The Mistress - Jill Childs Page 0,6

swallowed it down. I needed to get home, to crawl into bed, to sleep. If I could ever sleep again.

I thought about everything that would unfold once I called the police. Sirens. Banging at the door. Long hours at the station. Questions. Statements. Harsh lights and bare, chilled rooms. I couldn’t bear it. My head swam. Maybe she was right to hold off. Maybe there was another way.

Ralph. Lying dead in the cellar, just feet from me. And it was all my fault.

After a while, Helen opened her eyes, turned and looked out of the window. She rose to her feet, switched on a standard lamp and drew the curtains, leaving a crack between them for the light to show.

‘They can’t know what happened.’ Her face was stony. ‘No one must know.’

‘That he’s –’ I hesitated – ‘gone?’ It was impossible to say dead. ‘They’ll find out.’

She turned dead eyes on me. ‘Maybe. Eventually. But not yet. And not what happened.’

I blinked. Was that it, then – she wanted us to somehow keep secret how he’d died? So no one found out, not even Anna, that their happy marriage had never been what it seemed?

I didn’t know what to say. She suddenly seemed so hard, so determined, as if she were daring me to disagree.

She said coldly, ‘You owe me that, at least.’

‘But I don’t even know how—’

‘Do what I tell you. No questions.’ She got to her feet. Her hands were fists at her sides. ‘He’s heavy. I’ll need help.’ She hesitated. ‘It might keep you out of prison.’

She led me stiffly back out of the sitting room into the hall. Her manner had changed. She held her grief in check, her movements mechanical and efficient. I couldn’t imagine what it cost her.

At the cellar door, she turned back to me. ‘Wait here. I’ll call when I need you.’

She disappeared, her footsteps echoing as she hurried down the steps.

I shrank back against the wall, steeling myself, trying not to think of his prone, twisted body. This man who was always in motion, always full of passion, of life. My stomach twisted and heaved again and I put my hand to my mouth, tasting acid. My face was chill with nervous sweat.

Muffled sounds drifted up the steps. Her shoes, sharp on the cement floor. Her laboured puffs of breath. The tug and scrape of a heavy object. The rustle of thick plastic. I closed my eyes, trying to block it all out and shuddered.

Finally, she came heavily back up the steps and appeared in the doorway. She was panting slightly, her hairline slick with sweat.

‘Don’t think about it. Just do it.’

She was thinking aloud, talking to herself as much to me. I thought, how little I knew her, this woman married to the man I loved. I’d tried not to think of her much, unless I really had to. She was just another school mum, lining up at the gate at half past three. Just another volunteer in the school reading programme, sitting in the Lower School library, listening to children read, one by one. She’d had to be. It was too painful to think of her as anything more.

She seemed to focus again on my face, remembering I was there, and her expression hardened. ‘If you try anything, I’ll tell them it was you. You pushed him, didn’t you? What were you doing? Fighting?’ She despised me, I heard it in her voice. ‘No point denying it. Your skin under his fingernails. Your DNA all over him. It’s manslaughter, if you’re lucky.’

Lucky? I shivered.

She said, ‘I’d gladly see you rot in jail. Believe me. But it’s Anna…’ She swallowed. ‘They’d drag us all through the mud. Your sordid little affair – which meant nothing to him, by the way – splashed all over the papers. A teacher, hitting on another teacher, while his seven-year-old sleeps upstairs? Did you stop to think how she’d suffer? They’d crucify you. Ralph too.’ She paused. Her mouth trembled and, for a moment, she looked about to break down. ‘I’ll grieve… but not now. I can’t afford to. That comes later.’

A vein pulsed in her neck, a sign of the effort it took her to hold herself together, to keep herself in check. Once she could speak again, she stabbed at me with her finger.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘This is what you’re going to do. You’re going to shut up and do exactly what I tell you.’

The cellar stank of mould and turpentine. I blinked,