The Guilty Couple(75)
I hit it over and over and again, the small space ringing with each clang and clank of metal beating on metal, but no one comes and I sink to the floor.
I don’t want to open the freezer but I drag myself back onto my feet, and cross the room. I work methodically, lifting the lightest items first – the weight plates and the dumbbells – and place them on the ground. By the time I get to the last, and heaviest weight, I’m sweating and breathing heavily. My hand shakes as I reach for the edge of the blanket and pull it to the floor.
I don’t want to open the freezer.
I want Jack to be sitting on a beach in Spain, oblivious to the mayhem he’s left behind. I want him to be hiding out in Sonia’s attic, creeping out to play with the children when no one else is around. I want him to be curled up in a tent in the Lake District, listening to the sound of the rain.
I don’t want to open the freezer.
I want to scream at Jack for abandoning me. I want to tell him that he hurt me more than Dominic ever did. I want to pound my fists against his chest. I want him to tell me why. I want him to explain. I want him to gather me into his arms and tell me that he’ll never leave me again.
I open the door to the freezer.
The smell hits me first.
Chapter 52
DOMINIC
Dominic glances around the study to see if there’s anything he’s missed. He’s shredded every bank statement, every printout, every scrap piece of paper he could find and all that’s left in his desk drawers are a handful of pens, some paperclips and some stationery. There’s nothing incriminating in the bedroom or any other room of the house. The companies that provided Nancy with the house loans will have copies of his inflated valuations, which implicate him in the fraud, but no one will know a crime has been committed until she defaults on the mortgage payments and, by then, they’ll both be long gone. Nancy’s got balls, he’ll give her that much. There aren’t many women, many people, who’d have the guts to stroll into a bank, claim to be a South African heiress and demand four separate loans worth £10.5 million to buy four properties in London. She scares him sometimes, the way her mind works. He’s never met anyone more manipulative or ruthless in his life and the sooner he gets his share of the cash and shakes her off the better.
He strolls out of his office and pauses at the bottom of the stairs, listening. From the noises coming from the first floor it sounds like Grace is smashing up her room. He locked her in there last night, after he read the message on her phone from Olivia. As his daughter pounded her bedroom door, alternately begging to be let out and calling him every name under the sun, he sent a message to his ex-wife, grinning as he laid it on thick. Olivia’s reaction couldn’t have been more frantic. Call after call, then text after text after text. After ten minutes he turned off the phone, and left it off all night, but he couldn’t settle. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Olivia would turn up, restraining order or not. He double-locked the front door, checked all the windows were still closed and sat in the living room with the lights off and the curtains open, watching the driveway. He dozed off at some point and woke in a panic. The house was too quiet and he couldn’t hear a sound from behind Grace’s bedroom door. He banged on it, terrified she’d done something stupid. Her expletive-laden scream convinced him she was perfectly fine.
Now, he walks from the hallway to the kitchen, retrieves the SIM from Grace’s phone and cuts it in two. He drops it, and the phone, into the bin then he checks his watch and walks up the stairs to his daughter’s room.
‘I’m unlocking your door,’ he says as he turns the key. ‘Our lift will be here any minute to pick us up.’
He hasn’t told her that Nancy will be going to Dubai with them because he doesn’t want to answer her questions. Questions he’ll have to deal with at some point, ideally once they’re safely in the departure lounge. He’s going to have to work out a way to repair his damaged relationship with her too, but he hasn’t got the head space for that right now.
‘I hope you’ve packed,’ he says instead. Grace’s screamed response is unintelligible but, before Dominic can ask her to repeat what she said, there’s a knock at the front door.
He hurries down the stairs, hoping that a) it is Nancy and not Olivia, Dani or the police, and b) that there hasn’t been a terrible cock-up. His parents have put the house on the letting market, he’s destroyed his professional reputation, his bank account has never looked so infirm and his daughter hates his guts. He needs this to happen. He needs the cash, and to escape.
‘Nance.’ He opens the door to an unusually dishevelled Nancy. Her hair is piled up on her head in a messy bun, she’s make-up-free and she appears to be wearing her pyjama bottoms. ‘What the hell?’
He ushers her in, his gaze darting from her oversized blue handbag to the black suitcase she’s dragging behind her like a dead weight. Once she’s in the hallway, with the front door shut behind her, she looks him up and down then glances at his suitcase, standing alone near the living room door, and the bag that contains his travel documents and wallet, wound around the handle.
‘Where’s Grace’s case? Is she ready?’
‘Yeah,’ Dominic says absently. ‘What happened to you? Where are your clothes?’
‘Long story. Has Grace got a skirt or some trousers I could wear?’