The Wife Before Me(37)

Elena’s lips tremble as she rereads the letter. Her ribs hurt. She touches her neck. It feels stiff but the skin where he placed his hands will be unmarked. She is staggered by the force of his deceit. No trigger. No post-traumatic stress. Random violence and carefully constructed cruelty disguised by a veneer of grief.

The door of the ice house opens. Dressed for work, Nicholas stands at the entrance, his tall frame silhouetted darkly against the streaming light. She shrivels into herself, as if she can already feel his fists. She knows, instinctively, that this is the first time he has stood inside the ice house. He strides towards her without speaking and stares at the open folder. His concentration is on the documents but any sudden movement would direct his attention back to her. The contours of his face stand out in stark relief as he plucks the letter from her hand. After reading it, he tears the paper in two, then four, his movements growing faster as he shreds it. A scattering of breadcrumbs, Elena thinks when he walks to the open door and flings the pieces into the air. They swirl briefly before they fall, catching on the briers or lying among the mulching leaves.

‘You prying whore.’ He speaks to her at last. ‘How dare you sneak around my property without my permission?’

‘Billy Tobin’s property, you mean,’ she retorts. ‘And I know that you never owned a brick of Woodbine. Amelia’s father made sure of that. What a convenience her death must have been for you.’

‘Shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you.’

‘You never grieved for her. Not for one single minute. Post-traumatic stress. Don’t make me laugh.’ Every word she utters brings her closer to danger. She doesn’t care. The caution that has imprisoned her for so long has fallen away. Chains snapping. She is convinced she can hear them. ‘You inflicted the same brutality on your own wife as you’ve done on me. Did you kill her? Sabotage the brakes on her car? Drown her so that you could inherit her property? Murderer… yes, that’s what you are – murderer.’

One blow to her stomach brings her to the ground. He waits until she stands up again, then moves towards her, his hand raised high. He is upon her when her fingers run along the dusty stone shelf and close around the ice pick. She lifts her arm, unthinking, uncaring, and is filled with a pulsating sureness as she plunges the ice pick into his stomach. As he staggers backwards, she wrenches it out, sickened by the slick feel of flesh separating. His knees buckle like a foal just born, that same trembling need to stand upright before collapsing to the ground.

‘Oh, Jesus Christ,’ he cries. The sound splinters like glass. Is he praying for divine help or cursing her? Blood stains his trousers and spills over his impeccable brogues. His lips stretch around her name as he pleads with her to help him. His pallor reminds her of dead ash. There is an instant when she hesitates. She considers closing the ice house door and leaving him on the floor to bleed to death. Then the mist clears and, chilled to the bone, she comes to her senses. She eases his tie from his neck and ties it round the wound, lays her dressing gown over him. The sky is marbled with red as she runs across the grass. The dew is melting and the footsteps that betrayed her are already disappearing.

Joel is crying, his strident screams ringing in her ears, while she calls an ambulance. She breathes in the scent of her son’s hunger as she lifts him to her breast and he suckles from her for the last time.





Part Two





Twenty





The Past





The same nightmare. No matter how often it was repeated, Amelia could never succeed in escaping the horror that came with it. Sometimes she was an adult, sometimes a teenager, but, more often, she was five years old again. Dressed in white shorts, a blue T-shirt with an anchor on the front, white sandals and a pink plastic hairband, she was disobeying orders by running along the pier. A forbidden place but her mother was fixing the red beach umbrella that had been blown inside out by the wind and her father was queuing for ice cream cones on the road above. A 99, Amelia had said, with sprinkles of hundreds and thousands. Her mother wanted raspberry ripple, a nice, big, juicy dollop. Amelia’s beach ball had blown into the sea and there it was, hurtling like a rocking horse alongside the pier. So easy to stretch out her hand and catch it. But then the wave came pounding over the pier, deafening her,

blinding her. She sank and rose – not that she was aware of movement, just the struggle to breathe as her mouth filled with water. All those years later, so real, so utterly real. In sleep, memory had no borderline to stop her roaming through her subconscious.

Her father always knew when the dream came. She used to believe he had heard her screaming, that awful sound she made before the waves silenced her; but the scream, Amelia would discover, had been a whimper, practically inaudible. He too, though, was locked into their tragedy and intuition, as well as his love for her, brought him into her room on those stricken nights to soothe her as if she was a baby, even when she was ten and eleven and older.

‘How do you always know?’ she asked him once. Her voice rasped, as if those imaginary screams had leached it dry.



* * *



‘How could I not know?’ His expression was bleak in the filtering dawn light. ‘I feel it here.’ He touched his chest, then his head, and said, ‘This is where I hear her voice telling me to go and comfort you.’