Chapter Twenty-Five

 

 

I CATCH UP WITH HETTY on Monday morning. After having coffee in near-silence, we proceed to the second part of our ritual: walking around the duck pond. As per usual, baby Elizabeth is zonked from her morning feed and Rupert is quite content to watch the birds, but flails at them whenever they get too close.

“You’ve been with Sam again,” she says, looking me up and down. “I mean, you’ve actually been with him.”

“It’s that obvious?”

“I’m afraid so. You’re limping.”

I suppress a laugh, because that will hurt too.

“Mama!” Rupert squeals, and I lean down to run my hand through his curls, so much like Gage’s.

“Yes, baby?”

“Duck,” he says, “duck!”

“I know baby, very good. Duck. Quack, quack.”

Hetty throws her head back on a groan. “I can’t wait for Betty to get a bit bigger so she can tell me what the hell it is she wants all the time.”

“Urm, breast, and probably, more breast. Then cuddles. Then more breast.”

“Is that what you get with Sam, huh?” She can’t stop herself laughing out loud.

We find a bench and Rupert turns his head into the cushioned back of his buggy, letting me know he’s finally ready to rest a moment. I push the buggy back and forth to rock him off to sleep.

“I wasn’t going to tell you this,” I begin, giving her a warning look. “I’ve had quite the weekend.”

“It seems…”

“No, I mean… other stuff.”

“Oh, really?”

She takes a bag of Maltesers out of her bag and hands some to me. It’s our one shared vice.

“Sam was talking about moving in and it made me a bit crazy and then I got talking to Warrick about Gage’s death—”

“Oh, god,” she moans, shaking her head, “Warrick?”

“Yeah, why?”

“He sees stuff in everything. He’s like the worst conspiracy theorist I know.”

“I know, I couldn’t help offloading though. I had my hair done and then bumped into him. You know how it is, he’s often just there.”

“Yeah…”

“Anyway, he told me there’s no such thing as coincidence, which he was right about, actually. I confessed to Warrick about me and Sam, and then how Gage died just a day later, and Warrick and I started brewing all these theories.”

She smacks herself in the face. “Oh, my sweet lord.”

“Yeah… so, anyway, to save you all the details, the basic gist of it was that I started wondering if Sam was capable of bumping someone off… but the more I thought about it… the less it made sense. I told you about the roofies, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you did…”

“Basically, on Saturday night, I went through all of Gage’s stuff, and then I found a note.”

Hetty hands me more Maltesers. She’s smiling, intrigued. It’s clearly not clicked with her yet.

“A note?”

I take her hand and squeeze it. “Het, it was his suicide note.”

The bag falls out of her hands and the chocolate balls scatter to the floor, rolling across the dirty, duck-faeces-infested ground beneath our feet. Her hands fly to her mouth and tears rest on the edges of her lashes.

I feel shaky as I explain, “There were anti-depressants he’d been hiding. He’d been tracking my phone like a stalkerish serial killer or a paranoid ex-boyfriend.”

“How could he do this to his kids?” she asks, grabbing some tissue from her bag and wiping her eyes. Since motherhood took over her life, this is what she’s like now – all teary and concerned and beautifully caring all the time.

“I spoke with Marvin. He said when they got off the plane that Monday, Gage was sober. He was completely fine. Marvin never mentioned anything about Gage going through some bad stuff. I didn’t even know. He hid it so well from me, Het. Only the thing is, now I know it’s not like the signs weren’t there, I just didn’t recognise them. You know?”

“Wait,” she bellows, taking both my hands. “He arrived home from Copenhagen sober, then he took the roofies, to kill himself?”

“He made it look like an accident. He clearly didn’t want us to live with his shame. I nearly didn’t find the note. He’d saved it on his phone. It was like he didn’t want people to know… but he left me a sign in case I had more questions.”

Hetty’s shaking her head. “Why didn’t he say something? How are any of us meant to know why he did this. I can’t wrap my head around it.”

“I know. It would have been so awful. He would have felt so ill and then… just dropped off into a deep, deep sleep. He must have taken a lot. I know roofies pass through the system and leave only a trace behind, but knowing Gage and his strong constitution, he had a plan and he didn’t intend on it going wrong. He made it look like a lads’ weekend that went too far.”

“He was pictured with another woman though, Liz?”

“Yep, I know,” I say, having accepted it. “He did that in retaliation, I imagine. When he saw on his tracker app thingy that I was in Beverley for the whole night.”

I look down at the ground and chuckle as the ducks begin eating all the Maltesers, crowding around us.

“Let’s walk… what a waste,” I mutter.

Hetty puts her arm through mine as we walk on, just wherever our legs take us.

“It would have been a few things with Gage,” I muse, having had all last night to think about this. “His father walking out on him. He never talked about it with me, you know. The other night, Sam and I sat down and talked about his sister’s death and how his parents were so cold in the aftermath. Gage would never have opened up like that. I don’t know if it was a personality defect or perhaps his mother bringing him up to believe it was better to keep it all shut down.”

“It’s tragic. Maybe he took the pills as a cry for help, and he didn’t really know if he was going to make it or not. Maybe the suicide note on his phone was for just in case he didn’t wake up. Maybe he intended to get your attention, that was all.”

“We’ll never know, Het. I think that’s why I’ve been on shutdown mode. It’s been awful, you know. Feeling like something was behind all this, but not knowing what.”

“Explains why he never managed it in the bedroom though, Liz. He wasn’t the talking type.”

“I just don’t know, Het. Sam said it feels like Gage did this on purpose, to make me suffer and sabotage any future happiness. I could think of less wasteful ways of getting my attention, though.”

“Oh, fuck. Liz. What the fuck are we going to do?” She’s looking at Rupert as she says this.

“It’s simple. I’ll marry you and we’ll live happily ever after.”

She loses a couple more tears before she grabs me around my shoulders and kisses my hair.

“Fucking, stop,” she says, grappling with even more tears.

We’ve done several laps of the park by the time I stop and turn to her. “Look, right. I think there’s only one thing we can do.”

“Yeah? What?”

“Get back to work.”

She nods, but her head looks heavy as she does.

We’re nearly out of the park when she says, “I stopped Joe going to Liverpool.”

“I fucking knew it.”