‘The coroner was perfectly satisfied that it was a tragic accident and that no other vehicle was involved. I understand that the fact he was with another woman is unsettling and upsetting for you. As a matter of evidence, how they knew each other doesn’t matter.’
‘There’s no evidence at all, of any kind,’ I said. ‘Nothing to show that he knew her.’
Again, I anticipated what she was going to say. ‘If he was having an affair and keeping it secret, then perhaps that’s not surprising.’
‘I’m telling you, he didn’t know her.’
‘No. You’re telling me you don’t believe he knew her.’
‘It amounts to the same thing.’
‘With all due respect, it does not. What you believe and what is true are not necessarily the same thing.’
‘So you’re just going to let things lie?’
‘Yes. And I would advise you to do the same. You might consider seeing someone about -’
‘You think I need bereavement counselling? Professional help?’
‘I think you’ve had a terrible shock and are having difficulty in coming to terms with it.’
‘If anyone says “coming to terms” to me again, I think I’ll scream.’
Chapter Ten
I read through Greg’s emails so often that I almost knew them by heart. I thought they might give me a sense of his mood in the days and weeks leading up to his death. Was there a hint of anxiety? Anger? Apprehension? I couldn’t find anything and gradually they became familiar, like songs you’ve played so often you don’t hear them any more. Then I noticed something blindingly obvious, something that everybody in the developed world apart from me must already have known. Every email showed the exact time he had pressed the send button. Each email, whether from his home or his office computer, was a fairly accurate guide as to where Greg had been at a particular moment.
Within half an hour I was back from the stationer’s with two bulky carrier-bags. I tipped their contents on to the carpet. There was a large roll of poster-sized sheets of card, rulers, different-coloured pens and Magic Markers, highlighters, and sheets and sheets of little stickers – circles, squares and stars. It looked like the raw materials for a nursery-school art project.
I spread four of the cards in a row on the floor, using heavy books to hold the corners down. Then, using a ruler and a fine architect’s pen, I started to rule grids across them, each representing a week in the last month of Greg’s life. I traced seven columns, then drew horizontal lines cutting them into halves, then quarters, then eighths and so on, until I had chopped each column into a hundred and twenty rectangles, each representing ten minutes in a day starting at eight and finishing at midnight. I didn’t bother about the nights because we hadn’t spent a night apart in the last month.
Just from memory, I was able to cross out entire evenings I knew we had spent together. On the weekends there were whole days I eliminated with a bold stroke of black: the Saturday we had taken the train to Brighton, walked on the beach, eaten some awful fish and chips, bought a secondhand book of poetry and I’d fallen asleep on his shoulder on the journey back; the day we walked along the Regent’s Canal from Kentish Town all the way to the river. Those were two days when he hadn’t been having sex with Milena Livingstone.
Then I started on the emails. At work, Greg had written twenty or thirty a day, sometimes more. Based on each one, I wrote ‘O’ for office in the appropriate slot on the card. Some were in clusters. He had a habit of sending a flurry of messages as soon as he arrived at work, another just before one o’clock and another at around five, but others were dotted through the day. It didn’t take me much more than an hour to work my way through the emails, and when I was done, I stood back and surveyed the result. The chart was already satisfyingly shaded in, and there was still so much to do.
The next day I invited Gwen round. I said it was urgent but she was at work and didn’t reach me until almost six. When she arrived I hustled her through to the kitchen, boiled the kettle and made a pot of coffee.
‘Would you like a biscuit?’ I said. ‘Or a slice of ginger cake? I made both this afternoon. I’ve been busy.’
Gwen looked amused and a bit alarmed. ‘Some cake,’ she said. ‘A tiny slice.’
I poured the coffee and gave her the cake on a plate. I wasn’t hungry. I’d felt I needed to cook but not to eat.
‘So what’s up?’ said Gwen. ‘Did you summon me here to try the cake? It’s great, by the way.’
‘Good, have some more. No, it’s nothing to do with that. Drink your coffee and I’ll take you through.’
‘Take me through? What is this, a surprise party?’
‘Nothing like that,’ I said. ‘I’ve got something to show you. I think it’ll interest you.’
Gwen took a few quick gulps of her coffee and said she was ready. I steered her along the hall and into the living room.
‘There,’ I said. ‘What do you think of that?’
Gwen stared down at the four large pieces of card, now covered with marks and stickers, all different shapes and colours. ‘It looks lovely,’ she said. ‘What’s it meant to be?’
‘That’s Greg’s life in the month before he died,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
I explained to Gwen how the charts represented days and sections of days. I told her about the timed emails and my own memories and how I’d even found receipts from the sandwich bars where Greg had bought his lunch. All the receipts, whether for food or petrol or stationery, gave not just a date but an exact time, to the minute, when the purchase was made. ‘So all these stickers, the yellow circles and the green squares, they show moments when I know exactly where Greg was. It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but -’
‘A couple of times a week Greg drove to visit a client. But I pretended to be Greg’s assistant, rang up and said that for tax reasons I needed an exact time for when the meeting had taken place. People were very helpful. I’ve marked all those in blue. Even then I was left with the gap between him leaving the office and arriving at the client. But I found a website. If I type in the postcode of the office and the postcode of his client, it gives an exact driving distance and even an estimated journey time. I’ve marked those in red. Obviously, driving in London traffic during the day, it’s not an exact science, but even so it fits pretty well. It took me a day and a half – and look.’
‘What?’
‘What do you see?’
‘Lots of colours,’ said Gwen. ‘Lots of stickers.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s what you don’t see. There’s barely a gap over four weeks when I don’t know where he was and what he was doing.’
‘Which means?’
‘Look at the chart, Gwen,’ I said. ‘It shows Greg working very hard, travelling, eating, buying stuff, going to the movies with me. But where’s the bit when he’s having an affair? Where’s the space for him even to meet the woman he died with?’
There was a long pause.
‘Ellie,’ she began, ‘for God’s sake -’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Stop. Listen for a moment. I talked to Mary about this – not about this,’ I gestured at the charts, ‘I mean my feelings about Greg. She wasn’t sympathetic. She was even angry with me, as if it was some insult to her that I wasn’t immediately accepting that my husband had been having an affair and had had a crash with the woman he really loved.’
‘No one’s saying that,’ said Gwen. She looked at my charts almost with an expression of pity. ‘I don’t really know what to make of this.’ She took my hand. ‘I’m not an expert but I’ve heard that there are stages of grief and at the beginning it’s anger and denial. It’s completely understandable that you feel anger. I think the point of mourning is to get through that and reach some kind of acceptance.’
I pulled my hand away. ‘I know all of that,’ I said. ‘I read a piece about it once in Cosmo. And you know what I was thinking when I was doing all this crazy stuff with coloured stickers and ringing people up under false pretences? What would make it easy would be to find just one deleted email, just one scrap of paper in a pocket, that would show Greg had been having an affair. Or even just one occasion when he wasn’t where he was meant to be, or a missing afternoon when nobody knew where he was. Forget denial. Then I could just get angry and be sad, and my life would continue. There’s no trick to proving somebody’s having an affair. You catch them at it, just once. But how do you prove somebody’s innocent? What do you suggest?’