Chapter 31
Paula drops the laptop.
It slides off the sun lounger and skids off towards the edge of the boat. Part of Paula wants it to tip over and into the sea, never to be seen or heard from again.
But the email would still be there.
‘Whoops,’ Audrey says loudly as Ivy hops up, retrieving the computer and examining it for scratches.
‘Sorry, Teddy,’ Paula says almost under her breath. Her voice is shaking and far away. It doesn’t even feel like her speaking.
‘Oh God, don’t worry about it, babe,’ Teddy replies, waving her hand. ‘The amount of times I’ve nearly drowned a device . . .’ She pauses. ‘But mostly it’s been in a toilet, not the Mediterranean ocean.’
Paula doesn’t reply and Teddy sits up straighter, immediately sensing something has happened. ‘What is it, Paula?’ she asks, standing now and moving to sit at Paula’s side. ‘Was it a message from Tilly or Seb? Or the loan sharks?’
Paula shakes her head numbly. A coldness is creeping through her, spreading upwards from her toes and into her chest, despite the hot sunshine overhead.
The group watches her carefully, waiting. She looks up at them at last.
‘It was . . . It was an email,’ she begins as they stare. ‘From . . . John.’
The group glance at each other and Paula wonders if they think she’s mad. Maybe she is mad? Maybe her dead husband’s ghost heard her finally reveal his secrets and has leapt at the chance of haunting her.
Quietly, Teddy takes the laptop from Ivy and opens it. She blinks hard at the screen, her face quickly contorting with rage.
‘This is sick,’ she mutters. ‘Disgusting.’ She looks over at Paula, shaking her head. ‘It’s someone’s idea of a horrible joke. It must be.’
Paula blinks at her, something unfurling. Could it be a joke? Could it really be someone playing a nasty prank on her? Who would do that? The person behind the texts? Behind those tweets? The person who changed her lottery numbers?
Because it can’t be real. Surely it can’t be . . . John. John’s dead. They had the paperwork. They got his ashes. They had a funeral. He’s dead.
But who else would have access to his email account?
Audrey and Ivy crowd Teddy, reading over her shoulder. Ivy recoils in horror.
‘It can’t be real?’ she says softly. ‘There’s no way, is there, Paula?’
‘No! Of course not. I . . . I don’t know,’ she says, her mind racing. ‘I mean no . Definitely not. Of course it isn’t real. This is someone who’s got into his emails or . . .’
‘People can clone email addresses now, can’t they?’ Teddy directs this at the youngest of them. Ivy nods half-heartedly.
Audrey suddenly looks determined.
‘Call him,’ she tells Paula. ‘See if it really is him. You’ve still got his mobile phone number, haven’t you?’
‘I can’t,’ she shakes her head. ‘Tilly cancelled his contract. She sorted everything, shut everything down. His email was the only thing I had left. The only way I had left to . . . speak to him.’
‘OK, well . . .’ Audrey waves her hands, searching for an answer. ‘I don’t know, let’s maybe send him a Zoom invite!’
‘Teams is much better,’ Teddy says smoothly.
‘Nonsense!’ Audrey says as Teddy pulls a face.
‘Listen to me, old woman, Zoom has a forty-minute cut-off. Teams has thirty hours! It’s very obviously the superior video chat tool.’
‘You’re a video chat tool ,’ Audrey mutters, grabbing for the computer. ‘And do we think it’ll take longer than forty minutes to ask John if he’s really alive?’
Paula feels so far away. Her friends’ voices sound a million miles away. Like strangers shouting across the water.
Audrey starts tapping away at the keyboard. ‘We’re doing Zoom because that’s the one I know.’ She glares at Teddy. ‘Stop trying to make me learn new things.’
The whirring of the computer sounds strange and alien as Paula stares down at her left hand. At the plain gold band still sitting there, stuck on that finger. She hasn’t even tried to take it off.
Is John alive? He can’t be. So who’s done this? And why?
There is a fraught silence as Audrey presses send on the video invite email, and Ivy sits heavily back down beside Paula.
‘There’s no way, right?’ she says almost in a whisper. ‘You identified the body, didn’t you? You saw him?’
Paula looks at her, trying to ground herself in Ivy’s sweet, young face.
She feels so far away, so frightened. Then she shakes her head.
‘Well, no, they never asked me to . . . He died so far away. In Austria. On a work trip. They said it had all been sorted out over there. They never asked me . . . He was with a work colleague. They said his body had been identified. It was too . . .’ She’s stuttering.
She takes a deep breath, trying to level her thinking.
‘They had him cremated over there. They said it was simpler. It was a man with a nice voice . . . They sent over paperwork. There was a lot of paperwork! It was real . . . It couldn’t be .
. . I can’t . . . I don’t understand how . . . I had . . . paperwork.’
Teddy shakes her head slowly. ‘Was there a death certificate?’
‘Yes!’ Paula says, then swallows. ‘Or . . . I don’t know . . . I think so. There were a lot of documents.’ She shakes her head, trying to remember. ‘I couldn’t understand a lot of it. I know Tilly was chasing things, but . . . I don’t know.’ She finishes lamely, ‘I thought there was.’
‘Leave her be,’ Ivy murmurs at Teddy and there is steel in her tone. ‘This can’t be real. Stop putting mad ideas in her head. Of course this email isn’t from John, that would be . . . insane! This isn’t . . . It can’t . . . There’s just no way . . .’
‘Holy cow,’ Audrey interrupts, breathing hard from behind the computer screen. ‘It says someone has requested to join the Zoom meeting.’ She looks up, blinking hard at Paula. ‘Do we accept?’