Lies Page 11

  “That’s good, Wills. Now why don’t you come down for a minute and get back to normal.”

  “I am normal.”

  “The normal way up, I mean. So you don’t get dizzy.”

  “Don’t feel dizzy.”

  “Come on, matey. You’re very red in the face.”

  I picked him up carefully and put him back on the sofa, right side up. He sat for a minute and got his breath back, his cheeks still flushed.

  “Do you want to play a game?” I said. Anything to take my mind off Mel and what I was supposed to do next.

  “What game?”

  “Footie in the garden?”

  He thought for a moment. “Is everyone cross with Mummy?”

  “What do you mean, Wills?”

  “Alice’s mummy is cross with her. You’re cross with her.”

  “No, I’m not, Wills.”

  “You shouted at her.”

  “You heard that?”

  He nodded solemnly. “You were mean to her.”

  “I did shout. I was just a little bit upset.”

  “What about?”

  “It’s gone now. It’s nothing.”

  He rolled a car across the sofa. “Why were you mean to her?”

  “It’s grown-up stuff, Wills. We were both a bit mean to each other, but we’re OK now.”

  He began lining the cars up on one of the sofa cushions. “Are you sad, Daddy?”

  The question stopped me in my tracks. I swallowed painfully, tears springing to my eyes, and I turned away so that William wouldn’t see.

  What a godawful mess we have made, your mother and me.

  “No, matey. I’m fine.” I gestured toward the back garden, wiping my eyes quickly. “Do you want to play football, then?”

  We went outside into the late-afternoon drizzle, a net at each end of the garden, kicking his sponge ball until it was sodden and heavy with water. Before long, William’s jeans were streaked with mud and wet grass, and his coat was slick with rain. But it didn’t seem to bother him as he ran around and kicked and rolled over on the ground, calling for penalties.

  I let the tears come then, glad of the rain to disguise them.

  Mel came out in a raincoat and stood by the back door, the hood pulled over her head. We looked at each other, and for a moment, I thought she was going to come and talk to me. She took a step toward me, faltered when she saw the look on my face.

  I turned away. I didn’t want to talk.

  She sat down on the swing seat instead and stared straight ahead, fresh tears on her cheeks. She felt like a stranger, like someone else’s wife. It was as if I were standing outside someone else’s house in a different street, a different city, where I didn’t belong and never had. For the first time in years, I didn’t know what the future held—only that it held less hope than when I’d woken up this morning.

  Mel had only ever talked about being unfaithful once. Truth or dare at the blurry tail end of a house party, before we were even engaged. A game of “stand up if you’ve ever.” The game played by drunken adults who had played spin the bottle when they were teenagers. As in, “Stand up if you’ve ever … kissed a girl,” aimed at the girls.

  “Stand up if you’ve ever had sex at work.”

  “Stand up if you’ve ever been unfaithful.” That last one had gotten her on her feet, swaying slightly and grinning a charmingly plastered grin in the middle of the room. She’d admitted to a single infidelity. But insisted it didn’t count, because it happened when she was still at school when she was fifteen years old. I had asked her later, in the taxi home, but she’d just smiled and kissed me and said it was a long time ago. I’d forgotten about it. Until now.

  William was winning our football game 9–8 when my cell phone buzzed in my pocket.

  I dug the phone out of my jeans and held a hand up to stop play. He ran straight past me and scored into the empty net.

  “Ten!” he shouted, a smear of mud on his chin. “I’m first to ten! I win!”

  “Good game,” I said.

  “First to fifteen?” he said hopefully, blinking up at me.

  Shielding my phone from the rain, I looked at the screen. It showed the text message icon in the notifications bar. I clicked on it, checking over my shoulder to see if Mel had noticed. She was still sitting on the swing seat, looking at our son, a desolately sad look on her face.

  The message was from Ben.

  You want to know the truth big fella? Let’s meet. There’s something I need to show you.

  3:25 P.M. Ben cell

  Raindrops spotted the phone’s screen, distorting the words.

  Let’s meet.

  26

  I kept my distance from Mel for the rest of the day. Seeing her, hearing her voice, gave me a pain in my chest like there was a boulder pressing on my rib cage. I didn’t know what to say to her, what was supposed to happen next. We were in uncharted territory: my marriage was a shipwreck, and I had been washed up on some strange shore where I didn’t speak the language. There was anger too, but mostly a plunging sadness, a sense that much had been lost between us that might never be regained.

  Mel put William in the bath after we came in from football and then made his tea. I shut myself in the study with a bottle of red wine and thought further about the invitation from Ben.

  There’s something I need to show you.

  But what? And why now? Not to apologize, surely. That was not his style at all.

  It could be a trap. Maybe he was going to finish what he’d started on Thursday, with a shotgun to even the odds. Mel had been taken away from him, and he couldn’t deal with it. He thought I had threatened to hurt her if she didn’t end their relationship; God alone knew what kind of man he thought I was. Perhaps he thought he had to protect Mel from me, teach me a lesson. I had learned things about Ben in the last forty-eight hours that I would never have suspected, and I had to be ready for him if he turned violent again.

  It still begged the question: What did he have that he needed to show me?

  I booted up the PC and refilled my glass as the computer whirred into life.

  Ben had texted a map of the meeting place: a close-up picture of a page from a London A–Z, lots of green space, the A4140 going through the middle of it, Kingsbury HA9, Barn Hill, Fryent Country Park.

  Bridge in the park near the open-air theater. 10 A.M. tomorrow.

  Fryent Country Park wasn’t too far away. A few miles northwest, near the bottom of the M1, but still in London. Ben did his triathlon training there, something about being able to run and run without bumping into anyone you knew when you were red-faced and pouring sweat like you were going to have a heart attack. I guessed he knew it pretty well. The satellite image on Google Earth showed an open-air stage by a lake in the southern part of the park. It looked fairly isolated on the map, plenty of trees and no houses nearby. It was an interesting choice. If he had wanted to meet in public, with lots of witnesses and bystanders, he could have chosen one of a thousand other places. But instead he had chosen a big country park with plenty of trees and uneven ground where—at 10:00 A.M. on a Monday morning—we might not see another soul.

  The cell phone buzzed in my hand. Another text.

  Come alone.

  5:31 P.M. Ben cell

  I stared at his latest message for a moment before returning to the Google Earth image. Come alone. It hadn’t occurred to me to do anything else, but I would need to take precautions. Get there early and check the place out. Tell Mel where I was going too? I couldn’t bring myself to confide in her, not yet. She had kept the truth from me for months, and it was better that she didn’t know her ex-lover was asking to meet. No one at school could know either, because meeting him on a Monday morning meant taking a sick day from work. Nor could Adam, because I knew he’d advise me against the meeting, but it was something that I had to do. Should I take a weapon, in case Ben lost it? Bad idea. Really bad.

  There was a much better option.

  I found th
e business card with PC Khan’s name on it and dialed the number. It went through to a duty sergeant, and I explained who I was, asking that a message to be passed on to the demand management inspector as soon as possible in the morning, telling them where and when Ben had asked to meet. I asked—if it were possible—for an officer to meet me at the entrance to the country park so they could see Ben for themselves. See that he wasn’t missing anymore. Put an end to this charade.

  The printer clicked and hummed as it printed a map of the park. Paths, tracks, a lake, a parking lot, a road running through the middle of it all. I drank the last of the red wine and just sat there in the chair for a few minutes, wondering whether meeting Ben at the park might turn out to be a mistake. Or my best chance to close things out, draw a line under what had happened, and start putting my family back together. There was only one way to find out. In any case, there were some things I wanted to say to him: to look him in the eye and tell him that Mel was mine and I was hers, and nothing would ever change that. To tell him she was human, she’d made a mistake, and now we would put it behind us and start again. Part of me—maybe a big part—also thought briefly about hurting him, punishing him for what he’d tried to do to my family. He had forfeited his right to a fair fight.

  I didn’t notice the webcam until I was about to shut the computer down. The red light glowed next to its tiny digital eye, looking back at me from its perch on top of the monitor. The camera’s red light only lit up when it was in use. When there was someone at the other end, the webcam’s view displayed on their computer screen.

  Someone was watching me. No, not someone. It wasn’t a coincidence—there was only one person that it could be.

  Ben.

  MONDAY

  27

  Mel left for work at 7:10 A.M., as usual. We had not spoken last night or this morning. As soon as she shut the front door behind her, I rang school, leaving a message for the head of year to tell him I was sick in bed with food poisoning and would not be able to make it in today.

  Waiting in line with William in the school playground, I turned and caught one of the mums staring at me with a mixture of pity and curiosity. Her face rang a bell somehow, but she quickly looked away, saying something to the woman next to her. Then I realized why: she had been two tables away from us in the Stratford Arms yesterday and had witnessed the confrontation with Beth.

  Get used to this. People will find out, that’s just the way life works. So be it. I could handle that.

  The rendezvous wasn’t due to happen until ten and there were still only three other cars in the small parking area at Fryent Country Park by the time I pulled in, just after nine. One of them was a white Aston Martin DB9, registration W1NB1G.

  Damn. He beat me to it.

  I parked at the end of the row and sat for a moment, peering at his car, looking for movement behind the tinted glass. My cell chimed with a text message.

  I’m so sorry, Joe. Please forgive me. Love you xxx

  9:03 A.M. Mel cell

  Reading the words gave me a painful ache in my chest again. I put the phone back in my pocket without replying and waited another minute to see if Ben was still in his car. It would be better to do it here in the parking lot near the road, whatever it was he wanted to show me. This was nearer to an escape route, nearer to houses and people and witnesses, rather than some tucked-away part of the park. And I wanted, suddenly, to get it over with.

  There was no movement from the Aston Martin. I got out of my car and walked over to where Ben was parked, trying not to walk too fast or too casually, just calm and controlled and taking everything in my stride. I peered into the sports car’s window. A large Costa coffee was in the cup holder, and there was a pile of clothes on the back seat. Almost like he’d emptied them out of a bag to make space for something else. To make space for what?

  One of his guns is gone.

  I stared at the pile of clothes for a long moment, then switched on the GPS on my phone, checked the map, and set off up a long, winding track that led over a small rise and into a stand of trees. It was a crisp October morning, and the birds were making plenty of noise high in the branches, but I saw no one as I tramped up the path, keeping my eyes peeled and my hands out of my pockets, ready to react if necessary. The trees thinned out on one side, then disappeared, and a small lake took their place. Low autumn sunlight slanted through the trees at my back.

  Footsteps behind me. A young woman in a Lycra running top and shorts, jogging with headphones on. She passed by and on up the path without meeting my eye.

  The stones on the path clicked beneath my feet, and the open-air theater came into view across the lake. It looked out of place, a gray concrete amphitheater in this oasis of green trees and blue water. My pulse was picking up. Show yourself, then. I thought about what I would say to Ben. What do you say to a man who’s been sleeping with your wife? Maybe he still thought Mel would come back to him?

  He wouldn’t leave here with any doubts on that score.

  The path circled almost all the way around one side of the lake, the bridge coming closer and closer. There didn’t seem to be anyone around, but that didn’t mean there was no one there. Trees and bushes stood close to each end, and the open-air theater itself looked like it offered places to hide.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I snatched it out. A text from Ben.

  Are you alone?

  9:14 A.M. Ben cell

  There was no one about except an old woman walking a dog beside the lake, maybe a hundred meters from me. I studied her for a minute. She gave no indication of even being aware I was there.

  I hit Reply.

  Yes

  9:15 A.M. Me

  I walked up onto the bridge, feeling exposed as I got to the center. It had a shallow incline and a waist-high stone parapet. On a different day, it would be nice to come here with William. A different day, a different month, a different year maybe.

  Turning 360 degrees, I tried to get my bearings. It was a fair way from the parking lot, which was invisible on the far side of the trees. Apart from the jogger and the dog walker, I had seen no one. I leaned on the bridge’s stone parapet and looked out across the lake, stirred into small choppy waves by a fresh autumn breeze from the north. The sky was starting to cloud over, and what had been a clear, sunny October day was now threatening to turn darker. My eyes came to rest for a second time on the open-air stage on the other side of the bridge, its walls and angles seeming to offer a natural hiding place.

  I walked down off the bridge and tramped through the long grass to the series of concrete semicircles that formed the theater seating, each deeper than the next, until I was in a depression in front of the stage. The theater building itself, a two-story wooden façade on a one-story base, was locked and shuttered for the off-season. The amphitheater looked tired and sad and windswept, as if it had been abandoned to the elements now that winter was on its way.

  There was no one around. I went back to the middle of the bridge, checked my watch, sent another message.

  I’m here

  9:18 A.M. Me

  I had barely put the phone back in my pocket when the reply came back:

  So am I.

  9:18 A.M. Ben cell

  I spun around, the phone still in my hand, to look behind me.

  The path was empty. The open-air theater still abandoned for the winter. No signs of life. I searched the tree line across the lake from left to right, trying to spot him as my heart thumped harder in my chest.

  He has a gun, remember.

  Suddenly—now that it was really happening—it occurred to me that coming here on my own, to a half-deserted city park, was maybe not such a good idea. The meeting time I’d given to the police was still more than half an hour away.

  Maybe they’ll be early.

  Maybe not.

  Maybe they won’t come at all.

  I checked over my shoulder again and then went back to studying the tree line, scanning right to left this time,
looking for any movement or shape or color that would give him away.

  That was when I saw him.

  28

  Ben was on the far side of the lake, maybe fifty or sixty meters away, just standing there. Wearing the same jacket he’d worn on Thursday night: the Louis Vuitton, the one Mel had told me cost more than £1,000. He had on a black baseball cap and was carrying a long blue canvas sports bag that looked slack and half-empty, but weighted down in the middle. As if it held something long, thin, and heavy.

  I stared at him for a long moment, trying to make sure it was him, waiting for him to make a move, give a signal, show some sign that he had seen me on the bridge and recognized me. But he just stood there, absolutely still, staring back across the choppy water of the lake. It was the first time I had seen him since Thursday evening, and I was trying to work out what I was feeling, through the surge of emotion.

  Anger at his betrayal. Sadness at all the lying. Determination that this would be the end of it.

  The rough stone of the bridge parapet was coarse beneath my fingers. It was clear now why he had chosen the bridge for our meeting: not because it gave a perfect all-around view of the surrounding heath but because anyone standing on it was elevated, exposed, raised ten or twelve feet above everything else. Because if you were standing on the bridge, it would be very obvious if you were alone or not.

  And still he stood there. Him on one side of the lake, me on the other. He put a hand in his pocket and put a cell phone to his ear. He spoke, listened briefly, spoke again, then put the phone away. He raised a hand in a wave, then turned and walked away up the path.

  Now what—follow him? Why not? I wasn’t going to let him just walk away after bringing me all the way out here to this place.

  I walked down the bridge’s incline to follow him, keeping my eyes on him all the while. He had a big head start on me and was walking quickly, not looking back. He reached the fork in the path and took the left-hand side, quickly disappearing from view behind the screen of trees that led back to the entrance. I broke into a jog, my footsteps loud on the path. Can’t let him get away. I cut across the grass to gain on him a little more, but the path looped away behind the trees, and he was still out of sight.