Dying for Christmas (37 page)

I decided to believe him because the alternative was too awful to contemplate. Something else occurs to me. ‘That’s another thing. The police went through your phone records when they were investigating you. How come they didn’t find any record of all these touching little chats?’

He makes a face at me – the kind of face that says, ‘
Really?
’

‘A second pay-as-you-go mobile phone. The cheater’s best friend. I’m surprised you never thought about getting one, too.’

We glare at each other, and then each look away.

‘If you must know, Christmas was horrible. I was going out of my head with worry about you. I hated lying to your family. But Natalie convinced me this was the one way you were both going to be able to get rid of that bastard. And she has a hold over me, I can’t even explain it.’

‘She’s just using you,’ I say again. ‘She needed somewhere to stay. She was bored. Do you really think she’s going to look at you twice now she’s staged her triumphant comeback?’

Now it’s Travis’ turn to be shocked. His face, already pale, turns chalky white.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You didn’t know, did you? Now Dominic Lacey is dead, Natalie has taken out those contact lenses, dyed her hair back, donned some widow’s weeds and come back from the dead.’

‘Bitch,’ Travis whispers to himself and I can see that though he’s upset, this development isn’t entirely unexpected. ‘She’s after his money,’ he says, flatly. ‘That’s what she’s been after all along. Now he’s dead, as his wife she stands to inherit everything.’

Of course. It’s so obvious. Why didn’t it occur to me before? That’s why she turned up at the flat and tried to kill him. It was never about just getting him out of the way. She wanted him dead.

‘What the fuck did you see in her?’ I can’t stop myself. ‘You must have known you were just a distraction, a means to an end?’

‘I could ask you the same thing,’ he says. ‘You and Dominic Lacey. What possessed you?’

We exchange glances, two tired, angry people just starting to grasp that the great drama of their lives is nothing but a side show in someone else’s.

He groans, letting his head fall into his hands. ‘I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid.’

I don’t reply. I’m too busy thinking what a coincidence it is that Natalie wanted Dominic dead, and now he is dead, even though everyone expected him to pull through. And now I’m looking at Travis’ bent head and his shoulders shaking through his T-shirt and I’m thinking, no.

No, no,
no
.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Kim, Martin and the Super are clustered around the computer screen in Robertson’s office, so close together Kim can smell the fried bacon Martin had for breakfast. They are watching CCTV footage taken from the camera in Dominic Lacey’s hospital room.

‘Six different staff members adjusted Lacey’s intravenous equipment in the timeframe the medical examiner has indicated,’ Robertson is explaining. ‘Five of them have been traced and questioned. This one remains a mystery.’

The footage shows a bearded, white-coated doctor with a security pass around his neck and short, thick dark hair. He has his back to the camera and is fiddling with the saline bag feeding into the intravenous tube. Lacey himself has his eyes closed and appears to be asleep.

‘Did the guards get a good look at him?’ Martin wants to know.

‘Well, that’s the interesting thing.’ Robertson seems to be quite enjoying this. ‘Take a look at the footage from the corridor outside Lacey’s room in the minutes just before our mystery doctor pays his bedside visit.’

This time the footage is much grainier. As Kim squints, she can make out the two uniforms sitting on plastic chairs. One of them is looking at his phone, the other appears to be in the middle of recounting a story. Then there is some sort of commotion at the double doors to the lifts and one of the guards gets up to investigate. Because of the camera angle, it’s hard at first to see what’s going on, then a woman with short dark curly hair appears briefly in the corridor, waving her arms around. She seems drunk or upset and the second officer gets up to help his colleague deal with her. While they are engaged in animated conversation with the woman, the bearded doctor appears, flashes his security pass and is waved through. By the time he reappears, just moments later, the guards are bundling the woman through the doors and he is able to slip past, almost unnoticed. The whole thing doesn’t last two minutes.

‘And the morons didn’t get any descriptions at all?’ Martin is disgusted.

‘The woman apparently has blue eyes, the man brown, although one of the guards described them as more hazel. But that’s about it.’

The three detectives straighten up and Kim hears her back creaking like an old woman’s. Heather’s spare bed is proving not very comfortable.

‘So the woman couldn’t be Natalie Lacey, sir,’ she asks.

Robertson shrugs. ‘It would be neat if it was, but the description doesn’t match. Besides, the man had a hospital security pass.’

Martin folds his arms across his white shirt, and Kim notices that the cotton is straining. His is the type of physique that will run to fat if he doesn’t work at staying in shape.

‘A man like Lacey will have made loads of enemies. I’m sure those women in the photos we got from Lacey’s hard drive wouldn’t be too happy about their bondage sessions being made public. We need to start re-interviewing them,’ he suggests

‘Good idea,’ says the Super, and Kim is annoyed by her own childish jealousy at hearing her colleague praised.

Only after she’s left Robertson’s office and is sinking back into her seat does it occur to her that Natalie Lacey is a professional stylist who makes her living from knowing how to transform a person’s appearance.

* * *

After so long being the victim, it feels something of a relief to be looking after someone else for a change. Travis is like someone who’s been in a traumatic accident. All his reactions are delayed and when I say something to him he looks confused as if he’s having to translate it in his head.

Part of me thinks, ‘Serves you right.’ But a bigger part of me has had enough of seeing people hurt and in pain. He is a survivor too. And we survivors must support each other.

We both know this is the end for the two of us. Not so much because of what we’ve done with other people, but because of who we’ve been. With Natalie, Travis was a man in love, and even though she turned out to be a fake, it’s too late now to stuff all that love back into whatever bag he’s been hiding it in. And he can’t get past all the things I never told him.

It’s the secrets he can’t accept, he says. Not the betrayal itself. But that’s not entirely true. He can’t stand the things I’ve done with Dominic Lacey that I’ve never done with him. In the end, it’s what’s lacking in our relationship that will be the end of it – the things we haven’t done, rather than the things we have.

I’ll move back to my parents’ house, I suppose. It’ll be weird to move back home at nearly thirty. My mum and dad will pretend not to mind but I know they’ll miss that veneer of normality that Travis lends me. Though, after all the publicity, I’m not sure how normal my life will ever be again.

At least my notoriety will ensure a capacity turn-out at Mum’s next book-group meeting.

After Travis has gone to bed, I start thinking about Natalie and all the things she’s done, the people she’s used. Dominic broke her in the end, I don’t doubt that. She earned her payoff from him. But not at my expense, or Travis’ either. I haven’t asked him whether it’s a coincidence that Dominic Lacey died at the same hospital where he works. I don’t want to know. Travis is a doctor – he’s been trained to preserve life, not to end it. A thing like that would mark a person. A thing like that would change a person’s view of themselves.

I should know.

The more I think about Natalie, the angrier I get. I met people like her at university. Careless people who’d toss out an invite to a night out and then forget to call, leaving you sitting at home with newly washed hair, watching
Casualty
in your best clothes. That they don’t mean to be cruel is what hurts the most. It’s not because they don’t like you. It’s because they don’t think about you. You don’t feature.

I remember now how it felt to be Natalie, if only briefly. Dressed up in her expensive clothes – the bright pink top with the deep neckline, the overlong skin-tight leggings, the wedding dress.

A little seed of excitement starts to grow. I picture the long white strappy dress, cut on the bias, with the slightly damaged hem where it had dragged on the sand. I remember how surprised I was that Natalie had settled for a low-key private wedding on a beach rather than a big showy production with her at the centre of it. It didn’t make sense at the time. Dominic had described it as a romantic gesture, but now a different explanation is suggesting itself.

If he was still married to Francesca Dunbar, stalling on a divorce that would cut him off from all that money, he and Natalie would have had to settle for a token ceremony, probably on a beach somewhere.

I take out my laptop and spend an hour or so Googling ‘beach weddings India illegal’.

Then I Google ‘Andrew and Catherine Dunbar contact details’.

Then I write a very long email.

Chapter Forty-Nine

Kim wasn’t planning on coming into work today. It’s Saturday and she woke up sickened by the whole Jessica Gold case which has smeared itself across her consciousness like a grubby stain. She’d arranged to go to the house this morning and found she couldn’t wait to spend time with her children, breathing in their innocence. But when she called Sean to let him know she was on her way, he told her, in the new brusque voice he reserves for her, that both children were out – Rory at a friend’s and Katy at a Saturday-morning dance class. One of the other mothers had taken a group of them.

So now Kim is in the office and feeling bereft. It occurs to her that this is how things will be if she and Sean separate. Yes, there will be times when she will relish being free to immerse herself in work, but there will also be times where her life seems empty enough to lift up and blow clean away. She wants the promotion, the recognition, but without the children, who is she doing it all for?

Sometimes she misses them so much she can’t breathe.

She logs into her emails and is surprised to find a message from Catherine Dunbar. She opens it and reads how the Dunbars have just discovered Dominic’s ‘wedding’ to Natalie took place while he was still very much married to Cesca, rendering that second marriage little more than a sham. Natalie, it seems, will not automatically inherit Lacey’s fortune. In fact, with the Dunbars preparing a legal challenge, it seems very likely that the money he got after his first wife’s death will now revert back to her family.

Kim allows herself a smile as she pictures the expression on Natalie Lacey’s face when she hears that news.

Before long, though, the black mood returns and she is plunged back into gloom thinking about Katy and Rory and how they are growing up, getting independent lives. Whoever worked life out got the design all wrong, it seems to her. There’s such a narrow window of opportunity when your children need you – why does that window have to overlap with the very years when you’re expected to be building up your career, feeling most creative? Why couldn’t your kids’ needs coincide with the retirement years, say, when you’d have so much more time to give them? And so much more willingly?

She forces herself to focus on work. After Martin’s bright idea that they should get back in touch with the women in Dominic Lacey’s picture library, IT have sent her a disc of photos. There’s a covering note attached warning that though most of the photos are perfectly innocuous, the ones featuring women are pretty hardcore. Kim sighs. She once spent eighteen months working on Vice and has never managed to come to terms with how people can derive pleasure from watching women or, worse, children in pain and distress.

The photographs, all recovered from Lacey’s hard drive, are in no particular order. She scrolls through and winces when the hardcore images come up, somehow more shocking in the mundane context of the semi-deserted station. Women hooked up to various contraptions, close-ups of flayed skin and what looks to be burn marks on arms and buttocks.

Other images are clearly related to his work. There’s a series of photographs of individual items in a furniture warehouse he was obviously pricing up – picture after picture of Italian leather sofas in cream or red and elaborate glass dining tables. It doesn’t surprise Kim to find that Lacey has also taken many photographs of himself. As a narcissist, it makes perfect sense he’d be his own favourite model.

There are moody black and white shots of him on the balcony of his flat, with Tower Bridge in the distance and the Shard looming up behind it. There are photographs of him on a beach somewhere, his shoulders tanned and well defined. Even though he’s dead, Kim can’t look into those eyes without a shiver, the hypnotic pull of them wrenching her out of her world and into his. He’s even taken a photograph of himself on the top deck of a bus. Alone in the office, Kim snorts with derision at the sheer vanity of it. Then, abruptly, she stops laughing.

‘Oh my god,’ she says out loud, to no one.

Her mouth is dry and her heart slams painfully against her ribcage.

Two rows behind Lacey sits a schoolgirl in a blazer with long brown hair and headphones in her ears. If you were glancing through the photographs you wouldn’t even notice her, a young girl lost in her own thoughts, gazing out through the window. But Kim notices her because she recognizes her.