Surely not. The idea sounds so ridiculous inside my head, I can’t say it out loud.
Alicia White.
Seems more plausible; she’s hated me for such a long time now. Plus, she changed her hair color to match mine and she sometimes copies my clothes. The woman in the window was dressed just like me. She looked older, but then Alicia is an actress. I try to extract the memory of exactly what I saw last night. It’s already a little frayed at the edges, but it’s possible it could have been Alicia. I still can’t say her name out loud because the truth is, it could have been anyone. I shake my head.
“Well, if you do think of someone, just let us know,” says Croft. “We still don’t know the true identity of the man you were married to either; all we know is that he wasn’t really Ben Bailey. Whoever he is, he closed down his profile on the dating website shortly after you met, and they no longer have a photo of him. Sadly for us, they purge their servers every three months, and unused profiles get deleted. It might be easier to put all this together if we knew the motive, and it might be easier to establish a motive if you started being honest with me. How long have the two of you been having an affair?”
“This is outrageous, I want to make a complaint,” says Jack.
“Join the queue. How long?”
“I told you already, we’re not having an affair,” I reply.
“The night before the man you married disappeared, he accused you of cheating on him. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“We’ve interviewed every member of staff at the restaurant you were at last night. None of them saw the woman you have described standing in the window, but several of them saw you two … kissing. Some of them even took pictures. Do you want to see?” She reaches for her iPad. I shake my head and feel my cheeks flush. “Now, unless you’re going to tell me next that the two of you were just rehearsing for a new film together—”
“I really don’t see how this is relevant,” I say.
“It’s relevant because whoever is responsible for what happened had to have been planning it for a long time. Which means they have hated you for a long time. And if we knew why, we’d have a far better chance of knowing who they are.” She waits for me to say something, and when I don’t, she expels an audible sigh. “We’re done here.” She stands to leave, her silent sidekick following close behind.
“You’re done?” asks Jack. “Are you kidding me?”
She stops and turns. “One more thing.” She ignores Jack and stares at me. “We managed to track down your birth father.”
I sit completely still, and it’s as though I feel my blood turn cold. She knows I was born in Ireland. She knows I’m not really Aimee Sinclair. “What do you mean?”
“John Sinclair.” I try not to display the huge relief I feel. “He moved back to Essex when he was released from prison, stayed with someone called Michael O’Neil for a while, your uncle on your mother’s side, I believe.”
John is really alive?
I don’t know what to say and stare back at her. As usual, Detective Croft doesn’t waste any time waiting for me to find the right words. “Given you thought your father was dead all these years, and I’ve just told you he’s alive, your reaction does seem a little strange.”
I rearrange the expression on my face. “It’s just a lot to take in. Where is he now?”
“We don’t know. We think he moved to Spain, but that was almost twenty years ago. Would your father have any reason to want to hurt you?”
I put a gun in his hand and he went to prison for the murder of three men I killed in 1988.
“No.”
She turns back towards the door. “Mrs. Sinclair, I know when someone isn’t telling me the truth, and I know you’re keeping something from me. When you’re ready to tell me whatever it is, you have my number. Until then, please don’t waste any more of my time.”
Sixty-four
Time is a funny old thing, the way it stretches and folds and bends.
Maggie stares at the photo of Aimee as a little girl, thinking that it could have been yesterday. The look in the child’s eyes dislodges memories of happier times and reminds her that there were some.
We weren’t always the us we are now.
Maggie pushes the thought far away, wishing she’d never had it, but some memories are impossible to delete, no matter how hard we try.
Her back aches from a day of delivering antiques to shops along Portobello Road, and her hands are blistered from moving the larger items. Business is booming, and she had a lot of stock she needed to shift. The homes of the dead are dusty, neglected treasure troves, and the plunder is there for the taking; the dead don’t miss what is no longer theirs. It’s been hard work, and while she’s all for equality, truth be told it is man’s work; all that heavy lifting. She relaxes a little when she remembers it was the last time she’d ever have to do that job, there’s no need now for her to work ever again; Aimee will call soon.
The girl has always had the most incredible memory, even as a child, and once she remembers her past, they can both get on with their future. Maggie’s memory is a little less reliable. As far as she is concerned, none of us can remember every moment of every day of every year for an entire lifetime; the storage systems of our minds simply do not have that capacity. Yet. We select which memories to save and which to archive, and like everything else in life, it’s about choices. We lead the life we choose to, based on what we think we deserve, and we hold on to the memories that mean the most to us, the moments we believe shaped the life we lead now. It’s a pretty simple system, but it works. Unlike Aimee, Maggie might not remember it all, but she remembers enough.
Everything that has led them here was so carefully thought out, and soon, all of her hard work will have been worth it. It was always a good plan:
Identify a suitable partner for Aimee.
Someone nobody knew well enough to notice if he came back to life: Ben Bailey.
Cast someone believable to play his part.
Keep the keys to his home and delay clearing out his belongings until Aimee was in L.A. and could be persuaded to buy the property.
Dig up and rebury the dead man beneath the decking in what used to be his own garden.
Burn his remains in Epping Forest first, so that dental records would be used to confirm his identity.
Dress like Aimee to visit the bank and petrol station and make police believe she was violent.
Make it look as if she had killed her husband, to teach her a lesson: you should never forget who you are and where you came from.
No wonder Maggie feels so exhausted.
She stares at the framed Polaroid photo next to the phone again, reassuring herself that Aimee will call. All Maggie has to do is wait a little while longer. She knows this, because although Maggie might not have the best memory in the world, she knows Aimee better than she knows herself.
Sixty-five
The phone rings, waking me from a deep and blissful sleep. My dreams had taken me so far away from here that, at first, I don’t know where I am. My mind struggles to identify the unfamiliar bedroom and the crisp white sheets. Then I remember that I am in Jack’s house, and that the nightmare was real, but that I am safe again now. Safe enough at least. It’s only 8:00 p.m. but I’d gone to bed early, exhausted and unable to fight the call of sleep any longer.