Pong picked that moment to jump onto the table and Ria made an instinctive comic ‘Eek’ sound, raising jazz hands of horror. She recalibrated, gave a forced chuckle.
‘Pong, you silly thing, you scared me.’ With the exception of Tara’s sister Alana, the Ollerton family weren’t cat people. She’d always made a tremendous fuss of Pong whenever she came round.
Pete stood to lift Pong off the table, transmitting a grateful telepathic ‘nice timing’ message to the Siamese. He didn’t sit down again, steeled himself to be as dismissive as it was within his remit to be.
‘Well, thanks for stopping by anyway, Ria. You really don’t need to bring me food. I’ve got a freezer full of it and I tend to eat at work. It’s sweet of you, but don’t trouble yourself.’
He smiled then, to soften the words, afraid they had come out as too sharp. Ria was still seated. She was determined to make him work for her exit.
‘I’m sorry if I’ve acted out of turn . . .’
‘No, don’t apologise, really.’ He started to walk out of the kitchen towards the front door, making it impossible now for her to stay longer without entering ridiculous territory. She got up, followed him slowly as if giving him the opportunity to change his mind and ask her to watch a film with him, settle down with a bottle of wine, stay.
‘Well, see you soon I hope,’ said Ria. Her arms opened, she craned her neck to kiss his cheek, caught him half on the mouth. She laughed, apologised again. Her perfume enveloped him and evoked the essence of his wife, his child, his life with them wiped out by some bastard who thought it was okay to text while driving an articulated lorry in wet snow.
He closed the front door as soon as she had climbed into her car and he had given her one dutiful wave; she blew a kiss to him through the glass. He usually felt obliged to stand there until she had started driving off, but not tonight. He just wanted to sleep, shut out the world including this house with all the memories of his wife dyed into it like watermarks. And the flipside of the memory coin – visuals of what had been to come: him picking up a gurgling baby, a Christmas tree in the corner with stacks of presents underneath. It suddenly became all too much for his head, set off by that damned perfume. He felt a tear pop out, slide down his cheek and dashed it away with the back of his hand, but let the others that came after fall. He wished they would dissolve him away like acid.
*
Upstairs, he took off his jeans and checked the pockets before putting them in the wash basket and found the card that Sal had given him, with Molly’s name and number on it. He thought he’d thrown it away.
He’d go again, he decided, attempt to fit in with the mad menagerie of people who talked over tea and ate cake. He had no other option.
Chapter 15
Laurie drove home from work and thought that even if she changed her mind, she wouldn’t be able to get to the teashop for her second session. Everyone would be eating, drinking, talking now. The man in the frumpy tank top and the little red-haired woman who looked like a bird, and the fireman who was a first-timer last week just like she was. Then her attention was hijacked by the sight of a black beetle-shiny Lexus with a personalised number plate parked up just before her drive, unmistakably Alex’s parents’ car. For a split second her spirits reacted as they used to, an urge to speed up so she could invite them in, put on the kettle. But then it twisted to an anxiety, a downward drag because of the souring between them and she wondered what they could possibly want.
She was slowing down to turn when Meredith strode out of her drive and went straight into the passenger side of the vehicle, eyes at pains to avoid Laurie. The Lexus sped off immediately, before Meredith could have had a chance to fasten her seat belt, which indicated how little the Wilders wanted a confrontation. They shouldn’t be at war with each other, really they shouldn’t, thought Laurie with an inward sigh. They were all grieving and it felt as if Laurie were doubly grieving because she had lost the whole of the Wilder clan. They had been pulled out of her life like a beesting and taken a big chunk of her heart with them. Yes, Naomi could be wilful, Meredith was too used to getting her own way and Brendan wasn’t exactly a bon viveur – but they were part of Alex and she had loved them, loved being in the embrace of his family.
Maybe she should sell up and give them some of the money, if it meant keeping them. The thought was opened up and shut down immediately by another which was standing in her head with arms crossed asking if she was joking. The Wilders weren’t hovering on the breadline by any stretch. They had a cottage in France and bought a new top-of-the-range car every year. They were always bragging about how well off they were. The greed was theirs, not hers. But this battle wasn’t about money, it was about control.
Laurie stepped into the house to find some envelopes on the doormat bound together by an elastic band. She picked them up to see that they had all been sent to Alex Wilder at his parents’ address. She kicked off her shoes and padded across to the kitchen island to sit down and read what they were. They had been slit open already and were all bank statements. She arranged them in order: September, October, November, December – two months before he died. All of them showed his salary from Gold Financier Services Ltd going in on the seventeenth of each month, on the nineteenth a transfer into their joint bank account for the household bills, then around the twentieth a direct debit to Barclaycard to cover his Visa bill. On the first of every month, the balance was reduced to nil as whatever remained in the account was drawn out in cash from a Southyork Bank branch in Sheffield. At the top of the December statement, a message emblazoned across the top: ‘We’re going paperless in April’. The Southyork Bank were, it seems, way behind every other financial establishment in Britain on that.
Where was January’s statement?
Laurie stared at the sheets of paper and questions bombed her brain from everywhere. Alex rarely carried cash on him so what had he been using it for? Why had the statements been going to his parents’ house? Why was he using his Visa and not his debit card? That’s not what he did.
She went to the bag in the kitchen, destined for the garden incinerator, and took out the wad of Alex’s Visa statements, laid them on the island and scrutinised them this time, ensuring her brain processed each entry. The spending on his Visa had increased hugely from last September; it appeared he had started loading everything onto it. Then she spotted a thousand pounds cash advance in January. Why on earth would he take out a cash advance on a Visa? That was a huge no-no in his book because he hated paying interest. Laurie pulled out her phone, checked the date. Alex had been on a four-day course in Edinburgh then. Why would he need a thousand pounds cash?
She felt something akin to the dreaded sugar shakes claiming her body; a panic. She leapt to an obvious conclusion, then as soon as it had its foot in the door of her head, she tried to shut it out again. He hadn’t had an affair, she would know it. Her senses would have risen to meet the threat. Because that’s what had happened last time.
*
Laurie had been going out with Alex for just over a year when she felt the change between them, subtle as the first autumn morning following summer, a portentous chill. For the past months, they had started talking about moving in together, settling down, the subject of a future family easing into their conversations, then that strange reverse thrust. At first, she had thought a fear of commitment was dragging his collar back, even though he had driven the pace. He stopped answering his phone, took an age to ring her back when she left messages. Suddenly he couldn’t stay over at her small flat as often, citing excuses such as he had an early start in the morning or was tired, even though that hadn’t bothered him before. She’d offered to stay at his instead but he put her off: the place was a mess, he wanted to cram in some work before bed. She knew he was hiding something. She knew he was hiding someone. A period of temporary madness happened where outwardly she tried to stay calm but inwardly she was a torrent of worry, stress and suspicion.