Behind Closed Doors(90)

‘Hello?’

I took a deep breath. ‘Esther, it’s Grace. Am I disturbing you?’

‘No, not at all. I was just listening to the radio actually—apparently, Antony Tomasin was acquitted.’ She paused a moment as if she wasn’t quite sure what to say. ‘I guess Jack must be disappointed.’

My mind raced. ‘Yes, I’m afraid he is rather.’

‘Are you all right, Grace? You sound a bit upset.’

‘It’s Jack,’ I admitted. ‘He says he can’t leave for Thailand tonight as he has too much paperwork to do. When he booked the tickets, he thought the case would be over long before now but because of the new evidence, about Dena Anderson having a lover, it overran.’

‘You must be so disappointed! But you can always go later, can’t you?’

‘That’s just it. Jack wants me to go tonight, as planned, and says he’ll join me on Tuesday, once he’s got everything sorted out. I’ve told him that I’d rather wait for him, but he says it’s stupid to waste both tickets. He’ll have to buy a new one for Tuesday, you see.’

‘I take it you don’t want to go without him.’

‘No, of course I don’t.’ I gave a shaky laugh. ‘But in the mood he’s in, maybe it would be better. I’m meant to be phoning for a taxi to take me to the airport—he can’t take me because he had a hefty whisky when he came in. The trouble is, I don’t have a number for one and I don’t dare disturb Jack in his study and ask him if I can use the computer to look for one, so I was wondering if you knew of a local firm.’

‘Do you want me to take you? The children are already home from school and Rufus worked from home today, so it wouldn’t be a problem.’

It was the last thing I wanted. ‘It’s very kind of you, but I can’t ask you to drive to the airport on a Friday night,’ I said hastily.

‘I don’t think it’ll be that easy to get a taxi at such short notice. What time do you need to leave?’

‘Well, as soon as possible, really,’ I admitted reluctantly. ‘I have to check in at seven.’

‘Then you’d better let me take you.’

‘I’d rather take a taxi. If you could just give me a number?’

‘Look, I’ll take you—it really isn’t any trouble. Anyway, it’ll get me out of the dreaded bath-time.’

‘No, it’s fine.’

‘Why won’t you let me help you, Grace?’

There was something about the way she said it that put me on my guard. ‘I just think it’s an awful imposition, that’s all.’

‘It isn’t.’ Her voice was firm. ‘Have you got all your stuff ready?’

‘Yes, we packed yesterday.’

‘Then I’ll just go and tell Rufus I’m taking you to the airport and I’ll be straight over—say, fifteen minutes?’

‘Great,’ I told her. ‘Thank you, Esther, I’ll tell Jack.’

I put the phone down, appalled at what I had just agreed to. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how I was going to be able to pretend to someone like Esther that everything was all right.





PRESENT


The air hostess leans towards me. ‘We’ll be arriving at Heathrow in about forty minutes,’ she says quietly.

‘Thank you.’ I feel a sudden surge of panic and force myself to breathe calmly, because I can’t afford to crack at this stage of the game. But the fact is, even though I’ve thought about nothing else since Margaret saw me through passport control at the airport in Bangkok almost twelve hours ago, I still have no idea how I’m going to play it when we finally land. Diane and Adam will be there to meet me and take me back to theirs so I need to think very carefully about what I’m going to say to them about my last hours with Jack, because whatever I tell them I’ll have to repeat to the police.

The seat-belt sign comes on and we begin our descent into Heathrow. I close my eyes and pray that I’ll end up saying the right thing to Diane and Adam, especially as it is Adam who has been liaising with the police since Jack’s body was found. I hope there aren’t going to be any nasty surprises. I hope Adam isn’t going to tell me that the police think Jack’s death is suspicious. If he does, I don’t know what I’ll say. All I can do is play it by ear. The problem is, there are so many things I don’t know.

The euphoria I felt when Mr Strachan told me that Jack had taken his own life—because it meant that my plan had worked and I had got away with murder—was quickly tempered by the fact that he’d used the word ‘seems’. I didn’t know whether he’d decided to be cautious off his own bat or if the police in England had intimated that there was room for doubt. If they had already started questioning people—work colleagues, friends—maybe they had come to the conclusion that Jack was an unlikely candidate for suicide. The police were bound to ask me if I knew why Jack had taken his own life and I would have to convince them that losing his first court case was reason enough. Maybe they would ask me if there’d been problems in our marriage, but if I admitted that there had been, even if I gave them all the details, they would surely consider murder, rather than suicide. And that is something I can’t risk. Mr Strachan told me that Jack had died from an overdose, but he didn’t give me any more details so I don’t know where his body was actually found and I hadn’t thought it appropriate to ask. But what if Jack had a way of getting out of the room in the basement, what if there was a switch hidden away somewhere that I hadn’t found, what if, before actually succumbing, he’d made it up the stairs and into the hall? He might even have had time to write a note implicating me before he died.