The Turn of the Key(82)
The barb was palpable, but I didn’t bother to respond. It scarcely seemed important. What mattered was how far she had dug, and why—and what exactly she had found out.
“It didn’t take me long to track down Rowan Caine,” Rhiannon was saying. “She’s pretty boring isn’t she? Not much ammunition.”
Ammunition. So that was what this was about. Rhiannon had been digging around online for any little indiscretion she could use as leverage. Only she had stumbled on something much, much bigger.
“I couldn’t understand it,” she said, a little smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “It all matched up—the name, the date of birth, the time at that nursery with the stupid twee name—Little Nippers,” she said mockingly. “Ugh. But then suddenly there were all these pictures from Thailand and Vietnam. And when I saw you on the driveway, I began to think I’d fucked up, that maybe I did have the wrong person. It took me a few hours to track down the real you. Must be losing my touch. Shame for you she doesn’t keep her friend list private. Or that you didn’t bother to delete your Facebook profile.”
Fuck. So it had been as simple as that. As simple as scrolling down a list of Rowan’s Facebook friends and picking out the face I had so obligingly posted up for all the world to see. How could I have been so stupid? But truthfully, it had never occurred to me that anyone would join the dots so assiduously. And I hadn’t been setting out to deceive, that’s the thing. That’s what I tried to explain to the police. If I had really been setting up a fraudulent second life, wouldn’t I have bothered to cover my tracks?
Because this wasn’t fraud, not really. Not in the way the police meant. It was . . . it was just an accident, really. The equivalent of borrowing your friend’s car while they’re away. I never meant for all this to happen.
The problem was, the thing I couldn’t tell the police, was why I had come to Heatherbrae under an assumed name. They kept asking me and asking me and digging and digging, and I kept floundering, and trying to come up with reasons—things like, Rowan’s references were better than mine (which was true) and she had more experience than me (true again). I think at first they thought I must have some deep, dark professional secret—a lapsed registration, or a conviction as a sex offender or something. And of course none of that was the case, and as hard as they tried to find something, there was nothing wrong with my own papers.
It looked very, very bad for me, I knew that, even at the time. But I kept telling myself, if Rhiannon hadn’t discovered why I had come here, then perhaps the police wouldn’t either.
But that was stupid, of course. They are the police. It’s their job to dig.
It took them some time. Days, maybe even weeks, I can’t totally remember. The interrogation starts to run together after a while, the days blurring into one another, as they picked and picked and prodded and probed. But eventually they came into the room holding a piece of paper and they were smiling like Cheshire cats, while simultaneously somehow trying to look grave and professional.
And I knew. I knew that they knew.
And I knew that I was sunk.
But that was afterwards. And I’m getting ahead of myself.
I have to tell the other part. The hardest part. The part I can’t quite believe even now.
And the part I can’t fully explain, even to myself.
I have to tell you about that night.
After Rhiannon walked out, I stood for a long moment in the hallway, watching the lights of the van disappear down the drive, and trying to figure out what I should do. Should I phone Sandra? And say what? Confess? Brazen it out?
I looked at my watch. It was just half past nine. The line from Sandra’s email floated into my head—Bill is off to Dubai tonight, and I’m at a client dinner, but do text if anything urgent.
There was no way I could ambush her with all this in the middle of a client dinner, still less, text it through.
Oh, hi, Sandra, hope all is good. FYI, Rhiannon has gone out with a strange bloke, and I applied for this job under a fake name. Speak soon!
The idea would have been laughable if the whole situation hadn’t been so serious. Shit. Shit. Could I email her and explain the situation properly? Maybe. Though if I were going to do that, I should really have done it earlier, before Rhiannon sent that fake update. It would be even harder to explain myself now.
But as I pulled the tablet towards myself, I realized I couldn’t really email. That was the coward’s way out. I owed her a call—to explain myself, if not face-to-face, then at least in person. But what the hell could I say?
Shit.
The bottle of wine was there on the kitchen counter, like an invitation, and I poured out a glass, trying to steady my nerves, and then another, this time with a glance at the camera squatting in the corner. But I no longer cared. The shit was about to hit the fan, and soon whatever footage Sandra and Bill had on me would be the least of my worries.
It was deliberate self-sabotage, I knew that really, in my heart of hearts, as I filled the glass for the third time. By the time there was only one glass left in the bottle I knew the truth—I was too drunk to call Sandra now, too drunk to do anything sensible at all, except go to bed.
*
Up on the top landing, I stood for a long time, my hand on the rounded knob to my bedroom, summoning up the courage to enter. But I could not do it. There was a dark crack at the bottom of the door, and I had a sudden, unsettling image of something loathsome and shadowy slithering out from beneath it, following me down the stairs, enveloping me in its darkness . . .