She sensed Angela relenting slightly. Maybe she recognised the desperation in her voice. Not that she would be much moved by that. Come to think of it, Angela had always given every sign of disliking her, even when they were at school together, even when they were supposed to be friends.
‘It’s not working, I just tried it, it might be the batteries, they don’t seem to hold charge, he’s been meaning to get new ones,’ said Angela. ‘As soon as he gets in I’ll tell him to call you. That’s all I can do. Give me your number.’
Jennifer did so. It was the best she was going to get. Anyway, she supposed another few hours wouldn’t make any difference. She was probably being hysterical.
In North Devon, Angela replaced the receiver and reached for the message pad kept on the little shelf by the phone. It was where the whole family jotted messages and everyone checked it religiously. That way Todd would get his message as soon as he walked through the door, even if Angela had already gone to bed — which was quite likely knowing his cricket nights. Blast. The notebook wasn’t there. She roundly cursed her boys, one of whom had doubtless not replaced the book where it should be kept. Her endeavour to extract an admission from any of them proved fruitless. They barely paused in their extermination of innocent planets featured on the latest computer game which they had jacked into the living-room TV. The noise was deafening. And the baby was crying again — that child never seemed to stop.
Angela swiftly abandoned her rather half-hearted search for the notepad, and began a futile attempt to quieten her now screaming daughter.
‘To hell with Jennifer Stone,’ she muttered to herself.
When Todd Mallet came home there was no written note waiting for him, and his wife was, indeed, already in bed and asleep.
While she waited for Anna, Jennifer towel-dried her hair and then set herself up in her study with laptop computer and tape recorder. She jotted one or two thoughts into the laptop, just as she had done every day since the whole business had begun.
Then she braced herself for an unpleasant task, but something she none the less wanted to do. She wound back the tape in her voice-activated recorder and listened to her conversation with Marcus. It had only lasted around half an hour, she realised, but it had been the longest and most terrible half hour of her life.
She began to transcribe the tape methodically into her computer. By the time the doorbell rang she had almost completed the transcript. It made chilling reading.
At the front door she paused. She wanted to be quite sure who was outside. She peered through the peephole, and there stood Anna, comforting, wonderful Anna, clutching a woollen-wrapped bundle which presumably contained Pandora. She opened the door laughing.
‘Shush,’ commanded Anna.
Jennifer dropped her voice to a whisper: ‘Do you want to put her to bed?’ she mouthed.
Anna nodded. She followed Jennifer upstairs to a bedroom. Jennifer pulled back the duvet on one of the twin beds, and Anna carefully unwrapped her bundle and revealed a deeply sleeping Pandora. The child barely stirred as her mother laid her gently in the bed. Jennifer pulled the cover around her neck. Pandora snuggled down. A wonderful expression that, and when you watched a child settling into deep sleep you really knew what ‘snuggling down’ was, Jennifer thought.
She realised she was just standing there appreciating the peacefulness of the little girl while Anna tugged impatiently at her arm.
Together they left the room.
‘Come on,’ said Anna, taking charge. ‘Let’s sit down with a stiff drink, you look absolutely diabolical.’
‘Thanks,’ replied Jennifer.
But she caught a glimpse of herself in one of the mirrors on the landing, and it was indeed the truth. She had not dried her hair properly, or combed it through. It was damp and tangled. There were dark bags under her eyes which were still red and swollen from the tears she kept being unable to prevent, and her skin was blotchy and raw-looking for the same reason.
Downstairs she headed for the kitchen to make drinks. Anna steered her to an armchair in the sitting room.
‘Sit down, for Chrissake,’ she commanded.
Jennifer did so, obediently like a child. Anna disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a bottle of Scotch, an ice bucket, a big bottle of fizzy mineral water and two glasses.
‘I don’t drink whisky,’ remarked Jennifer mildly.
‘Exactly,’ said her friend.
And Jennifer was reminded of the uncannily similar incident with her mother two days earlier. Two days? Was it only two days? She could not believe all that had happened.
Anna handed Jennifer a tumbler filled almost to the brim with whisky and ice and water, then poured a much smaller one for herself. She had to drive Pandora home, after all.
She watched Jennifer take a deep drink and slump back in her chair.
‘Shoot,’ she ordered.
Jennifer just looked at her. She didn’t know where to begin. She said ‘Umm.’ No more words came. As ever, Anna seemed able to almost read her mind.
‘Begin at the beginning,’ she coaxed.
And so Jennifer did. She began with how she had found the body of Marjorie Benson in the sea at Pelham Bay, how Mark Piddle had come to interview her and they had embarked on an all-powerful relationship that had lasted most of their adult lives.
This much Anna knew. Then Jennifer told her about the disappearance of Irene Nichols, Mark’s former girlfriend, which Anna also knew about because after Irene’s body had been found she had read about it in the papers — all of which had mentioned the Piddell connection — but Anna was amazed that Jennifer had never told her about it in all their years of friendship. Surely it wasn’t the kind of thing you forgot. And Anna, who did not mean to interrupt, heard herself say exactly that.
‘In a way I did forget,’ said Jennifer in a very small voice. ‘I made myself forget, which is just part of my guilt.’
She went on then, becoming more and more fluent, taking Anna through it all in chronological order, how the old nightmare had returned from the moment of her return to Pelham Bay; and how, with every new little piece of information she gained, her terrible suspicions about the man that she married became a growing certainty.
She told Anna of the half-mad plot she had hatched. Her determination to trap Marcus. How she had decided to sleep with him again, to convince him that she was indeed his kindred spirit in more ways than just sexually. She had been sure she could do it if she kept her head. And she had been sure she was the only person in the world who could trap Marcus: that was why she had felt compelled to go through with it.
She told Anna almost every detail of the night she spent with Marcus, and how she tricked him in the morning so she could search his flat and how she took the computer tape to Dominic.
Then she stopped.
‘But you still don’t know for certain, do you?’ Anna queried.
‘Oh yes I do,’ said Jennifer. ‘I went back. Then I played my trump card. You haven’t followed it, have you?’
‘Not entirely, obviously,’ admitted Anna.
‘I convinced him that we were a true pair, that I only wanted to be his equal, to share every secret with him. He always said we were two of a kind. I convinced him that was so. That way I knew I could trap him.’
She stood up.
‘This afternoon I spent three hours in bed with Marcus, during which we drove each other to the heights of physical excitement that we could only ever reach together. At least, as far as he was concerned we reached them.’
Her words were quite clinical. She sounded robotic. It was the only way she could do this.