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SIXTY-TWO

Emma Greenlaw is a tall, angular woman with the gaunt, shrunken look of a mother who has lost too much weight too quickly after having her children.

On the lock screen of her phone there is a little girl with hair in bunches holding a baby inexpertly in her arms. “Sadie,” she says to Ash, pointing at the older girl, “and Robyn. Four and one.” She sighs.

“And my mum has never met either of them.”

Ash and Emma are sitting in a branch of Costa Coffee outside Emma’s nearest train station. She said she couldn’t get into town, too many commitments between the children and her job. She is brusque and dry.

Emma stirs sugar into her coffee and looks up at Ash. “So, he’s in your house, is he?” she asks. “As we speak?”

“Yes,” says Ash. “According to the girl in the flower shop, he’s told his wife that he’s in the Midlands looking after his elderly mother. But he’s been at our place since the day after Boxing Day. No elderly mother mentioned.”

“Wow,” says Emma bitterly. “That fucking bastard.” Then she lifts her head and looks at Ash. “So tell me the story. Of how he ended up with your mother?”

Ash tells her about the Zippo in the pink box, the impromptu visits, the wining and dining, the wine bar in Mayfair where nobody has heard of him, the flat in Tooting, the soaps from the pretty flower shop in Enderford. The wife called Martha.

Emma nods sagely throughout, her fingertips running around the edges of the tabletop. “And how do you think your mother feels about him? Right now.”

Ash shrugs. It’s a good question. “I think she really likes him. I think she’s into him. You know?”

“Is she in love with him?”

Ash thinks about it. “I’m going to say no? But it’s only a matter of time. Whenever she’s with him she has this glow, she looks prettier. She looks happier.”

Emma groans quietly. “Yup,” she says. “Sounds about right. And how has he been with you?”

“Sweet, I guess. Not too try-hard. Just pleasant.”

“But still, you feel uncomfortable?”

“I do. I felt uncomfortable immediately. It was like he was… too good to be true? Like no man could actually be like that?”

Emma nods. “And in particular a man who has no permanent home, no source of income, and is dating a recently widowed woman whose estate is worth over two million pounds.”

“Yes!” says Ash. “Exactly! It was like, who are you? Where did you come from? What do you want? And then lots of things didn’t add up and now, well, he’s in.

Feet under the table and he has an answer, an explanation, for absolutely everything.

I’ve tried talking to my mum about it, but she doesn’t really trust me?

” Ash pauses before taking a sharp breath in.

“I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder eighteen months ago and I was accused of stalking someone, which I didn’t.

Not really. But I did do some pretty crazy things and the police got involved and now, well, whatever I say to her, she’s going to see it through that lens.

Of me being unstable. Unreliable. So I’m waiting until I’ve got him, fully, a hundred percent. And then I’m going to hit her with it.”

Emma nods again, then she opens a folder and pulls out a couple of sheets of paper. “This is my list,” she says. “This is what I have so far.”

It’s a timeline. It starts in the mid-2010s with the words: Mum and Jonathan meet.

“How did they meet?” Ash asks.

“Dating app. She resisted his charms for a while—she was slightly unconvinced at first—but he worked really hard on her. He just seemed to know exactly what it was she wanted and then he’d give it to her.

And then the next we knew, they were getting married!

Some dodgy civil thing at the town hall with three guests.

I never liked him, not for one small minute.

But he made my mum happy. Until he didn’t. ”

“What sorts of things did he do?”

“Disappearing acts, mainly. And always scrounging for money. He told her he needed a knee-replacement operation, but the NHS waiting list was too long, so she paid for him to go private. He had the op, and then it turns out that he had it done on the NHS and just pocketed the cash my mum gave him. Always emergencies. Everything was always last-minute, and then every time my mum got close to throwing in the towel, he’d suddenly start being Mr. Perfect again.

He always knew exactly how far he could push her.

But eventually he pushed it too far. He was barely home, never answered his phone, my mum found some weird burner phone in his bag, he came home with a fucking Tesla that he said someone had lent him—and then he started talking about selling the house so they could move to the Algarve, and that’s when I intervened.

I just knew that he had no intention of moving to the Algarve, that he wanted her to sell the house to free up more cash.

For whatever reasons. Probably to pay for the stupid fucking Tesla.

To pay off debts. To pay for whatever other secret life he was living.

And then a young woman reported him for street stalking. Here.” She taps the list.

Emma continues. “I saw Jade’s post on our local neighborhood app, and I immediately knew it was Jonathan, so I wrote to her and the other young woman, Tilly, who also responded, saying the same thing happened to her, and we agreed to call the police.

They paid him a visit, but pah! Nothing.

Of course. He wriggled out of it. Just like he always does.

But that was the final straw for Mum. She kicked him out a few days later and he came back, so we changed the locks.

And then, well, you know what happened next. ”

They both fall silent for a moment and then Ash says, “What do you think happened to your mum?”

A shadow passes across Emma’s face and her jaw clenches with rage. “I think he killed her,” she replies tightly.

“Seriously?”

“Yes. Seriously. Remember that woman’s remains they found in the woodlands in Essex? About four years ago? I think that was her. But they couldn’t formally identify her and so there you go, another dead end.”

“Why would he have killed her?”

“Because she was onto him, I guess. She’d caught him in the act. I wish I could track down this woman, the one he was staying with in Tooting. I think she’s the missing link. I think she knows exactly what happened that day. But she seems to have disappeared too.”

Ash feels a wave of anxiety pass through her gut.

The woman sitting in front of her thinks that Nick Radcliffe killed her own mother because she’d worked out his scam.

What the hell does she think he might be capable of doing to her when he realizes that she knows his game?

“What next?” Ash says, nervously. “What should I do?”

“Keep him home. Keep him relaxed. Don’t let anything spook him. And keep me updated.”