The Guilty Wife Read online

  I nodded as I wiped my eyes. I knew he was right, but I wasn’t going to admit it. Not yet. He leaned towards me for a kiss, but I waved him away and stepped off the marble of the doorway onto the cement pavement.

  ‘Goodnight, Bethany,’ he called as I started walking. I didn’t turn around.

  I may have lost most of my dignity already that evening, but I wasn’t going to let the final image of me be that of the pitiful mistress. I pulled my shoulders back and strode to the glowing Tube entrance, exuding a confidence we both knew I didn’t possess.

  And a few minutes later he was murdered.

  In the exact spot where I’d left him, without saying goodbye.

  Now Calum was dead, and I was the last person to see him alive, and the police were wasting their time trying to discover why he’d been out – a detail that actually had nothing to do with his death.

  I was the only person who knew that. But I couldn’t explain what he’d been doing there without also telling them about the affair.

  Calum had made it quite clear that no one could know about us. And he was right. It was too much of a risk.

  Besides, it’s not like I actually knew who had killed Calum.

  If I’d seen something in the moments after leaving him in that doorway, I’d tell the police everything. But I hadn’t. What I knew couldn’t help Calum.

  I couldn’t save him now.

  I could only save myself.

  Chapter Twelve

  I couldn’t stop shaking after the police interview. I needed to escape the flat. Sending Fran a message to let her know that I was on my way to the office, I walked outside and hopped on the bus. As I stared out of the window I caught myself looking for Calum, peering at everyone we drove past, searching for his face, knowing even as I was doing so how stupid it was.

  Eventually exhaustion took over and I dreamed of Calum smiling, Calum laughing, Calum holding a bunch of black roses that were gushing thick, red blood.

  Feeling a strong hand on my shoulder, I gasped and choked back a scream as I was pulled from my nightmare. Blinking, I tried to get my bearings and realised that I was still on the bus. I looked out of the window again, but didn’t recognise the area.

  ‘The bus terminates here, miss,’ said the driver. ‘We’re at Mitcham. You must’ve fallen asleep.’

  I mumbled a thank you and stepped onto the pavement, wondering whether to just give up and go home. But home meant more space to think, to panic that I’d said the wrong thing to the detectives, and that was the last thing I needed.

  I strode to the next bus stop and furiously typed emails on my phone while I waited. I had to focus on my small screen; it was the only way to block out the newspapers adorning corner-shop A-frames all around me. The capital’s most exciting piece of news, BRUTAL BRADLEY MURDER! was taunting me from every direction. Even the papers discarded by bored commuters rustled under my feet, my heels crushing Calum’s face.

  By the time I reached my desk, I had worked my way through the majority of my outstanding tasks on my phone. And I was utterly drained.

  The day passed like time was trying to spite me, the clock taking an eternity to do its rounds of the white face on my wall. The distraction of work was in equal parts relieving and then exhausting when I suddenly remembered again that Calum was dead.

  Fran was overcompensating by being more upbeat than usual, too young to understand how to deal with grief. Her animated chatter was like nails on a chalkboard, but I held in the scream that lingered on my lips. She was just trying to help.

  She finally left me alone to run an errand, and as I scrolled through the folders that needed editing I spotted one titled bradley-shoot-7. Hovering my mouse over the folder, I hesitated. I wanted to look, but I knew it would be like peeling back a plaster to examine a still-bleeding cut. I navigated away from the folder, but a few seconds later I was back, incapable of resisting that double-click. I scrolled slowly past Calum at home, in the office, reading a book, on the phone, standing in front of his huge apartment windows.

  I got that tingling sensation that always arrived when I looked at him. Butterflies, and rising temperature. Except now I was lusting after a dead man. I kept flicking through the thumbnails, and then halted. I opened the image that had caught my eye and stared for a few seconds, absorbing every centimetre of his expression. It was a photo I’d taken just a couple of weeks ago – I’d completely forgotten about it until now, but at the time the shutter had clicked I’d been eager to see whether I’d captured the moment. It seems I had.

  Calum had been in a bad mood all day, something about a software implementation going awry, and everyone knew about it. He’d barked at Mark in front of the crew, refused to smile in photos and was, in essence, acting like a spoiled toddler. At one point, when Vincent was trying to explain a security process to him, Calum had lost his temper and had been so abrupt with the brawny man that I thought he was going to get punched. Thankfully things hadn’t ended in violence, but the tension in the room had risen like steam, hot and stifling. Shortly after this exchange, I was moving around him to catch a better angle and had stepped in his way. He shouted at me to move, but instead of moving aside I’d stopped.

  ‘You don’t have to act like a child, Calum. We’re all here to work, not to babysit you.’

  In my anger at him, my finger had clenched over the shutter, accidentally capturing his initial look of knitted-brow shock and then his loud, genuine, head-thrown-back laugh. He’d apologised to every member of the crew individually that afternoon, including the still-glaring Vincent, and had ordered a feast of sugar-glazed doughnuts as a peace offering.

  I loved that part of his personality. The human, humble side to him. He knew when he was acting like the spoiled billionaire everyone expected him to be, and he hated that it was part of his nature. He said to me, when I asked him about it later, that he was done with the days of using his status just to get his own way. He was determined to prove – probably above all to himself – that he was capable of being a normal, fallible human.

  I stared for what must have been half an hour at the picture that showed his face as it twisted from shock to mirth. Fran jolted me out of my reverie when she walked back in the door holding a box of cupcakes and a bottle of wine above her head.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Bad days must be made better. I have red velvet cupcakes. I have wine. Let’s do this.’

  I put a swaying Fran into a taxi early in the evening and smiled to myself. In her own, slightly misguided way, she really had done her best to try to make me forget about Calum. I put on as grateful a face as I could manage so she wouldn’t feel like her plan had failed. I’d slowly sipped half a glass of the cheap, five-pound-special wine as she polished off the rest of the bottle, gradually becoming more and more philosophical about the importance of living one day at a time, like we had any choice in the matter. I’d have loved to skip a few if I had a chance, just get to the next point in time that I’d feel normal again, avoid the grief, the lying, the pain.

  I made up for my slow drinking by devouring four of the six sugary cupcakes. I rarely binged on sweet treats, mostly choosing to waste calories on cheese instead, but today I didn’t care.

  Feeling queasy from the sugar, I closed my eyes on the bus home to avoid seeing the paper that was being closely read by the man in the seat in front of me. No matter where I went, there was no escape from Calum. At home, I was alone with my thoughts, or faced with my secrets when Jason was around. Outside, I had to see his face plastered all over papers and news bulletins, or listen to strangers gossiping about the year’s most shocking event. I wanted to disappear.

  I was about to pull a pre-packaged, preservative-laden ready meal from the oven when Jason walked in the door. He seemed surprised that I was cooking, like he didn’t expect me to be capable of piercing a film and throwing something in the oven. What a feat. He leaned in to kiss me and I turned my face at the last minute, offering a cheek instead. He looked hurt, then turned
away and tried to initiate small talk about my day. I felt guilty, but I didn’t know how else to react, and I didn’t have the emotional capacity to work through what I was feeling. I knew I loved Jason, but now that Calum was gone, I didn’t want him near me. I couldn’t bear the thought of his touches drowning out the memory of my lover’s hands on my waist, my breasts, my thighs.

  ‘You ready for the pub quiz, babe?’

  Of course. The pub quiz; our weekly chance to catch up with friends and get out of the house, joined because we caught ourselves getting into the habit of ordering takeaway and watching Netflix every Friday night, and felt ashamed that we weren’t more interesting. As much as I wanted to keep my mind off Calum, I didn’t think I could cope with quite as much exuberance as I knew I’d find in the cosy, dimly lit pub down the road.

  ‘Oh, Jason, I’m so sorry. I honestly forgot,’ I said. ‘I really just don’t feel up for it tonight, I think I’m going to give it a miss. You go, though!’

  It was the perfect solution. He could go and have fun, represent Team Reston. And I could wallow in peace, indulge in memories, curl up in a ball in bed, without constantly worrying how I seemed to my husband.

  ‘Of course I’m not going to go without you,’ he said, his ever-supportive self.

  ‘No, honestly, I don’t want you to miss out just because I’m not in the mood. You can say hi to everyone for me.’

  Unsurprisingly, frustratingly, my argument failed.

  Now I was going to have to work extra hard to be positive so I didn’t get fussed over all evening. Jason’s genuine concern was shredding my patience, and I despised myself for feeling anything other than gratitude.

  We ate in front of the television at my request. It was harder to ask questions that way. As I pretended to be glued to the political drama unfolding before us, I could see Jason’s eyes darting over to me every few seconds, making sure I wasn’t a mess.

  I sighed. I was picking the skin around my nails, thinking about the look Constable Clayton had given her colleague just after I’d lied about being at work, when I heard the familiar jingle of a breaking news story. The newsreader’s calm voice jolted me from my thoughts and I looked up as she began her report.

  ‘We bring you breaking news in the murder of billionaire Calum Bradley. Police have released this CCTV footage of the individual they believe could be linked to the murder of Mr Bradley. The famous business mogul was stabbed just metres from South Kensington Tube station at around ten-thirty on Wednesday night …’

  I clutched the arm of my chair until the blood was stretched out of my knuckles and they looked ghostly. In the pixelated footage on my screen, a dark shadow emerged from the entrance of an office building wearing a dark, floppy hat with an artfully folded brim and chunky metallic pin adorning the pleat. After a few seconds, the video turned fuzzy and stopped.

  That shadowy figure. It was me.

  I was the suspect.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I couldn’t move.

  I tried to rearrange my mind, to push panic to the back of the queue and let rational thought take precedence.

  What now?

  There was no doubt about it, the woman in the video was me. The fact that it was being aired as a breaking story with a plea for information seemed to indicate that the police hadn’t worked that out yet. But surely it wouldn’t be long before they did.

  How could I be the suspect, if the real killer had been there right after I’d left? Whoever had killed Calum should be on that footage, too.

  But if they were, I wouldn’t be on the evening news.

  I tried to focus on the newsreader’s voice as they replayed the video again.

  ‘The footage, captured by a nearby security camera, shows a woman in a distinctive hat walking away from the direction where Mr Bradley was murdered, towards South Kensington Tube station. Mr Bradley’s time of death was indicated by forensic experts to have been around ten thirty in the evening, and this video was taken at ten thirty-four exactly. Although there are other CCTV cameras in the area, including one in the doorway where Calum Bradley’s body was found, these seem to have been disabled in what the police believe to be a deliberate attempt to conceal the identity of the killer. This particular footage, which Scotland Yard is calling a key piece of evidence, was cut off just as the woman disappears from sight, leading police to believe that she disabled the camera, or that she saw the person or persons who did. At an earlier press conference, Chief Inspector Tim Moseley emphasised that there’s no proof that the woman in the video is involved, but that she could be a key witness to this troubling crime. They have offered no further details or theories at this time, but they are encouraging the woman in question, or anyone with information about her, to reach out to a newly created hotline …’

  I reached into the pocket of my blazer and ran my finger along the edges of the business card Constable Clayton had left me with. I should call her. Straighten this whole mess out. It was the right thing to do.

  But then I reminded myself of the argument I’d had with myself that same morning, when the police had been sitting in my lounge. It would have been risky enough telling them the truth then, but now? Never mind the right thing; that just seemed idiotic.

  I risked glancing over at Jason, expecting to see his face turned towards me, etched with the horrifying knowledge that his wife could be capable of murder. But he was looking down, engrossed by his phone, completely unaware of the bombshell that had just been dropped.

  I looked again at the image of me being played on national television and tasted bile at the back of my throat. I swallowed it down and studied the details in the footage. The image was grainy and dark, slightly out of focus. The figure moving towards the camera had her head down and was wearing head-to-toe black: black boots, black jeans, black T-shirt. The hat covered her face.

  Of course I knew it was me, but perhaps to another viewer it could be any woman. My outfit was nondescript. Even my handbag, which was a cheap tote that I’d picked up in a sale about a month ago. Thousands of women in London had the same one; it was the peril of buying from a popular store. I couldn’t walk down the street without seeing at least two identical bags hanging from other women’s shoulders.

  The only thing that could identify me in that image was my hat. Someone with a keen eye who’d seen me wearing it before could probably recognise it. The fold of the soft felt, held together by a thick metal pin, was distinctive and unusual, I knew that. But was it obvious enough for anyone to know it was mine?

  Jason had bought the hat for me as a birthday present. We’d spent a day exploring the seaside town of Margate the previous summer and I’d been charmed by the vintage shops dotted throughout the little high street. The hat had caught my eye and I’d tried it on, pulling poses in the mirror and making Jason laugh. I’d almost bought it but I hadn’t really worn a hat since I was eighteen, so I thought better of it. I’d never wear this one, no matter how beautiful it was. When my birthday came around a few weeks later I unwrapped the exact hat I’d fallen for. I was touched by Jason’s thoughtfulness, but as I’d suspected, it hardly ever made it to my head.

  So maybe I wasn’t so easy to identify. Perhaps no one would ever know who the woman in the video was.

  I knew I hadn’t killed Calum. So if the police did eventually work out that the footage was me, then I’d have to explain everything to them then. But I had to hope it wouldn’t come to that. There must be more clues, evidence that led to the real killer. Once they started following those leads, they wouldn’t need to come after the mysterious woman in black. And then there would be no need to share the details of my affair with anyone.

  To be safe, I found the offending hat underneath a pile of discarded clothes beside the washing basket and quickly stuffed it into the very top of my wardrobe, covering it with spare towels and old scarves.

  This would all blow over soon, I told myself.

  It had to.

  Chapter Fourteen

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nbsp; I opened my front door, watering can in hand, and froze mid-step.

  A bouquet of flowers wrapped in delicate pink tissue paper greeted me from just beyond the upside-down Welcome of my door mat. But this wasn’t a friendly delivery.

  I stared at the scene, trying to make sense of it. Closing the door quietly behind me, I stepped towards the strange bundle that had been placed a few feet away. The dozen or so roses that had been artfully arranged inside thin layers of tissue must have been red at one time, but they were now so dry that they’d turned brown. Black, almost.

  The hairs on the back of my neck bristled. Who would send dead flowers? And worse, who would wrap them up as a pretty bouquet and leave them outside my house?

  I reached out towards the flowers, and a petal crumbled at my touch. They must have been dead for weeks.

  Was this someone’s idea of a prank?

  Without warning, my mind flashed back to the tweet I’d discovered just a few days previously, the one that I’d tried to convince myself was nothing more than an alcohol-induced slip. I hadn’t thought about it since then, but now I was looking at everything through a much more paranoid filter. If I hadn’t sent that tweet … I shuddered at the thought. That would mean my account was hacked, or worse – someone had physically taken my phone to send the message. Either way, if it wasn’t me, that meant someone knew far too much about Calum and me. But I had been drunk, and I still couldn’t remember what had happened as the night wore on. It could have been, as I originally suspected, a stupid, harmless, drunk tweet. Or it could have been a warning. And this could be another.

  ‘No,’ I said out loud, sternly. A weak defence against an advancing army of frightening thoughts.

  Of course this wasn’t a warning. There was a logical explanation. There had to be.

  I picked up the bouquet nervously and turned it over, looking for a card, a note, anything that could clarify why it was outside my front door. But there was nothing.