The Cruellest Game

Eighteen

He left shortly afterwards. I assumed he was once again staying in that grim house he’d shared with his first wife, his real wife. The house I had so nearly visited.

Robert had wondered, with some alarm, I’d thought, what might have happened if I’d knocked on the door and been invited in. If Robert had been there, then the game, his wicked game, would have been up, of course. At once. But if not, the woman I’d known as Bella would surely have feared that I would quickly become aware of the strange and cruel deception she had so effectively accomplished, or even that I was already aware of it. And I believed her to have been capable of terrible things. So just what might she have done?

The thought made me shiver. DC Jarvis’s business card remained pinned to the kitchen noticeboard, though his manner towards me made it seem unlikely that I would ever want to call him again. What I had heard that morning changed everything. I called his mobile.

Rather to my surprise, again, he answered straight away. I was almost taken aback, and uncertain where to begin. But surely he had to listen now.

I started by telling him about the story in the Express & Echo, and how it had made me realize immediately that my husband must have been leading an extraordinary double life. I explained that Brenda Anderton had been known to me as Bella Clooney, and that she had insinuated her way into my life, the life of our little family.

‘I feel sure she’s been responsible for everything that’s happened to me: the night-time intruder, the trashing of the house, probably even the kidnapping of that poor little boy,’ I went on. ‘And I also believe she was involved somehow in Robbie’s suicide. I don’t know how, and Robert still claims she couldn’t have been, but—’

‘Mrs Anderson, is your husband with you?’ Jarvis interrupted.

‘The man I thought was my husband, you mean,’ I remarked unnecessarily.

‘Please, Mrs Anderson. Is he with you?’

‘No. I called him when I saw the story in the paper and he came right over. I made him tell me everything, though knowing what I now do about him it’s anybody’s guess whether he did or not...’

‘But he’s not with you now?’

‘No. He left about ten minutes ago. I called you more or less straight after he’d gone.’

‘Right. Stay in your house, Mrs Anderson. Lock the doors and do not let anyone in, except me and DC Price. We’ll be right over.’

It seemed Jarvis had listened to me for once. I couldn’t resist a jibe.

‘So you are taking me seriously at last, are you, Detective Sergeant?’ I asked.

He did not rise to the bait.

‘Please, Mrs Anderson, do exactly as I have told you,’ he said. ‘You could be in real danger.’

We ended the call. I considered his parting remark. I’d kind of assumed that any danger I might be in had departed with the death of Brenda Anderton. DS Jarvis obviously did not think so. Other than her there was surely only Robert who might, for whatever crazy reason, want to harm me. I believed that Robert still loved me. In as much as he ever had, I reflected grimly. Could a man who really loved a woman deceive her the way he had me? I had no answer to that. I only knew that I could not have behaved that way to someone I loved. Even the practicalities of it would have been beyond me. There was no way I could have successfully maintained such a deception while appearing to share my life with someone in the way Robert had.

DS Jarvis and DC Price arrived forty-five minutes later. They had wasted no time in getting to me. Indeed, they roared into the yard at Highrise with lights flashing and the siren attached to the roof of their silver saloon car still wailing, which I thought might not have been totally necessary.

While waiting for them I’d lit the fire in the sitting room. I don’t know why, really. In my other, now so distant seeming life we lit the fire frequently in winter and always on the rare occasions that we had visitors. Maybe some part of my subconscious was still seeking normality. Not that there was anything, surely, that could be regarded as remotely normal in the company of two police detectives wishing to question you about the double life of your bigamous husband and the death of his other wife.

The fire was blazing by the time I led the two men into the now so rarely used room. They each sat in one of the big armchairs on either side of the grand old fireplace, Price leaning forward, in that way open fires invariably invite, to warm his hands. I sat very upright, perched on the edge of one end of the smaller of the two sofas. I almost didn’t want to be comfortable.

Jarvis was serious and thoughtful, displaying a side of him I hadn’t seen before. His questioning was meticulous and incisive. His manner towards me had changed significantly. It occurred to me that he’d previously been so sure that I was an unhinged woman responsible for the crimes she claimed had been committed against her, and therefore also for the kidnap of Luke Macintyre, that he hadn’t really considered any alternative. Nor, probably, had he overseen a satisfactorily thorough investigation. I wondered if that was what he was thinking himself, and if he now regretted it.

He asked me to go over again what I had told him on the phone, occasionally prompting me for more detail, or clarification of a certain point, but otherwise listening carefully and quietly.

Only when I had pretty much finished did he begin to ask more questions of his own. The first was an obvious one.

‘I wonder, Mrs Anderson, if you have any idea how Brenda or Bella found out about you and Robbie? How did she first discover that her husband had another family and was leading a double life?’

I was ready with the answer. I stood up and walked across to the little Victorian Davenport desk which stood by the window, lifted its lid and removed from it a photograph of Robert and Robbie which I’d put there, when the Farleys and I were clearing up the house, largely because I could not bear to look at it any more. It was one of the few Robert had ever allowed of either me or our son with him, and the last one ever taken, on a beautiful evening in the garden at the end of the previous summer. Their faces, glowing in amber light, beamed at me from within a simple wooden frame. Father and son, so unmistakably father and son. The shrubs and trees which formed a backdrop already displayed more than a hint of autumn colour. Sycamores, that much maligned species of tree, lined much of the perimeter of our garden, and their angular leaves had just begun to turn. There was winter jasmine in bud. Autumn crocuses sprouted purple, white and yellow. Ours was a garden for all seasons. I held the photograph still and studied it for just a few seconds. We had been so happy then, hadn’t we? Surely we had. Now all I felt as I looked at my two men together was the pain of what was to come.

I handed the photograph to DS Jarvis. There was no glass within its frame, of course. That had been smashed into smithereens when the photo had been swept to the floor in the wanton destruction wreaked on the day Bella/Brenda — and there now could surely be no doubt that it had been her — entered my home and trashed the place.

The policeman looked down at the image then up at me.

‘Wow!’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I responded. ‘They could be clones, couldn’t they?’

‘They’re quite remarkably alike, that’s for certain,’ said DS Jarvis, as he passed the photograph to DC Price.

I felt the enormity of my loss hit me again. My special men. Gone for ever. Both of them. Robert was still alive. But really he may as well not be, as far as I was concerned anyway.

‘So you think that casual meeting of dog walkers on Exmouth beach wasn’t really that at all? You think Brenda Anderton arranged it, in order to begin to get to know you, to get close to you and your son?’

I shook my head.

‘No. When we met on the beach I honestly don’t believe she had any idea either I or Robbie existed. Any more than I had any idea about her. Robert was too clever for both of us as far as that was concerned.’

‘Then do you believe it was pure coincidence that you both decided to walk your dogs on Exmouth beach on the same day and at the same time?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was it something you often did?’

‘No. Nor her, I shouldn’t think. Robbie and I were only there because we’d had to go shopping in Exeter and Brenda didn’t have the sort of lifestyle that gave her a lot of leisure time, that’s for sure.’

‘So, it was just chance, catastrophic chance as it turned out?’

Jarvis sounded doubtful.

‘Yes.’ I said. ‘Coincidences do happen, you know, Detective Sergeant.’

‘Indeed,’ said Jarvis. ‘They’re just not something detectives are very fond of. But it seems you are probably right about this one. So exactly what happened on the beach?’

‘From the moment Bella — I mean Brenda — spotted Robbie, I reckon she just had to approach us, to find out who he was. Robert said she told him that, in as much as you can believe a word Robert says about anything. But I believe absolutely that she would have been suspicious straight away. More than that — shocked, I should imagine. I mean the resemblance is so striking. It would have been a total Boris Becker moment, wouldn’t it? You couldn’t really doubt Robbie’s parentage for a minute.’ I paused, reflecting briefly again on a wonderful young life now lost for ever.

‘We used to joke about it. Robert, Robbie and me. Robert always said he’d been going to ask me to have a DNA test when I claimed to have got pregnant the very first night we were together, but as soon Robbie was born he’d realized there was no point.’ I paused again.

‘How did Brenda make the approach?’ asked Jarvis.

‘She threw her dog’s ball straight at us, deliberately I now realize, contriving a minor incident if you like, making it seem perfectly natural to start a conversation with me. It’s what dog walkers do. And, of course, I was totally and blissfully unaware of any hidden agenda.’

‘You think she already had an agenda.’

‘Well, she would have known about Robbie, just known, at once. I feel sure of it. And, understandably, she wanted to talk to me, to find out exactly what was going on. I don’t think she would even have considered to begin with that Robert had married me. That he had built another family, and managed to lead a double life, to keep two families going for so long, each without any knowledge of the existence of the other.’

‘I still can’t quite understand how he got away with it,’ said Jarvis.

‘Robert was a master of deception, no doubt about that,’ I said. ‘But luck must have been with him, mustn’t it? His two families didn’t live that far apart. We didn’t go to Exeter often — and Robert never did, come to think of it — but Robbie and I had been shopping there that very day we finally met Brenda. A chance meeting could, surely, have happened long before it did.’

‘So Brenda Anderton questioned you, did she? About your son, your husband, and so on?’

‘Well, yes, looking back that was exactly what she did. But she was very gentle about it, made it seem like normal conversation. I don’t expect it took her long, though, to know she was dead right about Robbie’s parentage. And it would have been apparent that I was married to my son’s father.’ I realized what I had said and added: ‘Or thought I was.’

‘The level of Robert’s deception would have quickly become clear to Brenda, then,’ mused Jarvis.

‘Yes, which I’ve no doubt was as much of a shock to her as it was, eventually, to me.’

The detective looked thoughtful. ‘She thought quickly, didn’t she? Gave you a false name, and so on.’

‘Yes. I suppose she was afraid that I might mention our meeting to Robert. I’m not sure that I would have thought so quickly, though. I mean, I don’t know if it was deliberate or not, but she chose to call herself Bella, which is vaguely similar to Brenda. It’s what Robert did too, only he went further, using a last name that was damned near the same apart from one letter. They say that people who adopt false identities are quite often found out because they don’t respond to their names properly. And that it’s easier if the names are similar. Is that right in your experience, DS Jarvis?’

‘It probably is, yes. But there aren’t many people capable of maintaining a false identity, a double life, the way your husband did, that’s for certain.’

‘Thank God for that,’ I said. And I meant it from the bottom of my heart. The hurt and distress caused by such enormous deception could never fully be understood by anyone who had not experienced it. I wouldn’t wish it on any human being.

‘Bella — I mean Brenda — did the same thing with her dog’s name,’ I went on. ‘She called him Flash; turns out he was really called Splash. Dogs respond to sounds really, not actual words. So Splash and Flash would sound much the same to a dog and it would therefore respond to either as if it were the name it had been taught. Did you know that, DS Jarvis?’

Jarvis nodded. ‘I’ve heard it,’ he said. ‘Though I have a dog that appears not to know her name or the sound of it. Always tearing off in the opposite direction...’

I smiled and glanced down at Florrie, her head resting on my knee, her tail wagging occasionally, eyes not quite open, not quite shut. She was a real comfort to me, even in such dire circumstances. More than that I rather envied her: well fed and well loved, unaware of the horrors of the last few weeks. She might be missing the presence of her masters, but they say dogs have little concept of time. That’s why they will just sit and wait for their owners to return, even when they have been abandoned. But a loved and well looked after dog has a pretty good life, I thought. An uncomplicated life, that was for sure. At that moment, and not for the first time since the death of my beloved son, I rather wished I was a dog.

My mind had wandered. I could hear that DS Jarvis was still speaking, but only in the distance. I made myself concentrate. I still had enough desire for self preservation to want very much to be released from police bail and to no longer be suspected of a dreadful crime. I knew this was my opportunity to provide the information that could make this happen sooner rather than later. I needed to grasp it.

‘So after that first meeting how did things develop?’ DS Jarvis was asking.

I explained that it was Bella who’d suggested a second dog walk together, instigated our swapping phone numbers, and made sure to arrange further meetings.

‘So she took the initiative, did she?’ queried Jarvis.

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘I also realize now how she always managed to turn any conversation she was having back to me and my family. She must have learned so much about us. She certainly had the knack of doing that without raising any suspicions. And I was someone who wasn’t used to talking about myself to strangers.’

The detective sergeant proceeded to press me on every detail I could remember in my dealings with Bella, and he took a note of all our meetings. Not surprisingly he was particularly intrigued by what had happened on the night of Robbie’s death, when I had — and it so made my flesh crawl now — turned to Bella for company and comfort, and then Robert had walked into Highrise to find the two women in his life together.

‘How on earth did he react to that?’ asked DS Jarvis.

I tried to answer him truthfully and accurately. Bizarrely, it was very hard for me to remember. I suppose at the time all I had been thinking about was the death of my son and then the relief, albeit so fleeting as things turned out, of at least having my husband home to share my grief with.

‘I suppose he just looked stunned,’ I said. ‘But then I would have expected him to be stunned that night, and at the time I certainly didn’t think it had anything to do with Brenda’s presence. He said something like “What the hell is she doing here?” But I didn’t think anything of that either, really. He never liked visitors much. And one thing there is no doubt about is how much Robert adored Robbie. Being the kind of man he is...’

I paused. ‘I suppose I should say the kind of man I once thought him to be. Well, I would have expected him to want to be alone with his wife. The mother of the son who meant so much to him. His reaction didn’t surprise me.’

‘And Brenda Anderton? How did she react? They must both have known, husband and wife, that their various games were up. She’d been stalking you and Robbie, hadn’t she? That’s what it amounted to.’

He glanced at me as if waiting for a response. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but of course that is exactly what she had done.

I nodded. Jarvis continued.

‘Robert must have realized, at the very least, when he saw her here, that Brenda knew about his double life. There could have been no doubt in his mind about that, surely?’

Again, I had difficulty remembering.

‘He told me that today, but on the night she just left, and I really wasn’t aware of anything strange,’ I said. ‘She left more or less straight away after Robert arrived. I remember apologizing to her, for Robert’s rudeness, I suppose.’ I half laughed. ‘Deeply engrained English courtesy even in such circumstances. She said something like “Of course you need to be on your own now.” And she just went.’

‘But sooner or later there must have been a confrontation between them, presumably? Yet things carried on much the same for you, in as much as they could, after the death of your son.’

I told him that Robert had admitted to me that he’d gone straight to see Brenda the next day and how she’d agreed to put up with his double life, put up with almost anything, as long as he didn’t leave her or the girls. She’d even continue the deception.

‘But, of course, he didn’t know what it seems she must already have been planning, did he? That the death of your son was not enough. She was determined to destroy you completely.’

I nodded. Then realized what Jarvis had said.

‘Does that mean you also now believe she had something to do with Robbie’s death?’

DS Jarvis stared me directly in the eye, something he had never really done before. Perhaps he had never been able to bring himself to look directly into the eyes of a woman he thought was mad.

‘We have no way of knowing that for certain, Mrs Anderson, do we? At least, not at the moment. But I can assure you that we will be thoroughly re-investigating that matter along with the abduction of Luke Macintyre and the break-ins and destruction of your home.’

This time I knew I could trust him to do so. I felt mightily relieved. I didn’t think I cared very much about myself any more, and I was somewhat surprised by how much I wanted those criminal charges against me dropped. But now surely that would happen, and hopefully in the not too distant future.

Price, who had been keeping in the background while his superior officer did most of the questioning, shuffled forward in his chair and leaned towards me.

‘Mrs Anderson, do you know where we could locate your husband right now?’ he asked. ‘Do you know where he is living?’

‘Well, yes, of course,’ I said straight away, mildly surprised that they hadn’t grasped what I felt to be obvious. ‘At the home on the Bridge Estate that he shared with Brenda. He returned from the North Sea after being told the news of her death, as you’re aware, and I presume he is looking after his younger daughter there as we speak. And I know, well, as much as you ever know anything with Robert, that he was there with his other family after he came home when I was arrested, until going back to work just two or three days ago. He phoned me from the airport...’

I told them about hearing the airport noises, the flight calls and so on.

I saw Jarvis and Price exchange meaningful looks. It seemed I had presented another possibility to them, one that now probably seemed quite obvious too, and one which this time they took swiftly on board.

‘We will also be conducting further investigations into the motor incident that caused Mrs Brenda Anderton’s death,’ said Jarvis.

I noted the choice of word. Motor incident. The newspaper report had called it an accident.

DC Price interjected again.

‘Mrs Anderson, do you happen to know if your husband has any mechanical knowledge of motor cars at all?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘He’s a very good car mechanic. It’s what he used to do before he went on the rigs. He’s always looked after all our vehicles...’

I stopped in mid-sentence. Jarvis and Price exchanged an even more meaningful look.

It was Jarvis who spoke next. And his expression was sombre.

‘Mrs Anderson, if your husband had come to believe, as we know you do, that his first wife was in some way responsible for your son’s death, whether or not she in fact was, how do you think he would have reacted to that?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I stumbled. ‘He told me he couldn’t believe she would ever do anything like that. Even if you accepted the other things she really must have done, the kidnap, and the house trashing and so on, he couldn’t believe she would have deliberately brought about Robbie’s death. At least that’s what he said. Of course, I have finally learned not to accept as truth anything he says, really.’

Jarvis nodded. ‘So let’s say he suspected her, nothing more than that. And he must have, surely. What do you think he might have done?’

It was pretty clear where he was leading. I didn’t know quite what to say.

‘What do you think Robert may have been capable of?’ Jarvis persisted.

I took a few seconds before I answered.

‘He worshipped Robbie,’ I said. ‘I think, I honestly think, that he could have been capable of anything, anything at all.’