Watching You: A Novel

Joey closes her eyes and forces herself to think. There must be a rational explanation for all of this. She needs to get it straight in her head before the lawyer arrives.

Think, she hisses to herself, think.

Someone has brought her a cup of tea in a paper cup. It tastes of the insides of a vending machine. She drinks it so fast it scalds her mouth. She doesn’t care.

Think, Joey, think.

A moment later she brings her hands down against the tabletop, hard enough to make the female police officer assigned to watch over her jump slightly.

Of course. Tom Fitzwilliam killed Nicola! Of course! He’d taken her to that hotel deliberately. It was all a set-up. He knew his son would be out and so he’d taken her there so that he could make her complicit, so he could take the tassel from her boot. Or maybe he already had it? Maybe it had fallen off in his car? Maybe that was when he’d hatched the whole plan? Then he’d made up the big woe-is-me act at the hotel and disappeared into the night and then parked somewhere, waiting for her to get home. Why else would he not have been there? He’d left the hotel five minutes before her. And then he’d sneaked through the back of the houses and gone in through the back door and …

She groans.

The gardening shoes.

How was she going to explain the gardening shoes to a lawyer?

Tom wouldn’t have sneaked into her house and taken Rebecca’s shoes. Not even as a red herring. The back door was always locked and double-locked. And besides, his feet were enormous.

Someone had worn the gardening shoes and rinsed them off. Jack had been working last night and there was no way it would have been Alfie, which just left Rebecca. But she said she’d been in her room all night. Someone had even seen her there.

And as she thought this an image flashed through her mind, bright as sunlight off water. Turning on to the first floor landing the night before, a glass in her hand, her head spinning with the events of the preceding hour, nervous about seeing Alfie, pulling herself together, calming her nerves, making herself normal, she’d paused for a moment to take a last breath before heading up the stairs and had had a brief glimpse through the small gap in the doorway to Rebecca’s office and wondered for one hazy confused moment why on earth she had moved the life-size cardboard cut-out of Jack into the window.