Chapter 21
‘There he is,’ Ivy gasps. The women all flatten against a wall.
Across the road, Evil Bastard, Dominic Shipman, is emerging from the pub. Evil Bastard is how Teddy is referring to him. Paula thinks it’s a bit much.
‘I can’t see anything,’ Audrey whispers loudly from the back. Paula ducks her head, trying to get out of the older woman’s way. ‘No, my darling,’ Audrey tells her. ‘I mean I literally can’t see anything. I haven’t got my glasses on. You’re all blobs.’
‘ You’re all blob,’ Teddy mutters childishly.
‘Are they in your handbag?’ Ivy offers more helpfully. She might be the youngest of the group by a couple of decades, but she’s probably the closest to an adult.
‘No,’ Audrey shakes her head. ‘I don’t like how I look in them. I want to be gorgeous at all times.’ She flicks her pashmina over her shoulder and smiles mysteriously.
‘You look more like a hippy art teacher in that scarf,’ Teddy tells her dryly.
‘It’s not a scarf!’ Audrey retorts. ‘It’s a pashmina.’ She eyes Teddy’s pink coat and coiffed hair, up in a loose bun tonight. ‘Better than looking like Barbie with a pink tequila hangover.’
‘You two!’ Ivy scolds as Audrey and Teddy smirk at one another.
‘The point is,’ Audrey continues breezily, ‘I want to make an effort for our special evening outings together.’
‘Special evening outings ?’ Paula raises an eyebrow. She wouldn’t exactly call these past few days spent following Dominic Shipman around . . . an evening outing .
Plans have stepped up a gear since their discussion last week on Teddy’s rooftop terrace, sitting around on that expensive outdoor furniture.
The TLWWC WhatsApp group has been alight with messages.
But gone are the memes about ageing disgracefully.
Now they’re all murder themed. ‘Feeling stabby’ says one, while another reads, ‘I’m the quiet neighbour with the big chest freezer!
’ A third warns, ‘Don’t annoy me, I’m running out of places to hide the bodies.
’ That one comes from Teddy, who follows it up with a quick, ‘Actually, that’s not true, there’s still plenty more room in my back yard. ’
There are also the messages that Paula mostly doesn’t reply to.
If we go for an overdose, where does one buy heroin these days?
These days? Does that mean you once knew?
Oh darling, I’ve lived a long time. The sixties were a magical era.
What if we just ran up to him in the park and whacked him over the head with a brick, then ran away?
Audrey, you have such a violent streak.
Or I could strangle him with my pashmina!
He’s not worth wasting a good scarf on.
It’s a PASHMINA.
Do we need to make sure the ex-wife is nowhere around or at least has an alibi? I’d hate to kill him and then have her blamed?
I’m seeing Gemma at the support group today. I’ll see what I can find out about her schedule.
Be subtle about it, Ivy, keep your distance as much as you can.
I think we should just go for something simple, like a burglary gone wrong. We break in, smash him round the head with a baseball bat. Get out of there. What do you think?
I’m not sure we’re really capable of bashing someone’s brains in. Not when it comes down to it.
We could wait until he’s asleep, turn all the gas knobs on full blast?
I like that!
It could work?
It’s better than my next suggestion, which was going to be inviting him up to my castle in Scotland, then arranging some kind of country shooting accident.
Maybe that’ll work for the next one!!
Has everyone got gloves by the way?
I’ve only got fingerless gloves, would that work?
No.
I have some spares! Oh hold on, they’re mittens. No good?
No.
I’ve got proper gloves! And I have the matching pashminas if that helps.
It doesn’t.
OK, well, I’ll bring them anyway. Just in case it gets chilly.
I found out from Gemma the name of the pub Dominic goes to every night. Shall we case the joint tonight?
How lovely! I’ve always wanted to be a stalker. You don’t get much of a chance up in Scotland.
It is, oddly enough, a welcome distraction for Paula, who is under orders from Seb to ‘stop looking at the internet.’ She was really quite shocked after she’d rushed home last week.
She had opened Facebook to find hundreds of friend requests from strangers, and almost as many messages.
Seb didn’t let her read them all, but they mostly seemed to be from people she didn’t know, accusing her of killing her husband for the money.
It was bizarre and harrowing. And it hasn’t slowed down since.
Neither have the journalists, calling and emailing, harassing her for an interview.
Across the road, Dominic staggers off down the street into the dark.
He’s oblivious to his surroundings and free of any safety concerns in the way that only a forty-something straight white man gets to be.
When he reaches the crossing, he pauses and checks his watch.
Instead of turning left in the direction of his car, Dominic heads right.
The women silently glance at one another. This is new. So far, he has very much been a creature of routine. He leaves work, goes straight to the pub – sometimes with friends, sometimes on his own – where he gets extremely drunk, and then he goes home to sleep it off.
Tonight though, he apparently has a new idea.
‘Should we keep following?’ Ivy asks anxiously in a whisper.
Paula shrugs. ‘Whatever you think. We’re at your beck and call.’
Audrey squints at her. ‘Who are Beck and Paul? I thought it was Dominic and Gemma?’
Teddy shakes her head, rolling her eyes at her. ‘She said beck and call. Listen up, you deaf old bint.’
Audrey shrieks with amusement, then covers her mouth. ‘My hearing is perfect, thank you. It’s my eyes that are shot. It’s Paula’s fault for mumbling.’
‘I don’t mean to,’ Paula mumbles.
‘I think you speak at a very nice volume,’ Ivy says kindly and Paula smiles at her gratefully.
En masse, they make their way down the darkened streets after the Evil Bastard. It’s only just after ten p.m., but the streets are mostly empty. It’s the middle of May, but unseasonably cold. People seem to be holding off breaking out the early summer socialising for now.
Dominic stops after a few minutes, lingering by a lamppost. He stares out across the road at a steakhouse. It looks busy.
‘What is he doing here?’ Teddy hisses. ‘Is he going for dinner?’
Audrey brightens. ‘Ooh, shall we go for dinner there? I’m starving.’
‘I’m a pescatarian,’ Teddy comments, shaking her head.
Audrey pouts. ‘I’m an Aquarius, what’s your point?’
‘I don’t believe in horoscopes,’ Paula adds helpfully.
‘For the love of—’ Teddy begins but stops when she sees Ivy’s expression. She’s pale and trembling.
‘What is it?’ Teddy asks urgently.
‘Gemma,’ Ivy whispers softly, her voice trembling. ‘I remember Gemma saying she works at a steakhouse one night a week.
‘Shit,’ Teddy says in a low voice. ‘What do we do?’
‘We wait,’ Audrey says firmly. ‘If we have to step in, we step in. But we shouldn’t blow our cover unless we have to. Let’s watch and wait.’
Paula can hardly breathe as she watches him watching the restaurant entrance.
After a few minutes, a woman emerges. It’s Gemma.
Paula recognises her from the social media photos Ivy’s shown them.
She’s laughing with a colleague – a man – and they turn together to lock the door behind them.
Paula’s eyes flick to Dominic a few feet away, waiting by his lamppost. Even from this distance, she can see his breath is getting faster, his chest rising and falling. He’s furious.
He steps forward, into the light, blocking their path, and Gemma’s entire expression and body language change. The terror on her face is obvious.
Beside Paula, Ivy reaches for her hand, and they squeeze each other hard, fighting an urge to run towards the woman.
Dominic starts shouting immediately. She’s a slut, she’s a cheat, a bad mother for leaving the kids at home.
The male friend steps in front of Gemma protectively.
There is more shouting, more horrible, cruel insults thrown.
Dominic tells Gemma he’s going to take the children.
She won’t get custody. She’ll never see them again.
She shakes her head, fighting her instincts.
It’s clear she’s in survival mode, hunched in on herself as she waits for this to be over.
The man with her says he will call the police and Dominic laughs at this.
Eventually, he turns to leave, calling his wife a whore as he goes.
Gemma and her friend – as well as the four women hiding in the shadows across the road – all watch him go, holding their collective breath.
No one says anything for a while. Not even as Gemma and her friend hurry away in the opposite direction.
Ivy is the first to speak, and she does so quietly. ‘I don’t think letting this man peacefully die in his sleep from gas poisoning is enough,’ she says.
‘Agreed,’ Teddy replies quickly.
‘What do you want to do to him, Ivy? What would you like to do to him?’ Audrey asks and Ivy narrows her eyes, considering this.
‘Pushing my husband down the stairs felt pretty good,’ she answers solemnly, fine lines appearing around her eyes.
‘Let’s do that again then,’ Audrey says with delight, and Teddy nods with determination.
‘We’ll follow him home from the pub one night – make sure he’s really drunk and everyone’s seen him staggering about. Then we’ll break into his house and push him down the stairs. Everyone will assume the drunken fool fell.’
They all look at one another and nod.
When Paula gets home an hour later, her phone beeps with a message in the group WhatsApp from Ivy.
I messaged Gemma. She’s going away on Friday for a whole week. She’ll be in Cumbria staying with her parents. We should do it while she’s there with a decent alibi.
The replies come thick and fast.
Sounds like a plan.
Next week it is.
Paula is the last to respond.
I’m ready. Let’s get that Evil Bastard.