could see highlights there, glinting as she walked across the road.
She walked into the café and looked around. I waved halfheartedly, wondering why on earth I was there.
“Hi,” she said. She blushed bright red and I thought, Good, so you should. I had to quell the thought that I wasn’t exactly an innocent here. “Can I get you a drink?”
“No, thanks. I’m fine.”
She ordered coffee at the counter and waited for it before coming back to my table. She sat down next to me; I knew she’d sat there so that we could both check out the room that way, see if we were noticed together. Nobody was looking at us, though. We just seemed like a couple of friends having a drink together. Appearances can be so deceptive.
Ruby stirred her coffee until I wanted to grab the spoon from her. She looked up and saw my expression and put the spoon down swiftly. “I’ve got something to tell you,” she said.
My heart thumped hard in my chest. “Did they look at his phone?”
She looked confused. “No, why?”
“Are you sure? Absolutely certain?”
Every night since Tom died I’d woken at about three o’clock and lain in bed worrying about his phone. I hadn’t thought about it on the day itself, there was too much to think about, but I’d thought of little else since. I knew it would be password protected, but the police could get beyond that, couldn’t they? And once they’d examined it, they’d say, Hold on, isn’t this person he’s sending threatening messages to the same woman who said she’d witnessed his accident? Then they’d arrest me. Each night I panicked at the thought that I’d have my baby in prison and Harry would have to take care of it. We’d never get past that, and when I left prison the baby would stay with him.
“Yes. I took it with me.” She flushed. “Actually I smashed it that night, down by the river, and threw the pieces away. Don’t worry, nobody will find anything now.”
I was overwhelmed with relief. “Oh, thank God. I wish you’d told me.”
“I’m sorry. I should have. I just didn’t think. I was waiting for the postmortem results.”
I saw telltale shadows under her eyes and knew she’d spent her nights the same way I had. My mouth was dry. “Do you know the results now?”
She nodded. “Accidental death.”
I was careful not to meet her eyes. We both knew the truth about that.
“The funeral will be on Monday,” she said. “We had to wait for the results to come in before they’d release the body.” I saw her swallow. “Tom died from the bang on his head, when he hit it on the tiles. There was a laceration at the back of his scalp where it had hit the floor and his skull was fractured.” She stopped suddenly and looked down at her drink. I kept quiet. “He’d broken some ribs in the fall, too, and a couple of vertebrae were shattered in his lower back.” She took out a tissue and rubbed her eyes. “There was a lot of alcohol in his bloodstream. Three times the drunk-driving limit. He must have been drinking all day.”
I thought back to that afternoon when I’d kneeled next to him to see whether he was alive. I hadn’t consciously noticed it at that point but late that night Harry had slipped into bed beside me when he got back from London. He’d had a couple of drinks on the train with one of the guys from work, and when he leaned over to kiss me, his breath had smelled just the same as Tom’s had. I’d jumped out of bed and run to the bathroom. I shuddered at the memory. “Did he normally drink a lot?”
“He did, yeah. He said it relaxed him. It didn’t relax me, though. I’d be on tenterhooks wondering what fresh argument he’d come up with.”
I saw a look on her face then as she remembered. For a moment I forgot what she’d done to me and reached out to touch her arm. “Did he hurt you? Was he violent?”