‘Enough.’ Fran Whittingham sat down at her desk again. Was that a smile? Charlie was impressed. She’d taken a nasty blow, but she was rallying. ‘I’m sure nothing I’m about to say will come as a surprise to you, but you’re all off the case. Both cases. You’re to take no further action on anything relating to Marianne Upton. Is that clear? Now, all of you get out of my office without uttering one more word. Return to your desks and await further communications.’
‘Acting against us now is going to make life much easier for every would-be murderer, all over the region you’re supposed to care about keeping safe,’ Simon told Dooper. ‘You know that as well as I do. Your decision, though.’
Charlie thought about the silly self-help catchphrases her sister Liv was always inflicting on her, picked up from a range of internet-based gurus with bouffant hair. Normally Charlie waved them away with a snort and a raised eyebrow, but one came back to her now:It was always meant to happen this way. Everything unfolds exactly as it’s supposed to – and that’s as true of the painful things as it is of the ones we welcome and celebrate.Total bollocks, probably, but perhaps helpful when it came to feeling better about the end of a career you’d loved.
It took an uncomfortably long time for the six of them to exit the super’s office. Charlie was last but one in line, with Proust behind her. She wanted to turn round on her way out, look at the ‘princess from a dream’ photograph one last timeto check she hadn’t imagined it. None of this seemed particularly real at the moment, not even Fran Whittingham being the person whose office this was; Superintendent Barrow had been its occupant for so long.
‘Don’t weaken, Sergeant,’ Proust muttered from behind.
Charlie stepped out into the corridor and exhaled with relief. Simon squeezed her arm. ‘Don’t worry, Char,’ he said. ‘We’re winning this one.’
35
Tuesday 7 November 2023, 12.17 p.m.
SIMON
‘Marianne never wanted to save Jemma and Paddy’s marriage,’ said Oliver Mayo. He and Jemma were sitting across from Simon in one of the wooden booths at The Brown Cow. It was where they’d been sitting when Simon had arrived, and he hadn’t felt he could reasonably ask them to move to the table he thought of as his, even though it was available.
‘All she wanted was to have Devey House to herself every Thursday, the night Gareth was regularly in London overnight for work,’ Mayo went on. ‘That was what prompted her to come up with her “Date Nights in London” plan for Jemma and Paddy. How could they refuse? Overnight in a fancy spa hotel with a gorgeous pool once a week, all paid for, dinner and breakfast paid for, free childcare thrown in, a guaranteed good night’s sleep, uninterrupted by—’
‘Lottie was a terrible sleeper until she was about three,’ Jemma cut in, and Mayo stopped talking instantly, as if afraid to miss a precious utterance from her, even though she was speaking in a matter-of-fact way about an unromantic subject. The two of them had been holding hands since Simon got there.
‘As soon as Marianne suggested the London arrangement,all I could think about was the miracle of being able to guarantee one whole night a week of proper sleep,’ Jemma said. ‘It’s funny thinking about it now that Lottie’s thirteen and it’s nearly impossible to drag her out of bed in the morning, but I can remember fantasising about it: turning out the light at nine or ten and sleeping right through until eight the next morning.’
‘And meanwhile, Marianne would babysit Lottie at Devey House – but not alone,’ said Mayo. ‘The point of the whole scheme was to invite me round too, every Thursday, so that the three of us could play happy families: me, Marianne and Lottie.’
‘Not the only point,’ Jemma said quietly. ‘Don’t forget the me-and-Paddy bit.’ She looked at Simon. ‘The London hotel nights were supposed to reveal to me, slowly but surely, that even in luxurious conditions, I really didn’t want to be with him. Marianne was banking on me not being able to get my love for Ollie out of my system. And I’d finally give myself permission to leave Paddy, because I’d be able to tell myself I’d done right by Lottie and given the marriage my best shot, but it just wasn’t going to work. Does that make sense to you?’ Jemma asked Simon.
He nodded.
‘It didn’t to me when Ollie first told me,’ she said. ‘A few months after Ollie and I briefly … reconnected in 2010, Marianne found me trying to have a secret cry one day. I ended up telling her I was convinced I’d made a terrible mistake by marrying Paddy, that Ollie was the one I wanted to be with … That was when she out-hystericalled me and started weeping as if me having a one-night stand had ruined her life.’
Simon noticed that Mayo had winced at ‘one-night stand’.
‘She came as close as she could to forbidding me to leave Paddy,’ Jemma said. ‘Said things like “How can you thinkabout divorcing him when you’re pregnant with his child? That would be a tragedy – for all three of you, the baby too.” But if all she’d wanted, since 2006, was for me and Ollie to get back together—’
‘We’ve worked it out, though, right?’ Mayo said. ‘You wouldn’t have left Paddy then, however much you’d wanted to. Because of the baby.’
‘I once had a good mother.’ Jemma’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Not for long, but I did. I had the best mother. And I was, I still am, determined to be the best mother.’ She looked at Simon. ‘I’ve racked my brains to try and remember exactly what I told Marianne that day. Like, the specific words I used. And … I think I probably said something about how unbearable it was to realise with so much clarity that Ollie was the one I wanted when it was finally too late, when I had no choice but to stay with Paddy because of the pregnancy. Marianne tried to persuade me – not that I should leave someone whose baby I was expecting, but that the baby might be Ollie’s. It lasted ages, that argument. It felt … very bewildering at the time. Marianne wasn’t normally quite so irrational. I kept telling her: I knew for a fact Ollie wasn’t the father. It had to be Paddy. The dates put it beyond doubt. But it was like she didn’t hear me. She kept insisting strange things can happen and “Doctors don’t know everything you know, Jemma”, and could I really bethatsure?’
Mayo was nodding. ‘And that’s why she didn’t say, “Leave Paddy and be with Ollie if that’s what you want.” You’d made it clear you weren’t prepared to leave Paddy, having just found out you were carrying his child. So Marianne decided to play a longer game.’
‘Much longer,’ said Simon. ‘Lottie’s thirteen now. When did the nights in the London hotel start?’
‘Beginning of 2012,’ said Mayo. ‘Lottie was fifteen months old, the first Thursday night I went round.’
‘So Marianne was prepared to wait out the pregnancy and the whole first year of Lottie’s life before getting going on her plan?’
Mayo was shaking his head. ‘That’s not how she saw it. By that point she and I were meeting regularly, in secret, in her study at Devey House, right up until November 2012 when—’
‘Doing what, exactly?’ Simon asked. ‘Sorry to interrupt.
‘We just talked,’ said Mayo. ‘Mainly about how sad we both were. I was devastated for obvious reasons, and at first I felt utterly alone and cast out, but then … I saw that Marianne was too. In the seven months Jemm and I had been together, Marianne had become very fond of me and started to hope that I’d one day … well, be part of her family. Be her son-in-law. Knowing she wanted that as much as I did was comforting. I’d just lost everything I cared about, and then suddenly I felt as if I was part of something again – and not just any old thing. The thing I yearned to be part of: Jemma’s family. Marianne kept saying, “The story isn’t over, Ollie. Who knows what might happen soon, or at some point?” Kept telling me I was infinitely, and obviously, superior to Paddy and that Jemma would see that one day, when the time was right. I … I believed her because I desperately wanted to.’
Jemma leaned in closer to him.
‘Marianne could have that effect on you,’ Mayo said. ‘She’d bring this whole … vision, this imaginary world, to life for you and you just couldn’t help believing it. I was soon so convinced that I told my dad: not to worry, I was miserable now, but I’d be getting Jemma back sooner or later. How did I know? Because Marianne had said so, and Marianne had a plan. Dad thought the whole thing sounded sinister as hell andcouldn’t be talked out of going round to Devey House to give her a bollocking—’
