Second Intention (10 page)

Eleven

‘
Excuse me.’ The sharpness of Sue’s voice brought me back to consciousness with a jolt. ‘Am I missing something here?’

I blinked and looked around, suddenly remembering where I was. I could tell, instantly, that she was unimpressed by what she had just found.

‘What time is it?’ I mumbled.

‘Half past five.’ She looked around at the state of the room, an angry look on her face. ‘Just
what
is going on?’

I sat up and stretched, and realised it all looked pretty bad. She had just come in from what she had thought was a perfectly normal day to find a most unexpected diorama. The coffee table was littered with two empty wine bottles, a glass which was lying on its side, and the half-eaten remains of a pizza. The TV screen was still flickering away with the
frozen image of Ruben Limardo in mid-fleche, and was providing the only source of light in the room. Her husband, a tracksuit carelessly pulled on over his stinking running gear, had been fast asleep on the sofa.

All in all, not a pretty sight.

‘I’ve been at home,’ I muttered.

‘I can see that for myself, thank you very much,’ she snapped. ‘It doesn’t answer my question, though. What is going on here, Richard?
’

She flicked the switch for the big overhead lamp. Everything in the room was bathed in light and it hurt my eyes. I put my hand up to shield them. I knew she was pissed off, but this seemed unusually cruel.

I was gathering my thoughts to try and figure out where to start, but she didn’t give me a chance.

‘You never said you’d be home,’ she went on, and began waving a hand at the detritus on the table. ‘And look at the state of you. What is all this doing here? You
never
drink during the daytime. Just tell me what this is all about?’

It must have been a shock for her, probably more than I first realised, as it sounded like she was close to crying.

‘Who is he?’ I reached forward and picked up the wine glass.

‘What?’

‘Don’t act all innocent, Sue. Who is he?’ I swigged the tiny bit of wine that was left in the glass and instantly regretted it. Lukewarm Frascati is never pleasant, but right then it was a mistake.

‘What are you talking about?’ She snatched it off me.

‘The man you were with at the gallery,’ I said, aware that my voice, in spite of my drunkenness, had a hard edge to it.

‘What?’ Her voice was little more than a whisper, as she realised what I was getting at.

‘I saw you with him this morning.’ I stared her in the eye. ‘The scruffy bloke you were getting all lovey dovey with.’

‘You’ve been spying on me?’ There was incredulity in her voice.

‘No. Well … no … not deliberately. But it doesn’t change anything. I
saw
you with him, Sue.’

There was a moment’s silence as it sank in, and her lower lip began to tremble. What happened next shocked me to the core.

‘You bastard!’ She threw herself on me, and began pummelling at my chest and face with her fists. Her face was contorted in anguish, and tears were streaming down her cheeks. ‘You bastard! You bastard!’

I caught her wrists and pitched her sideways. We rolled off the sofa together and hit the floor with a thump, her head narrowly missing the edge of the table. All the fight went out of her, as abruptly as it had started, and I let her go.

She pulled herself away from me, her whole body still racked with sobbing. I misunderstood, of course, but with that much booze in me I wasn’t thinking straight. I had assumed that her reaction was an admission of guilt, and that all the upset was from the fact that she had been caught. It took a moment for me to realise what she was saying.

‘How … could … you think … that?’ She was crying so hard that her words were interspersed with sobs. ‘How … dare you … think … like that?’

‘Sue …’

‘Do you really not know … how much you mean  … to me?’ She pulled herself up i
nto a sitting position, and straightened her glasses, which had almost been knocked off. She was in a real state, the stream of tears now joined by a runny nose, and she was gulping in short, snatched breaths.

‘Susan …’ I reached out and placed my hand on her shoulder, but she wrenched herself free and moved away.

‘What have I ever done … to give you even the slightest reason to think I’d cheat on you?’ Her speech was a little more fluent, but she was still very,
very
upset. ‘What have I done to make you trust me so little that you spy on me when I’m at work?’

I realised, all of a sudden, that she didn’t know about the e-mails. She had no idea that I had been sent home, and only drove by the gallery by accident. She must have thought that I had booked the time off just so I could check up on her. To her line of thinking, I must have got drunk because I was one hundred per cent convinced that my wife was an adulteress.

I pulled myself to my feet and plodded over to the kitchen doorway, returning with a roll of kitchen towel.

I handed it to her and flopped back down onto the floor. Close, but not too close.

I desperately wanted to know that my beloved hadn’t been unfaithful, but there was no denying the evidence that something wasn’t right. If I had been sober, and if she hadn’t walked in and seen me in that state and begun creating a fuss, then I would probably have handled it differently, but I hadn’t had the chance. It had just got out of hand, that was all.

She took the kitchen towel I offered without a word, and began cleaning herself up. It was definitely time for me to start thinking straight, and choose my next few words very carefully. It was important that I did this right.

‘Sue,’ I said quietly, after a few moments.

‘
What?’ She flicked a glance back at me over her shoulder and sniffed.

‘Sue, I haven’t been spying on you. At least, I haven’t deliberately. I called by the gallery this morning purely by chance because I needed to speak to you, but I could see you were busy so I left it. I’d forgotten about the exhibition and didn’t want to distract you. That was when I saw you with him.’

‘Oh,’ the scorn in her voice cut deep as she turned to face me, ‘and that’s your basis for accusing me of having an affair is it?’

‘I didn’t say that. I just asked you who he is.’

‘No, maybe not. But it’s what you’re thinking though, isn’t it?’ She wiped her eyes again.

‘I just want to get it straightened out, that’s all.’

‘Well you’ve got a bloody nice way of going about it, Richard.’ She blew her nose. ‘Shoot first and ask questions later.’

‘I’m sorry.’ I touched her on the shoulder again, but at least she didn’t pull away this time. ‘I hadn’t planned that we would discuss it like this.’

‘Oh … good.’

She was upset, she was angry, and she still didn’t understand what was really going on. She took another piece of kitchen towel and blew her nose.

‘So if you’re not having an affair, who is he?’ As soon as I’d said it I knew it was the wrong way to go about it. It still sounded like I had made an accusation.

‘
He
is Hugo Tilley.’ Her voice was carrying more anger than general upset now. ‘And we’re bloody lucky to have him exhibiting in our gallery. It took weeks for us to persuade him to go along with it.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yes. Well might you say ‘oh’, because you obviously haven’t thought this through, Richard. I don’t know what you think you saw this morning, but whatever
he
might have done you certainly didn’t see me reciprocating. He’s a randy little bugger who spends all his time throwing his arms around any woman who doesn’t get out of his way fast enough, and if you had perhaps stayed around and watched for a bit longer you would have seen him trying to molest Amy
and
Karen
and
that Irish woman from Radio Cambridgeshire.’

‘Ah.’ There wasn’t really much else to say.

She got to her feet and went through to the kitchen. I could hear her clumping about, and eventually there came the sound of ice clinking in a glass and something being poured. She returned, gin and tonic in hand, and plonked herself down on the sofa to look at me.

No drink for me then.

‘He any good?’ I said, after a moment.

‘What?’ She frowned.

‘Hugo … thing. His stuff. Is it any good?’

‘No.’ She took a swig from the glass. ‘It’s a pile of crap, but he happens to be one of the bright young things in the world of art at the moment, which is why we put up with him doing what he does. You don’t think we like having him try to jump us all the time do you?’

‘No … no, of course not.’

She stared at me for a moment and sighed. ‘I just don’t know how you can take what you saw and jump to that conclusion, Richard. I mean, it’s hardly the only explanation, is it?’

‘So who were you on the phone to on Tuesday?’

‘What?’

‘Tuesday night. The phone here was engaged all evening. I tried to call you because I’d left my wallet behind.’

‘I
switched the phone off. That business with those creepy calls had been really getting to me so I switched it off.’

‘And your mobile?’

‘I’d left it in the loo at work. You know me, I’m always leaving it somewhere.’

‘And what about the internet? You said you
’d been on the net looking at places to visit in Copenhagen.’ I was about to add that I’d seen from our history that nobody had logged on that day, but didn’t need to, which was probably a good thing as it would have
really
seemed as if I was spying on her. She made a brief gesture across the room to a netbook case which she had dropped onto one of the armchairs.

Her netbook
from the gallery.

Oops.

‘Oh … er … yeah. Sorry. I forgot.’

She shook her head and gave me a long look. One which seemed to convey a
whole range of feelings, from upset and indignation, right through anger and astonishment, and all the way to disappointment. I had let down the most important person in my life, by not even giving her a chance to talk about it.

I felt terrible, but realised that it was in part due to the effects of the wine beginning to wear off. I remembered what Shirley had once said about the best way to avoid a hangover being to stay drunk, and knew that I needed either a top up or some strong coffee.

No contest.

‘Look … er … do you mind if I have another drink?’ I stood up.

‘Please yourself,’ she said, with a bit of a snort. ‘It’s not as if you can do much more damage by getting even more pissed, is it?’

Hmmm. I figured I deserved that one. I went and fetched another glass of wine from the fridge then sat on the sofa next to her. As the cold liquid coursed down my throat I instantly felt better.

We said nothing for a while, but she did allow me to take hold of her hand.

‘If his stuff’s that bad,’ I eventually said, ‘how come everybody thinks he’s so wonderful?’

‘Oh, you really don’t understand the world of art, do you, pet?’ Her use of that last word was encouraging. ‘If I say ‘emperor’s new clothes’, you’ll probably get the idea.’

‘Ah.’

‘Mmmm. I wish we could just stick to the highbrow stuff - you know, the artwork which requires actual
talent
- but I’m afraid it’s not like that anymore. Just at the moment, a Tilley sculpture in wax and feathers is getting more critical acclaim than a Bordoni landscape. If we didn’t go along with the trends it’d be commercial suicide.’

Yeah. I could see her point.

‘Anyway,’ she went on. ‘What was it you wanted to speak to me about?’

‘Eh?’

‘You said you came by the gallery because you wanted to speak to me about something. What was it?’

‘Oh … er … yes. There’s something else I need to talk to you about.’

*                   *                   *                   *

Poor Sue. I think she honestly didn’t know whether to be relieved that I didn’t
only
spend the day getting drunk because I suspected her of infidelity, or even more worried because somebody had done the nasty business with the e-mails and got me into trouble at work. I tried to make light of it, and suggest that it could have happened to anybody at Medicom, but she is far too smart to buy that one. She knew that this must have had something to do with the phone calls, and possibly even the flat tyres, and that until we got to the bottom of it we might have to expect more.

I explained that Derek Green was on the case, and that if anybody could track down where the e-mails had come from it would be him, but it only reassured her a little. I certainly didn’t mention my suspicion that the vindictive husband of a forme
r lover could be behind it all.

No, that definitely wouldn’t be a smart move. I’d keep that to myself until
I had a little more to go on.