Page 10 of The Instruments of Darkness

“Call me Colleen, please. Right now, the only people who call me ‘Mrs. Clark’ mean me harm.”

“Colleen, then. I’m not going to sugarcoat this pill, but it strikes me that your husband has very quickly assumed an antagonistic position in this case, even allowing for the circumstances. It raises questions about the state of your marriage.”

She took a long time to answer. The gloom of the house drew tighter around us. She couldn’t keep living like this, surrounded by loss and mired in adumbration. Before too long, her sanity would begin to crumble.

“Stephen had an affair,” she said at last, “shortly after I became pregnant. It was a woman he met through work. It didn’t last very long—it was barely more than a one-night stand—but it’s hung over us ever since.”

“How did you feel about that?”

She laughed for the first time. It wasn’t a pleasant sound.

“Angry. Betrayed. And then, weirdly, sorry for him. It was a difficult pregnancy from the beginning, and I can’t have been easy to live with. Stephen was working too hard, and drinking too much in hotel bars far from home. He faltered. It hurt—it hurt a lot—but it happens.”

“And after?”

“I told him I forgave him. I haven’t, of course. I never will, not completely, but I wasn’t about to let it destroy our marriage, not with a baby on the way. I suppose you think I’m an idiot for doing that. My mother certainly does.”

“I’m not here to judge you,” I said.

“Aren’t you? I don’t believe that. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t.”

“You might be surprised.”

“I’m hard to surprise. The worst has already happened. There’s not a whole lot left.”

I had to resist the urge to reach out to her, to tell her that I had some inkling of what she was going through. Grief is like cancer: near-universal in its reach, but specific in its grasp. No two people experience it alike, so to claim I knew how she was feeling would have been a lie, yet some aspect of it had also taken root in me, triggering a transformation both visible and unseen. That process did not end, merely ebbed and flowed. If her child was gone, the loss would define her for the rest of her days, just as my losses defined me.

“Do you know the name of the woman with whom your husband had his affair?”

“Mara,” she said. “Mara Teller.”

CHAPTER V

We heard the sound of sirens approaching, and Colleen tensed. The noise passed on, but she didn’t speak again until it had faded away entirely.

“If they come bringing news,” I said, “it won’t be with sirens.”

“I’m afraid that someday I’ll answer the door to find police officers standing on the step with their caps in their hands, looking like they’d rather be anywhere else. I think I might prefer some warning.”

I said nothing. I’d made those calls, and knew the procedure: always bring another officer; try to get inside and have the recipient seated before delivering bad tidings; and avoid platitudes, even at the risk of seeming uncaring. Disengagement was important, because there was still information to be sought. In a homicide, one might even be sharing intelligence with the killer. Should Henry Clark’s body be found, that would be on the minds of the police who came to inform Colleen.

“We were talking about Mara Teller,” I said.

“Stephen didn’t give me her last name, only her first. I had to find the rest out for myself.”

“How did you do that?”

“He met her at a conference in Boston. I looked up the names of the other attendees. There was only one Mara, so I knew it was her.”

“What was the conference?”

“The National Gas and Petrochemicals Forum,” she said. “No doubt it was as boring as it sounds, the affair apart.”

“What was Mara Teller’s role?”

“She was listed as an independent consultant on the website. I googled her, of course, but nothing came up, apart from a link to the consultancy. When I tried the link, it went to a homepage that said the site was still under construction. I returned to it a couple of times after, but the message remained the same, and then the homepage disappeared and the link went dead.”

“Do you recall the name of the consultancy?”