Before I Let You In (12 page)

23

Now

How did you feel when you realised that Eleanor was the wife Jessica despised?

I think I was just confused if I’m honest. I’m not saying I don’t believe in coincidence, but her choosing me as her psychiatrist by accident was stretching credibility. At first I just thought she wanted me to tell Eleanor so that Eleanor would leave him. There was simply no chance of that – patient confidentiality forbids it.

But not if you believe someone is in danger.

Exactly. At first I wondered if she was telling me these awful things to force my hand, so that I had to tell Eleanor. I never thought she’d act on them. I should have moved quicker.

What happened when you finally told Eleanor what you’d seen?

You know what happened. She didn’t believe me.

Did that hurt?

No, she was in denial. Besides, I still couldn’t tell her about Jessica being my patient, or the things she’d said. I had no other evidence to give her besides seeing him standing next to a girl in a shop.

So what did you decide to do?

What could I do? I had to wait to see what her next move would be. Are you saying I should have done more? That this was my fault?

I didn’t say that. Do you feel like this is your fault?

Of course I do. I should have done more. I just don’t see how I could have known after one meeting what she was capable of. I didn’t know who she really was. And when I did try and warn them, they didn’t listen. They didn’t believe me. I did my best. I only wanted to protect them.

Just like you always did.

Exactly. So you do understand.

24

Eleanor

Eleanor lay on the sofa, her head in her husband’s lap, both of them staring at the TV – although if anyone had asked her to name the mindless drivel they were watching, she’d have had no idea. Her limbs were heavy with the exhaustion of everyday life, but her mind hadn’t stopped working since the minute she’d woken up to an empty bed and a silent house.

Silent as the grave. That was the saying, wasn’t it? She should have been ecstatic. Noah’s first full night’s sleep since the day he was born meant an entire nine hours’ rest for her, and she hadn’t even woken in a cold panic in the middle of the night to check his breathing in the way she had on the few occasions he hadn’t woken every three hours. She’d obviously needed the rest, and had she woken lazily and reached out to find Adam snoring gently beside her; moved over to snuggle under his armpit like the days before a tiny demon had infiltrated their lives, it would have been the perfect start to her morning. Instead she’d woken with a start, unable to put her finger on what had disturbed her. It must have been Adam heading to the toilet, but when she reached out to snuggle up to his pillow, his side of the bed was cold and his mobile phone was gone from his bedside table.

She had dragged herself out of bed and cracked open the curtains to see that his car was missing from the drive. Shit – was it later than she’d thought? Her breasts ached with the weight of stored milk, but it was still quite dark outside – though it always seemed to be dark these days, what with winter making its imminent presence known. Maybe Adam had snuck out to take Toby for breakfast, leaving Eleanor and Noah to have a well-deserved lie-in. The thought was so glorious that she’d been gutted to check her phone and see that it was only 7.05 – there’s no way they would have got themselves up and out that early. Gutted, then worried. Where was Adam? He hadn’t mentioned an early start the night before, and it was so unlike him to be up before his alarm went off at 7.45. The number of times she herself had still been up at 6 a.m. from a 2 a.m. feed and prayed he would somehow psychically wake from his slumber and take Noah while she clawed back an hour and a half of the night, but not once had he opened his eyes before that alarm.

She’d thrown on her dressing gown and slippers and padded across the landing and down the stairs, one eye on the monitor as the third step from the bottom let out its trademark groan, half hoping, despite the missing car, to find Adam with a full English breakfast laid out on the table. But the bottom of the house was as quiet as the upstairs.

Trying hard to control her rising panic, she had tried Adam’s phone twice whilst going about her normal morning tasks – making toast, pouring cereal for Toby, the whole time cradling the phone between her shoulder and her ear. When she gave up and threw the handset on to the kitchen counter, she heard grumpy little noises crackling from the monitor like angry static.

Typically, Adam had called back just as Noah hit full-blown panic mode at waking and finding himself alone and probably starving after a full night without milk. Where the bloody hell had she left the phone? It had only been about four minutes since she’d last had it … Yes, the kitchen. Lugging Noah with her, she got to it just as it stopped ringing. Immediately her mobile started upstairs. By the time she’d answered, Noah was puce in the face and Eleanor was already exhausted and livid.

‘Where are you?’ She’d tried – and failed – to keep the annoyance from her voice.

‘I woke early and couldn’t get back to sleep. Thought I’d go to the gym rather than risk waking you and the kids.’

‘The gym?’ Adam hadn’t been to the gym in over twelve months, and suddenly this morning he was Mr Motivator?

‘Well I told you I wanted to start up again.’

He’d mentioned it. Once. Eleanor had told him that if he wanted to start back at the gym, he’d have to go before work – the kids missed him enough in the evenings as it was. She’d just never expected it to actually happen.

‘And you didn’t think that if you were up early you could have done some of the housework, or got the kids’ stuff ready for school like I would have had to do?’

Adam sighed, and she pictured him rubbing his face. ‘Els, I don’t want to argue. I just wanted some time to myself.’

She laughed. ‘Time to yourself?’

‘We’ve been over this before. Time at work doesn’t count as time to myself. You get your Fridays – what do I get?’

She’d wanted to ask what was so wrong with time with her – or point out how nice it would have been to wake up together for a change, instead of him going downstairs to find her half asleep and drooling on the sofa – but Noah’s demands for his breakfast had reached a level only dogs could hear, and she could hear Toby banging around in the kitchen and could only imagine the mess he was making getting the milk into his cereal.

‘Okay, have a good day at work, babe. Love you.’

This was all Karen’s fault. If she hadn’t mentioned seeing Adam with that girl, Eleanor would never have spent the rest of the day wondering if her husband had really been at the gym, or thinking about all the ways she could find out if he’d been telling the truth, ranging from calling the gym to say he’d lost his pass and had it been used recently (risky – they’d issue a new one and probably mention it to him) to pretending to be a police officer and asking to see their security cameras (she realised they weren’t fantastic ideas). The old Eleanor of just a week ago would never have moved practically everything in the house under the guise of cleaning to look for evidence of his affair, and she definitely wouldn’t have spent forty minutes on Google looking up phone-tracking software – just in case. She had to forget what Karen thought she’d seen and concentrate on not screwing up her marriage.

She could tell that Adam had been expecting an argument when he walked in that evening, but Eleanor had been too tired – and too scared of where it might lead – to oblige. The last thing she wanted to do was ask him outright if he was having an affair. What if he admitted it? Everything in their lives would be turned on its head, and she’d be forced to decide what to do about it. She didn’t feel ready for that tonight, perhaps not ever. And yet was she really the type of person to ignore her husband’s affair? Those women were weak, spineless, devoid of any character or backbone. Eleanor had never been like that. She abhorred people who lied and cheated; if you treated the person you were supposed to love that way, then what kind of person were you? Whenever she’d talked with her friends about cheating partners, she’d been the first to assert her opinion on the subject – if Adam ever cheated on her, he’d be gone. She felt almost embarrassed by that woman now; she’d known nothing of real life and of a marriage under strain. And suddenly life wasn’t so black and white.

They bathed the children and put them to bed with barely a word between them. As Eleanor left Noah’s nursery, she paused by the door of her elder son’s room and listened to father and son talking about Toby’s day at school. How had it been so easy with Toby and yet so hard with Noah? True, there were differences in their situation, but if anything their bond after Noah was born should have been stronger than before. Now they had a child who was both of theirs, something they shared together, without secrets and lies. This should have been simple.

The street outside was silent save for the occasional car pulling in and parking up at one of the other houses. Adam seemed more relaxed now that no row had been forthcoming, yet Eleanor felt him stiffen at a noise from outside the window.

‘What is it?’ she asked, sitting up. Adam’s eyes didn’t leave the TV.

‘What’s what?’

‘You heard something outside. It was in the bushes; I heard it too.’

Adam leaned over and pulled the curtain aside an inch, peered out into the darkness. ‘No one there. Probably a bird.’

‘It wasn’t a bloody bird. Aren’t you going to go and look?’

He pulled a face. ‘Go and look at someone walking past the house? What’s wrong with you?’

The words stung like a slap to the face. Not
What’s wrong?
but
What’s wrong with you?
As though all their problems could be traced back in a Freudian flowchart to the lunatic mother rather than the absent, possibly philandering husband.
He disappears in the middle of the night and yet there’s something wrong with me?

Did he know who was out there? Was that why he wouldn’t go and look? Karen’s words came back to her as clearly as if her friend was sitting beside her.
You really haven’t noticed anything unusual? Any signs that someone has been in the house, watching you and the baby …?

Eleanor felt sick at the very thought. She hadn’t noticed anyone, but would she? She was always so busy, her attention taken up by one or other of her children. Would she spot someone walking behind her or watching them from afar? Karen must have had a good reason to say it. What did she know?

But it couldn’t be anything like that. The noise from outside was like Adam said, someone walking their dog, or kids on their way home from the park. Nothing more. Because if he knew there was someone out there, he would put a stop to it. He would never put their family in danger.

25

I went to her house.

Afterwards I sat in the lay-by at the end of the street, seething quietly at my stupidity, at my total disregard for the rules I had set myself. Your life, I told myself through gritted teeth, is defined by the rules you have vowed to abide by. If you lose sight of those, you lose everything. It could all come slipping down round you, the snowdrift that is your life becoming an avalanche that will bury you alive. It wasn’t the fear that I could have been caught that caused self-loathing to bubble under my surface like tar on a hot road – when you have had the worst possible thing happen to you, that kind of fear is as ridiculous as being afraid of monsters under the bed. I hadn’t been caught. But I had lost control.

The house was as different to mine as our lives were to each other. This home welcomed you towards it with a magnetic pull; even empty you could practically smell the freshly baked bread and hear the sounds of children’s quickly forgotten squabbles. Sounds that had choked and suffocated him, I tried to remind myself.

There were no cars on the drive, but still I approached with apprehension. I had no desire to rush this. I wasn’t looking for anything specific here, I just wanted to look.

I’d kept the key in my hand throughout the entire journey, its warmth and the way it sat comfortably in the creases a silent affirmation that I was doing the right thing. That this was long overdue and I couldn’t avoid her forever. I’d expected it to refuse to turn in the lock, unwilling to betray its master and let the enemy over the threshold, yet it had slid smoothly in and turned without resistance the first time. I stood for a second with my hand on the door handle and my mind stuck in that place between before and after. I was still closer to before; there was still time to walk away from this place with my discipline intact. The minute I pushed open that door it would become after, and I would have to consider at some point what that meant for me, how far I would slip and whether I could pull myself back from where this was all heading.

But I knew myself, and I knew, even as I hesitated, that I wouldn’t have come here if I hadn’t fully intended to walk through that door. There was a big part of me that had wanted her to be home so I wouldn’t have a chance, but now I was here and the house was empty. Better just to get it over with, rip off the plaster without stopping too long to think about the pain it might cause.

The hallway was sparsely decorated – built to be family functional, with coat hooks that each held one coat and a shelf for the post. I turned my face from the crisp white envelopes ripped open at the top and the letters crammed back in the rush of the school run. The thought of seeing his name on them in this place that felt so unlike him caused my stomach to cramp uncomfortably.

I lifted a man’s jacket off the hook. A heavy wax jacket, expensive and functional, the kind of thing you’d wear to walk a pack of dogs across the countryside on a bitter Sunday morning. Dark green, with a black sheepskin trim on the inside of the collar. I raised it to my face and inhaled deeply, the scent pervading my nostrils like poison. Expensive aftershave that reminded me of the cold side of my bed – how I’d spray it on the pillow so that I could smell him when he wasn’t there, so I could pretend he was still with me when I closed my eyes. Did she do the same?