Woman with a Secret (28 page)

I tell Adam I’ll be back no later than ten, then watch him drive away and out of sight before I ring Kate Zilber’s doorbell. Her house is double-fronted, detached, with a bay window on either side of the door. In front of each one, there’s an identical landscaped garden patch, a continuation of the house’s symmetry.

Kate comes to the door wearing gray yoga pants and a white sleeveless top, no shoes. My smile withers when I see her hard face. I’ve never seen her look like this before: completely different from the woman I know. “I’m sorry, Nicki,” she says.

“Why? What’s happened?”

“I can’t have you around for the evening. We can’t socialize. Your children are at my school. You’re a parent; I’m the headmistress. Let’s keep it professional, OK? Again—I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have invited you. It was a bad idea.”

“Kate, what the hell’s going on? I was a parent yesterday, when you invited me. Since when do you care about professional? You’re constantly telling me which of your staff you’d like to sack.”

“Nicki,” she says gently, “you should go.”

“I’ll go as soon as you’ve explained your change of heart. Luckily for you, I no longer want to socialize with you either—I tend to prefer socializing with people who don’t suddenly disown me—but I’m not an idiot, and I want an explanation.”

“The police contacted the school about you,” Kate says. Behind her, in the house, I see encaustic tiles on the floor, a pale blue rug that looks like seagrass or something similar. There’s a spicy smell—curry or Mexican food.

“About Monday morning? Yes, I know—Izzie told them I was on and off the phone to her for much of the morning.”

“This is in connection with the murder of that journalist, isn’t it? Damon Blundy?”

“Yes. Which, as Izzie made clear to the police, I can’t possibly have been responsible for.”

“I’m not accusing you of murder. But . . . you’re clearly mixed up in a murder, and you told me on the phone that some weird man’s following you—”

“Wait, wait!” I put up a hand to stop her. “I’m only mixed up in Damon Blundy’s murder to the extent that I drove along his road on my way to school—”

“Nicki,” Kate silences me with her loud head-teacher voice. “Listen. Spare me your innocent-until-proven-guilty speech. This isn’t about what you’ve done or haven’t done. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. I just don’t want to get close to anyone right now who’s going to bring any kind of trouble or stress into my life. I’m up to my eyes as it is. This is about protecting myself. Sorry if that sounds selfish. And I’m sorry if you’re in a difficult place at the moment, but—again, forgive me for being honest—you’re not the kind of friend I need. I thought you were. I thought you’d be fun—”

“Oh, I am, believe me,” I say, nearly choking on what feels like a red spiky ball at the back of my throat. “I’m great fun when I’m not being wrongly suspected of murder or trying to shake off strange men following me.”

“I understand that you’re angry, but I’m trying to be honest. I need friends who are going to lift me up, not drag me down. I really am sorry. And, just so we’re clear, this doesn’t affect Sophie and Ethan—all right? Try taking them out of my school and I’ll call the police and un-alibi you!”

Unbelievable. She’s actually trying to save face with a joke. Yes, let’s have a good laugh about me being trouble and best avoided.

I can’t bring myself to say anything in response. I turn and walk away from her house as fast as I can.

AN HOUR LATER, I’M
sitting outside a pub—the first one I came to after my escape from Kate’s street—with a double gin and tonic, and my phone on the table in front of me. I can’t think, can’t do anything, can’t stop crying. The only advantage to being in the state I’m in is that no one wants to share my table, so I’ve got plenty of space.

Kate was supposed to listen to my long, weird story and tell me what to do. I was relying on her. It’s a danger, when you can’t rely on anyone close to you—you tend to get desperate and pick random strangers instead, put them on pedestals they haven’t earned and decide to rely on them.

Most people don’t do that, though. Only idiots like you
.

OK, think, Nicki. You have no one to turn to apart from your own stupid self. What are you going to do?

As far as I can see, one of two people must have murdered Damon Blundy—his wife, Hannah, or King Edward. Except that adds up to more than two possible people, since King Edward could be anyone.

What if King Edward is Adam?

No, that’s absurd. Adam was at work when Damon Blundy was murdered. Wasn’t he? Just because he’s an IT genius and he defends my parents, that doesn’t mean anything. He likes to give people the benefit of the doubt—that’s a good thing. He’s a good man, one who wouldn’t fake an online affair lasting more than two years with his own wife. In order for him to have answered my Intimate Links ad in 2010, Melissa would have had to have told him I’d mentioned the site to her, and that she was suspicious. No, she wouldn’t have done that. Not then. She still felt too guilty then about moving in with Lee.

Adam could have grown suspicious all by himself, I suppose. All the time I spent on my computer and on my phone . . .

Where was Lee when Damon was murdered? Was he at work, like Adam?

I shove the thought violently out of my mind. My brother is not King Edward.
Unthinkable
.

Melissa’s ruled out, since King Edward I know—knew—is unambiguously a man.

What if he was a man hired and instructed by a woman? By Melissa. A man with a blue BMW and blond streaks in his hair, who maybe didn’t follow a rented car all the way from Spilling to Highgate but knew Melissa’s address anyway . . .

My stomach heaves like a fragile ship on a churning, storm-tossed sea, threatening to overturn.

I mustn’t let myself speculate in all directions. It will drive me crazy.

Craz
ier
.

If I call Adam’s work and try to find out if he was there on Monday morning or not, what does that say about me?

The blindfold
. I’ve been assuming it was so that I wouldn’t see his face and say, “But you’re not Damon Blundy.” It never occurred to me that it might have been to stop me saying more than that: “You’re not Damon Blundy. You’re . . .”

Who?

I pick up my phone and start to draft an email. There’s a voice in my head telling me not to, that it’s the worst thing I could possibly do, but it’s not a persuasive voice. It’s panicky, insecure, reciting lines it learned by rote a long time ago that have since become meaningless.

I have a close relationship with somebody who knows the truth—someone whose real name I don’t know, true, but still: a man I shared my honest thoughts and feelings with for years. He
was
a man. He wasn’t Melissa—how could I suspect that, even for a second? He shared his thoughts and feelings with me too, in a way that neither of us ever has with anyone else.

He cares about you. He’s a killer, but he loves you. He’s obsessed, and when you’re obsessed, you’ll do anything
.

You’ll do anything, also, when nothing matters to you more than finding out the truth.

I touch the letter keys on my phone’s screen with the tip of my
index finger. “Dear Gavin/King Edward,” I write. “We need to talk. Can we meet, as soon as possible? N x”

I press “send.”

THE MAN YOU WERE
with at the Chancery Hotel . . . it wasn’t me, or anyone you know. He was a stranger
.

Words that will hurt for the rest of my life. Hurt of a kind that most people never feel.

I managed to remain coherent in order to find out as much as I could. I emailed back immediately. “What do you mean, he was a stranger? If you sent an acquaintance of yours to have sex with me—a process he failed to see through to its logical conclusion, incidentally—then you must know his name. I’d like to know it too.”

As I pressed “send,” I was thinking, “I could call the police. I’ve been raped. This is rape, what’s happened to me. Even though . . .” And then I remembered myself on that bed, and how I’d felt at the time. I realized how pointless it would be to think in terms of the police. They’d probably never find him—King Edward would protect him—and even if they did, he’d be sure to mention in court how much I’d enjoyed it. And Adam would find out, and my children would find out . . . No, it was unthinkable.

Another email arrived from King Edward within five minutes. “Nicki, are you crazy?” it said. “You honestly think I’d send a stranger—a real stranger? You think I’d do that to you? Wow, I’m pretty cut up about that. KE7.”

“You told me he was a stranger,” was the most I could manage in response.

“You’re right, I did,” King Edward wrote back. “Please forgive me—I’m not thinking clearly at the moment. I’m all over the place, to be honest. Nicki, it was me. Of course it was me. The man you’ve been writing to since June 2010 and the man in that hotel room are one and the same. KE7.”

“Then what did you mean when you said he was a stranger?” I had detached myself by this point. I knew what my next logical move was each time, and I made it, but I’d switched off my feelings. I knew, though, that when I switched them back on, I would find that nothing King Edward had said or would say, or could ever say, would make me feel any better.

His next email nearly stopped my heart. “I am not, and have never been, Damon Blundy. That’s what I meant by the stranger line. You’ve believed that you’ve been having a love affair with Damon Blundy. You haven’t. The man in that room was me—a man whose name you still don’t know, a man who’s still hiding from you. A stranger. I was being melodramatic. Of course I’m not really a stranger.”

I didn’t believe a single word he said, and knew I never would again. I remember going through the possibilities in my head:

        
1.
 
King Edward was Damon Blundy, but the man at the Chancery Hotel wasn’t.

        
2.
 
King Edward was the man at the Chancery, but he wasn’t Damon Blundy.

        
3.
 
King Edward was neither Blundy nor the man at the Chancery.

        
4.
 
King Edward was Blundy and the man at the Chancery.

There were probably more options to choose from, but I decided I’d rather run a deep bath and drown myself than try to figure them out.

Another email arrived, when I failed to respond to the last one. “I lied to you, Nicki. I’m so, so sorry. I know you won’t forgive me. That’s why I couldn’t email you for days afterward. I felt too guilty, if you want the truth. I hate myself as much as you must hate me. Please believe that. I don’t know why I ever thought it was a good idea to pretend to be someone I’m not. Please be reassured that everything
else I’ve ever written to you has been sincere and heartfelt. As for our time together in the hotel, I’m sorry about not seeing things through to their logical conclusion. You know my code—I tried to explain it to you. Quaint though it might sound, I don’t want to cross my line in the sand and be fully unfaithful to my wife in terms of all things physical. I need to be able to live with myself. I hope you understand. I suffer from poor impulse control, and if I cut myself too much slack, I’m afraid of what might happen. KE7.”

“Fully unfaithful”—that was the phrase that made me want to stab him in both eyes. And that was when I wrote back and said it: the stupid, ridiculous, reckless thing that led to Damon Blundy’s murder.

He is no less dead
. . .

That, also—that same angry email—was when I told King Edward never to contact me again. If what he’d done to me was love, then I was going to find the opposite of love, I said. I’d go straight back to Intimate Links and answer an ad that wanted nothing more than sex, nothing more than a body to use; it would be less soul-destroying.

And so King Edward created Gavin.

If I’d only ignored his last email, there’d have been no Gavin, no humiliating encounter with a policeman in a supermarket parking lot, no involvement in a murder case.

No murder at all?

Very possibly.

It serves me right that I’ve been dragged into the police investigation. If it weren’t for that last email I sent King Edward in February, Damon Blundy might well still be alive.

MY PHONE BUZZES ON
the table. I grab it.

A new message.

I gasp when I see the name in my inbox. I wrote to Gavin’s address—[email protected]—but it’s King Edward who’s replied from the address that’s been engraved in my mind since 2010:
[email protected] Same subject heading as in my email to Gavin: “Meet?”

My heart hammers in my chest. I drop my phone, pick it up again.

You knew Gavin was King Edward
.

Of course I knew, but now the last sliver of doubt is gone.

I open the message.

Hi Nicki,

It would be unreasonable of me to refuse your request, wouldn’t it? After everything I’ve put you through. Am I unreasonable? Not to that extent, no. Yes, we can meet as soon as possible. At the Chancery Hotel again. Make the arrangements and tell me when. Like last time, I will arrive at the appointed hour. You’ll be waiting for me, as you were last time. In **all** respects, as you were last time. Yes, even the blindfold, which, once again, you must promise not to remove at any point during our meeting. You must also promise, like last time, not to speak a single word.

You said in your message, “We need to meet and talk.” I will talk. You will listen. I’m confident that, once you’ve heard everything I have to say, you will know what you want and need to know. You will know who killed Damon Blundy. (I know you think it was me. You’re wrong.)

Am I unreasonable? I suppose I am. Those are my conditions. I hope you will agree to them.

Trust me, Nicki, I won’t harm you. I love you.

KE7

DING DONG, HYPOCRISY IS ALIVE AND WELL
Damon Blundy, April 16, 2013
, Daily Herald Online

Yesterday, former Labour MP
Paula Privilege, in admirably nonpartisan fashion, blogged about misogyny
in connection with the
death of Margaret Thatcher
. By all means, said Saint Paula, criticize Thatcher’s harsh treatment of the unions if you wish, and her warmongering in the Falklands (sic), but don’t call her a witch, because that language is sexist and debasing of women. I was amused to learn that this was Saint Paula’s opinion, in the light of something she’d tweeted to her 68,000 Twitter followers on April 8, the day Baroness Maggie died. After reading her blog post that railed against the use of witchy imagery in connection with the unfairer sex, even if they happen to be one’s political opponents, I trawled back through Saint Paula’s tweets to see if she’d deleted the one that revealed her true feelings on the matter. These, I think, can be summarized neatly: “It’s wrong to compare women to witches, unless I do it, in which case it’s OK.”

Here’s what Saint Paula tweeted on April 8:

Paula Riddiough
@politixpaula
Finally, room on the broom! For strong but compassionate women in politics. Never celebrate death. Always celebrate hope for the future.

She hadn’t deleted the tweet, and must either have forgotten about it by the time she wrote her blog post a week later or else she assumed no one would notice the disparity. For the culturally excluded among you,
Room on the Broom
is a bestselling picture book by
Julia Donaldson
, author of such children’s classics as
The Gruffalo
and
Tiddler
. The broom in question belongs to a witch. I shall spell it out for the hard-of-believing-a-leftie-can-ever-put-a-foot-wrong: Saint Paula’s tweet unequivocally implies that Margaret Thatcher was a witch and that, by dying, she has made room for superior women like Paula herself in the political sphere. But the meaning goes further than that: Paula’s tweet suggests that the compassionate women who might take Thatcher’s place would also be sitting on the broom. All women in politics are witches, are they, Paula? What, even the ones who
empathize with Argentinian dictators
partial to purloining islands that don’t belong to them?

I couldn’t resist embroiling Her Saintliness in a Twitter debate on the subject:

Damon Blundy
@blunderfulme
@politixpaula Saw your room on the broom tweet. Read your blog today. So which is it—OK or not OK to compare women to witches?

Paula Riddiough
@politixpaula
@blunderfulme Not okay. Good point, I hadn’t spotted that. I apologize, and will delete tweet.

Damon Blundy
@blunderfulme
@politixpaula Your instinct, on hearing of death of one of UK’s greatest women, was to tweet misogynistically, in a way you profess to find unacceptable. Hypocrite!

Paula Riddiough
@politixpaula
@blunderfulme I’d be a hypocrite if I tried to defend my original tweet. I’ve apologized for it and have now deleted it.

Damon Blundy
@blunderfulme
@politixpaula Hypocrite. Your misogyny pours forth, soon as you hear of
the death of someone you disapprove of. Never call yourself a feminist again.

Wasim Khalid
@waswashere
@politixpaula @blunderfulme Paula, ignore him. He is the cunt to end all cunts.

Damon Blundy
@blunderfulme
@politixpaula @waswashere Christ, the misogyny on here’s unbelievable. I thought I was a sexist shit. Feel like Emmeline Pankhurst compared to you lot!

Paula Riddiough
@politixpaula
@waswashere I will take your advice and ignore him!

Wasim Khalid
@waswashere
@politixpaula Haha, yeh, he’s a bitter twat! You are one amazing lady, btw!

Damon Blundy
@blunderfulme
@politixpaula @waswashere More misogynistic language! Paula, any views?

Paula Riddiough
@politixpaula
@blunderfulme I don’t condone sexist language, but he’s right about one thing: you’re bitter. And we’re done here.

Damon Blundy
@blunderfulme
@politixpaula A Twitter spat with a bitter twat? No better spat. No, that’s where it’s at. (To misquote Julia Donaldson.)

Paula Riddiough
@politixpaula
@blunderfulme Very good. I’m so very impressed by how clever you are.

Damon Blundy
@blunderfulme
@politixpaula I notice you haven’t criticized @waswashere directly for his appallingly misogynistic language. Can’t bear to criticize a fan? Hypocrite.

Paula Riddiough
@politixpaula
@blunderfulme Do fuck off, Damon.

Damon Blundy
@blunderfulme
@politixpaula Once there was a dish and her name was Riddiough. / She had the blinkered mindset of a left-wing twit / But Riddy was a bird . . .

Damon Blundy
@blunderfulme
@politixpaula . . . who inflamed imaginations. / She talked pure rubbish but she looked well fit.

Paula Riddiough
@politixpaula
@blunderfulme Once again: fuck off, Little Johnny Tory.

Wasim Khalid
@waswashere
@politixpaula @blunderfulme You tell him, sweetheart!

Damon Blundy
@blunderfulme
@politixpaula @waswashere He’s calling you sweetheart now, Paula—any thoughts? Bit sexist, no?

Paula Riddiough
@politixpaula
@blunderfulme A former MP took a look online. / She spotted the rage of a right-wing swine. / Why are you trolling me, tedious louse? . . .

Paula Riddiough
@politixpaula
@blunderfulme . . . Go and spout bile in your Hicksville house.

Damon Blundy
@blunderfulme
@politixpaula That’s terribly kind, but I can’t for a bit. / I’m busy exposing a hypocrite.

Damon Blundy
@blunderfulme
@politixpaula (A hypocrite? What’s a hypocrite?) / A hypocrite? Why, Riddiough is it.

Coffee and Biscuits
@coffeebiscuits
@politixpaula Hicksville? Charming! Fine way to talk about your former constituency!

Damon Blundy
@blunderfulme
@politixpaula She has terrible friends with risible views / And visible cleavage on Channel Four News . . .

Damon Blundy
@blunderfulme
@politixpaula . . . Why am I hounding her? Well, she cried, “Witch!” / And her favorite phrase is “Tax the rich.”

Alleviate Suffering
@thealleviator
@politixpaula @blunderfulme Jesus, what a pair of exhibitionist narcissists! Fuck the both of yous.

(I love that contribution from Alleviate Suffering at the end there. It quite made my day.)

I can’t help wondering if Saint Paula was one of the bloodcurdling, death-celebrating lefties who downloaded “Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead” onto their iPods after Margaret Thatcher ascended to the great cabinet in the sky last week. I’d bet my mortgage-free Hicksville House that she was, and I challenge her to deny it.