Authors: Catherine Hunt
Someone Out There (26 page)
He’d given up the chase a few weeks after Anna had left him. He told himself it was because he didn’t care anymore, but the real reason was fear. Fear that if he carried on snooping or followed her or staked out her new home, she would find out and tell Laura Maxwell and they would use it against him. It would give them ammunition to prove that he was a crazy obsessive, a danger to his wife and daughter.
Now, at last, Harry thought he might have a clue. The name Martha had mentioned: ‘Joe’. He considered it. He knew two ‘Joes’, business acquaintances who his wife had met on a few occasions, but neither man could he ever imagine as Anna’s lover.
On Tuesday afternoon, as soon as it was dark, he drove once more to the lane where his wife lived and took up position behind the hedge. There were lights on downstairs in what he thought was the main living room, but he couldn’t see anything as the curtains were drawn. He had never been invited into the house; whenever he collected Martha, he had waited for her outside in his car.
There was a flower bed in the middle of the front garden with large, straggly shrubs in need of pruning, He slipped from the hedge and edged his way in among them. To his left was the driveway leading to a detached brick and timber garage.
Harry Pelham waited, waited for the man called Joe to arrive. It wasn’t a great plan, but it was the best he had for now; if he stuck at it he might get lucky. His teeth chattered and his feet froze and he didn’t dare stamp them up and down for fear of disturbing the shrubs.
He’d been there two hours when he heard a car coming up the lane. His wife’s black Peugeot pulled into the drive. An external lamp flashed on, bathing the garden in light. Harry shrank back among the plants. Doors slammed, women’s voices. Anna with Martha and a woman he didn’t know.
‘Thanks a lot for offering, Claire. I totally forgot it was tonight. I won’t be long.’ he heard his wife say before the three of them disappeared into the house.
It sounded as if his wife was going out, and excitement stirred in him. Carefully, he extricated himself from the flower bed and took off back to his car. He turned on the ignition, got the heater blasting hot air on his feet, then slid down in the driver’s seat.
Headlights on the windscreen. He sat up slightly, peered into the night, trying to be sure. Yes it had to be. It was his wife’s car. He glimpsed her behind the wheel as it passed by. He started up the engine and followed.
The clock on the dashboard read 20.34. She had left the woman babysitting, he thought, while she went off somewhere. The boyfriend. She was going to meet the boyfriend. He blew air out through his teeth. Gotcha.
Fifteen minutes later his excitement had become uncertainty. Twenty minutes later it was confusion and suspicion.
The black Peugeot was parked at the end of a wide avenue called Chapel Road. It was under a tree, away from any street light, and Harry, who had been keeping a safe distance behind his wife, almost missed it as he turned into the street. He drove on by, teeth gritted, seriously upset. He knew this road, knew it very well indeed. He had been here only yesterday. It was where he lived.
Anna Pelham got out of the car and pulled the hood of her dark green Parka tight around her face. She didn’t want to be seen. She reached a gloved hand into the back seat, pulled out a plastic bag and zipped it inside the coat. It was bulky and it made the Parka bulge, but she didn’t care. She had put in as much as she could, every last bit she could get away with; the idea of being rid of it in this way was hugely cathartic.
She set off quickly towards the other end of the road, straining her eyes for signs of the police or one of her former neighbours; she had a cover story ready but she didn’t want to have to use it. She wasn’t worried about running into Harry, she thought he would steer well clear in case the police nabbed him.
The houses here were Edwardian, large and detached, set well back from the road, and no one was going to look out of their window and spot her. The risk would be from a car – if one of the neighbours happened to be going in or out as she went by. She had done this thing before, several times. So far she’d been lucky but she worried about the law of averages.
No problem. Without incident she reached the long gravel drive that led to her old home. Her feet crunched on the gravel and a security light came on, but she was now out of sight, the house screened from view by a tall evergreen hedge. There were two lights on downstairs but she knew they were the ones Harry had on timers.
Confidently, she strode to the front door. She took the key from her coat pocket. He had changed the locks when she’d left but he’d given a new key to Martha. Typical of him, she thought. Martha didn’t need it, she wasn’t likely to be coming or going on her own, but to Harry it was a symbol, a symbol that his daughter was still firmly part of his life. Martha had proudly told her how Daddy had solemnly presented it to her. It was a grown-up thing and Martha had been pleased. Anna had warned her not to carry it round with her in case she lost it. So she left it in her bedroom; the same day, her mother got it copied.
Anna didn’t have much time. She’d told Claire some cock and bull story about forgetting that a friend of hers was having birthday drinks for her husband and that she’d promised to drop in. It was a chance. If Claire offered to babysit for a while she would put her plan into action; if not, so what, she would find another way.
The plan had come to her that afternoon. She had gone through the Laura Maxwell collection, sorting it carefully, with the kind of meticulous attention to detail that hate can give. She put to one side the things Harry would have been unlikely to come by – the things from school, some of the Maxwell family details. The rest, including the scarf she’d stolen from Laura’s office, she put in a Sainsbury’s plastic bag.
At the same time, she added one new item to Joe’s collection. She held it up, examined it, then laid it gently on the top. She had collected it only that morning after she’d had sex with him. It was a used condom.
Now she planned to leave the Sainsbury’s bag in Harry’s wardrobe, together with a knife, which she took from his kitchen and used to score through Laura’s face in several of the photographs before adding it to the bag.
She darted down the hall, glancing into the big living room with its cream and pale blue furnishings, then went into Harry’s office where a light was on. She smiled, remembering how Harry had changed his passwords as well as his locks, how she’d found his new ones written on a Post-it note stuck to his computer when she’d first revisited the house. With pleasure, she noted the signs of the police search and that the computer was gone. She would soon be sending the police another anonymous tip suggesting they search the house again. By now, they should have found the child pornography on his computer and would be happy to oblige. They would find no more porn, but they would find the collection and they would know that Harry had killed Laura Maxwell.
Anna Pelham didn’t have much time, but she didn’t need it. She headed up the staircase and into the bedroom she’d shared with Harry, opened his wardrobe and shoved the plastic bag underneath a pile of his old sweaters, leaving it half hidden. Her previous visits to the house had been much more time-consuming – she’d had to send death threats to herself from the Paul Giles email address, access child pornography sites, and input Harry’s credit card details, and she hadn’t known for sure where he was or when he might come back and find her.
She was back home at the cottage little more than an hour after she’d left it.
‘How was your birthday friend?’ Martha asked in a flat tone of voice she used a lot lately. The dark brown eyes regarded her mother coolly. She doesn’t believe me, Anna thought, not for the first time.
Harry drove slowly along the road, anger rising inside him. What the hell was she up to? Nothing good, that was for sure. If she was coming to visit him, which he thought most unlikely, why park her car so far away, as if she was trying to hide it?
Ahead, he saw a figure hurrying along the pavement huddled into a coat with the hood pulled up tight against the weather. For a second it didn’t connect, and then he realized it must be his wife. A furious urge to confront her took hold of him; to grab her, shake her, slap her until she told him what she was doing – what she had been doing and who she had been doing it with.
He beat it down and was surprised at how easily he did so. He felt a new emotion stirring for his wife, one he’d never have dreamt he would feel. Fear.
She was not the person he had thought she was, not a bit as he had thought. Loving, caring, honest – once he would have listed all of these, but not any more. He was more than a little scared of her, he thought bleakly; she had him off balance. He was scared he would lose a confrontation with her; instead, he needed to be as cunning as she was.
He pulled over, waited for her to walk on, then turned his car around. He parked in another wide avenue, which led off Chapel Road. He wasn’t taking any chances that she might spot his car. He set off fast towards his house then told himself to slow down. The last thing he wanted was to run straight into her.
He reached the house without seeing her again and edged cautiously into the shadow of the large hedge which formed the front boundary. Hiding in bushes, he thought sourly, was getting to be a habit with him.
None of the security lights were on, which meant she wasn’t standing at the front door or anywhere near the outside of the building. He started to think she’d gone somewhere else, maybe to visit a neighbour, though, so far as he knew, she hadn’t been friendly with any of them. Could one of the neighbours be Joe? He was struggling with this idea when a light went on in his bedroom.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered.
Almost at once the light went out again, and shortly afterwards, Anna came out of the front door. He drew back into the darkness, watched his wife walk quickly down the drive, the hood of her coat drawn close around her face. Again came the urge to confront her but he pictured her calling the police afterwards, concocting some damning story about him forcing her to come to the house. He stayed put until she was safely on her way back up the road, then went inside.
He stood in the hall and sniffed her perfume in the air. Dior’s Pure Poison. How often had he bought it for her, how appropriate it had turned out to be. He wondered how many times she had done this before, how many times she had been here without his knowledge.
He went up the stairs, along the landing, and into his bedroom, and smelled her perfume again. Memories, unsettling. He stood looking round carefully for some clue as to what she had been doing there but he could find nothing, no sign that anything had been disturbed. He checked all the upstairs rooms, his daughter’s bedroom especially, in case Anna had some dark purpose there. Nothing. Whatever her purpose, he could not pin it down.
He walked back down the stairs and picked up the post lying on the hall floor. With a sinking heart he realized that she could have taken it, realized that, in the past, she almost certainly had taken it. It might explain why Laura Maxwell was so well informed about his financial affairs. It might explain quite a lot. He glanced at the letter on top of the pile. It was his Visa bill and he opened it almost without thinking, his mind still occupied with what his wife might have done.
Suddenly, the bill got all his attention, his eyes locked on it, specifically on four transactions. Four payments on two separate dates to companies he’d never heard of but about which he had a very bad feeling. One in Moscow and one in Bangkok. He guessed what the payments were for and his stomach knotted. Child pornography. Seeing them in black and white, listed on his credit card bill, left him petrified. The vile stuff was on his computer, then, and the police would find it.
As he stood staring at the bill, a few things started to add up. He turned towards his office; the door was open but he couldn’t remember if it had been when he’d left the house to go to the police station. Everything had been disturbed in the search, and he would have found it impossible to tell if Anna had been inside if it hadn’t been for that tell-tale scent lingering in the air.
The computer was gone, taken away by the police but, he thought, she wasn’t to know that. How disappointed she would have been to find she could not log on, download more pornography, and pay for it with his credit card. Maybe that explained why she hadn’t stayed long.
Harry no longer understood his wife, knew that she was a different woman to the one he’d believed her to be. But what sort of awful creature was she, he wondered, to do this to him?
He crumpled the bill and stuffed it in his coat pocket. He was out of options. All he could think of was to go to see Ronnie and try to persuade him. There was no hard evidence that his wife had set him up he realized that only too well. He would have to call on years of friendship, would have to beg Ronnie to hear him out and to take his word on trust.
Anna gave her daughter a hug and told her how much she’d enjoyed the birthday drinks. Martha pulled away from her and Anna felt, as she so often felt, a pang of disappointment that Martha should be so like Harry, so obviously his child. She not only had his looks but his character too. Lately, it had been obvious that Martha doubted her and it would not be long, Anna guessed, before she openly challenged her. How different to have a child of Joe’s. What bliss that would be.
‘Thanks for hanging on here, Claire,’ Anna turned towards the woman, ‘I really appreciate it.’
‘Oh, don’t thank me. I’ve been on my own. I know what it’s like. I’m just glad to help out.’
‘You’ve certainly done that,’ Anna laughed. ‘Lending me the car’s been a real lifesaver. I hope you didn’t miss it too much.’
Anna had scraped the side of her Peugeot in a multi-storey car park in town. It had needed repairs, and while it was in the garage, Claire had offered to lend her the car. It was a bit old and battered because it was used on the family farm, but if Anna wanted it for a couple of days, she was more than welcome.