Valentina: A Hauntingly Intelligent Psychological Thriller (41 page)

“
We should clean up,” he said.

“
All right.”

The rabbit was a blackened, dried out mess: a husk. I left Michael to prise it from the rotary pole while I sniffed the various bowls, wondering if they’d made it through the night. In the end, we threw away everything, every scrap. Michael lugged it out to the bin in a black plastic refuse bag.

By midday, Shona had not reappeared. Michael could not leave his phone alone.

“I can’t even track her,” he whined. “She must have turned it off. Oh God, she hates me, she really hates me.”

“Actually,” I said, “have you seen my iPhone? I haven’t seen it since last night.” I grabbed my bag from the kitchen floor and rummaged through it. No phone.

He appeared not to hear, too lost in his own phone, which he kept sliding unlocked, his face set in this wretched, angst-ridden expression so deep I wondered whether it would ever change.

“
Oh, never mind,” I said.

I searched through my coat pockets but it wasn’t there either. Fuck. I must have left it ... I’d had it with me in the bathroom ... I must have left it on the side of the bath when Zac started whining. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“Why won’t she text?” He wailed.

Erm, maybe because her phone is switched off?
“I really don’t know, Michael.”

“Maybe if I send her a message ...”

“Don’t,” I said, crossing the kitchen to him so I could physically stop him if I had to. “She was very clear. If you text her now after she expressly asked you not to, you could lose her forever.”

He’d already lost her forever, I knew that. We both had, which was a shame. But, my God, I wanted him to leave his fucking phone alone. And I needed to get hold of mine. It was OK, though. She didn’t know the passcode.

Unable to bear Michael’s expression any longer, I turned away. I made lunch, made myself sit opposite him and composed my face into the very picture of sympathy. But there was something else in his eyes now, besides the misery, something worse. Hope. He had not let go of the hope that, if he bombarded her for long enough with messages of love and contrition, she would crumble and come back and all would be well. But last night from the garden I had watched her leave. She would not, I knew, crumble and come back. Michael could talk, God knows, he could charm the proverbial birds out of the trees, but there would be no talking now. I couldn’t say this to him of course. It was tragic enough being around him as it was. My main concern, frankly, was the mad woman currently in residence in my other house and what she might be doing.

“
If you’re going to sit waiting for a reply,” I said. “We may as well go and see her. She must have calmed down by now. Maybe we can talk to her.”

The door to the Fittie house swung open at the lightest touch of my finger. As soon as I stepped into the tiny kitchen I knew something was not right. The floor and countertop were spotless. Everything had been put away in the cupboard, apart from Michael’s favourite mug, which was on the draining board, right way up.
But You May Call Me Lord
. That, I’ll admit, gave me the shivers.

I wandered into the living room. Same: vacuumed, immaculate. Eerie.

“
See?” Michael’s voice came through from the kitchen. “I told you she wouldn’t trash the place.”

From the mantelpiece I picked up the photo of Michael. “You’re right. She hasn’t.”

No, she hadn’t wrecked my house. But why the hell had she cleaned it? Another shiver passed through me. I rolled my shoulders and shook my head against an inchoate case of the heebie-jeebies.

Michael came into the living room, holding Zac and smiling like an idiot. “She just needed somewhere to stay,” he said.

“
But where is she?”

He looked around, as if he expected to find her standing by the window, ready to play happy families. “She’s probably gone for food. Maybe taken Isla for a walk.”

“
You think?”

“
Yes. Along the beach.” The hopeful set of his eyebrows made me want to scream. This man, this face, would murder me by stealth.

I headed for the bedroom. Maybe Shona had cut the sleeves from my suits. I hoped so. Something, anything, other than this ... this weird perfection. In the bedroom, the bed looked strange. And then I realised. The duvet had been folded and tucked at the corners to make a kind of pleat. The cushions sat in a row, points down. They were completely central, as if she’d measured their position with a ruler. My jaw clenched. My breath quickened. I opened the wardrobe door. Surely ... but no. Nothing had been ripped or damaged in any way. I closed the door. Even the bedroom floor was spotless. Before leaving the house last night I had thrown some underwear down, two changes of clothes
–
they were in the wash basket. The curtains had been tied back, something I never bothered doing. The bureau was closed
–
had I left the key in the lock?

I headed for the bathroom. The shower bore no ghostly rings of dried droplets, no soap slime, no stray hairs. I looked around and shrieked.

“
Michael!”

He appeared in the doorway. “What?”

“
The mirror.”

He came to stand beside me, the two of us fractured as a cubist painting: eyes doubled, random noses and ears repeated between the cracks. We were all wrong. We were freakish.

“
I told you,” I said.

“
No,” he said. “It will have been an accident.”

“
An accident? So, tell me, did a heavy object accidentally throw itself from the floor, across the room perhaps, and land smash in the centre of the mirror? Don’t be ridiculous.”

But he only shrugged and left the room. “Well, maybe she did do it on purpose. But it’s only a cheap mirror. You’re not superstitious, are you?”

No. But even so. Unable to look at my reflection, I stared down at sink. It gleamed, the scab of dried toothpaste I knew had been there when I left was gone. And my phone was no longer on the side of the bath.

“
Michael, have you seen my iPhone?”

“
Nah,” he called from the other room. “It’ll be at the cottage.”

“
I don’t think so. I thought I’d left it in here.” I bit my nail, tore a strip from it with my teeth and spat it out. “Don’t you think it’s a bit weird, how clean it all is?”

“
She’s proud, that’s all. I think we should head back.
S
he’ll probably be waiting at the cottage.”

I felt myself blanch. “The cottage,” I said, joining him and Zachary in the living room. “What if she’s there? What if she’s trashing the place?”

“
Now you’re being ridiculous. She’s solid gold, is Shona, she’d never do anything to the cottage. She loves it.”

I could look only at Michael’s feet, the white trainers I always hated.

“
I need time to think.” I said.

Oh, but he wasn’t going to give me time to think, I knew it even as I said it. He wasn’t going to give me space either. These were two things I would never have again. He was going to wait there with his fool’s grin and believe that Shona wasn’t as angry as all that. I had no idea what this pristine house, the smashed mirror or my missing phone meant, other than her possibly flipping out as I had predicted. And she had obviously, also as I had predicted, scuttled back to Glasgow.

“
I think, actually, I’ll get changed,” I said, forcing myself to look into his hopeless, hopeful face. His designer hooded top screamed discount village. He actually believed style could be purchased in a brand name aimed at teenagers. How had I not seen him for what he was? I had thought him such a breath of air compared to the boarding school boys of my teenage years but now I saw he was nothing but vain, vain and more than a little stupid. I met his eye and smiled. “Darling, would you mind taking Zachary along the beach, give him a walk while I take a shower?”

“
OK,” he said, bewildered. “So, hang on, you don’t think she’ll do anything to the cottage then?”

“
No, you’re right, she wouldn’t. It’s like you said. Shona’s solid gold.”

Once the two of them were out of my sight, I sat on the sofa and wept with relief. Yes, wept. I made coffee and sat and sipped and plotted. They would be back soon. I had to think fast. I had to devise a plan.

They got back an hour later, Michael still wearing that pathetic, deluded optimism, the gurning, lobotomised half-smile of a mentally challenged game show contestant. I kissed him full on the mouth, stroked his chin. He smiled, a horrid, hoi polloi
Saturday night is sex night
smile. I smiled right back. Now that I knew what my next move was, I felt so much better.

On the way back to the cottage, Michael’s energy slid away. He called Shona twice between Fittie and Sainsbury’s but did not leave a message. He became morose once again, slid low in the passenger seat like a truculent spoilt schoolboy.

“
What are we going to do if she’s not at the cottage?” he said once I’d parked in the supermarket car park.

“
I don’t know,” I said. “But you have to give her some space. She’s had a shock and she needs you to let her come around. Tell you what, we’ll have a nice dinner tonight and see where we are in the morning, all right? Curry, how does that suit you?”

“
Shall I come in with you?”

“
No, you stay here with Zachary. I only need a few things.”

I kissed him on the cheek, left him like a cripple waiting in the car while I grabbed some food. I shopped quickly, but with care. A quick trip to the Ladies’ is easily enough time to dump one bottle of oil down the sink and fill it with another kind of oil entirely.

“
OK!” I said, throwing my goody bag onto the back seat. “One cheeky chicken madras to pick us up, maybe open a bottle, what do you say?”

It was five o’clock by the time we drove up the darling bumpy lane to the exquisite country cottage that was all but mine. As soon as I hit the kitchen I opened the red. We drank quickly, reached for our glasses, for numbness. We sank the first bottle before dinner was even on the table. Once Mikey had put Zachary to bed, I lit two oil lamps, turned off the overhead light and opened another bottle.

“
Do you think I should call her?” His eyes were two sad pools of brown.

“
Not again.” I turned away, made great work of organising the cooking ingredients on the countertop. “Leave her be.”

I couldn’t see him but I knew he was checking his phone for the fifteen-thousandth time that day. “What do you think she’ll be doing?”

“
I really have no idea.”

“
Do you think she’ll get in touch tomorrow?”

“
Michael, let it drop now.”

“
Maybe she’ll need a week or two. I need to know she’ll come back.” His voice had a nasal, whining tone to it. “She said she’d think about it. She said that. Did you hear her? Did you hear her say that?”

Oh, for Christ’s sake, Michael, she’s gone.
“Yes. She said that. I did hear her say that.”

From the cutlery drawer I pulled out the carving knife.

“
Are you OK?” Mikey squeezed my shoulder.

Get off me.
“I’m fine.”

“
More wine?”

“
Great. Thanks.” I could feel the tannin in the cave of my mouth, my gums thick, as if after a dentist’s jab.

The lamplight glanced on the carving blade. There, on the scratched steel surface, watchful eyes blurred to no more than a dark strip. I gasped, seeing for a second Shona’s eyes, staring back at me. And that was just it. Maybe she was gone. But she would always, always be here with us, watching, judging. This was the way it would be. Forever. If not spoken out loud, then shown in faraway looks and heard in heavy sighs. This was why I’d had to sit down and think straight and make my plan B (well, plan C, technically), because Shona and Isla would live between us every single day, like restless spirits, the doomed souls of the undead. They would be everywhere, a chill air at the chimney stack where a fire once burned, a photo fallen from a drawer, a particular flavour of ice cream transporting him back to his
amour perdu
. Every look he gave me, every time we made love, every time we enjoyed anything at all
–
all of it would be underpinned by her and what he believed we had done to her.

On the handle of the knife, my hand tightened. Behind me I heard the slump of him sinking into his chair, a sniff. Oh dear God. I had married a whole man, for half the time. I had ended up with half a man, the whole time.

What use, frankly, is that?

Another bottle of red opened. A joint. Destination oblivion. The room began to spin a little but I needed the kind of courage only large quantities of opiates can provide. Somewhere in all of this, I made Indian chicken curry, extra hot, with the ingredients I had got. Michael joked about the latex gloves I’d bought.

“
I need them to keep the chilli off my hands.”

“
Hey, I’m getting a bit nervous, here. You’re not going to ask me to drop my trousers, are you?”

The naffness of the joke made me nauseous. “Maybe later. No, seriously, chilli on your hands is a disaster in bed,” I positively chirruped. “You want fire in your loins, not your pecker, my love. Hey, can you twist off the top, baby?” I handed him the paste jar. “The booze has sapped my strength. Can you open the tinned tomatoes while you’re at it, thanks.” I laughed, merrily. “These gloves are making me clumsy.”

I’m no cook but it wasn’t bad. Hot as hell. A little oily perhaps.

Michael began to cough.

“
Too spicy for you?” I asked, eyebrow arched for innuendo.

He pulled at his collar, took off his hoodie.

“
Can’t.” Cough. “Stop.” Cough. “Coughing.”