The Husband's Secret (21 page)

She kept tearing at the letter, shredding the pieces into tinier and tinier fragments until she could roll them between her fingertips.

Her husband was evil. So, therefore he must go to jail. Cecilia would be the wife of a prisoner. She wondered if there was a social club for the wives. She’d set one up if
there wasn’t. She giggled hysterically, like a crazy woman. Of course she would! She was Cecilia. She’d be president of the Prisoners Wives Association and organise fundraising for airconditioning units to be put in their poor husbands’ cells. Did prisons have airconditioning? Or was it just primary schools that missed out? She imagined chatting with the other wives while they waited to go through the metal detectors. ‘What’s your husband in for? Oh, bank robbery? Really? Mine’s in for murder. Yep, strangled a girl. Off to the gym after this, are you?’

‘She’s gone back off,’ said John-Paul. He’d returned to the study, standing in front of her, massaging little circles under his cheekbones, the way he did when he was exhausted.

He didn’t look evil. He looked just like her husband. Unshaven. Messy hair. Shadows under his eyes. Her husband. The father of her children.

If he’d killed someone once, what was to stop him doing it again? She’d just let him go into Polly’s room. She’d just let a murderer go into her daughter’s room.

But it was
John-Paul
! Their father. He was Daddy.

How could they tell the girls what John-Paul had done?

Daddy is going to jail.

For a moment her mind stopped completely.

They could never tell the girls.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said John-Paul. He held out his arms uselessly, as if he wanted to hold her but they were separated by something too vast to be crossed. ‘Darling, I’m just so sorry.’

Cecilia wrapped her arms around her naked body. She trembled violently. Her teeth chattered.
I’m having a nervous breakdown, she thought with relief. I’m about to lose my mind, and that’s just as well because this cannot possibly be fixed. It is simply not fixable
.

chapter nineteen

‘There! See!’

Rachel hit the pause button so that Connor Whitby’s angry face was frozen on the screen. It was the face of a monster. His eyes were evil black holes. His lips were pulled back in a rabid sneer. Rachel had watched the footage four times now, and each time she became more convinced. It was, she thought, quite stunningly conclusive. Show this to any jury and they’d convict.

She turned to look at former Sergeant Rodney Bellach sitting on her couch, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and caught him flattening his hand across his mouth to stifle a yawn.

Well, it was the middle of the night. Sergeant Bellach – ‘You can just call me plain old Rodney now,’ he kept telling her – had obviously been deeply asleep when she’d called. His wife had answered the phone and Rachel had overheard her trying to wake him up. ‘Rodney.
Rodney
. It’s for you!’ When he finally got on the phone, his voice had been thick and slurred with sleep. ‘I’ll be right there, Mrs Crowley,’ he’d finally said, when she’d made him understand, and as he put down the phone Rachel had heard his wife say,
‘Where, Rodney? You’ll be right
where
? Why can’t it wait until the morning?’

His wife sounded like a right old nag.

It probably could have waited until the morning, reflected Rachel now as she saw Rodney valiantly struggling to repress another massive yawn and rubbing his knuckles into his bleary eyes. At least he would have been more alert then. He really didn’t look well at all. Apparently he’d recently been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. He’d made some dramatic changes to his diet. He’d mentioned all this as they’d sat down to watch the video. ‘Completely cut out all sugar,’ he’d said sadly. ‘No more ice cream for dessert.’

‘Mrs Crowley,’ he said finally. ‘I can certainly see why you would think that this proves Connor had a motive of some sort, but I have to be honest with you, I just don’t think it’s enough to convince the boys to take a second look.’

‘He was in love with her!’ said Rachel. ‘He was in love with her and she was rejecting him.’

‘Your daughter was a very pretty girl,’ said Sergeant Bellach. ‘Probably a lot of boys were in love with her.’

Rachel was gobsmacked. How had she never noticed that Rodney was so stupid? So obtuse? Had the diabetes affected his IQ? Had the lack of ice cream shrunk his brain?

‘But Connor wasn’t just any boy. He was the last one to see her before she died,’ she said slowly and carefully to make sure he understood.

‘He had an alibi.’

‘His mother was his alibi!’ said Rachel. ‘She lied, obviously!’

‘And his mother’s boyfriend backed it up too,’ said Rodney. ‘But more importantly, there was a neighbour who saw Connor put out the rubbish bin at five pm. The neighbour was a very reliable witness. A solicitor and a father of three. I remember every detail of Janie’s case, Mrs Crowley. I can assure you, if I thought we had
anything
–’

‘Lies in his eyes!’ interrupted Rachel. ‘You said Connor Whitby had lies in his eyes. Well, you were right! You were exactly right!’

Rodney said, ‘But, see, all this proves is that they had a little tiff.’

‘A little tiff!’ cried Rachel. ‘Look at that boy’s face! He killed her! I
know
he killed her. I know it in my heart, in my . . .’ She was going to say ‘body’, but she didn’t want to sound like a loony. It was true, though. Her body was telling her what Connor had done. It was burning all over, as if she had a fever. Even her fingertips felt hot.

‘Well, you know what, I’ll see what I can do, Mrs Crowley,’ said Rodney. ‘I’m not making any promises about whether it will go anywhere, but I
can
promise you this video will get into the right hands.’

‘Thank you. That’s all I can ask.’ It was a lie. She could ask for a lot more. She wanted a police car with a shrieking whirling siren to race to Connor Whitby’s house right this second. She wanted Connor handcuffed, while a grim-faced burly police officer read him his rights. Oh, and she did
not
want that police officer to tenderly protect Connor’s head when they put him in the back of the police car. She wanted Connor’s head smashed over and over, until it was nothing but a bloody pulp.

‘How’s that little grandson of yours? Growing up?’ Rodney picked up a framed photo of Jacob from the mantelpiece while Rachel ejected the video cassette.

‘He’s going to New York.’ Rachel handed him the cassette.

‘No kidding?’ Rodney took the cassette and carefully replaced Jacob’s photo. ‘My oldest granddaughter is off to New York too. She’s eighteen now. Little Emily. Got herself a scholarship to some top university. The Big Apple they call it, don’t they? Wonder why they call it that?’

Rachel gave him a sickly smile and led him to the front door. ‘I have absolutely no idea, Rodney. No idea at all.’

6 April 1984

On the morning of the last day of her life, Janie Crowley sat next to Connor Whitby on the bus.

She felt strangely breathless, and she tried to calm herself by breathing in slowly with slow, deep breaths from the diaphragm. It didn’t seem to help.

Calm down
, she told herself.

‘I’ve got something to say,’ she said.

He didn’t say anything. He never did say much, thought Janie. She watched him studying his hands resting on his knees, and she studied them herself. He had very big hands, she saw with a shiver, of fear or anticipation or both. Her own hands were icy cold. They were always cold. She slid them under her jumper to warm them.

She said, ‘I’ve made a decision.’

He turned his head suddenly to look at her. The bus lurched as it went around a corner and their bodies slid closer, so that their eyes were only inches apart.

She was breathing so fast she wondered if there was something wrong with her.

‘Tell me,’ he said.

wednesday

chapter twenty

The alarm clock wrenched Cecilia cruelly, instantly awake at six-thirty am. She was lying on her side, facing John-Paul, and their eyes opened simultaneously. They were so close their noses were almost touching.

She looked at the delicate scribbles of red veins in the whites of John-Paul’s blue eyes, the pores on his nose, the grey stubble on his strong, firm, honest chin.

Who was this man?

Last night they had got back into bed and lay together in the darkness, staring blindly at the ceiling while John-Paul talked. How he’d talked. There had been no need to probe for information. She didn’t ask a single question. He wanted to talk, to tell her everything. His voice was low and fervent, without modulation, almost monotonous, except there was nothing monotonous about what he was telling her. The more he talked, the hoarser his voice got. It was like a nightmare, lying in the dark, listening to that raspy whisper of his, going on and on and on. She had to bite her lip to stop herself from screaming,
Shut up, shut up, shut up!

He’d been in love with Janie Crowley. Crazy in love. Obsessed even. The way you think you’re
in love when you’re a teenager. He met her one day at Hornsby McDonald’s when they were both filling in applications for part-time work. Janie recognised him from when they’d been at primary school together, before he’d gone off to his exclusive boys school. They’d been in the same year at St Angela’s, but in different classes. He didn’t actually remember her at all, although he sort of knew the Crowley name. Neither of them ended up working at the McDonald’s. Janie got a job at the dry-cleaners and John-Paul got a job at the milk bar, but they had this amazing intense conversation about God knows what, and she gave him her phone number, and he rang her the next day.

He thought she was his girlfriend. He thought he was going to lose his virginity to her. It all had to be really secretive because Janie’s dad was one of those crazy Catholic dads and he said she couldn’t even have a boyfriend until she was eighteen. Their relationship, such as it was, had to be completely secret. That only made it more exciting. It was like they were secret agents. If he rang her house and anyone but Janie answered, the rule was that he had to hang up. They never held hands in public. None of their friends knew. Janie insisted on this. They went to the movies once and held hands in the dark. They kissed on a train in an empty carriage. They sat in the rotunda at Wattle Valley Park and smoked cigarettes and talked about how they wanted to go to Europe before uni. And that was it, really. Except that he thought about her day and night. He wrote her poetry he was too embarrassed to give her.

He never wrote me poetry
, thought Cecilia irrelevantly.

That night Janie asked him to meet her in Wattle Valley Park where they’d met often before. It was always deserted and there was the rotunda where they could sit and kiss. She said she had something to tell him. He thought she was going to tell him that she’d gone to the family
planning centre and got the pill, they’d talked about that, but instead she said that she was sorry but she was in love with another boy. John-Paul was stunned. Bewildered. He didn’t know there was another boy in the running! He said, ‘But I thought you were my girlfriend!’ And she laughed. She seemed so happy, John-Paul said, so happy that she wasn’t his girlfriend, and he was just crushed, and humiliated, and filled with this incredible rage. It was his pride more than anything. He felt like a fool, and for that he
wanted to kill her
.

John-Paul seemed desperate for Cecilia to know this. He said he didn’t want to justify it, or mitigate it, or pretend it was an accident – because for a few seconds he absolutely felt the desire to kill.

He didn’t remember making the decision to put his hands around her neck. But he remembered the moment when he suddenly became aware of the slender girlish neck between his hands and realised it wasn’t one of his brothers he had in a chokehold. He was
hurting a girl
. He remembered thinking,
What the fuck am I doing
? and he dropped his hands so fast, and he actually felt relieved, because he was so sure he’d caught himself in time, that he hadn’t killed her. Except that she was limp in his arms, her eyes staring over his shoulder, and he thought, no, this couldn’t be possible. He thought it had only been a second, maybe two seconds of crazy rage; definitely not long enough to kill her.

He couldn’t believe it. Even now. After all these years. He was still shocked and horrified by what he’d done.

She was still warm, but he knew, without a shadow of doubt, that she was dead.

Although later he wondered if he could have been wrong. Why hadn’t he even tried to revive her? He must have asked himself that question a million times. But at the time he had felt so sure. She was gone. She felt gone.

So he laid her carefully at the bottom of the slide, and he remembered thinking that the night was getting cold, so he put her school blazer over the top of her, and he had his mum’s rosary beads in his pocket, because he’d done an exam that day and he always took them for luck. So he placed them carefully in Janie’s hands. It was his way of saying sorry, to Janie and to God. And then he ran. He ran and ran until he couldn’t breathe.

He thought for sure he would be caught. He kept waiting for the heavy weight of a policeman’s hand to drop on his shoulder.

But he was never even questioned. He and Janie weren’t at the same school, or in the same youth group. Neither their parents nor friends had known about them. It seemed that nobody had ever seen them together. It was like it had never happened.

He said that if the police had ever questioned him he would have confessed immediately. He said that if someone else had been accused of the murder, he would have given himself up. He wouldn’t have let anyone else take the fall for it. He wasn’t
that
evil.

It was just that nobody asked the question so he never gave the answer.

During the nineties he started hearing news reports about crimes being solved through DNA evidence, and he wondered if he’d left a miniscule vestige of himself behind: a single hair, for example. But even if he had, they’d been together for such a short time and they’d played their undercover game so effectively. He would never be asked to give a DNA sample because nobody knew he had known Janie. He could almost convince himself that he
hadn’t
known her, that it had never happened.