The Other Side of the Door, Nicci French [new reading .TXT] 📗

of his bloody complacency, or maybe I thought that telling him would make him look at me properly for once.’ She gave a sharp laugh. ‘It’s certainly done that.’

‘How did he take it?’

She gave a little shiver. ‘Let’s just say he wasn’t calm about it. He kept saying he didn’t know how I could do something like that to Lola. Oh, God. I wasn’t doing anything to Lola. I love Lola and I’d never harm her and if I thought—The thing is, though, he’s not completely blind, Richard. He knows, he half knows, that it wasn’t just my fault. If we’d been getting on better, it wouldn’t have happened. I was so lonely, Bonnie.’

I put my hand over hers. ‘You should have told me before.’

‘You always seem so in control of things. You wouldn’t have a husband who treated you like you were there to keep the house clean and put meals on the table. No one would just fuck you a couple of times when they first met you and leave you without even bothering to tell you he was leaving.’

‘That’s just what I seem like on the outside,’ I said. ‘From the inside it doesn’t feel like that.’

‘What happened with Hayden—it was so important to me, and important to Richard as well. Maybe it’s even ruined our marriage, although I don’t think either of us wants that. But now I think maybe it meant nothing to Hayden. Just one of those things. He’ll forget about me soon enough—perhaps he already has.’

I recognized everything she had said. In a way, her story had been my story—except she was now trying to return to her husband, retracing her footsteps to where she had been before she’d met Hayden. But I had crossed a line and was in another country, one from which there was no coming back. My old life, as it had been before Hayden pulled me into his arms and kissed me, seemed far away, safe and luminous with the soft allure of something irrevocably lost. It wasn’t just my old life that was lost, but my old self. I could never be that woman again, I thought. I had done something that couldn’t be confessed and forgiven.

‘We should talk properly about what happened,’ I said, ‘and what’s going to happen with you and Richard now. But you’re about to go to a police station, so tell me why you’ve reported him missing.’

‘I got scared.’

‘Scared?’

‘It sounds stupid. I know he’s just wandered off to the next bit of his life. I don’t think he has the kind of continuity that you or I have. It’s just one thing, and then the next thing, and nothing adds up. As a matter of fact, I think even when he was with me there was someone else, although he never said so. I just got this sense. I think that’s why he didn’t come back after the second time. But I was thinking—I was thinking what he said to me once.’

‘What?’

‘That he was worthless. That I shouldn’t get involved with someone like him.’

‘He said that?’ The very words he’d used with me, and I’d repeated to Neal.

‘Yes.’

‘You think he might have killed himself.’

‘No! Yes. I don’t know. I don’t really think he’d do that but once I started wondering I couldn’t just leave it. I went round there, you know—I phoned him on his mobile and on his landline, and went to where he was staying and rang the bell. I felt sure he was there, knowing it was me and not wanting to see me. It was horrible.’

But it was me, I thought—me and Sonia with Hayden’s dead body, listening to you, willing you to go away. My skin prickled at the memory.

‘So?’ I prompted her.

‘I told Richard yesterday that I was going to report it to the police and even he thought it might be sensible.’ She looked at me with her reddened eyes. ‘Did I do right, Bonnie?’

‘You did what you had to.’

‘I’ve realized I don’t actually know anything about him. I don’t know where he grew up, who his parents are, his friends, anything.’

I didn’t know much either. Just odd fragments he’d let slip. Once he’d said he loved elephants because they never made any noise when they walked but were silent and delicate, and that when any of their family died, they mourned them; when I’d asked him how he knew, he told me he’d once spent some time in Africa. The idea of Hayden in some game park looking at elephants and lions through binoculars was so ridiculous it had made me laugh. He had mentioned women, of course—that one’s spirit, that one’s madness—but never by name or in specific detail. He talked about them as if they were fantasies or dreams or myths. He had talked about bands, festivals, odd gigs in obscure pubs, but with no date, no location. I knew he had grown up somewhere in the West Country, that his father had been hopeless and his mother sad, that he had hated school, wherever that school had been. I wondered if that was why women had so adored him. He seemed to have come from nowhere and to carry with him an air of mystery and hurt. We wanted to solve him and we wanted to cure him. For a minute, I saw his face flushed with rage and his fist raised. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

‘I’m so glad you know,’ Sally was saying.

‘I’m glad too.’ Did she know, though? Did she suspect? Surely, surely she must. And why hadn’t she asked me how I’d come to have the necklace? ‘I’ll come with you to the police.’ Because there was nothing else I could do. This was Sally: my secret rival, unwitting whistleblower and oldest friend.

Before

‘Sally rang and told me we can’t play at her house any more,’ I called, into the bathroom.

‘That’s a pain.’ Hayden was in the bath. He’d been there for about an hour. Every so often he would