Chapter 41 Freya
FREYA
I feel painfully vulnerable and despite trying to convince myself it was an opportunist who got lucky, I can’t help but feel targeted.
Which considering the effort I’ve gone to to stay under the radar, quietly watching others live by their mistakes, is overwhelmingly debilitating and not an emotion I’m used to.
“Do you think it could have been personal?” I asked Charlie, reaching out to him for reassurance as we lay in bed last night. There was the tiniest flexing of a muscle in his bicep.
“No,” he said resolutely.
I’d pushed myself up, to look at him in the half-light creeping in around the edges of the blinds.
Willing him to at least have a theory, however tenuous.
Because if he thought it might be something to do with him, it meant that it wasn’t anything to do with me.
And that, right now, is what I need to hear.
“How can you be sure?” I asked.
I could only see the outline of his face, the shadows hiding any real expression, but he’d remained steadfastly still, staring up at the ceiling.
“Because I’m not in the business of pissing people off,” he said.
“But maybe things are different out here. The one thing that the anonymity of London affords you is that you can say and do whatever you like, knowing you’ll likely never see them again. But here, everyone knows everyone else … you might have said something to the wrong person.”
“Pulling truffle from the menu doesn’t make me the village villain!” His tone was acerbic, but I was sure I could hear something else in his voice. Was it fear?
“But maybe it’s something to do with Feast,” I said, referring to the restaurant in town that the Fork was in direct competition with. “They might not have reacted well to having you bowling in from London, thinking you own the place.…”
“Is that how I come across?” I felt the bed lilt as his weight shifted. Saw his silhouette against the window. He didn’t even need to speak anymore for me to feel his frustration. It was evident in his body language.
“That’s not what I meant,” I said, still pushing to find a motive. “I’m just saying that these communities have been here for years, and probably don’t take too kindly to out-of-towners coming in and taking their business.”
“I don’t have enemies,” he snapped, before walking out and going into the bathroom.
I’d let out a heavy sigh, wondering if perhaps the only ones we had were each other.
Now, my phone rings and I groan when I see it’s my mother. It’s as if she has an innate ability to get me at my lowest.
“Is there any news?” she asks.
It feels like I’ll be entering into a game of Russian roulette if I ask, What about?
“No,” I say, playing it safe.
“So what have the police said?”
I close my eyes off to the conversation that I know is about to ensue. “They’ve not been yet.”
“What do you mean they’ve not been yet? You’re a victim of an aggravated burglary, it should have been an emergency. Anything could have happened to you.…”
I daren’t tell her that they hadn’t even been called. Another thwarted conversation from this morning.
“I’d feel better if the police were at least aware of what had happened,” I said, as I watched Charlie get ready for work.
His jaw had tensed, a silent warning.
“Just in case he’s thinking of coming back,” I pushed on.
He’d turned to look at me. “And what do you think the police are going to do to stop that?”
“I’d just feel reassured to know they’d been notified.”
“He’s not going to come back,” he said, as if he knew for a fact he wouldn’t.
“How can you be so sure?”
He puffed out his cheeks, his irritation at what he seemed to perceive as a stupid question evident.
“He was a chancer, nothing more,” he said. “He probably goes around the villages, looking for a quick smash-and-grab.”
“But we had nothing to ‘smash and grab,’” I said, drawing speech marks in the air with my fingers.
I looked at him, half expecting him to add, “Apart from a seventy-thousand-pound watch.” I was almost disappointed when he didn’t, as in the middle of the night I’d allowed myself to believe that he might somehow have “arranged” the burglary.
That in his attempt to plug the bottomless pit that was draining our finances, he might have succumbed to something as scurrilous as a criminal act.
It wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine, as, after all, he’d done it before.
And as terrible as it might sound, I would almost have been relieved to know that he’d stooped to such a low.
Because then I would trust him when he said that the assailant wouldn’t be coming back.
“Your laptop was sitting on the dining table in full view” is all he said, as if it were my fault.
“Is there a reason you don’t want the police involved?” I dared to ask, knowing I was pushing my luck.
“Is there a reason why you’d want to stick your head above the parapet?” he’d shot back.
“They’re coming later,” I say to my mother, knowing that lying is the path of least resistance.
“You’d have thought that out there in the sticks, you’d get a better service, but it seems they’re just as incompetent as they are here.” She tuts. “You know, they still won’t give that poor family closure.”
I don’t need to ask who she’s referring to—she’s been sending me text messages with hour-by-hour updates on Marcus Harding’s death—as if I wasn’t googling every other minute to see for myself.
“They’re not releasing his body until they’ve done an autopsy,” she says.
My blood runs cold. “But surely he died from complications stemming from the accident?”
“They’re checking for everything,” she says. There’s a drawn-out pause. “Even foul play.”
I should warn Charlie. But from his veiled insinuation the other night, he’s not going to be surprised.
He’ll no doubt ask himself how far the police will go in their pursuit of the truth.
Question, like me, whether they’ll trawl through the hours of CCTV to see who went in and out of the hospital.
Check visitor logs to see who was in intensive care that day.
Be able to trace the names of people who had meetings scheduled with consultants. And who might have followed them in.…
“So you may find the police might start sniffing around again,” my mother goes on.
“Why?” I ask, feeling suffocated by the weight on my chest.
She sighs. “Because your car has killed someone.”
The words sound like they’ve been sitting on her tongue for a while, souring until perfection.
“Look, I’ve got to go,” I say, seeing Charlie walk down the path with a face like thunder. “I’ll speak to you later.”
“I’ll let you know if anything more comes out,” she says. “But perhaps you’ll hear before I do.” I ignore the aside and put the phone down, preparing myself for the even bigger shitstorm that feels about to descend.
The front door slams and Charlie’s black mood instantly fills the house, creeping into its crevices and poisoning the foundations.
“Freya!” he yells.
“In here,” I call out, my nonchalant voice defying how I feel inside.
His footsteps come down the hall, scuffing the skirting board as he turns into the kitchen. I could pretend that it’s a normal day, but the look in his eyes tells me it’s anything but.
“Everything okay?” I ask, hopefully.
“I don’t even know where to start,” he says, walking in circles on the slate-tiled floor.
“Sit down and tell me what’s happened,” I say, assuming it’s something at work, because I don’t want to believe it’s anything to do with me.
“H-how…,” he stutters, his voice shaky. “How has this happened to us?”
A breath catches in my chest. “W-what?” I ask, needing to be put out of my misery, but not wanting to.
“Sit down,” he says, rubbing at his beard the way he does when he doesn’t know what else to do with himself.
I pull out a chair from underneath the kitchen table. “What is it? You’re scaring me.”
He looks at me in a way I’ve never seen before. “Why were you in London?” he asks.
“I told you,” I choke. “I had a meeting with a consultant.”
His beard bristles as his jaw spasms. “I’m not talking about last week. I’m talking about three weeks ago.”
I force an uncomfortable laugh, looking around for something to distract the impertinence of the question. “That’s the only time I’ve been to London since we moved here. You know that.”
He falls heavily onto a chair opposite, staring at me intently, giving me nowhere to hide. “But that’s not true, is it?”
My antenna snaps up, aware that storm clouds are gathering, their darkness bearing down ominously. He knows.
“I—I’m not sure what you mean…,” I say, my brow furrowing in faux bewilderment.
“The night I went out with Tom, you went to your mum’s.”
I shake my head. “No, I didn’t.”
He slams his fists onto the table with such force that its pine legs wobble. “For fuck’s sake, Freya! You did, because your mother told me.”
Shit. There’s no way out of this, yet I still feel obliged to try. “I don’t know why she would have said that. You know what she’s like—always trying to drive a wedge between us.…” I reach my hands across to his, a reminder that it’s me and him against the world, but he pulls away.
“You need to stop talking and listen,” he says, sitting up straight and pushing his shoulders back as if needing to bolster his confidence. I have no idea what’s coming next, and it unnerves me.
“We’re in trouble,” he says. “Like, big trouble, financially.”
The stranglehold that had been around my throat slowly releases. Maybe this isn’t about me after all.
“I know we’ve been struggling, but…”
He shakes his head. “It’s more than that,” he admits. “Everything’s on the line. The restaurant, the house … I’ve taken on too much, gotten in too deep, and I can’t see a way out of it.”
I snatch a breath, relieved that it’s not insurmountable. That it’s not a problem between us.
“So I did something that I thought would get us out of the hole, at least in the short term.”
He clears his throat as I look at him, waiting. “It was me,” he says. “I set up the burglary.”
My eyes widen as his confession drip-feeds into my psyche, my panic and confusion increasing with each realization.
“But … I don’t understand,” I start, not yet knowing whether I’m furious or relieved.
He laughs cynically. “I thought I was being clever. That an insurance claim would see us through.”
“But we don’t have anything of value,” I say.
“That’s what I thought.” His eyes feel like they’re boring a hole into my soul. “Until I got our stuff back.”
“You … you got it back?” I mutter numbly, the overwhelming sense of foreboding too prevalent for any other emotion to penetrate.
“Why did you do it, Freya?” He chokes, as if the words are hard to form.
I get ready to deny whatever it is he’s about to throw at me, my default, it seems, whenever accusations of any kind get bandied about.
Charlie shakes his head. “I mean, who in their right mind would do something like that?”
“You’re the one who sent a man into our home,” I bark, needing to divert the attention away from me. “You’re the one who was happy to have your wife tied up and assaulted. What kind of a man would do something like that?”
His jaw tightens. “You weren’t supposed to be here,” he says, through gritted teeth. “Do you honestly think I would have done it otherwise?”
My brain scrambles back to yesterday, trying to place where I was and how I came to find myself at home at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning. Because, although a part of me doesn’t want to admit it, knowing what I fear is coming, he’s right. I should have been at work, so why wasn’t I?
Then I remember Maria and the meeting I was hoping to have with her, waiting in a coffee shop in town for over an hour, only to be disappointed when she couldn’t make it.
He might actually be telling the truth, but ironically, I’d rather he wasn’t. Because it leaves me in a whole world of trouble.
“I still don’t understand how this is my problem,” I say, defensively.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he says, getting up. “I love you, Freya, and I’ve tried so damn hard to make this work, but this…” He shakes his head and bites down on his lip.
He throws Coco de Luca’s watch down on the table and my heart stops.
“And don’t insult my intelligence by trying to tell me it’s anything other than what it clearly is,” he says, turning to leave.
My breath catches in my chest, trapped by the overwhelming panic that if I let him walk out of here, I might never get him back.
I want him to ask me why I did it. Why I was outside her house that night, waiting for her to come home from spending the evening with my husband.
I want to tell him that all I wanted to do was wipe that smug smile off her face.
But that she fought back, harder than I expected, and in the heat of the moment, I panicked and took the watch.
Figuring that an aggravated robbery was harder to solve than a vengeful attack by the scorned wife of her lover.
But he doesn’t give me the chance to explain—he just keeps walking—away from me.
“Is that it?” I call out after him. “You fuck her, and I’m the one to blame.”
He turns, his nostrils flaring. “I’ll tell you again, like I told you before. I have never been unfaithful to you. Not with her, not with anyone.”
There’s a part of me that wants to believe him, but it’s easier not to.
“Not everyone is like Pete,” he barks. “And the quicker you realize that, the more chance you’ll have of a happier life. But not with me.” Tears spring to his eyes. “Because I’m done.”
I cling to him as he moves toward the front door, holding on like a limpet. “Please, Charlie, don’t do this.” He tries to shirk me, but I hang onto his arm, pulling him back. “I only did it because I love you. I don’t know what comes over me sometimes. I’m sorry.…”
“I can’t do this anymore,” he says. “I’ll be back to pick up my things tomorrow.”
“No!” I cry, clawing at him. “No, you can’t leave me.…”
He unclamps my fingers from his arm. “Don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”
“You can’t leave me,” I sob, letting a beat pass as he silently questions why. “Because I’m pregnant.”