Хилари Боннер - The Cruellest Game

He asked me to go over again what I had told him on the phone, occasionally prompting me for more detail, or clarification of a certain point, but otherwise listening carefully and quietly.

Only when I had pretty much finished did he begin to ask more questions of his own. The first was an obvious one.

‘I wonder, Mrs Anderson, if you have any idea how Brenda or Bella found out about you and Robbie? How did she first discover that her husband had another family and was leading a double life?’

I was ready with the answer. I stood up and walked across to the little Victorian Davenport desk which stood by the window, lifted its lid and removed from it a photograph of Robert and Robbie which I’d put there, when the Farleys and I were clearing up the house, largely because I could not bear to look at it any more. It was one of the few Robert had ever allowed of either me or our son with him, and the last one ever taken, on a beautiful evening in the garden at the end of the previous summer. Their faces, glowing in amber light, beamed at me from within a simple wooden frame. Father and son, so unmistakably father and son. The shrubs and trees which formed a backdrop already displayed more than a hint of autumn colour. Sycamores, that much maligned species of tree, lined much of the perimeter of our garden, and their angular leaves had just begun to turn. There was winter jasmine in bud. Autumn crocuses sprouted purple, white and yellow. Ours was a garden for all seasons. I held the photograph still and studied it for just a few seconds. We had been so happy then, hadn’t we? Surely we had. Now all I felt as I looked at my two men together was the pain of what was to come.

I handed the photograph to DS Jarvis. There was no glass within its frame, of course. That had been smashed into smithereens when the photo had been swept to the floor in the wanton destruction wreaked on the day Bella/Brenda — and there now could surely be no doubt that it had been her — entered my home and trashed the place.

The policeman looked down at the image then up at me.

‘Wow!’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I responded. ‘They could be clones, couldn’t they?’

‘They’re quite remarkably alike, that’s for certain,’ said DS Jarvis, as he passed the photograph to DC Price.

I felt the enormity of my loss hit me again. My special men. Gone for ever. Both of them. Robert was still alive. But really he may as well not be, as far as I was concerned anyway.

‘So you think that casual meeting of dog walkers on Exmouth beach wasn’t really that at all? You think Brenda Anderton arranged it, in order to begin to get to know you, to get close to you and your son?’

I shook my head.

‘No. When we met on the beach I honestly don’t believe she had any idea either I or Robbie existed. Any more than I had any idea about her. Robert was too clever for both of us as far as that was concerned.’

‘Then do you believe it was pure coincidence that you both decided to walk your dogs on Exmouth beach on the same day and at the same time?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was it something you often did?’

‘No. Nor her, I shouldn’t think. Robbie and I were only there because we’d had to go shopping in Exeter and Brenda didn’t have the sort of lifestyle that gave her a lot of leisure time, that’s for sure.’

‘So, it was just chance, catastrophic chance as it turned out?’

Jarvis sounded doubtful.

‘Yes.’ I said. ‘Coincidences do happen, you know, Detective Sergeant.’

‘Indeed,’ said Jarvis. ‘They’re just not something detectives are very fond of. But it seems you are probably right about this one. So exactly what happened on the beach?’

‘From the moment Bella — I mean Brenda — spotted Robbie, I reckon she just had to approach us, to find out who he was. Robert said she told him that, in as much as you can believe a word Robert says about anything. But I believe absolutely that she would have been suspicious straight away. More than that — shocked, I should imagine. I mean the resemblance is so striking. It would have been a total Boris Becker moment, wouldn’t it? You couldn’t really doubt Robbie’s parentage for a minute.’ I paused, reflecting briefly again on a wonderful young life now lost for ever.

‘We used to joke about it. Robert, Robbie and me. Robert always said he’d been going to ask me to have a DNA test when I claimed to have got pregnant the very first night we were together, but as soon Robbie was born he’d realized there was no point.’ I paused again.

‘How did Brenda make the approach?’ asked Jarvis.

‘She threw her dog’s ball straight at us, deliberately I now realize, contriving a minor incident if you like, making it seem perfectly natural to start a conversation with me. It’s what dog walkers do. And, of course, I was totally and blissfully unaware of any hidden agenda.’

‘You think she already had an agenda.’

‘Well, she would have known about Robbie, just known, at once. I feel sure of it. And, understandably, she wanted to talk to me, to find out exactly what was going on. I don’t think she would even have considered to begin with that Robert had married me. That he had built another family, and managed to lead a double life, to keep two families going for so long, each without any knowledge of the existence of the other.’

‘I still can’t quite understand how he got away with it,’ said Jarvis.

‘Robert was a master of deception, no doubt about that,’ I said. ‘But luck must have been with him, mustn’t it? His two families didn’t live that far apart. We didn’t go to Exeter often — and Robert never did, come to think of it — but Robbie and I had been shopping there that very day we finally met Brenda. A chance meeting could, surely, have happened long before it did.’

‘So Brenda Anderton questioned you, did she? About your son, your husband, and so on?’

‘Well, yes, looking back that was exactly what she did. But she was very gentle about it, made it seem like normal conversation. I don’t expect it took her long, though, to know she was dead right about Robbie’s parentage. And it would have been apparent that I was married to my son’s father.’ I realized what I had said and added: ‘Or thought I was.’

‘The level of Robert’s deception would have quickly become clear to Brenda, then,’ mused Jarvis.

‘Yes, which I’ve no doubt was as much of a shock to her as it was, eventually, to me.’

The detective looked thoughtful. ‘She thought quickly, didn’t she? Gave you a false name, and so on.’

‘Yes. I suppose she was afraid that I might mention our meeting to Robert. I’m not sure that I would have thought so quickly, though. I mean, I don’t know if it was deliberate or not, but she chose to call herself Bella, which is vaguely similar to Brenda. It’s what Robert did too, only he went further, using a last name that was damned near the same apart from one letter. They say that people who adopt false identities are quite often found out because they don’t respond to their names properly. And that it’s easier if the names are similar. Is that right in your experience, DS Jarvis?’

‘It probably is, yes. But there aren’t many people capable of maintaining a false identity, a double life, the way your husband did, that’s for certain.’

‘Thank God for that,’ I said. And I meant it from the bottom of my heart. The hurt and distress caused by such enormous deception could never fully be understood by anyone who had not experienced it. I wouldn’t wish it on any human being.

‘Bella — I mean Brenda — did the same thing with her dog’s name,’ I went on. ‘She called him Flash; turns out he was really called Splash. Dogs respond to sounds really, not actual words. So Splash and Flash would sound much the same to a dog and it would therefore respond to either as if it were the name it had been taught. Did you know that, DS Jarvis?’