‘That was either a big lie on Marianne’s part or else she just underestimated Paddy,’ said Mayo. ‘We’re all flawed, him included, but …’ He stopped.
‘He loves Lottie,’ said Jemma. ‘She’s never felt unloved by him.’
Simon was still at a bit of a loss. ‘So you’re saying you felt as if it was truethat you were Lottie’s dad to all intents and purposes, or soon would be?’
‘No. Marianne lied to me. That’s why I did what I did, because I found out about the lie. That and … the other reason. She told me I was Lottie’s biological dad. Said she’d sent off some of both of our DNA and proved it beyond any doubt.’
‘When did she say that?’ asked Simon.
‘A few weeks after the Thursday nights had started.’
‘Did you ask to see the DNA results?’
‘Of course,’ said Mayo. ‘She was well prepared for that question. Said she’d torn them up and binned them – that it wasn’t safe to keep them anywhere in the house in case someone found them. I said, “But you’ve got this study, that you keep locked.” That didn’t go down well at all. She looked angry and snapped at me: “I told you, I’ve torn them up.” Maybe that was true, I don’t know – but the part about me being Lottie’s dad was a lie, as I found out in 2012, on 8 November. I readall about it in one of Marianne’s diaries: she’d had private DNA tests done, yes, but the results were the opposite of what she’d told me. No match at all between me and Lottie, but a clear result for Paddy and Lottie. He was her father, no question. And she’d told me the opposite. The diary entry I read made it clear she was proud of her ingenious idea: to get me even more on board and invested than I already was, by adding that one lie to the mix.’
‘Unbelievable,’ Simon murmured.
‘Yeah, I was pretty shocked when I read that,’ said Mayo. ‘And I only saw it sort of by accident. For the first time ever, on 8 November 2012, Marianne had left the study first, without me, and gone downstairs, leaving me sitting in a chair, too stunned to move. Why was I paralysed? Because she’d just told me that there was now no other way for our plan to work – I was going to have to kill Paddy.’
‘What?’ Simon hadn’t been expecting that.
A tear had escaped from the corner of Mayo’s left eye. He wiped it away. ‘“Important developments!” That’s what she said when I arrived that night – as if something exciting had happened. And it had, but it wasn’t exciting. It was terrifying. She’d realised, she said, that Jemma had more grit and determination than Marianne had expected from her. She really did seem determined to stick it out with Paddy, for Lottie’s sake, and it was already November – the Thursday nights had been going on for eleven months by then, and Marianne was sick of waiting. So, her workaround was to tell me I had to kill Paddy. As a fireman, she said, I must know a way to do it, something involving fire, that would look like an accident. She said …’ He stopped. Shuddered. ‘“Burn down the whole of Devey House if you have to. You have my blessing.” Those words actually came out of her mouth. Then she said, “Let’sgo downstairs and open a bottle of wine – we need to drink to this new arrangement.” And she … she just walked out of the room. I hadn’t agreed – I’d been too gobsmacked to say anything – but she behaved as if I’d said, “Sure, no problem” and it was all in the bag, a done deal.’
Jemma had covered her face with her hands.
‘I heard her calling me from downstairs and eventually I managed to stagger to my feet – and in doing so, clumsily, I knocked against Marianne’s desk. Her diary, which was on it, slid off and landed on the floor. I picked it up, not planning to read it, and I was about to put it back when I realised she might have written something about what she’d just done – what she’d asked me to do, I mean. Maybe she’d decided the day before that she was going to ask me to kill Paddy, and written about it. Or maybe I’d find something reassuring like, “I’ve thought of a brilliant trick to play on Ollie …” So I looked. And kept looking. And saw that it wasn’t a prank – she was deadly serious. And I found the page where she’d written about the DNA test lie.’
‘You must have been angry,’ Simon stated the obvious.
‘I didn’t feel it, weirdly,’ said Mayo. ‘Utter shock – that was all I felt. Like the world wasn’t real any more. Or I wasn’t real. So I went downstairs and sat across from Marianne at her kitchen table, feeling numb, with this horrible buzzing in my head. She was chatting away cheerfully about me murdering Paddy, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, and I couldn’t listen any more. That’s when I attacked her.’ He wiped his forehead with the palm of his right hand. ‘I should have come clean about all this a long, long time ago, but I thought Jemma would hate me, and I still … even after I’d nearly murdered someone, I still hadn’t given up hope of getting my happy ending.’
‘I’m glad you hadn’t,’ Jemma said quietly.
‘The woman I love is an extraordinary person,’ Mayo told Simon.
So’s the woman I love.Simon didn’t say it. It would have sounded weird, and it wasn’t a competition.
‘My best mate Suzanne would use a different adjective,’ said Jemma. ‘Many different ones, in fact. All of them rude.’
‘At what point did you involve Belynda Simmonds?’ Simon asked.
‘I rang her soon as I got out of Sleatham St Andrew,’ said Mayo. ‘Pulled over, called her. I knew she’d cover for me – she was very loyal. But also … I mean, to put it crudely, I had something on her. I knew about her adulterous affair, and I also knew something else about her home life, which is probably why I thought of her straight away: every Thursday evening, her husband was out with his mates for five-a-side football followed by a curry. I only knew that because it was a point of contention between Belynda and her lover. She couldn’t understand why he would never agree to spend those Thursday evenings with her, when she was home alone and it would have been so convenient. Apparently, it was down to me.’ Mayo sounded surprised, and looked exasperated as he said it. ‘The lover said he didn’t like seeing her on days when she’d seen me already. Some weird sort of misplaced jealousy, I think. Anyway, that’s how I knew that she spent Thursday evenings home alone.’
‘Which prompted you to think of her as a possible alibi-provider,’ said Simon.
Mayo nodded. ‘She agreed to tell the police she’d been with me on the evening of Thursday 8 November 2012, and that we’d been seeing each other on Thursday evenings at 7.30 going back fourteen months. It was true she’d been my client for thatlong. I faked some retrospective records at the Cedarwood Centre, got the fake history put into the system – really easy to do. No one’s generally in of an evening, so no one could have said, “Wait, I remember that night and Ollie wasn’t in with any client then.”’
‘And the Ollibi was born,’ said Jemma.
‘The police descended on me very quickly,’ Mayo told Simon. ‘I had no idea Marianne had survived, or that she’d named me as her attacker. She very quickly took back her accusation, though. That and the … er, Ollibi saved me. A month or so later, Marianne wrote to me – a proper letter that she sent through the post.’
‘Saying?’ asked Simon.
‘It was an apology. For naming me, for driving me to it. She blamed herself for all of it, and … I forgave her. I wouldn’t have thought she’d be capable of … But she was. I wrote back, saying I accepted her apology and I wished her well. Neither of us said so, but there was an unspoken agreement that our meetings would stop. All communications would stop – that seemed clear somehow. And then, years later …’
‘Wordle,’ said Simon.
Mayo nodded. ‘For the last year or so, until she died, we swapped Wordle scores most days. It felt … I don’t know. Nice, somehow. In spite of the monstrous things both of us had done. Perhaps that was it: we were two monsters who had been through a lot together. And sometimes she used to … goad me, using whatever happened to be the Wordle word of the day.’
