Page 58

FIFTY-SIX

Jane Trevally is waiting for Ash under the kissing couple statue on the top concourse at St. Pancras station. She is wearing a huge green parka with a fur-trimmed hood and dark sunglasses, even though the sun has yet to come out this year.

She greets Ash with a hug and says, “Happy New Year,” and Ash feels a strange surge of affection toward her, this woman she has known for only a few weeks.

They walk toward the street and cross over to the Standard hotel, where they find three low-slung armchairs in the lounge in front of a large sixties-style open fire.

As they watch the door opposite for the woman called Laura to arrive, Ash feels her stomach swirl with anticipation and anxiety—and also a touch of excitement.

What will this woman tell them? What will they know about Nick Radcliffe in one hour’s time that they do not know now?

And how will this new information reshape the landscape of Ash’s life, which has already been rendered almost untraversable by the senseless death of her father?

Jane is being chatty, but Ash can tell that she is distracted too.

She’s telling Ash about her Christmas with her first husband and his new wife and their baby, plus her oldest stepson and stepdaughter, who both hate the new wife and, by extension, the baby, and there are anecdotes about dogs doing unspeakable things and stepchildren doing unspeakable things and it all sounds like she’s making it up, just to be entertaining, but Ash is pretty sure she isn’t.

And then a woman appears in the entranceway, looking around uncertainly. Jane stands and glances at Ash to check that it’s OK for her to take the lead, then gestures the woman over.

“Hi,” she says, her hand outstretched. “I’m Jane Trevally. And this is Ash. Thank you so, so much for agreeing to meet us. We’re very grateful.”

Jane fusses around the woman for a moment, taking her coat, ordering her a coffee and a sparkling water, making the whole thing a little less weird, but then it is quiet and Laura, who is a pale woman with large eyes, a small nose, and fine blond hair that she constantly tucks behind her ears, looks from Jane to Ash and says, “So. What do you want to know?”

“Well,” says Jane. “We should probably start at the beginning. How did you meet him?”

At this question, a peachy blush hits Laura’s cheeks and her eyes mist over, and she looks like she is revisiting a precious moment. “We met… well, he was my life coach.”

“Oh,” says Ash with a small gasp. “Right. And where did you find him? I mean, was he advertising? Or did someone recommend him?”

“Weirdly enough, he approached me on the street. I thought he was one of those charity collectors at first, but then he said he was offering special rates for his life-coaching consultancy because he’d just moved to the area and needed a new client base.

He said my first session would be free and then if I wanted to continue, it would be fifty pounds an hour as opposed to a hundred pounds an hour, and I took his details and did a google on him, saw that he had a few five-star reviews, and thought, Well, I have nothing to lose. ”

“What did you think of him? When you first saw him?”

The peachy glow reappears, and it occurs to Ash that Laura is still in love with him.

“I thought he was preposterously good-looking. Way too good-looking to be selling life-coaching classes on the streets of Cambridge. I thought maybe it was a scam, that he was a front for something because of his looks and I’d end up in a dungeon with a dozen other women, become a sex slave or something.

” She laughs drily. “But I looked up where he said he worked, and they were lovely serviced offices near the Market Square, and I thought, Hmm, maybe he is legit, and I did actually want a life coach, that was the weird thing. How did he know? When he approached me? It was like he had a sixth sense about me. Knew exactly what I wanted. And that was kind of how it was for all the years we were together—he always knew exactly what I wanted. And he gave it to me. And then, when he couldn’t give me what I wanted, he’d find a way to make me believe that I didn’t want it.

He had this way… he used to cry. Well, not cry as such, but his eyes.

They were so blue, and they’d fill up with tears and… ”

She stops, pulls in a breath, aware it seems like she has been getting carried away.

“Anyway,” she continues, “I went to the first session, and I thought he was good. But more than that, I thought he was the most beautiful man in the world. Beautiful, charming, gentle, interested in me. I went back for a few more sessions and he told me about his fiancée who’d died, just a few weeks before their wedding.

Ruth. And I told him about my first husband, who left me for my sister. ”

“Your sister!”

“Yes. Don’t.” She pushes the concept away with a wave of her hands.

“Anyway, after our fifth session he asked me out for dinner, and of course I said yes because I’m pretty sure I was already in love with him by then.

I was nearly thirty. Aching to be with someone.

And this man, this beautiful man…” She smiles grimly.

“What a fucking grade-A idiot I was. Falling for it all.”

Ash and Jane exchange looks. “So, when did you know?”

“That he was a bad man?”

Ash feels a sharp chill pass through her. “So, is he?” she says. “A bad man?”

Laura sighs and places her coffee carefully back onto the saucer.

“It’s not that simple. For such a long time, he made me so happy.

Our life—it was perfect. He was attentive and loving.

He was a wonderful father. He worked hard.

He made us the center of his world. And then one day he just started disappearing.

Said his mother was ill, somewhere in the Midlands.

Never very specific about where, never let me go with him.

Said his relationship with his mother was toxic and difficult, and he didn’t want me to be involved.

But whenever he went, he’d turn off his phone.

He said he had some kind of disorder that meant he compartmentalized too much.

Said he’d always been that way. Said he had severe ADHD.

He said, oh —” She closes her eyes and rolls back her head.

“He said so much. He always had answers, always had so many words. But he never got angry, he never shouted. He always knew how to calm me down. He’d get those tear-filled eyes of his.

And all I wanted was for everything to be like it was when things were good, and that’s what people don’t understand about abusive marriages.

About toxic relationships. That it’s not bad all the time .

Or at least, it wasn’t for us. When he was home, when he was there, life was perfect. He was perfect.”

“So, what happened. Why did it end?”

“He just disappeared. Boom. ” Laura makes a tiny nuclear mushroom cloud with her hands.

“Gone. The girls were so young. It was so hard to explain. He sent me a message. Here. Look. I kept it.” She fiddles inside her handbag for a minute and brings out her phone.

She scrolls to the screenshot on her roll and shows it to them:

Darling Laura,

My mother is killing me. I can’t come back. I am broken. I love you. I love the girls. Please forgive me.

Jxxx

Ash gasps quietly. “Oh my God.”

“I assumed he’d killed himself,” Laura says, putting the phone back into her bag.

“I thought it was a suicide note. I told the police, but there was nothing they could do without knowing where he was. After a few weeks, I reported him as a missing person, but I could tell they didn’t think he was in danger.

That if he’d killed himself, he’d be found at some point, and if he hadn’t killed himself, then he was probably off living his best life without me, and that was that.

I was just left adrift. Floating. And then I started getting bills.

Credit card statements. Loans I hadn’t agreed to take out.

Fifteen thousand pounds’ worth of debt. All him.

“And then at last I knew. He wasn’t dead.

He’d scammed me. Can you believe it? An eight-year-long scam!

Two children! Memories. Love. Marriage. So much joy.

A true, true thing—it was a true, true thing.

But all a facade, for fifteen thousand pounds.

Jesus Christ, I’d have given him fifteen thousand pounds if he’d asked.

And I probably did, all in, over the years.

The things—the money for equipment for his business, I gave him thousands for that.

And… oh God!” she groans. “The student of his who’d been scammed by a con man out of all her life savings!

He told me her story and he had the wet eyes, and I said, let’s give her something.

A thousand pounds! I gave that woman who probably didn’t even exist a thousand pounds!

When I think back on it, I gave away thousands and thousands, but all of it felt legitimate.

All of it felt like it was making things better.

Making our life better. And then he fucks off and runs up fifteen grand’s worth of more debt in my name, and argh!

” She emits a small, animal roar. “So embarrassing. So humiliating. I couldn’t tell anyone.

I didn’t tell anyone. I moved away from Cambridge, so I wouldn’t have to answer any questions. And then four years ago…”

Ash pulls in her breath and waits for Laura to continue.

“Four years ago, I was contacted by a woman called Emma Greenlaw. She’d done exactly what you two have done.

She’d found Jonathan’s defunct web page for his life-coaching company on some kind of archiving website and somehow traced it back to me.

She’d just reported her mother missing to the police.

Her mother, Tara she was called, she’d been married to a man called Jonathan Truscott.

Emma told me that Tara had ended the marriage and then followed him to the Cotswolds, where she saw him with another woman.

He and this woman were having some kind of romantic getaway together, apparently.

Then she followed him back to London, went to a flat in Tooting to confront him—”

Ash and Jane exchange looks. “Tooting,” Ash hisses under her breath.

Jane says, “Nick Radcliffe claims to live in Tooting.”

“Oh,” says Laura. “Well, there’s a connection then.

Anyway, Emma’s mum, Tara, went to confront him there, to tell him she knew about his affair, about him lying.

She called Emma to tell her what she was doing.

Emma told her not to, told her it wasn’t safe.

But she didn’t listen to her, she went there, and she never came home. ”

The air chills. A dark shiver runs through Ash, and she exchanges another look with Jane. “Seriously?” she asks breathlessly.

Laura nods. “Emma said her mum sent her a weird message the next day saying that she’d spent the night talking to Jonathan and that they were going to give it another go.

Emma didn’t believe it at first, but the messages kept coming for the next few days.

Then, after a few weeks, her mother said she was in the Algarve, starting a new life with Jonathan, and that was the last straw.

Emma went to the police and reported her as missing.

There was a police investigation, they found CCTV footage of Emma’s mum leaving the flat in Tooting twenty hours after she got there, then more footage of her getting on a train to Reading, but that was it.

She never got off the train. She was never seen again.

And they saw footage of Jonathan in the area in the hours and days after Emma’s mother left, visiting shops, coming and going from the apartment, which meant he had an alibi, but when they went to the flat in Tooting there was nobody there, it was empty.

They called off the investigation, or at least in terms of Jonathan Truscott’s involvement, and that was that.

But Emma didn’t want to let it go and she’s been building up this, like, dossier kind of thing.

A record of all the women she can find who have had any sort of interaction with Justin/Jonathan/Nick/whoever.

And there are women in this dossier who have had all sorts of bizarre and unsettling interactions with him. You know he’s a street stalker?”

“A…?”

“He follows women at close quarters, strangers, to make them feel uncomfortable.”

Ash throws Jane a terrible look.

“Are you serious?”

“Mm-hmm. There’s CCTV footage. He was even reported to the police for it once about four years ago.

That was why he and Tara split up for a while.

The police came and spoke to him, according to Emma, but nothing ever happened.

Not enough evidence.” Laura shrugs and turns her coffee cup around on its saucer.

“But we have him!” says Ash. “He’s in my house. Right now. Living with my mum. I mean… this could be it. We could trap him. Stop him getting away again. Stop him doing this to anyone else.”

“Don’t underestimate him,” says Laura, a shadow passing across her face. “Seriously. He’s always one step ahead. He can make people do anything he wants them to do.”

After Laura leaves, Ash and Jane sit for a moment in a sharp silence.

“What shall we do now?” asks Ash.

“Well, for a start, we need to talk to this Emma Greenlaw. And then”—Jane pauses and touches the arm of her chair with her fingertips— “we need to talk to your mum.”

“We?”

“I mean, I could come? If you want? I know that you said you and your mother, your relationship is a bit strained? That she doesn’t always trust you? Maybe if I came too?”

Ash blinks hard. What would be worse, she wonders, to come home and tell her mother that she’s been investigating her new boyfriend and that he’s a serial scammer and a sex offender, or come home and tell her mum that she’s been investigating her new boyfriend with the help of Mad Jane Trevally?

She shakes her head, then nods, then says, “I’ll think about it.”