ten years before you bought it, and this man had already been dead, and buried, for over two years, albeit somewhere else. He committed suicide when he lost his job, was laid to rest in Scotland, and someone decided to dig him up and replant him beneath your decking in West London. There are things I understand about this case, but mostly there are things I don’t. I don’t understand your involvement in it for starters.”
She stares at me as though she expects me to say something, but my mind is busy processing everything she just said, trying to make sense of something that simply doesn’t make any. I feel as though this can’t possibly be real, and yet it is. A contradiction of thoughts and feelings jumble themselves up inside my head, folding into conclusions I can’t seem to iron out.
“Someone has gone to a lot of effort to set you up,” she says.
“And you fell for it.” Hate loosens my tongue. “I tried to tell you I was being framed and you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Your story was a little far-fetched.”
“You fucked up!”
I watch as she tries the idea on for size, before deciding it doesn’t fit and shrugging it off.
I turn my voice back down to its normal volume. “What happens now?”
“You’ll be released. We can’t keep you here for killing a man who was already dead.”
“Then what?”
“Well, we’re trying to find him. The man who pretended to be Ben Bailey, the man who married you using a dead man’s birth certificate and persuaded you to buy the same dead man’s house. To even try to begin to understand the who and what of this case, it would be really helpful to know the why. Why would someone go to such lengths to do this to you?”
“I don’t know.”
“If the man you were married to wasn’t really Ben Bailey, then who was he?”
“I. Don’t. Know.”
She stares at me for a little while and appears to conclude that I am telling the truth.
“How did you meet him?”
“An online dating website.”
“You were on a dating website? Using your own name?”
“Yes. It was before I got my first big role a couple of years ago. My name didn’t mean anything to anyone then.”
“Who contacted who?”
“He contacted me.”
“Then I guess maybe your name meant something to him. Whoever did this to you was planning it for some time. Maybe the dating website was how he found you. And he told you from the start that he was Ben Bailey?”
“Yes.”
“Was there a picture of the man you married on the dating website?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Good, we’ll check that out and see if it might still be there. I’m guessing now that the reason you couldn’t find any pictures of him in the house was because he deliberately removed them all. And he told you that he worked for TBN?”
“Yes, we even met outside the TBN offices, several times.”
“But you never went in? Never met any of his colleagues?”
“No.”
“What about his family?”
“He said he didn’t have any left. It was something we had in common.”
“And you didn’t meet any of his friends?”
“He said his friends were all back in Ireland. He hadn’t been in London that long, and it just sounded like he’d been too busy to make any.”
“Why would you agree to marry a practical stranger after just a couple of months?” She looks at me as though I’m the most pathetic and stupid person she’s ever come across. I share the sentiment and start to wonder if maybe I am. I should have learned to let go long before now, but I held on too tight to what I thought I wanted: a chance to start again. This is all my fault. Your past only owns you if you allow it to.
“He said we’d wasted so many years being apart before we found each other. He said there was no need to wait when you knew that you’d met the one,” I say eventually.
She looks as if she might throw up. “You’ve clearly made an enemy out of someone. The stalker you mentioned, the name she used … Maggie. What does that name mean to you?”
“Maggie is dead. It can’t be Maggie. I watched her die.”
Detective Croft leans back, looks unsure about what she is going to say next, which makes me quite certain I won’t want to hear it.
“I’ve read about what happened to your parents when you were a child…”
Her words wind me a little. I don’t talk about this. I