‘I told you, we’ve searched Devey—’
‘No, look closer toourhome. The nick,’ said Simon. ‘Spilling Police Station. That’s where you’ll find everything the murderer wanted to hide.’
29
Thursday 2 November 2023, 10.04 p.m.
JEMMA
Afew minutes after ten o’clock, I decide I’ve sorted my head out as much as I can for the time being, and pick up my phone to ring Simon Waterhouse. Lottie is staying overnight with Suzanne, who kindly offered to do some ‘marriage-saving babysitting – or divorce-hastening babysitting; whichever you want it to be, Jemm’.
Upstairs, Paddy is snoring. I wonder if I should go outside and call Simon from the farthest end of the garden, but in the end I decide not to bother. It’s cold tonight, and it isn’t as if being that little bit further away when you tell a virtual stranger you no longer love your husband makes anything any better, morally.
Funny thing is, I’ve known Paddy since I was a child, yet he feels more like a stranger to me than Simon does – Simon whom I met on Monday for the first time in my life.
He picks up immediately, and I’m about to say I’m sorry if I woke him when I hear voices and a clattering noise in the background. ‘You sound like you’re somewhere busy,’ I say.
‘Motorway services,’ he says. ‘What’s up? Has something happened?’
‘Kind of. I hope you’re sitting down and not in a hurry.’
‘Tell me,’ he says.
I give him an update: everything I’ve found out since we last spoke. He listens without interrupting. There’s a short silence after I’ve finished. Then he asks, ‘When did Marianne give up drinking?’
I make a frustrated face at my phone. How can that be his first question, after everything I’ve just told him? ‘What’s that got to do with anything? She didn’t give up, as far as I know. She just didn’t drink. Never did. Not that I can remember, anyway. I mean, she’d have the odd sip of champagne at a special occasion – she did at Lottie’s christening, I remember.’
‘Tell me about Christmas in the Cotswolds,’ says Simon.
‘What?’I’m tempted to ask if he’s the one who’s been hitting the bottle. He seems to be trying to have a different conversation from the one I started.
‘There was a Christmas before 2006 that you spent with Oliver Mayo in a rented house in the Cotswolds. True?’
‘That’s right, 2005. Probably the only great Christmas I’ve ever had since Mum died.’ Something twists inside me. That whole period – the week away, the weeks before, the months after when Ollie was the main focus of my days – was one of the happiest of my life, except I didn’t realise it at the time. If you’d asked me then, I’d probably have said I expected to maintain that same level of happiness for the rest of my life.
‘Who went?’ Simon asks.
‘To the Cotswolds? Me, Ollie, Dad and Marianne.’
‘Just the four of you?’
‘Yes. Simon, what have Marianne’s drinking habits and a trip to the Cotswolds from nearly twenty years ago got to do with anything?’
‘Unbelievable,’ he says, as if he’s just received shocking news. ‘Okay.’
‘You’re not making sense,’ I tell him. ‘Why’s it unbelievable? Who else would you expect to have spent Christmas with us, the Archbishop of Canterbury? Plenty of photos got taken, if you need proof it was just us four.’
‘No, I didn’t mean I don’t believe you—’
‘Dad got Marianne a posh camera as a Christmas present and, boy, did she use it. Dad joked all week that she was secretly planning to sell an exposé of our holiday toHellomagazine.’
‘And you had a great time even though Marianne was there?’ Simon asks.
‘Yes. Ollie was my main focus, not her. Actually …’ Is it strange that this hasn’t occurred to me before? ‘I hated her significantly less that week. Probably because she and Ollie kind of … bonded. Or seemed to get on really well, anyway. It was kind of like … I saw her liking him. So I liked her more – or at least, I could cope with her company more easily.’
Even though she was running a regime in which it was pretty much illegal to mention your mother, or your grief at losing her.
True – but that week in the Cotswolds was the height of the ‘Nothing Matters But Ollie’ season of my life.
