Page 68

SIXTY-FIVE

There are two women in Martha’s shop the next morning. The first is an older woman with shiny dark hair cut into a blunt fringe, and the second a younger, fair-haired girl wearing a teddy bomber jacket and oversized jeans, a pair of headphones hanging around her neck.

Martha recognizes them immediately.

It’s the women from the photo she’d seen through the window of Paddy Swann’s house yesterday morning.

Nina Swann and her teenage daughter—except the daughter is now an adult.

Martha has no idea how they have found her here, but she is ready, so very ready for this to finally begin, to confront the other woman.

She keeps her features even and says, “Hi. Can I help you?”

The woman, Nina, is striking. She’s wearing black jeans and platform-soled boots, an oversized fluffy black jumper, and a leather jacket.

Martha can’t imagine her side by side with dapper Alistair Grey; they seem mismatched, and for a moment she wonders if maybe she’s got it all wrong.

Maybe Nina Swann is not having an affair with her husband?

Maybe it’s something else? Maybe it really is just business?

Paddy’s restaurants? Maybe Alistair is helping her to run them?

But if that’s the case, why lie? Why could Al not just say that he’s in Folkestone helping a newly widowed client run her dead husband’s restaurant empire? Why pretend to be in the Midlands helping his sick mother get back on her feet?

Nina Swann smiles and moves closer to Martha.

Her face looks soft and almost charitable.

She looks, Martha realizes, as if she is about to tell her something terrible, and surely, Martha thinks, surely she wouldn’t come all the way out here with her own daughter to tell her that she is fucking her husband.

Who would do that? Nobody, that’s who. Is she—the thought stabs at her like a knife—is she going to tell her that Alistair is dead?

Her body pumps out adrenaline and for a moment she feels dizzy, like she might pass out.

“Are you Martha?” asks Nina.

“Yes. I’m Martha. What’s going on?” Her voice comes out jagged and raw.

“Is there somewhere we could talk?”

Martha grips her elbows and nods, then leads them into the little office at the back of the shop, where there are three chairs arranged in front of her desk. She offers them tea and they say no.

Nina says, “Is this your husband?” and shows her a photo on her phone of a windswept Alistair on a beach somewhere.

Martha’s stomach churns and she nods. Al’s head is just turning in the photo, not looking at the camera, as though he didn’t know it was being taken. Typical Al. He hates having his photo taken.

Martha lifts her eyes to Nina. “What’s going on?” she says.

Nina and her daughter exchange looks and then Nina says, “Is he here? Is he with you? Do you know where he is?”

“He’s… I thought… I thought he was with you?”

Nina gives her a small, apologetic smile. “He was with me. Yes. And then you came to my house yesterday?”

Martha flinches with embarrassment and nods.

“Well, we think your husband saw you ringing our doorbell yesterday morning. Two hours later, he left in a hurry. Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”

Martha takes a moment to turn her swirling thoughts into words. “He saw me?” she repeats. “He was there?”

“Yes. And listen, Martha, I don’t know what you think is going on, but it’s all much more complicated. Your husband—what do you call him?”

“Call him?”

“Yes. His name.”

“Al. Alistair. His name’s Alistair. That’s his name.”

“Right,” says Nina, “well, Alistair came into my life a year ago, claiming to be called Nick Radcliffe. He wrote to me to offer condolences after my husband died. He said he lived alone in Tooting and had shares in a wine bar in Mayfair, that he’d never been married and never had children.

We’ve been dating since October, and he’s been living with me since December the twenty-seventh.

My daughter tracked you down via a box of soaps he bought her for Christmas that he told her were from a shop in Mayfair, but which, it turns out, came from here. ”

Martha’s mouth is suddenly dry. She shakes her head just once, trying to settle these new facts into some semblance of order. “I…,” she begins, but can’t go any further.

“I’m really sorry,” says Nina. “Really, really sorry. And listen. I’m afraid there’s more.”

Martha’s mind swoops through the last four years of her life—the holes, the gaps, the weirdness—and she looks up at Nina again and says, “Right. OK.”

Then Nina tells her about other wives, other children—abandoned children!—police reports of women being stalked on the streets, a missing wife, suspected murder.

Martha breathes in when Nina stops talking. She blinks slowly and then says, “You know, my husband, Al, he had a thing about your late husband.”

“Sorry?” Now it is Nina’s turn to look confused.

“Yes. He took me for dinner there, to your husband’s place in Whitstable.

About two or three years ago. Your husband was there.

He was very friendly, going round chatting to everyone.

And then he came over to talk to us and I was a bit starstruck, I don’t know why.

I mean, he was just a guy, just a chef, not famous or anything.

But you know, being in his restaurant, everyone was so excited to talk to him.

Your husband was super friendly, possibly a tiny bit flirtatious, he put his hand on my shoulder, though really it was nothing?

But Al was so weird after that. I never really worked out why, but then, yesterday, when I came to your house and realized who you were, it came back to me.

He bought your husband’s cookbook for me for Christmas that year, said something like, ‘Thought you’d like it.

It’s full of pictures of him.’ I thought that was weird at the time.

But still, none of it fell into place until yesterday.

Did he ever tell you that he’d been there? To your husband’s restaurant?”

“Well, yes, he did, but he described it like it was a reunion, because he and Paddy had worked together in London in the nineties when Nick—sorry, Al—was a chef.”

“Al told me he’d worked in restaurants when he was young—but he was never a chef.

Or at least, not that he told me.” And as she says these words, Martha remembers that lovely, slightly dreamy, wine-softened lunch with Grace two days before Christmas, when Martha had thought her life was perfect again, and she remembers what Grace had said: “I thought it was going to end up that he was one of those blokes you read about. The ones who marry loads of women and lie to everyone and steal all their money.”

And now it turns out that Grace had been right.

Her friend’s instincts, her spider senses, they’d been spot-on, because unless this very pleasant woman sitting in front of Martha right now, looking at her with compassion and concern, is spinning her a crazy web of lies, then the man she’s loved for four years, been married to for two, the father of her daughter and stepfather to her sons, is a con artist and a fantasist and a liar and a freak.

But he is also the best man she has ever known.

The cognitive dissonance floors her. She’d been ready to deal with an extramarital affair. Her heart had been hardened, ready for the fallout. But she had not been ready for this.

A lie made of everything.

Every last thing.

“You know,” says Nina, “Nick—Alistair—I think he might have been trying to scam me. He asked me if I wanted to invest in a restaurant venture down by Folkestone.”

Another wave of nausea passes through Martha.

Another tainted memory. That perfect, beautiful day when she and Al took Nala and the dog to the seaside and Al showed her the old ice cream pavilion, the beach huts, he’d held her in his arms and talked about fairy lights and fishing nets and Greek villages and dreams. And then he’d disappeared just before lunch, hadn’t he?

Dropped them at the pub and driven off to see a client.

But it was not, she now knows, a client.

It was Nina Swann. This woman, right here.

“What did you say?” she asks quietly.

“I said no way. I’m just about coping with the three restaurants that Paddy left me to deal with. The last thing I want is another one.”

“He took me there too,” Martha says softly.

“Told me we should buy it, turn it into another Martha’s Garden, with a tea shop, pop-up restaurant nights, Airbnb rooms. All of that.

He said I should remortgage my house to pay for it.

I’ve already spoken to my accountant about it, he was getting me the forms to fill out.

I was halfway to doing it.” And then, finally, at the thought of the dreams she’d had about the café on the beach, the hours she’d spent obsessing over what color she’d paint the walls, whether she’d have tablecloths or not, how she’d display her crockery—on open shelves or in antique haberdashery cabinets—the tears come.

Nina puts her hand across the desk and cups Martha’s inside hers. Her face is pale but set with grit and determination. “We’re going to fix this,” she says. “We’re going to fix all of it. And we’re going to get this man put where he belongs, OK? For a very long time. Are you up for it?”

Martha wants to say no. She wants to say, Leave him alone, he’ll come back, he always does.

We’ll carry on. My lovely life. My lovely man.

Our beautiful daughter. Our dreams. She wants to say this, but she is far too broken to say it and so, instead, against all her basest and most guttural instincts, she says, “Yes. I’m up for it. Let’s bring him down.”