I was unable to speak. It was just not possible. It wasn’t real. I just shook my head as if I could clear the confusion away. Links leaned closer, as if I were short-sighted and deaf as well as mad.
“Did you hear what I said, Mrs. Hintlesham?”
“What?”
“Your husband, Clive Hintlesham,” he said, as if it had to be spelled out, detail by detail. “An hour ago. We charged him with the murder of Zoe Haratounian on the morning of July seventeenth, nineteen ninety-nine.”
“I don’t understand,” I repeated. “This is mad.”
“Mrs. Hintlesham, Jenny…”
“Mad,” I repeated. “Mad.”
“His solicitor is fully involved. He will appear at Saint Steven’s Magistrate’s Court tomorrow morning. They will make a bail application. Which will be refused.”
“Who is this woman, anyway? What’s she got to do with Clive? With me and the letters?”
Links looked uneasy. He took a breath and spoke in a slow, patient voice, quietly, even though there was nobody around to hear.
“I can’t tell you in detail,” he said. “But because of the special circumstances I thought I should prepare you. It seems that your husband was having an affair with her. We believe he gave her your locket. Her photograph was among his possessions.”
I remembered the photograph I had seen last night: an eager, laughing face, a glass in her hand lifted in a toast to the future she didn’t have. I gulped, and a wave of nausea swept over me.
“That doesn’t mean he would kill her.”
“Miss Haratounian also received letters like yours. Written by the same person. We believe that your husband threatened her, and then killed her.”
I gazed at him. A jigsaw was beginning to click together, but the picture that emerged made no sense, it was just a scribble of violent images. A bad dream.
“Are you saying that Clive was the person writing those letters to me?”
“All we are saying at the moment is that your husband is charged with the murder of Miss Haratounian.”
“Tell me what you think.”
“Mrs. Hintlesham…”
“You must tell me. It doesn’t make any kind of sense.”
Links was silent for some time, visibly trying to make up his mind.
“This is very painful,” he said. “I wish you could be spared it. But it is possible that he wanted to rid himself of this woman, for whatever reason. Then, having done that, it seemed that nobody knew that he had met her. For that reason, if you were… well, targeted by the person who did that murder, he wouldn’t be a suspect.” Another long silence. “It’s one way of looking at it,” he said uneasily. “I’m sorry.”
“Could he loathe me that much?”
Links didn’t speak.
“Has he admitted it?”
“He still denies even knowing Miss Haratounian,” Links said dryly. “Which is a bit rich.”
“I want to see him.”
“That’s your right. Are you sure?”
“I want to see him.”
“You don’t believe this, Jenny? Jens. You can’t possibly believe this ludicrous charge?” In his voice I heard a mixture of anger and fear. His face was red and unwashed, his clothes were stained. I gazed at him. My husband. Jowly cheeks, a thickening neck, eyes that were slightly bloodshot.
“Jens,” he said.
“Why shouldn’t I believe it?”
“Jens, it’s me, Clive, your husband. I know things have been shaky recently, but it’s me.”
“Shaky,” I repeated. “Shaky.”
“We’ve been married for fifteen years, Jens. You know me. Tell them it’s ridiculous. I was with you that day. You know I was. Jens.”
A fly settled on his cheek and he brushed it away violently.
“Tell me about Gloria,” I said. “Is it true?”
He flushed and tried to speak and then stopped.
I looked at him, the hairs in his nostrils, the grime of dirt on his neck, the flaky skin by his ears, dandruff in his hair. He looked good only when he was carefully groomed. He wasn’t one of those people, like Stadler, for example, who actually look better after staying up all night. Who could stay up all night and still seem sexy.
“I don’t think there’s anything more to talk about, do you?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.”
“Good-bye.”
“You’ll see,” he shouted. “You’ll see and then you’ll be sorry. You are making the biggest mistake of your whole stupid, little life.” His fists came down on the table between us, and the moon-faced policeman at the door stood up. “I will make you suffer for it, see if I don’t.”
There was only one police officer outside my house now, and he lay in the car, half asleep behind a paper. Clive’s office looked like a burglar had been in there. The house was a building site of half-finished rooms. The garden was a wasteland; nettles grew in the beds that Francis had prepared for the flowering, sweet-smelling shrubs; the grass was yellow.
I opened a bottle of champagne and drank a glass of it, but it made me feel violently sick. I ought to eat something, but that didn’t seem possible. I wanted Grace Schilling to come in and make me another herb omelette, runny and good. I wanted Josh to call me and say he was coming home.
I sat alone in the kitchen. I was shamed and I was free.
FOURTEEN
A day of frenetic activity calmed me down. That was what I needed. It stopped me from dwelling on things too much; it muffled the jangling in my head that I couldn’t make go away whatever pills I took for it. The morning was sunny and it hadn’t yet got horribly hot, and as I sat at the kitchen table with Lynne, I felt almost calm. She was wearing her uniform again. There was a feeling of things being over and winding down and farewells. We had worked our way through almost a whole cafetiere and I’d made some toast that we both nibbled. Lynne asked if she could smoke and not only did I say she could but I asked for a cigarette myself and went and found a saucer we could use as an ashtray.
My first puff felt sinful, as if I was fourteen years old, and then I felt soothed. Maybe in my new life I’d start smoking again.
“I used to do this to lose weight,” I said. “At least it was a welcome by-product. I gave up when I was pregnant with Josh. My bottom and thighs have never been the same.”
Lynne smiled and shook her head.
“I wish I had your figure,” she said.
I looked at Lynne with a critical eye.
“You wouldn’t like it,” I said. “You haven’t seen it the way I see it.”
We both took puffs from our cigarettes. Mine felt amateurish after all these years. I would need a lot more practice.
“So you’ve been busy?” Lynne asked.
“An awful lot of things need sorting out.”
“When do you leave?”
“I’m flying to Boston this evening.”
