“Paul!” she calls, again.
She clumps through the downstairs rooms in the surgical boot they gave her at A&E. Late-afternoon sun spills through the windows at the back of the house. The kitchen is clean and tidy, just how she left it, but that doesn’t tell her much. Paul’s a neat freak. He could have cooked a roast in here since she left, and it would look like this.
It’s a slow ascent upstairs. He’s not there either. She gets sick of calling his name. Every time he doesn’t reply her anxiety levels hike up.
She has to pee.
As her bladder empties, she thinks, something’s different in here.
She touches a towel on the heated rail. It’s not the one she put out last week. That was one of the new, fluffy blue towels that match the bathmat. This towel is green. And the bathmat is draped over the side of the bath, not on the rail, where she left it.
Somebody has used this room. Paul hates taking baths, though, so who?
Edie? But why?
She stands and flushes. She’ll call the police right away andreport Paul missing. Enough is enough. She can’t handle this on her own any longer. It’s doing her head in.
A noise catches her attention. It sounds like the front door opening.
Hope and relief swell in her, messy uncontrolled feelings. “Paul?” Her voice shakes.
She hobbles onto the landing.
The front door slams shut.
“Paul?” she repeats, but all she can hear is silence.
They arrive at Ruth and Toby’s house first. A Victorian semi in the middle of the city. Jayne gets out of the car so she can move into the driver’s seat to take herself home.
The goodbyes are perfunctory and tense. “Let me know as soon as you’ve heard from Mark,” Ruth says.
Jayne wonders if she should feel guilty about leaving Ruth, but if Toby has done something terrible it cannot be unpicked immediately. And Ruth looks ill. She needs to be home, in bed, to recover and Jayne is desperate to get to her own home to see if Mark is there, if he’s left her a note, if there’s any sign of him at all.
As Jayne puts on her seat belt, she watches Toby hold their front door open for Ruth. Ruth doesn’t make eye contact as she brushes past him.
In the moment before she turns on the ignition, Jayne hesitates, considering knocking on their door and asking Ruth if she wants to come with Jayne to her house.
Something has rattled her about seeing them disappear into their home with such grim faces, seeing the door slam behind them. It’s not a premonition of violence, exactly, more the thought of what can go on behind closed doors, when nobody else is watching. But she tells herself off. This is her own mind jittering becauseEdie has infected them all with the idea of violence and John Elliott’s suicide has compounded it.
She needs to find Mark. That is her priority.
She heads home, hands tight on the wheel.
Their house is on a quiet, tree-lined street. Jayne wanted to live somewhere away from the sirens and noise of the city center, to avoid PTSD triggers. It’s an unremarkable sixties house, but relatively spacious inside, with large windows letting in a lot of natural light and a generous garden. Nothing fancy, but a place where she feels safe.
The drive is empty, but that means nothing because their car might be in the garage. She unlocks the front door. There’s mail in the cage mounted on the back of it, but that means nothing either. The job of collecting and opening it always falls to Jayne.
She pushes the door shut behind her and as it closes with a soft click, the hair on the back of her neck stands up. Someone is here. She can sense it.
She glances left and right, down the hallway and up the stairs and sees nothing out of the ordinary, no movement in the corner of her eye, hears nothing either. Her mouth feels sticky as her lips part. She intends to call out to Mark. It must be him. But before she can make a sound, she becomes aware of the scent, a perfume of some sort, an unmistakably bright, feminine fragrance. It prickles her nostrils.
Edie?
Who else could it be?
Ruth slept most of the way home in the car and as the front door of their home closes behind her and Toby, she’s overwhelmed by a feeling of disorientation and claustrophobia.
In spite of the tragedy of what happened to the Elliott family,she knows she should feel as if she won the lottery this morning. Toby was the husband who arrived, after all. Mark and Paul are uncontactable. If the letter is to be believed, then Ruth is one of the lucky wives. If the letter is a hoax this is true, too, because she’s the first wife to be put out of the misery of wondering, what if?
