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‘She’d had a few rough nights, keeping me awake all hours. I needed a night to myself.’
‘Why didn’t you lock her in? Isn’t that what the padlock was for?’
He shrugs. ‘An oversight brought on by sleep deprivation.’
His words say one thing but his tone and body language tell a completely different story. Every word coming out of his mouth is a lie and he wants me to know it.
‘I don’t believe you,’ I say. ‘If you didn’t push her, you still heard her down there and left her to die.’
‘Earplugs,’ he says and taps his ears. ‘They block out every little noise – even pitiful cries for help.’ I shudder at the twinkle in his eye as he says this.
‘I bet you were standing over her body with a calculator, totting up how much you were going to make from this marriage before she was even cold.’
‘That’s quite the imagination you have there, Connie. But you know a lot about making up stories, don’t you?’
I don’t get a chance to ask him what he means because he turns and makes his way downstairs. I have too much to get off my chest to end this conversation now and let him off the hook. I need tohear him admit his guilt. I hurry after him, and if I move that little bit quicker, I could probably push him down the staircase myself. It’s what he deserves. But that’s not who I am.
‘You didn’t give a damn about Mum,’ I continue. ‘You saw a vulnerable woman you could take advantage of. She was only ever a meal ticket to you.’
‘Shouldn’t you be offering a grieving widower a little more compassion?’
‘You wouldn’t know grief if it slapped you across the face.’ We reach the lounge and he stops. I look around. ‘Where are all her belongings?’ I continue. ‘Her furniture, her clothes, her photographs?’
‘Her clothes are with the Mind shop, any furniture I couldn’t sell on eBay is with the British Heart Foundation, and I think there’s still a few bin bags somewhere in the utility room with the rest of her stuff that’ll make for fire pit kindling. You should be grateful. My clear-out has saved you a lot of work.’
I run my hands through my hair as I shake my head. ‘They weren’t for you to throw out or give away, and this house isn’t yours to sell. She left it tomein her will, not you.’
‘The will you encouraged her to make when you first moved here,’ he says. ‘Yes, she mentioned that.’
‘This place doesn’t belong to you. You stole it.’
He raises a thick eyebrow. ‘Stole?’ He laughs. ‘You can’t steal something from someone when it doesn’t belong to them. I have every legal right to this house. I was her husband.’
‘Marriage means you didn’t have to go through the hassle of taking me to court for a slice of her estate. And why couldn’t you have waited until I got back from Italy to arrange her funeral and bury her with Dad like she wanted? Dumping her in an unmarked grave with none of her friends there to say goodbye was heartless.’
‘Italy,’ he repeats slowly. ‘Ah yes. The Amalfi Coast, yes? Don’t they have telephones there? Couldn’t you have called Gwenny while you were away to see how she was?’
‘You bought her a new phone, changed her number and didn’t give me the new one,’ I counter.
‘I thought you’d made a note of it when that copper found it on that Post-it? Or when you were snooping around her bedroom and found the phone next to her bed. I assume you scrolled through it and read our texts. It’s what I would’ve done.’
‘I’m not you, I wouldn’t,’ I lie.
‘Do you really believe that? You could also have called the neighbours to see how Gwenny was while you were gone. But you didn’t do that either. Why was that, now?’
A sour taste creeps slowly up my throat and into my mouth. He knows something, I’m sure of it. However, he doesn’t give me time to read between his lines.
‘Was the reason behind your complete silence because you weren’t actually in Italy?’ he continues. And now his eyes are narrowing to match the shift in his tone. ‘You don’t have an apartment or a car waiting for you over there and you’ve certainly never been a wedding planner. Because you’ve never lived or worked in Italy, have you, Connie? You actually spent those missing weeks in a women’s prison in Kent, jailed for fraud. And that’s why no one could get in touch with you to inform you of Gwen’s “accident”. It’s why you didn’t call. You didn’t want anyone to know where you really were.’
He knows. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.Shit!How could I have been so naive as to think someone as cunning as him might not have researched me? And if he knows about this, what else is he aware of? I’ve got to retaliate, but I have nothing in my arsenal to fight back with. I’m throwing flowers at a tank.
‘I’m going to the police to tell them that you killed her!’ I say in desperation.
He shakes his head again. ‘No, Connie, you’re not.’
‘Yes I am, and you can’t stop me.’
‘I’m not going to try and stop you. But I know it won’t be in your best interests.’
