A Poison Tree (Time, Blood and Karma Book 3) (6 page)

6

CLAIRE

“
Oh, I forgot to tell you. I got an A+ for my last business studies essay,” announced Katie Braddock.

“Well done, sweetheart,” replied her mother.

“I think it’s because Mr. Jennings fancies me.”

“
What?”

“Well, that’s not the only reason
. It’s mainly because I’m brilliant. But I think he fancies me too. I catch him looking at me in class.”

“Are you serious, Catherine? Because if so –“

“Mum, chill out. So what if I have to run my tongue over my lips and flash him a bit of cleavage now and again? Like Dad says,
Focus on the result not the process
.”

Claire looked at her daughter
with suspicion.

“You
are
winding me up, aren’t you?”

Katie threw her arms around her mother’s neck and giggled.

“Just a little bit. Mum, you are sooooo easy.”

“
You’re just like your father,” she sighed.

“Now you’re just being nasty. Anyway, I did use one of
Dad’s lines in my essay.”

“Which particular pearl of wisdom would that be?”

“The one about the difference between capitalism and communism?”

“Enlighten me.”

“The difference is that with capitalism man exploits man, whereas with communism it’s the other way round.”

“I am so glad your expensive education hasn’t been wasted.”

“When I’m a lawyer my clients are going to
love
this sort of stuff. Now I’m going out. See you later. And there is no need to worry. I have money
and
condoms.”

“That’s a weight off my mind. Do you need a lift anywhere?”

“No. Tom’s picking me up.”

A car horn beeped three times.

“That’s him now. See you later.”

“Take your keys. I might be out when you get back.”

Through the window, Claire watched her daughter climb into the battered Ford Fiesta and she waved to Tom. Claire wasn’t worried about Tom’s intentions. Tom was a nice boy. And even if he wasn’t, Katie could handle him. In Katie’s world, Tom was located in the
Friend Only Zone
.

Claire consulted her watch. It was just
before two. David was spending his Saturday afternoon playing a round of golf with Max and wouldn’t be back for hours. She took out her phone and typed an SMS:
MHUP3?

Within a minute, a reply came back:
O
K


She went upstairs, showered and reapplied her makeup. After due consideration, she put on a pair of tight-fitting jeans, black ankle-length boots and a fluffy sweater. She examined herself in the mirror. The sweater wasn’t right. She changed it for a cream-coloured blouse with a low neckline. She’d have to wear a scarf with her coat, otherwise she’d freeze. March was not being the kindest of months, weather-wise.

Before she left the house, Claire rang David.

“How’s it going?”

“It’s going,” was the response.

“I’m
thinking of driving over to Market Harborough this afternoon. See if I can pick up some nice cheeses and meats from the French market stalls.”

“No problem.
We’re only on the first hole. We’ll be hours unless it decides to rain.”

MHUP3
.
Market Harborough, usual place, 3 o’clock
.

Claire had
a reason to be where she would be. She had only to watch the sky. She climbed into her silver Vectra and started the engine.

Claire parked in the free car park behind Church Street, close to the centre of the town of Market Harborough. She made her way to a small tea shop in the shadow of St. Dionysius Parish Church, the large fifteenth-century structure that rose from the street and which, along with the wooden Old Grammar School beside it, fixed the character of this small market town. The old-fashioned tea shop was, in many ways, an improbable spot for a clandestine liaison. Perhaps that was why she and Jack had chosen it.

Jack Irving, the owner of
Jael Construction, was already sitting at a corner table and Claire took the seat facing him.

“Tea and cakes?” he asked. “Or just tea?”

“Just tea,” she replied.

She looked
at him. In spite of his shock of silver-grey hair and the wrinkles around his eyes, furrowed deep by years of chain-smoking, Jack still had something boyish about him.

They ordered tea from the black-costumed waitress
. Claire glanced around at the other patrons: two middle-aged ladies deep in conversation and a thin elderly man clad in tweed, his nose buried in a newspaper. No one was paying them any attention.

“It’s an unexpected surprise to see you today,” said Jack
, in an accent that betrayed his West Country origins.

“I don’t know quite what I was thinking when I
SMSed you. I just wanted to see you today.”

“My good fortune,” he replied. “I was over at Kettering for a meeting about the estate development when I got your text, so I was in the area. Well, sort of.”

“A meeting on a Saturday?”

“Sometimes when you’re
meeting a member of the Planning Committee, it’s best to do it outside of normal working hours and away from prying eyes.” He gave a roguish grin.

“I don’t think I need to know about that.”

“No, you don’t.”

The waitress arrived with the tea, and they sat in silence for a while.

Sometimes Jack reminds me so much of David
, Claire thought.
He has that same gentleness. Although David doesn’t have his quick temper. Or his tendency for skulduggery, for that matter.

She wondered – and not for the first time – what on earth she was doing.

“Where is Eleanor this afternoon?” she asked.

Jack stirred
with unease. “Some Church thing at St. Mark’s. I don’t know what exactly.”

“You should take more of an interest in her church work, Jack.”

“I suppose I should.”

“Sorry. I’m not in a position to be giving you marital advice, am I?”

“Perhaps not.” He touched her hand.

“Where are you parked?”

“Behind the Conservative Club.”

“Let’s drink up
. Later you can drop me back in town. I need to buy some things from the market.”

“OK.
Where do you want to go?”

“Somewhere quiet.”

“How about we drive over to Foxton Locks?”

Claire shook her head.
“Too public.”

The place also held memories of times with David.
Inappropriate.
So much of what she thought and felt these days was inappropriate. So much of what she
did
was inappropriate. Guilt clung to her like a limpet. Yet here she was, regardless. She could not change course. She was waiting for something to happen, but she did not know what.

“Then let’s just drive out into the countryside and find somewhere. Yes?”

“Yes.”

Jack drove west out of the town until he found a secluded country lane
, out of sight from the main road. He switched off the engine, reached across and took Claire in his arms. She held him and stroked his hair.

“Let’s sit in the back seat,” she said. “We’ll be more comfortable.”

“Are you all right, Claire?” he asked, concerned.

“Of course I am. I’m here with you
.”

When Jack dropped her off back in Market Harborough, the first spots of rain were starting to fall.

Claire made her way around the market quickly. The
muffled stallholders blew on their hands and stomped, determined to see out the hours, to chase down those last sales. They were a hardy bunch. Gusts of wind flicked the hanging plastic sheets. Money changed hands and disappeared into leather belt wallets. Organic produce, cake and homemade biscuits found their way into shopping bags. The clock on the church tower registered five o’clock and the sky darkened appreciably. The weather deities decided it was time for everyone to call it a day and volleys of water began to drench the shoppers.

David would be home by now, or on his way home. Claire made one final purchase, a bottle of apple juice, and hurried back to her car.

She looked at herself
in the rear view mirror. The face was familiar but the eyes that stared back at her were those of a stranger. It was another Claire that sat in the car. A Claire that had secrets, that dwelled in a different world – a constricted world that contained only Jack and the potential of shameful discovery. While the real Claire was ostensibly a happily-married professional woman,
this
Claire was no such thing. She was a creature of the shadows, a betrayer of those who loved her.

Her eyes filled with tears
.

The
deluge beat on the car roof and the streets ran with water.

Claire switched on the windscreen wipers, but the rain was too heavy.

She could not see where she was going.

7

DAVID

The pathology of suspicion must be an interesting study, if you have the stomach for it.

The
germ of disquiet, once planted, inveigles its way into your consciousness and starts to connect new neural pathways in the most insidious fashion. The term
affair
jumps out at you from newspaper articles and television shows, as if you had never encountered it before. Your objectivity erodes away. Something flutters around inside you. Your ears become more attuned to the nuances of words. You begin analysing your partner’s choice of phrase.  Trivial events assume an air of importance. The ground under your feet is suddenly less solid.

Despite the fact that I received no further unpleasant phone calls or any more anonymous letters
about Claire, my mind inaugurated subtle departures from its normal routines.

M
y internal dialogue moved away from the question of who might want to poison my peace of mind, and turned towards the issue of whether there might be any truth in the noxious assertion that whispered to me in the moments of silence. I started to take more of an interest in my wife’s casual remarks, her references to individuals.

Had the red flag of
disloyalty been raised at any other time in our marriage, I should have paid it scant regard. But I recognised, through the haze of uncertainty, that over the last couple of years a distance had grown between Claire and me. There were many things we no longer discussed, although on the surface we continued as before. I wondered whether complacency over our marriage had disabled my critical faculties.

The frequency of our lovemaking had declined. Our conversations had become focused on everyday matters, the triviality of routine.

I found myself looking at the framed photographs of our Registry Office wedding. The eyes of the happy couple were bright and disingenuous. Some scales had fallen from those eyes in the years since.

And yet I
knew
Claire. I knew the kind, feeling person she was. But like all knowledge, conjecture sits at the base of the pyramid. We only know what we assume we know. Some assumptions are buried so deep in our subconscious that we no longer see them: they are part of our programming. That Claire and I would be together forever was not something I had ever questioned. It was a catechism.

I put aside the manuscript that Anna had given me after I read the phrase,
I was a fool to trust her so completely
. Like the comet that the ancients took as a sign of evil days to come, it seemed portentous. I placed
Madame Bovary
back on the bookshelf for the same reason.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
seemed a safer choice.

I
repeated to myself I was being asinine. Claire was a busy woman. She juggled a career and a household. How the hell could she find the time to conduct an affair? And with whom for God’s sake?

It could be someone she met through work
, the synthesised voice told me.
Have you noticed how many late meetings she goes to these days?

She’s never stayed away overnight
, I replied.

Not yet, maybe
, said the voice.

Braddock Motors’ business was booming. The January turnover figures turned out to be a blip. Sales of the revamped Vectra were good regardless of the car experts’ concerns about build quality. In popularity it was challenging Ford’s UK dominance. The management at Vauxhall’s Luton plant was cock-a-hoop. Our upmarket ranges were also performing well, and already it looked as though this year’s bonuses were going to be good. Even the Old Bugger appeared happy – or as happy as he ever gets. Perhaps the world would not to end in December.

Not everything has gone smoothly in Braddock Land, however. I had to sack Mark from his position as general manager at Coventry. Despite his promises of improvement, his performance at work had deteriorated
with rapidity. He was like a different person. All the old sparkle had gone. I tried to offer him his old job back, but I guess the step-down was too much of a humiliation for him. Mark seemed to have aged in a matter of months. He never did discuss the break-up of his marriage and for me to have raised it would have been yet another kick in the genitals. His bitterness was only too evident. He packed up and left without a goodbye.

I installed
Harry as acting general manager to give me some time to think and to see how he coped before making his position permanent. That did not go down too well either.

“Have you lost confidence in me too, David?”
Harry sounded exasperated.

“For
God’s sake, Harry,” I responded with some heat. “I’ve just let Mark go. Let’s not act with indecent haste on this. Certain people are convinced I set Mark up to fail from the start so that you could get the job. Cut me some slack. And while you’re about it, lose that fucking check jacket. It’s a grey or blue suit from Monday.”

He muttered something about ‘short odds’, but took the job anyway.

That weekend, Claire, Katie and I had dinner at my father’s.

As usual it was a stilted affair. Nang and the other two ladies tried their best to keep the tone light, but it
was always a struggle.

My father sat at the head of the table bemoaning the state of the nation
following the recent bomb explosions in Brixton and Brick Lane. Behind him on the wall hung the Braddock coat of arms, an ermine shield with an engrailed line and, at the centre, a large oak. Our motto reads,
A Fructibus Cognoscitur Arbor
– ‘The tree is known by its fruit’. I’ve always hated the pomposity of it. Furthermore, given that Nang had suffered two miscarriages before giving up on having children, the sight of that every day must serve to keep that wound open. My father is one insensitive bastard.

To give him his due,
though, he does have a soft spot for Katie, and they talked at length about how her studies were going while Claire and Nang chattered about some new dress shop that was opening in town.

Eventually Edward Braddock remembered I was at the table.

“What are your thoughts on the new Zafira, David?” he asked.

So we talked about cars. Again.

“Where would you like me to file this business card, David?” Sandra asked me. “Should I file him under your personal section, or what?”

She handed me a white embossed card.
James Fosse, Consultant
.

“We don’t have a ‘psycho’ category, do we?”

“Not yet. Do you want me to start one?”

“Just joshing. He’s an American guy I met at the Chamber of Commerce. He has a rather black sense of humour. The sort usually reserved for Brits.”

“OK, I’ll put him under ‘Chamber of Commerce’.”

“Let me just enter him in my phone contacts first.”

I
chucked my briefcase on the bed and changed out of my suit. I was wacked. It had been a long day at work.

As I wandered downstairs, Claire announced, “We’re having a family night in. The weather’s filthy anyway. I’ve ordered pizza for us all and Katie has chosen a DVD.”

“Sounds great,” I replied. “What are we watching?”

Katie handed me the DVD case.

“It’s a comedy.
Throw Momma from the Train
with Danny DeVito and Billy Crystal.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s kind of a funny remake of Hitchcock’s
Strangers on a Train
. You know, that
film noir
stuff? Danny DeVito offers to kill Billy Crystal’s ex-wife if he’ll kill his mother in return.”

“Sounds like a barrel of laughs.”

The doorbell rang twice.

“That’s either the pizza boy or the postman,”
remarked Claire.

“The postman?” I asked.

“The postman always rings twice,” said Katie and Claire together.

Katie had fallen asleep on her bed. Her study notes were strewn around her, and Aerosmith’s ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’ was playing on her music system.

I tucked her into bed, kissed her and switched off the music and the lights. S
he didn’t stir. Katie looked so much like Claire sometimes, it was uncanny. She didn’t seem to have acquired any of my features at all. Lucky girl.

The house was quiet. It was gone eleven and Claire had another late dinner.

I opened the French windows from my study and wandered out into the garden. The sky was black and starless, but the night was unseasonably warm. I lit a Marlboro and took a long draw on it. I had recently confessed to my family my return to the ranks of smokers, and they were
not
happy about it. I consoled them with the promise that I would only smoke a few cigarettes a day and I would never smoke in their presence. Claire had bought a large bottle of mouthwash and left it by my sink in our bathroom.

Somehow over the weeks I had managed to push my suspicions about Claire into the back of my mind. She was going out a lot, but I knew that
Jael Construction was doing brisk business and that the big, new estate development at Kettering must be taking up a lot of time. Claire, unlike many CFOs, got involved in some of the commercial negotiation aspects of the building projects, and that meant out-of-hours meetings. The wheels of capitalism continued to turn outside of the Monday to Friday routine. I remembered Jim Fosse telling me the international power business was ten times worse. With time zones to consider, ludicrous power plant build times and twenty-four-hour-seven-days-a-week operations, it was amazing anyone managed to sleep at all. But perhaps he exaggerated.

Jim Fosse.

I finished my cigarette and lit another one.

It was a while since I’d spoken to the American. I s
aw him briefly at the last Chamber of Commerce meeting, but he was deep in discussion with a rather depressed-looking Mat Hoggard of Leicester Wheels Auto Limited, and I did not feel inclined to interrupt.

The real truth was that I was avoiding Jim.

Since I’d received the vindictive phone call and anonymous letter, and with the universe sending me coded messages about murder conspiracies, the last thing I needed was a conversation with Jim – especially one about killing his wife, even if it was in jest.

When midnight struck I had a whisky and went to bed.

I double-checked the address that Harry had given me before ringing the doorbell.

The house was in Hillfields, an area of Coventry redeveloped after the bombing of World War II had flattened much of the city. It is one of the most disadvantaged places in England, and this house had certainly seen better days. Grubby net curtains hung at the windows and the roof looked like it needed serious repairs. Tracksuit-clad teenagers wandered the street and gave me curious glances. Barely serviceable cars rusted at the curb. I was glad I was visiting during daylight hours.

One of the downstairs curtains twitched and a few moments later the peeling front door opened a few inches. Mark peered at me.

“David? What do you want?”

“Just to talk. Can I come in?”

“How did you get my address?”

“From Harry.”

With reluctance, he stood aside to let me enter and I followed him into the living room. There was little furniture and the room was dusty and smelled of male sweat. A television muttered and a half-eaten carton of Chinese takeaway sat on the floor beside an old armchair whose stuffing was spilling out. Mark slumped into the chair and picked up the carton.

“Excuse me while I finish lunch,” he said. Then, remembering his manners, he asked me if I’d like a cup of tea. I
declined, and sat down on a straight-backed wooden chair next to the non-functioning fireplace.

Mark shovelled the noodles into his mouth with a pair of plastic chopsticks and waited for me to say something. He looked unkempt and I doubted he’d shaved that morning.

“How are you, Mark?”

He made a wry face and indicated the room with his chopsticks.
“As you can see, I’m doing OK.”

“Are you working?”

“What do you think?”

“Harry told me you and Janine are no longer together. He was concerned about you.”

“Then why are you here and not him?”

“I’m here because I can offer you a job and Harry can’t,” I replied.

He leaned back in the chair.

“Yes, Janine and I have split up. Women, eh? Can’t live with ‘
em and can’t kill ‘em.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” He recommenced eating.

“We need someone at
the Northampton showroom. I thought of you. It could be a bit of a new start for you.”

“
Northampton?
” he said, dripping sarcasm. “Ah, the Venice of the Midlands. Culture, nightlife and all the tedium you can stomach.”