She stood in the middle of the room, thinking. Then she ran upstairs, pulled Mr Nicholls’s money from its nest among her tights, and before she could think she stuffed it into an envelope, scrawled a note, and wrote the address in careful letters on the front.
She would pay it back. Every penny.
But, right now, she didn’t have a choice.
That night, Jess sat at the kitchen table, studied the figures and worked out a rough plan. She paid off the minimum on her credit card, sent a holding letter to the gas company disputing her bill (that should buy her at least a month), and wrote cheques to the creditors whom she knew wouldn’t wait, like the housing association. She looked up the cost of three train tickets to Edinburgh, laughed a bit hysterically, then looked up coach tickets (£187, including the £13 it would cost to get to the coach station) and the cost of putting Norman in kennels for a week (£94). She put the palms of her hands into her eye sockets and let them stay there for a bit. And then, when the children were asleep, she dug out the keys to the Rolls-Royce, went outside, brushed the mouse droppings off the driver’s seat and tried the ignition.
It turned over on the third attempt.
Jess sat in the garage that always smelt of damp, even in high summer, surrounded by old garden furniture, bits of car, plastic buckets and spades and the empty boxes for air-conditioning units, letting the engine run and thinking. Then she leant forward and peeled back the faded tax disc. It was almost two years out of date. And she was uninsured.
She stared at it, then turned off the ignition and sat in the dark as the engine ticked down and the smell of oil gradually faded from the air, and she thought, for the hundredth time: Do the right thing.
8.
Ed
[email protected]: Don’t forget what I told you. Can remind you of deets if you lose the card.
[email protected]: I won’t forget. Whole night engraved on my memory. ;-)
[email protected]: Did you do what I told you?
[email protected]: I did. Thanx.
[email protected]: Let me know if you get good results!
[email protected]: Well, based on your past performance, I’d be amazed if it was anything but! ;-0
[email protected]: Nobody’s ever done for me what you did for me.
[email protected]: Really. It was nothing.
[email protected]: You want to hook up again, next weekend?
[email protected]: Bit busy at the mo. I’ll let you know.
[email protected]: I think it worked out well for both of us ;-)
The detective let him finish reading the two sheets of paper, then slid them towards Paul Wilkes.
‘Have you got any comment on those, Mr Nicholls?’
There was something excruciating about seeing private emails laid out in an official document. The eagerness of his early replies, the barely veiled double-entendres, the smiley faces (what was he? Fourteen?) viewed in the cold light of an interview room, made something inside him shrivel.
‘You don’t have to say anything,’ Paul said.
‘That whole exchange could be about anything.’ Ed pushed the documents away from him. “Let me know if you get good results.” I could have been telling her to do something sexual. It could be, like, email sex.’
‘At eleven fourteen a.m.?’
‘So?’
‘In an open-plan office?’
‘So I’m uninhibited.’
The detective removed his glasses and gave him a hard look. ‘Email sex? Really? That’s what you were doing here?’
‘Well, no. Not in that case. But that’s not the point.’
‘I would suggest it is totally the point, Mr Nicholls. There are reams of this stuff. There’s a paper trail of the two of you meeting twice. You talk about keeping in touch …’ he flicked through the papers ‘… “to see if I can help you out some more”.’
‘But it’s not how it sounds. She was depressed. She was having a bad time getting rid of her ex. I just wanted to … make things a little easier for her. I keep telling you.’
‘Ed …’ Paul’s voice was a warning bell.
‘Just a few more questions.’
They had questions, all right. They wanted to know how often he had met Deanna. Where they had gone. What the exact nature of their relationship was. They didn’t believe him when Ed said he didn’t know much about her life. They didn’t believe him when he said he knew nothing about her brother.
‘Oh, come on!’ he protested. ‘You’ve never had a relationship based on sex?’
‘Miss Lewis doesn’t say it was based on sex. She says the two of you were involved in a “close and intense” relationship, that you had known each other since your college days, and that you were determined to make her go ahead with this deal, that you pressed it on her. She says she had no idea that in taking your advice she was doing anything illegal.’
‘But she’s – she’s making it sound like we had much more of a relationship than we did. And I didn’t force her to do anything.’
‘So you admit that you gave her the information.’
‘I’m not saying that! I’m just saying –’
‘I think what my client is saying is that he cannot be held responsible for any misconceptions Ms Lewis might have held about their relationship,’ Paul Wilkes interjected. ‘Or what information she might have passed on to her brother.’
‘And we were not having a relationship. Not that kind of relationship.’