and it isn’t how I want to remember her, but I can’t stop myself from looking. Oh God, Kate, what happened?
When we walk out into the hallway I see a sign for a bathroom and point at it. ‘I just need to go the loo,’ I tell Nunes and dart inside before he can say anything. As soon as I’m locked in a cubicle I pull out Kate’s phone, relieved to see it’s still unlocked and the screen is still on. This might be my only chance to check the email and texts on it.
First things first, I check her call log. The very last call she received was on Friday at ten fifty-six p.m. That was the call when we were at the restaurant. She said it was from Toby but it’s not. The number’s saved as RJ Plumbing. Why was she taking a call from a plumber at that time of night? I hit dial, because it’s the only thing I can think of doing.
It rings and after ten seconds someone picks up. ‘Hello?’ they ask tremulously.
The breath catches in my throat like barbed wire. I hang up instantly and almost drop the phone into the open toilet, my hands are shaking so hard from shock. What the hell? Leaning against the cubicle door I press the little ID button beside the plumber’s name and check the number. Then recheck it. And recheck it again, the blood pounding so loudly in my head I think I might go deaf.
It’s Rob’s number. It was his voice I recognised just now. But why is it saved as RJ Plumbing on Kate’s phone and, more importantly, why the hell was she arguing with him on the phone hours before she died?
Chapter Twenty-Five
RJ. Robert John. Rob.
Feeling faint I flip the toilet seat down and collapse onto it, aware that time is rushing by and I don’t have long. I scroll to Kate’s texts. There are lots of unread ones, a dozen or more from the last three days, mainly me asking her where she is and begging her to call and some from friends, but I ignore them and scroll down to the ones from RJ Plumbing. With a gnawing sense of horror I open up the text chain. There are hundreds of texts. Words leap out at me.
Please don’t.
I’m begging you don’t tell her.
Kate, stop fucking around.
You said you’d leave her. You lied!
Let’s talk.
I love you.
The words do what Kate’s corpse could not. I fall off the toilet, scrambling to lift the lid in time to dry-heave into the bowl. My stomach aches from retching earlier but I barely notice because the pain inside my chest is so immense I think I might die from it. My heart, already cracked from grief, breaks clean in two. ‘Rob,’ I whisper to myself, ‘how could you?’
The phone jerks alive in my hand and I almost drop it. It’s Rob! He’s calling me back. Oh God. He must think he’s getting a call from a dead woman. Though I told him I had Kate’s phone. Maybe he knows it’s me. In a panic I hit the button to cut off the call. I’m not ready to talk to him and I don’t have the time either.
I force myself to go back and scroll further back through the text chain but there are simply too many to read and I don’t have time to go over them in detail, not with the policeman outside waiting for me. I’ve got a minute or two at most. The messages stretch back over a year. Before Marlow was born. Further. When I was pregnant. Further. Before I got pregnant. Oh my God. They’ve been having an affair for years, right under my nose. There seems to be a period where they don’t talk, of nearly a year. But then a few months ago they start back up again.
I rock back on my heels.
Kate … how could you?
You’re my best friend. You know I love you.
The bitch! She told me that and the whole time she was lying to me.
Bitch!
I jerk around in the stall. I can hear her voice. But now I’m wondering if in fact, it was me, saying it to her? Deep down, did I know about the affair? Did I learn about it on Friday night? Did I black out not just from the drugs, but because psychologically I was trying to blank out what I’d discovered?