The Husband's Secret

At the mention of Janie’s name, John-Paul began to visibly shake. He clung to the sides of the doorframe. Seeing him shake like that was even more shocking than the actual words he’d written.

‘If you’d died,’ she said. ‘If you’d died and I’d found this letter –’

She stopped. She couldn’t breathe for the fury.

‘How could you just leave that for me? Leave me to do that for you? Expect me to turn up on Rachel Crowley’s doorstep and tell her . . . this . . . thing?’ She stood up, covered her face with her hands and turned around in circles. She was naked, she noted without particular interest. Her T-shirt had ended up at the bottom of the bed after they’d had sex and she hadn’t bothered to find it. ‘I drove Rachel home tonight! I drove her home! I talked to her about Janie! I thought I was so great for telling her this memory I had of Janie, and all the time this letter was sitting here.’ She removed her hands and looked at him. ‘What if one of the girls had found it, John-Paul?’ That had only just occurred to her. It was so momentous, so dreadful, she had to say it again. ‘What if one of the girls had found it?’

‘I know,’ he whispered. He came into the room and stood with his back up against the wall and looked at her as if he was facing a firing squad. ‘I’m sorry.’

She watched as his legs gave way and he slid to the carpet to a sitting position.

‘Why would you write it?’ She picked up the corner of the letter and dropped it again. ‘How could you put something like that in writing?’

‘I’d had too much to drink, and then the next day I tried to find it so I could tear it up.’ He looked up at her tearfully. ‘And I’d lost it. I nearly lost my mind looking for it. I must have been working on my tax return and then it got caught up in some of the papers. I thought I’d looked –’

‘Stop it!’ she shouted. She couldn’t bear to hear him talking with his usual hopeless wonder about the way things got lost and then turned up again, as if this letter was something perfectly ordinary, like an unpaid car insurance bill.

John-Paul put a finger to his lips. ‘You’ll wake the girls,’ he said tremulously.

His nervousness made her feel sick. Be a man, she wanted to scream. Make this go away. Take this thing off me! It was a disgusting, ugly, horrible creature he needed to destroy. It was an impossibly heavy box he needed to lift from her arms. And he wasn’t doing anything.

A tiny voice floated down the hallway. ‘Daddy!’

It was Polly, their lightest sleeper. She always called for her father. Cecilia would not do. Only her father could make the monsters go away. Only her father. Her father who had killed a seventeen-year-old girl. Her father who was a monster himself. Her father who had kept this evil, unspeakable secret for all these years. It was like she hadn’t fully comprehended any of it until this moment.

The shock winded her. She collapsed into the black leather chair.

‘Daddy!’

‘Coming, Polly!’ John-Paul got slowly to his feet, using the wall to support himself. He gave Cecilia a desperate look, and headed down the hallway towards Polly’s room.

Cecilia focused on her breathing. In through the nostrils. She saw Janie Crowley’s twelve-year-old face. ‘It’s only stupid marching.’ Out through the mouth. She saw the grainy black and white picture of Janie that had appeared on the front cover of the newspapers, a long blonde ponytail falling down one shoulder. All murder victims looked exactly like murder victims: beautiful, innocent and doomed, as if it was preordained. In through the nostrils. She saw Rachel Crowley gently banging her forehead against the car window. Out through the mouth. What to do, Cecilia? What to do? How could she fix it? How could she make it right? She fixed things. She made things right. She put things in order. All you had to do was pick up the phone, get on the internet, fill in the right forms, talk to the right people, arrange the refund, the replacement, the better model.

Except that nothing would ever bring Janie back. Her mind kept returning to that one cold, immovable, awful fact, like an enormous wall that couldn’t be crossed.

She began ripping the letter into tiny pieces.

Confess. John-Paul would have to confess. That was obvious. He would have to come clean. Make it all clean and shiny. Scrub it away. Follow the rules. The law. He’d have to go to prison. He’d have to be sentenced. A sentence. Put behind bars. But he couldn’t be locked up. He’d lose his mind. So, then, medication, therapy. She’d talk to people. Do the research. He wouldn’t be the first prisoner with claustrophobia. Weren’t those cells actually quite spacious? They had exercise yards, didn’t they?

Claustrophobia didn’t actually kill you. It just made you feel like you couldn’t breathe.

Whereas two hands placed around the neck could kill you.

He’d strangled Janie Crowley. He’d actually put his hands around her thin girlish neck and squeezed. Didn’t that make him evil? Yes. The answer had to be yes. John-Paul was evil.

She kept tearing at the letter, shredding the pieces into tinier and tinier fragments until she could roll them between her fingertips.

Her husband was evil. So, therefore he must go to jail. Cecilia would be the wife of a prisoner. She wondered if there was a social club for the wives. She’d set one up if there wasn’t. She giggled hysterically, like a crazy woman. Of course she would! She was Cecilia. She’d be president of the Prisoners Wives Association and organise fundraising for airconditioning units to be put in their poor husbands’ cells. Did prisons have airconditioning? Or was it just primary schools that missed out? She imagined chatting with the other wives while they waited to go through the metal detectors. ‘What’s your husband in for? Oh, bank robbery? Really? Mine’s in for murder. Yep, strangled a girl. Off to the gym after this, are you?’