Sophie Hannah - Hurting Distance

‘Mr Haworth’s lorry’s parked outside,’ said Simon.

‘I know.’ Juliet made no attempt to hide her impatience. ‘I said Robert was in Kent. I didn’t say his lorry was.’

‘Does he have another car?’

‘Yes, a Volvo V40. Which—I’ll tell you now, to save you some unnecessary detective work—is parked out there as well. Robert went to Sissinghurst by train. Driving’s his job. When he’s not working, he tries to avoid it.’

‘Do you have a phone number for where he is?’

‘No.’ Her face closed down. ‘He’s got his mobile with him.’

This sounded wrong to Simon. ‘I thought you said he was staying with friends. You haven’t got their number?’

‘They’re Robert’s friends, not mine.’ Juliet’s curled lip suggested she wouldn’t have wanted to share them, even if her husband had offered.

‘When did you last speak to Robert?’ Simon asked. His contrary streak had kicked in. Because Juliet Haworth was impatient for him to leave, he felt inclined to linger.

‘I don’t mean to be rude, but why is that any of your business? Last night, okay? He rang me last night.’

‘Naomi Jenkins says he isn’t answering his mobile phone.’

Juliet seemed to find this news invigorating. Her features became animated and she smiled. ‘She must be spitting feathers. Reliable Robert not returning her calls—whatever next!’

Simon hated the way jealousy turned people into savages. He’d been that sort of savage himself, more than once; humanity disappeared, was replaced with beasthood. An image of Juliet as a predator, licking her lips while her prey bled to death in front of her, flared in his mind. But perhaps that was unfair, since Naomi Jenkins had admitted she wanted Haworth to leave Juliet and marry her.

Naomi had written down Robert Haworth’s mobile number yesterday. Simon would leave a message later, ask Haworth to call him back. He’d make sure to inject some man-of-the-world levity into his tone. I’ll pretend I’m Colin Sellers, he thought.

‘Do me a favour, will you?’ said Juliet. ‘Tell Naomi that Robert’s got his mobile with him and it’s working fine. I want her to know that he’s got all her messages and is ignoring them.’ She pulled the front door closer to her, restricting Simon’s view of the inside of her house. All he could see now was the small semicircular telephone table immediately behind her.

He gave her his card. ‘When your husband gets back, tell him to contact me straight away.’

‘I’ve already said I will. Now, can I go? Or rather, please can you go?’

Simon could imagine her bursting into tears as soon as she’d closed the door on him. Her manner, he decided, was too brittle, slightly artificial. An act. He wondered if Robert Haworth had gone to Kent in order to make his final decision: Juliet or Naomi. If so, it was no surprise that his wife was on edge.

Simon pictured Naomi sitting tensely at home, trying to apply logic to the problem of why Haworth had abandoned her. Love and lust had no respect for logic, that was the trouble. But why was Naomi Jenkins the one Simon suddenly felt sorry for? Why not the wronged wife?

‘Naomi thought I didn’t know about her,’ said Juliet, with a snide grin. ‘Stupid bitch. Of course I knew. I found a photograph of her on Robert’s phone. Not just her. A picture of them together, with their arms round each other, at some service station. Very romantic. I wasn’t looking—I found it by accident. Robert had left his phone on the floor. I was putting up Christmas decorations and I trod on it by mistake. There I was, pressing buttons at random, panicking because I thought I’d broken it, and suddenly I was staring at this photo. Talk about a shock,’ she muttered, more to herself than to Simon. Her eyes had started to look glassy. ‘And now I’ve got the police on my doorstep. If you ask me, Naomi Jenkins wants shooting.’

Simon stepped away from her. He wondered how Robert Haworth had managed to keep up his weekly meetings with Naomi, if Juliet had known about the affair since before Christmas. If she’d only found out last week, that might have explained Haworth’s hasty departure to stay with friends in Kent.

There was a half-formed question lurking in the recesses of Simon’s mind, but before he had a chance to knock it into shape, Juliet Haworth said, ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ and closed the door in his face.

She wasn’t the only one. Simon raised his hand to ring the bell again, then decided against it. To ask any more questions at this stage would be prying. He returned to his car with much relief, turned on the engine, and Radio 4, and had forgotten about Robert Haworth’s sordid little love triangle by the time he reached the end of the street.

Charlie marched into the bar of the Hotel Playa Verde and slung her handbag down on a bar stool next to her sister’s. At least Olivia had followed her instructions and waited, instead of rushing to the airport and booking a first-class flight to New York as she’d threatened to. God, she looked out of place in that black off-the-shoulder dress. What had Liv expected? This was a four-hundred-pound, last-minute deal.

‘There’s nothing,’ Charlie said. She took off her glasses and wiped the rain off them with the hem of her shirt.

‘How can there be nothing? There must be a million hotels in Spain. I can’t believe they aren’t all better than this one, every man Jack of them.’ Olivia examined her wine glass to make sure it was clean before taking a sip.

Neither she nor Charlie spoke more quietly than usual; neither cared if the barman heard. He was an elderly man from Swansea with two large, navy-blue butterflies tattooed on his forearms. He’d moved here, Charlie had heard him telling a customer earlier, after working for twenty years as a driving instructor. ‘I don’t miss Britain,’ he’d said. ‘It’s gone to shit.’ His sole concession to his new country of residence was to tell everyone who approached the bar that a jug of sangria was half price and would be until the end of the week.

Charlie and Olivia were his only customers this evening, apart from an overweight, orange-skinned couple with a huddle of suitcases around them. They hunched over six peanuts in a silver dish, occasionally poking at them with their thick fingers, as if hoping to roll one over and find something remarkable beneath it. ‘You Wear It Well’ by Rod Stewart was playing very faintly in the background, but you’d have had to strain to hear it properly.

All four walls of the Bar Arena were covered with green, red and navy tartan wallpaper. The ceiling was nicotine-stained Artex. Still, it was the only place to be if you were unfortunate enough to be in the Hotel Playa Verde, since at least it served alcohol. There was no minibar in the tiny room Charlie and Olivia were sharing. This came as a shock to Olivia, who opened every drawer in the cupboard and bent to peer inside it, insisting, ‘It must be here somewhere.’

A net curtain that stank of old cigarettes and grease hung at the bedroom’s narrow window. It couldn’t have been washed for years. The bed Olivia chose because it was closer to the en-suite bathroom was so close that it actually blocked the doorway. If Charlie needed to go to the loo in the night, she would have to climb across the bottom of her sister’s bed. She’d made the effort this afternoon and found dried toothpaste stuck to one of the two plastic glasses by the basin, and a stranger’s soggy hair clogging the bath’s plughole. So far the fire alarm had gone off twice for no noticeable reason. Each time it had been over half an hour before someone had had the gumption to turn it off.

‘Did you look on the Internet?’ asked Olivia

‘Where do you think I’ve been for the past two hours?’ Charlie took a deep breath and ordered a brandy and dry ginger, once more refusing the barman’s offer of half-price sangria, moulding her face into a false smile when he mentioned that she had until the end of the week to take advantage of this one-off special rate. She lit a cigarette, thinking that smoking couldn’t possibly be bad for your health in situations like this, even if it was the rest of the time. The end of the week seemed very, very far away. Plenty of time to kill herself, then, if things didn’t get any better. Perhaps she ought to suicide-bomb the shitty hotel.