Ruby looked to be in shock when she came back into the living room; her face was so pale I thought she’d faint. She looked at me as though she hardly recognized me, which wasn’t surprising, really, but while we waited for the undertaker to arrive she let me sit next to her and hold her. After Tom was taken away, the police locked up the house and kept the keys. They said she could have them back in a few days and she seemed too stunned to respond. We stood outside the house afterward. Our cars were parked next to each other and we sat in her car for a while, neither of us knowing what to do. We swapped numbers, just as though we were normal people, as though we didn’t have this history between us. As though we hadn’t slept with each other’s husbands and covered up the death of hers. She was going back to her flat, she said. It seemed like she had no one she could call on. Nobody she could talk to. It was exactly the same for me.
It was two weeks before I heard from her again.
* * *
• • •
She sent me a message early one Friday morning, two weeks after Tom died. I was taking a long weekend so I was at home on my own; Harry had gone in to work. Had she known that? I was just trying on my new yoga pants; there was a pregnancy yoga session on at the gym in town that morning and I thought I’d give it a go. I had every intention of being one of those lithe and relaxed yummy mummies that you see on adverts. And yes, when I put them on I thought of Ruby and me in our fictional yoga class, but then she was always on my mind.
When I saw the message: Hi, it’s me. Are you free for a chat? my knees were suddenly so weak I had to sit down on the bed. Had something happened? Was she going to warn me that the police would call?
I took a deep breath. If they were going to contact me, I needed to know. I started to type Has anyone suspected anything? and realized how that might look if our messages were ever seen, so changed it to a chatty, Hi, how are you?
She must have assumed I was being friendly. Immediately she replied: Fine, thanks. Just thought a coffee would be good.
Oh, decisions, decisions. I could bend my tired body into downward dog while awaiting the treat of a wheatgrass smoothie. On the other hand I could face my husband’s mistress—or was that my lover’s widow?—and talk about how we’d collaborated in concealing the way he died. It was a hard choice but eventually I replied:
I’ll be at the Oval Café at 11.
CHAPTER 72
Emma
I got there early and sat with a glass of water in the corner at the back of the café. There were just enough people there so that we wouldn’t be noticed, but not enough that anyone would have to sit near us. The French windows were open and most people had spilled outside onto the small terrace. At the counter there was a wide array of cakes and normally I would’ve made the most of them, but that day my stomach was clenched and I couldn’t have eaten a thing. I saw a little black car drive up the street, then slow down and park. I recognized it immediately. It had been parked outside their house that afternoon, two weeks ago.
My stomach tightened further as she climbed out of the car. It was as though I was seeing her for the first time. My competitor. The woman who’d been having an affair with my husband. She looked younger than I remembered, more like the old photo I’d seen on their mantelpiece, the one where Tom’s son was young. Her hair was wavy now and I could see highlights there, glinting as she walked across the road.
She walked into the café and looked around. I waved halfheartedly, wondering why on earth I was there.
“Hi,” she said. She blushed bright red and I thought, Good, so you should. I had to quell the thought that I wasn’t exactly an innocent here. “Can I get you a drink?”
“No, thanks. I’m fine.”
She ordered coffee at the counter and waited for it before coming back to my table. She sat down next to me; I knew she’d sat there so that we could both check out the room that way, see if we were noticed together. Nobody was looking at us, though. We just seemed like a couple of friends having a drink together. Appearances can be so deceptive.
Ruby stirred her coffee until I wanted to grab the spoon from her. She looked up and saw my expression and put the spoon down swiftly. “I’ve got something to tell you,” she said.
My heart thumped hard in my chest. “Did they look at his phone?”
She looked confused. “No, why?”
“Are you sure? Absolutely certain?”
Every night since Tom died I’d woken at about three o’clock and lain in bed worrying about his phone. I hadn’t thought about it on the day itself, there was too much to think about, but I’d thought of little else since. I knew it would be password protected, but the police could get beyond that, couldn’t they? And once they’d examined it, they’d say, Hold on, isn’t this person he’s sending threatening messages to the same woman who said she’d witnessed his accident? Then they’d arrest me. Each night I panicked at the thought that I’d have my baby in prison and Harry would have to take care of it. We’d never get past that, and when I left prison the baby would stay with him.
“Yes. I took it with me.” She flushed. “Actually I smashed it that night, down by the river, and threw the pieces away. Don’t worry, nobody will find anything now.”
I was overwhelmed with relief. “Oh, thank God. I wish you’d told me.”
“I’m sorry. I should have. I just didn’t think. I was waiting for the postmortem results.”
I saw telltale shadows under her eyes and knew she’d spent her nights the same way I had. My mouth was dry. “Do you know the results now?”
She nodded. “Accidental death.”
I was careful not to meet her eyes. We both knew the truth about that.
“The funeral will be on Monday,” she said. “We had to wait for the results to come in before they’d release the body.” I saw her swallow. “Tom died from the bang on his head, when he hit it on the tiles. There was a laceration at the back of his scalp where it had hit the floor and his skull was fractured.” She stopped suddenly and looked down at her drink. I kept quiet. “He’d broken some ribs in the fall, too, and a couple of vertebrae were shattered in his lower back.” She took out a tissue and rubbed her eyes. “There was a lot of alcohol in his bloodstream. Three times the drunk-driving limit. He must have been drinking all day.”
I thought back to that afternoon when I’d kneeled next to him to see whether he was alive. I hadn’t consciously noticed it at that point but late that night Harry had slipped into bed beside me when he got back from London. He’d had a couple of drinks on the train with one of the guys from work, and when he leaned over to kiss me, his breath had smelled just the same as Tom’s had. I’d jumped out of bed and run to the bathroom. I shuddered at the memory. “Did he normally drink a lot?”