Rachel?’ Matthew asks, reaching up and giving me a kiss from his seat at the kitchen table.
‘Yes,’ I say, slipping off my shoes. The tiles are beautifully cool beneath my feet. ‘And I bumped into Hannah on my way to meet her, so that was nice.’
‘We haven’t seen her and Andy for ages,’ he muses. ‘How are they?’
‘Fine. I said they must come round for a barbecue.’
‘Good idea. How did it go with the alarm man? Did you manage to get rid of him?’
I take two mugs from the cupboard and switch the kettle on. ‘Eventually, yes. He left his brochure for you to look at. How about you? Did you have a good day?’
He pushes his chair back and stands, stretching his back, easing the muscles in his shoulders. ‘Busy. I could do without going away next week.’ He comes over and nuzzles my neck. ‘I’m going to miss you.’
Shocked, I twist away from him. ‘Wait a minute! What do you mean, you’re going away?’
‘Well, you know, to the rig.’
‘No, I don’t know. You never said anything about going to the rig.’
He looks at me in surprise. ‘Of course I did.’
‘When?’
‘I don’t know, it must have been a couple of weeks ago, as soon as I found out.’
I shake my head stubbornly. ‘You didn’t. If you’d told me, I would have remembered.’
‘Look, you even said you’d use the time I was away to work on your lesson plans for September, so that we’d both be able to relax when I got back.’
Doubt fingers its way into my mind. ‘I couldn’t have.’
‘Well, you did.’
‘I didn’t, all right,’ I say, my voice tight. ‘Don’t keep insisting that you told me you were going away when you didn’t.’
I feel his eyes on me and busy myself making the tea so that he can’t see how upset I am. And not just because he’s going away.
My body clock still hasn’t adjusted to being on holiday so, despite it being the weekend, I’m in the garden early, pulling up weeds and tidying beds, only stopping when Matthew arrives back from the shops with fresh bread and cheese for lunch. We picnic on the lawn and, once we’ve finished, I mow the grass, sweep the terrace, wipe down the table and chairs and dead-head the plants in the hanging baskets. I’m not usually so obsessive about the garden but I feel a pressing need to have everything looking perfect.
Towards the end of the afternoon, Matthew comes to find me.
‘Would you mind if I go to the gym for an hour or so? If I go now, instead of in the morning, I’ll be able to have a lie-in.’
I smile. ‘And breakfast in bed.’
‘Exactly,’ he says, kissing me. ‘I’ll be back by seven.’
After he’s gone, I begin to make a curry, leaving the door to the garden open for air. I slice onions and dice chicken, singing along to the radio as I cook. In the fridge, I discover the bottle of wine we started a couple of evenings ago and pounce on it. I pour what’s left into a glass and carry on with the curry, sipping the wine as I go along. By the time I’ve finished in the kitchen, it’s almost six o’clock, so I decide to have a long, bubble-filled bath. I feel so relaxed that it’s hard to remember the relentless anxiety that had burdened me last week. This is the first day that I’ve managed to push all thought of Jane to the back of my mind. It’s not that I don’t want to think about her, it’s just that I can’t stand the constant guilt. No matter how much I want to I can’t turn the clock back, I can’t not live my life because I didn’t realise it was Jane in the car that night.
A news bulletin comes on but I turn the radio off quickly. Without the noise from the radio, the house is eerily quiet – and maybe because I’ve just been thinking about Jane, I’m suddenly conscious of being home alone. Going into the sitting room, I close the windows which have been left open all day, then the one in the study, and lock the front and back doors. I stand for a moment, listening to the house. But the only sound I hear is the soft ca coo of a wood pigeon outside.
Upstairs, I run the bath but before getting in I find myself hesitating over whether or not to bolt the bathroom door. I hate that the visit from the alarm man has played with my head so in defiance to myself I leave it ajar, as I normally do, but undress facing the gap. I climb in and sink down under the water. The bubbles rise up around my neck and I lie back against their foamy cushion, my eyes closed, enjoying the stillness of the afternoon. We’re rarely disturbed by neighbour noise – last summer the teenagers who live in the house nearest to us came to apologise in advance for a party they were throwing that night and we didn’t hear a thing. It’s why Matthew and I chose this house over the much larger, more impressive – and consequently more expensive – property that we also looked at, although I think price was also a consideration for Matthew. We’d agreed to buy it jointly and he was adamant that I wouldn’t put in more than him, even though I could well afford to, despite having bought a house on the Ile de Ré six months previously. A house nobody knows about, not even Matthew. And certainly not Rachel. Not yet.
Under the bubbles, I let my arms bob to the surface and think about Rachel’s birthday – the day I’ll finally be able to give her the keys to the house of her dreams. It’s been a hard secret to keep. It’s perfect that she wants to go to the Ile de Ré for her birthday. She took me there a couple of months after Mum died and we stumbled upon the little fisherman’s cottage on our second-to-last day there, an À Vendre sign hanging from an upstairs window.
‘It’s beautiful!’ Rachel had breathed. ‘I need to see inside.’ And without waiting to consult the estate agent, she marched up the little path and knocked on the door.
As the owner showed us round, I could tell that Rachel had fallen in love with it even though she couldn’t afford it. To her it was just a pipe dream, but I knew I could make it happen so I arranged it all in secret. I close my eyes, imagining her face when she realises that the cottage is hers. I knew it was exactly what Mum and Dad would have wanted me to do. If Dad had lived to make a will, he would definitely have bequeathed something to Rachel. And if Mum had been of sound-enough mind, she would have done the same.
A sound, like a crack, interrupts my thoughts. My eyes snap open and my whole body tenses. Instinctively, I know that something is wrong. I lie as still as I can, straining my ears, listening through the open door for the sound that told me I wasn’t alone in the house. Hannah’s words about Jane’s murderer being holed up nearby come back to me. I hold my breath, and my lungs, deprived of air, tighten painfully. I wait; but there’s nothing.
Keeping my movements steady so as not to disturb the water any more than necessary, I raise my arm carefully; it breaks through the suds and I stretch my hand towards my mobile, perched precariously on the edge of the bath near the taps. But it remains out of reach and, as I slide further down the bath towards it, the water lapping against the side of the bath sounds as loud as waves crashing onto the shore. Terrified that I’ve drawn attention to myself and horribly conscious that I’m naked, I leap suddenly from the bath, taking half the water with me, and lunge for the door, slamming it shut. The sound reverberates around the house and, as I shoot the bolt, my fingers shaking, I hear another creak, I can’t work out where from, and my fear increases.
With my eyes fixed on the door, I take a couple of steps backwards and grope along the edge of the bath for my mobile. It slips from my grasp and clatters to the floor. I freeze, my arm outstretched. But still there is nothing. Bending my knees slowly, I retrieve my mobile. The time appears on the screen, six-fifty, and the breath that I forgot I was holding comes whooshing out in relief, because Matthew will soon be home.
I dial