Chapter 60
HENRY
He’d had no choice. Marielle was getting suspicious, and he had to act quickly to stop her finding out everything.
‘I’ve tried to make ends meet,’ Hugh had said, sounding decades older since they’d last spoken.
‘But it’s difficult now I’m no longer able to work as a doctor.
I need cash, Henry. And I know you have plenty of that.
I’ve been following your career from afar.
I know your lovely wife would never understand what you’ve done, but I can be paid to keep quiet. For the right amount.’
Henry had agreed to pay him a monthly sum.
Thankfully, he dealt with all the outgoings, so Marielle never saw monies going out to H.
E. Warrington every four weeks. And then Hugh started getting greedy, demanding more and more.
Once, he had travelled over a hundred miles from his place in Nottingham to where Henry was living in Reading, after Henry stopped answering his calls.
Henry had been furious. Marielle knew Hugh was the doctor who had delivered their baby, and if she’d recognized him she would have bombarded him with questions about the birth.
Henry had managed to keep her away from the court case all those years ago by moving them to a remote village in Scotland and shielding her from the news.
Marielle had been so grief-stricken that she hadn’t put up much of a fight or taken an interest in the world around her.
But it hadn’t ended there. Of course it hadn’t.
Blackmailers never stopped. They kept on and on and on until their victim snapped.
And Henry believed he was a victim in all of this, he really did.
Hugh didn’t have as much to lose as Henry if the police became involved.
After all, Hugh had already lost his career, thanks to his drugs conviction, and his marriage had ended.
Henry couldn’t risk Marielle ever finding out what he’d done.
It all came to a head when Marielle saw Hugh lurking in their street.
Marielle never forgot a face, even if that face was jowly and twenty years older.
She began questioning Henry, asking to speak to Hugh, telling him how much of a fog it had been after losing Peter. ‘He might be able to give us answers, Henry. I didn’t know you were still in touch with him.’ When he put her off, she started her own investigations, trying to find his address.
Henry knew he had to act fast. He couldn’t risk Marielle finding Hugh.
He planned it carefully. He drove to Nottingham late one night on the pretence that he wanted to talk to Hugh about the money situation.
He got his old adversary drunk and injected him with a lethal dose of fentanyl.
Hugh died slumped in his armchair. Not a bad death, Henry reasoned, as he arranged the scene to make it look self-inflicted.
They moved again. This time to Salisbury. Marielle had decided to retire by then and was happy to move somewhere more rural.
He really hoped that would be the end of it.
Until Marielle found that photograph in the local newspaper of Simone Harvey.