CASSANDRA
We had been engaged for six months when Hugo’s girlfriend came to see me.
That’s what she called herself, I hasten to add.
I’m his girlfriend, she said, as if she had been in a loving, committed relationship with the man.
As if their lives were intertwined, as if he spent every day thinking of her.
She was pretty, and clearly prided herself on this fact, but there are so many pretty girls.
Hugo would know. She came to the house, had the gall to stroke Miss Marigold on the head while she told me she was pregnant with Hugo’s baby.
I love him, she said, but he doesn’t want to be with me. He said he doesn’t want to support me or the baby. So I said I would tell you everything.
She thought, bless her, that I would be on her side.
Outraged at my fiancé. Demand he leave. She probably naively hoped that if I kicked him out, he’d come crawling back to her.
She was barely eighteen. She told me she was going to raise this baby no matter what.
I played my part perfectly. The false tears, the wails, a particularly skilled quivering hand on the wall as if to hold up my frame.
I told her she was free to have my husband, that I was done with him, but not before I was able to get crucial information from her.
Had she told anyone else? No, just me. Did anyone at all know she was pregnant or seeing someone?
What about her parents? Her friends? No, no one at all.
Hugo had wanted it to be a secret, and she had gone along with it quite happily.
Poor, naive creature.
Still, let’s not feel too sorry for her. She was sleeping with my husband, after all.
When she left, I called Hugo.
Your whore was just here, I said. She’s pregnant.
I’ll sort it, he promised. You don’t have to worry.
You had better, I told him. No one can know about her.
Now, looking back, were my words that damning an instruction? Did he misinterpret what I said? It’s not as if I cried, Will no one rid me of this turbulent mistress?
But rid me of her he did because in his next phone call, he told me he had killed her.
That, let me be clear, was not my plan.
What was the plan? I hadn’t got that far yet.
But she needed to be gone, and he had succeeded in that. His father had helped cover it up. She was in the river, and in the end, she was never found.
It’s romantic, really, the lengths Hugo would go to for me.
But, foolish man that he is, he’s done it again.
I did make him promise not to kill anyone else, but I know what his promises are worth. Far less than his actions.
This is why I know he’s had an affair with the dead girl, and when things turned complicated—perhaps she was pregnant again—he killed her.
She was only seventeen, and he was almost ten years older this time.
He knew there was serious trouble coming his way if it got out.
Rather than troubling me, when he knew how angry I was before, he went to Daddy.
Rodrick has sorted Hugo’s problems again and enabled him to run off and live another life while I am left to wait endlessly for him.
I wasn’t sure until I found that body.
Bishop’s House was obviously where he conducted his affair.
So I will take great pleasure in destroying it . . . and then naming it after him, of course.
There’s no turning back for me now; I am in too deep.