The Guilty Couple(39)
Sonia blows out a stream of smoke. ‘Sorry, he’ll always be Matt Platt to me. That was what he called himself when I met him, when he was at uni with Jack.’
‘Who was? Sorry, I’m really not following—’
‘Dominic … what’s his new surname? … Sutherland. Olivia’s husband.’ She blinks, then corrects herself. ‘Ex-husband. I explained all this to Olivia earlier. Matt and Jack were flatmates, in Manchester, after uni … along with another guy, Ian. They both went to prison – my brother and Matt – for defrauding a man on their street. Look …’ She stamps her feet against the gravel and shivers. ‘Can we do this somewhere else? I’m really cold.’
‘Yeah. No.’ Dani feels as though her brain has frozen too, thanks to the tsunami of new information she’s just acquired. ‘I’ll let you go but I need to check something first. How much of this did Olivia know?
‘None of it.’ Sonia takes another puff on her cigarette. ‘She was as surprised as you.’
Dani turns the heaters in her car to full blast and cups her hands over the vents until the feeling returns to her fingers. It’s been fifteen minutes since she returned Sonia to her smokers’ huddle and she’s still reeling from what she was told. No wonder nothing came up when she ran Dominic’s details through the database five years earlier. If what Sonia said is correct then he must have changed his name when he got out of prison. And because he hasn’t committed any crimes since, the two names aren’t linked.
‘Shit.’ She steeples her fingers over her nose and mouth and exhales heavily. Jack Law wasn’t some random bloke Olivia had an affair with. Dominic knew him, they shared a flat and served time together. Dani’s mind whirrs through the information she’s acquired and how it might fit with what she already knows. Dominic’s going to have a lot of explaining to do when she meets him later. Unless … unless she doesn’t mention it. Her instinct is telling her that this is a piece of information she should keep close to her chest for a while.
Her phone pings and she snatches it up. It’s a message from her mother, Brenda:
Where are you? I just got home from book club and Casey’s gone. She’s taken my bank card from my purse.
Chapter 27
OLIVIA
Ayesha wasn’t home when I got back and, several hours later, I’m still struggling to come to terms with what Sonia told me on the phone. Jack is a career criminal who’s been in and out of prison? I can’t believe it. I don’t want to believe it. We were together for six months and we talked about our pasts, we talked about everything. He told me that, after school, he’d taken a gap year to volunteer as an English teacher at a Tibetan monastery in India, then had returned to the UK to do a degree in English Literature. He said he’d bummed about a bit afterwards, travelling and working in restaurant kitchens or behind bars, then he’d settled in Leeds where he’d worked as a copywriter for a while before switching to be a web editor and content manager, which eventually led to a senior project manager role at some tech company in London. He didn’t stumble or pause as he told me about his life. He kept eye contact with me and didn’t look shifty once. And he never asked me for money. He paid for dinners, cinema tickets and river boat cruises. His flat was on the small and cosy side but that’s far from unusual in London. Maybe he was keeping his past from me because we were madly in love and he didn’t want to risk bursting the bubble?
Or maybe he thought I had enough on my plate with a struggling business, a child, and a husband I was planning to leave. But that’s making excuses for him. He should have told me about his past, he knew everything about me. Would I have continued our affair if I’d known the truth? No, definitely not. It takes a certain kind of cruelty to trick someone elderly into trusting you and then steal everything they have. I feel sick, just thinking about it, as though the ground is shifting under my feet. If Sonia is telling me the truth then I didn’t fall in love with Jack at all, I fell in love with the man he was pretending to be. Was our whole relationship a lie?
What dark twist of fate led me to start relationships with two men who had committed the same crime? Unless it wasn’t a twist of fate. Did Jack know whose wife I was when he turned up at my exhibition and casually charmed me? Had Dominic done something twenty years earlier that Jack was still quietly seething about? Did he seduce me for revenge?
Is that why Dom framed us? To punish us both in one go?
The more I think about it, the more it makes sense. When Dom asked me who I was sleeping with and I told him Jack’s full name he didn’t so much as flinch and I’m pretty sure that’s because he already knew about him. How? Perhaps they didn’t fall out after they left university and they’ve kept in touch this whole time. Maybe they forged a plan for Jack to seduce me because Dominic needed me out of the house more often, he wanted to keep me distracted. But why? And why go on to frame me for conspiracy to murder? And not just me, Jack too. Had he gone too far when he seduced me and angered Dominic? Had their plan failed at some point?
The restraining order means I can’t confront Dom so Jack’s my only shot at the truth. If he ever replies. It’s been two days since I asked to meet him. He replied to my previous email about Iceland within ten minutes but now he’s gone suspiciously quiet.