neighbours, I could tell them that I was picking something up I had left in the house. An old laptop. A box of CDs from the 90s. Something sad like that.
And so that’s why we are here, watching and waiting. My heart is beating fast, too fast, and my mouth tastes like sawdust. We’ve been here for the best part of forty minutes, and no one has put any lights on even though it’s gone dark. Bex whispers to say she’s confident that Laurence is not at home. And that we should go in. I start to explain why I think this is a bad idea, but then she goes ahead, walks down the street and into the front garden. She looks at me as if to ask whether I’m coming with her. She’s right, I tell myself. It’s the only way to know for certain.
I try to think through the action of that day again, who was where, when, and doing what. Daniel must have planned something, as he had taken a knife with him. He knew about Laurence, as it seemed he recognised him. But why was Laurence there? Yes, he liked jogging, and Parliament Hill Fields was a regular spot for him, but more often in the evening after he’d finished work. Had he been following Victoria? Was he jealous of her relationship with Daniel? Did Laurence know that Victoria was pregnant? Perhaps some of these answers lie inside the house and so I take a deep breath and follow Bex towards the front door.
She rings the bell, just to be on the safe side, and when no one answers she opens the door and walks inside. I hesitate for a moment because the sensation is like stepping back in time for me. I feel a little disconnected – I’ve learned to recognise the signs of what my therapist calls dissociation – and I try to do the exercises that help me bring me back to myself.
‘You’d better shut the door,’ says Bex.
I blink and do as she says.
‘We may not have much time. Now you know the house better than me, so where should we start?’
I think for a moment. ‘I suppose we could start with his office, upstairs. There’s a computer there.’
‘Great,’ she says.
As we climb the stairs I inhale the smell of the beeswax. I see myself, the first morning after I had slept with Laurence here. I’m radiant with happiness. My skin is glowing. Everything seems sharper, brighter, more defined. I go into the kitchen and try to make a coffee for Laurence, who is upstairs, but I realise that his machine is beyond me. After five minutes of trying to make it work I’m considering searching for instant when Laurence comes into the kitchen. He sees the state of the coffee machine and the mess I’m in and laughs. He takes hold of me and leads me back to bed.
All that’s gone now, I know that. But how could that sense of a love so deep it felt like a kind of hunger, how could that have turned into this?
I show Bex the office. She starts to look through a filing cabinet while I switch on the Mac. Of course, it’s password protected. I tap in the password that Laurence used when we were together, a combination of the word, ‘Bauhaus’ and the year of his birth, 1972. The icon shakes its little head in refusal. I try using a lowercase ‘b’, but again I’m refused. I put the year first, the word second, but this doesn’t work. I try a series of other possibilities – the name of his mother, his first dogs, RexWhistler (yes, really), and then, saddest of all, my own name. But nothing works.
‘How are you getting on?’ asks Bex.
‘It’s not letting me in,’ I reply. ‘What about you – have you found anything?’
‘Nothing but work stuff,’ she says. ‘But I do have to commend him for his filing system. Talk about ordered.’
‘That’s Laurence for you. He always was. Used to drive me mad sometimes.’
I remember the time we had a blazing row because I had put a wine glass down on one of his blueprints. There was no stain – I’d already learned that I had to be a bit careful around his things – but Laurence worried about the possibility of one. And of course, this conversation mutated into an argument about my general slovenliness versus what I called, during the heat of the screaming match, his anal retentiveness. He warned me not to put the incident into my column, but of course it ended up in there, related line by line. Laurence had stopped reading my pieces, but perhaps he heard about it from someone at work because the day after it appeared he made some snarky comment about it over dinner. I didn’t want another row and so I ignored it.
‘Let’s check the bedroom, shall we?’ suggests Bex.
The thought of walking into that space where we had spent so much time, where we had made love, makes me feel sick.
‘Do you want to look in there? It’s just that …’ I can’t finish the sentence.
‘I’ll go ahead,’ she says. ‘Why don’t you go and check out, I don’t know … where would Laurence keep something he didn’t want anyone else to find?’
‘As you know he’s not a big one for personal possessions.’ Suddenly something occurs to me that makes me look at the house in a totally new light. My voice drops to a whisper. ‘Bex, do you think there’s anything belonging to Victoria in here?’
‘Oh my God, of course!’ she says. ‘There’s bound to be. There might be something of hers that could help. Why don’t you look in the bathroom and I’ll check the bedroom.’
I hear her open one of the drawers by the bed. I dread to think what she might find there and so I leave her and walk into the bathroom. It’s a gorgeous big room at the back of the house, with an enormous freestanding bath in the middle.
Part of me doesn’t want to find any trace of Victoria in the house. The thought of coming across something like an old packet of contraceptives or an item of underwear, even one of her lipsticks, makes me want to retch. I can’t seem to control my breathing. I feel like running out of the room, down the stairs and into the road. I catch a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror. There’s a nasty yellow and purple bruise on my forehead. My blonde hair is lank. I have shadows under my eyes. No wonder Laurence doesn’t love me. Perhaps he never loved me. Was he always waiting for the moment when he could finish it all? Did my bad behaviour give him the perfect excuse he was looking for? I wonder again how long he had been seeing Victoria.
‘Found anything?’ calls Bex from the other room.
‘N-no, not yet,’ I answer.
My eyes are drawn to the cupboard below the sink. As I reach out for the handle, I notice my fingers are trembling. I close my eyes for a moment, take a deep breath, and tell myself that I need to just do this. I pull the handle towards me.
The first thing I see is a bottle of Penhaligon’s aftershave I bought Laurence for one of his birthdays. Behind this there’s a pair of tweezers and an expensive pot of moisturiser. I twist open the top of the jar and see, in the top of the cream, the faint impression left by a slender finger. I imagine Victoria standing here, in front of the mirror, massaging the potion into her face. I can’t let this distract me. I have to search the rest of the house. We don’t know how long we have before Laurence returns. But just before I go to close the cupboard I notice something stashed away at the back, behind the bottles of cleaning products. I push my hand past the bottles and feel something with a sharp plastic edge. I wrench it forwards, not caring whether I knock anything over. I can’t believe what I’m holding.
It’s the Guy Fawkes mask that I last saw on the person who attacked me.