Chapter Fifteen
Haze
Fox was clearly pissed about Danny, even though he refused to admit it.
How could he be jealous of an ex and try and ban me from seeing him?
I could understand if Danny was uncharted territory.
But as if I would ever do anything with someone I’d already tried, tested, and rejected.
When I’d told Fox there was no one before him, I meant it.
No one relevant; no one worth remembering.
Men and their egos. It was exhausting. Fox knew I had a history, just as I knew he did.
But I wasn’t going to start griping at him if I had the misfortune of bumping into one of his blond, perma-tanned, long-limbed sorority exes.
I would’ve dealt with it the mature way and just made retching noises and told him how lucky he was to have upgraded.
I knew he wasn’t himself and that everything seemed to be hitting him harder than it should. I just wished he could move forward, move back to what he once was.
My husband and his blessed life had never faced hardship.
He had grown up not wanting for anything, materially at least. Big houses, plural.
Staff for the staff. Always turning left on a plane—that was, if he was roughing it enough to share one with the public.
And beyond his money, he had the looks, the brains, and the brawn.
He always won a fight. He always had a plan go exactly as expected.
He was part of the privileged echelons of every society.
He was used to getting everything he wanted.
He was used to people treating him with respect.
He was used to being invincible—or, at the very least, to everyone thinking he was.
He had drifted through life always getting his own way. Always having people wanting to be his friend, to make him happy, to meet his every need.
My childhood had taught me to always expect the worst; his had taught him to always get the best. I could fare in any situation. He could not.
For all of this, I understood why he was struggling.
Bad dreams, paranoia, indecision, blank staring off into the distance.
He was falling from a great height. It was why I let him do insufferable things like going to see a therapist. He didn’t want to open up to me, but he was happy paying to do it with another woman.
I was the one there holding him at night, but I wasn’t a safe enough space for him to talk through his trauma.
He’d also started going to yoga classes.
I wanted to believe this was because his yoga teacher was really hot, and not because he actually wanted to limber up and center his chakra or whatever.
Watching him slope off gripping his rolled-up yoga mat was really not working for me.
Neither was having to suffer through his attempts to learn the guitar.
He’d taken Bibi with him to buy one and come back with an additional purchase.
If ever there was a sure sign he wasn’t thinking straight—it was buying a four-year-old a drum kit.
Within an hour of their first band practice, I had one-clicked a pair of noise-canceling headphones.
Fox hadn’t worked out how to use the amp properly, and in case the crackle of feedback wasn’t enough, the smashing of Bibi’s cymbal added to the headache-inducing hell.
Why did his midlife crisis have to be so noisy?
Did being a good wife mean having to suffer through noise pollution so that he could feel better about himself?
Not for the first time, I thought about how wedding vows really didn’t cover all the shit you needed to put up with.
I had signed up for the emotionally reticent preppy American who felt most at home in a collared shirt and a loafer. A practical, no-nonsense, blue-eyed, man-killing, spreadsheet-filling machine. And now he was wearing yoga pants, strumming on a guitar, and talking about his feelings to a stranger.
Whenever he muttered to me about the importance of self-help, it was hard to not lose it.
I didn’t need self-help. I needed a full-team-of-people-help.
A cook, nanny, night nurse, driver, cleaner, personal trainer, PA-to-deal-with-all-the-school-emails…
That was what I needed to find my Zen. Lighting a candle and humming really wasn’t going to cut it.
How was I meant to clear my mind when I had so much on it?
I was trying to be patient with him. But we were flailing here. Barely holding it together. I didn’t want to be in this alone. Feeding the baby. Tidying the house. Killing the man. He needed to pull himself back together.
We needed to find The Chameleon above all, because if there was ever a victim that could get him back to the bloodlust, back to enjoying what he was born to do, it was the one who’d orchestrated the trauma that had taken it away from him.
The drive back to London was quiet: Bibi plugged into the iPad, her parents plugged into thoughts they didn’t want to share.
The traffic was bad. We made it to Bibi’s dance school with seconds to spare before her lesson started. There was a big practice before her recital. We had just enough time to get home, get some food into Reggie, and head back out to watch it.
I was just puréeing some carrots on high speed when Jenny rang.
“We’ve got a problem. You know where you said goodbye to our friend?” That was Jenny’s code for “where you buried your last victim.”
After the scare at the petrol station, Clark Dixon had finally been laid to rest inside a water tank at an old crisp factory. Jenny had starred it as an “excellent” dump site location with a small chance of discovery.
One rainy Sunday afternoon, she’d compiled a detailed spreadsheet on all the best places in a thirty-mile radius.
Looking at her in her faded dungarees with a biro stuck through her mum bun, tapping away at her laptop with Felix watching Bluey next to her, you’d never have guessed she was working on where to hide a body, and not a school class contacts list. I’d underestimated her the first time we met, and had never again since.
Before Jenny came on board, Fox had insisted that we stick to the golden rule of never killing on our own doorstep.
We could fly high when in Europe, but in England we needed to live our cover stories.
But that had all changed with Jenny. Also, in fairness, with becoming parents.
The logistics of organizing trips abroad with kids, sorting childcare, and being able to track down and eliminate targets was a lot of work.
We’d had to rethink our model and decided that the added security and efficiency of having Jenny meant we could finally kill on home territory.
It really was much easier to fit in the stalking, researching, and abducting when we didn’t have to deal with different time zones and attempting to hack foreign street cams.
“There’s a report of a fire on that road.”
Clark being discovered now would be big trouble for us. The chemicals we had poured in with him to make sure he couldn’t be identified, as well as to destroy any potential evidence we might have left on the body, needed time to do their job.
Clark was meant to be festering in there for at least weeks, if not months or years.
It had only been eight days.
“You both need to get out there and see what’s going on. I just—” Jenny’s voice went muffled. I could hear her faintly, speaking to someone else. “Sure, coming back in now.”
I looked at my watch. We had an hour and a half until Bibi’s recital.
“I’ve got to go.” Jenny came back on the line. “Text me what needs to be done from my end.”
If it looked like Clark was about to be discovered, Jenny needed to be briefed so she could prepare for damage control. The dump site was within her police force’s area, another reason why we had picked it.
I abandoned the carrots and grabbed a ready-made pouch from the larder.
“Fox!” I shouted up the stairs to him. “Problem with Clark! We’ve got to go.” I plucked Reggie out of his bouncy chair.
Fox came rushing into the kitchen gripping a leatherbound journal in which I knew he liked to write incredibly bad poetry. He could expertly wield a knife, but not a pen.
“Jenny rang. A fire’s been reported close to the dump site.” His eyes widened. I flung the car keys at him. “You drive. I’ve got to feed Reg.”