‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this,’ I say, staring down at the oily surface of my cold tea. ‘I was already against her. You knew that. I understand that you were scared of her, but – I mean, what about your lies to me?’
He grabs me suddenly, twists me round so that I have to look at him. ‘Is Lottie really mine?’ he asks.
‘Yes. But I had a one-night stand with Ollie.’ I ought to benervous – scared, even – to tell him this, but I’m not. I don’t want to be needlessly cruel, but I also don’t mind if finding out upsets him. I can’t afford to care any more if I hurt him. I just can’t.
‘It happened when I was already pregnant but didn’t know I was,’ I say. And then a strange feeling takes hold of me. For a few seconds I can’t work out what it is. Then I recognise it: peace. It feels so good to be telling the complete truth. I should have done it years ago.
‘I figured something like that had happened,’ Paddy says, and he doesn’t sound angry. ‘I’ve spent most of our marriage wondering when you were going to leave me for him. I’m glad about Lottie, though.’
‘I wouldn’t allow you to believe you had a child if you didn’t.’
‘We can make it work, can’t we?’ says Paddy. ‘The whole separation, co-parenting thing. I mean … sorry if this sounds crass, but we’ve both kind of lied to each other, haven’t we, so there are no good guys or bad guys invol—’ He frowns. ‘What?’
I don’t know whether to laugh, cry or pour the rest of my tea over him. ‘Wait, did I miss something?’ I say. ‘Have you just broken us up, without consulting me?’
‘I assumed you were breaking us up,’ he says. ‘Aren’t you? Or aren’t you about to?’
‘Paddy, I can’t think further than the next breath at the moment.’
‘Right, but you must know if there’s any hope.’ He’s using his most reasonable voice, the one he only wheels out for very special occasions. It would be unacceptable for me to scream at him:Why does all the hope always have to come from me? Why is everything down to me?
‘Is there anything else you’ve been lying about or withholding?’ I say. ‘Because there’s zero chance for our marriage if you don’t tell me everything now. This is your chance.’
One. Only.Last.
Paddy’s eyes move uneasily away from me. ‘No,’ he says, starting to run his finger around the rim of his glass of water. ‘There’s nothing else.’
He’s lying.
28
Thursday 2 November 2023, 5.50 p.m.
SIMON
Jason Moorhouse, when he turned up twenty minutes late to the Lannanta Blue Hotel, looked less like a former Cambridge college chaplain than Simon had imagined he would, though maybe it was the ‘former’ that should have given the clue. Moorhouse was tanned, with a forehead that was all wrinkles but smooth skin on the rest of his face, which made it hard to guess his age. He was wearing faded jeans, gleaming white trainers that looked fresh out of the box and a grey T-shirt bearing, in black, the slogan ‘ANGLICAN FUNDAMENTALIST – BASED AF’. Both his arms were tattooed: a series of what looked like small bird and animal skulls on the left and ‘Belynda’ in curly letters on the right. That would be awkward if he ever bumped into Belynda Simmonds’ husband on his way to St Ives, Simon thought.As I was going to St Ives, I met a man who had one wife – with a very unusually spelled name that I’d stupidly had inked into my arm, so I got my head kicked in.
Simon could happily have started an argument about the T-shirt, too. He didn’t consider himself a Catholic any more – hadn’t been near a church in years, much to his mother’sdisgust – but he could still join in with the part of being religious that he’d always enjoyed most: disapproving of others. What kind of Anglican fundamentalist betrays his wife and his God at the same time by committing adultery?
Luckily, Moorhouse turned out to have no illusions about his own moral character. ‘What can I say?’ He spread open his extensively vandalised arms with a chuckle, then pointed up at the ceiling. ‘I was tested by Him Up There, and I failed about as badly as it’s possible to fail. Still, you’ve met Belynda, haven’t you? Then you’ll know what I’m up against. Temptation doesn’t come much stronger. But here’s the thing about Jesus: who did he focus on? Who did he used to consort with? Sinners! That’s one of the things I always loved about him as a kid.’
‘So when you and Belynda lived in Cambridge—’
‘He’s still the centre of my life, is Jesus, even though I’ve left the church.’ Moorhouse pressed the flat of his hand against his chest. ‘Still my daily companion, still my best friend.’
Lucky you. Some of us have to make do with Colin Sellers and Chris Gibbs.Simon tried again.‘When you and Belynda were still in Cambridge, did she ever talk to you about her psychotherapist, Oliver Mayo?’
Moorhouse nodded. ‘She certainly did. I got quite jealous, the way she talked about him: “Oliver thinks this, Oliver says I should do that.” And she’d never miss a session with him, not for anything. I said to her, “I don’t want to see you on Thursdays from now on, not after you’ve been with him – all you do is witter on about how brilliant he is.”’
So that was that, Simon thought: 8 November 2012, the night someone had tried to kill Marianne Upton, had been a Thursday. They were all telling the truth: Moorhouse, Belynda Simmonds, Oliver Mayo.
It made sense, because – yes, this was it, this was what hadbeen prodding at the edges of Simon’s awareness for a while now – if it had been Mayo who’d attacked Marianne in 2012, then it was all too convenient to be plausible. Simon went over it again in his head, the Guilty Mayo version: he wants to kill Marianne and, lo and behold, he’s got Belynda Simmonds, a loyal client, willing to lie for him. Conveniently, Thursday nights are when she sees him for therapy – and this has been going on for fourteen months by the time the attack on Marianne happens. No one sets up an alibi that far in advance, surely. And Thursday also just happens to be the one night Marianne can be guaranteed to be the only adult at home at Devey House; her husband is always away for work on Thursdays, and Paddy and Jemma Stelling are at a hotel for their weekly date night, trying to save their marriage – that’s been going on for nearly a year too.
In other words, if Mayo was guilty, then all the surrounding circumstances were conspiring like crazy, well in advance, to help exonerate him. It would be an every-murderer’s-dream scenario, especially when you factored in Marianne insisting he hadn’t done it, even though she’d initially claimed he had.
Whereas if someone else, not Oliver Mayo, had tried to kill Marianne in 2012, there was no implausible coincidence to grapple with, only several different people doing their various activities on Thursday evenings.
Maybe Simon needed to think less about the living and more about Marianne herself. Why had she said ‘Oliver’ when asked in 2012, if he hadn’t done it? He thought back to what Jemma had told him at her house, while they’d been busy confiding in each other in a way Simon never had with anyone before: Marianne had almost insisted Jemma stay with Paddy, after the one-night stand with Mayo in 2010. Why? Why try and persuade anyone you cared about to stay with a weed-addicted loserwho went from one dead-end bar job to another? Oliver Mayo, meanwhile, was charming, professionally successful … True, there had been a baby on the way – Paddy’s baby – but still, what kind of stepmother would do everything she could to make her stepdaughter stay with an obvious loser she didn’t love any more?
