Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner (primary phonics .TXT) 📕

message, he admitted eventually. Like an arm reaching out to him, telling him not to leave. He was starting to love this baby, his son. I was losing control.

Then everything else started going wrong, too. The money for the building work got out of hand. Daniel was having to take more and more from the getaway fund. For fuck’s sake, I kept telling him, we’re not supposed to be actually doing this building work. Can’t you just say it’s stalled? But Helen was asking questions about why nothing ever seemed to progress. And I was impatient, too. I wanted to know when we’d have the three million, when we’d finally be able to leave. Take it out of the company if you need to, I’d said. Rory won’t even notice. Even when he found out all the firm’s cash had moved to the Cayman Islands, Daniel told him it was all just tax planning and he seemed to accept it. But there was only so long you could do stuff like that before it was discovered. I knew the clock was ticking.

Things just went from bad to worse that night in the club, when Rachel came on the scene. We didn’t know her name, then. We just knew it was the girl from the boathouse floor. Daniel and I were only there because Rory had dragged us there to charm some sleazy client. It was the worst luck in the world.

All the blood had drained from Daniel’s face. He looked terrified. I knew what I needed to do. I’m sorry, I said sweetly. You’ve got the wrong person. I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. Excuse me. But Daniel fucked it up. He engaged. And when you engage with someone like that, nine times out of ten, you’ll lose.

I walk back to my bedroom, sit at my dressing table, start on my hair. I can hear Vivienne loading the washing machine, tidying the bathroom up. I take out my dark eyeshadow, my red lipstick. As I pull it across my bottom lip, I am startled by my reflection. By the thought of another pair of red lips and charcoal eyelids, with nothing behind them. I rub the lipstick off.

Daniel told me he’d sorted it. But he hadn’t, of course. Not even close. It was only when she came to my studio that day that I found out he’d lied to me, that she hadn’t gone away. So, I tried to talk to her. But she wouldn’t listen. She wouldn’t even tell me her name. She said I didn’t need to know. You just need to know what I know. About you.

That was when I realised how serious it was. She’d been hanging around outside our houses. Mine and Daniel’s. She’d been tracking all of our social media. That’s how she found out I was booked onto Helen’s antenatal classes: Helen had tagged me in a post about it. And she’d followed us, Daniel and me, one night, in Greenwich Park. The pictures are a bit dark, she said. But let me play you a recording. Halfway through, I told her to switch it off. She knew everything.

All right, I said. How much do you want? But she just laughed. You’re not listening, she said. Either of you. I don’t care about the money, not really. Though it will come in useful. I want justice. I want you to tell the truth.

She sat down in my chair, her hand on that ridiculous bump of hers.

I get it now, she said. Why you never said anything. You didn’t want people knowing you were fucking. Be a bit worse if it came out now, wouldn’t it? That and the fact you’d been at it behind her back. I bet that baby’s his too, isn’t it? I still wasn’t that worried. But then she pulled the documents from her bag.

Even then, I had no idea that she and Rachel, this girl from the antenatal class who had befriended Helen, were the same person. That she had been turning up at Helen’s house, pretending to want to have lunch, or a chat, when in fact she was making excuses to snoop on what we were up to. She’d taken Daniel’s laptop, worked out his password by asking Helen his favourite football team. Men – they are so fucking stupid. And of course, once she had that, she’d found everything. She’d laid it all out for me, there and then, on my studio table. The mortgage. The money transfers. The tickets, the bank account details. She knew everything. She knew where we were going. She knew the whole plan.

I told Daniel all this. He lost it, then. Lost control. Grabbing her round the neck that time, in the tunnel, was a particularly stupid touch. I had to hand it to her, I didn’t expect her to call his bluff like that. Turning up at his house the same day he did it. Knowing that Helen would take her in.

Anyway, that was it. It was obvious to me then. She wasn’t going to stop. That was when I knew we had to do two things. We had to get rid of her. And we had to make it look like someone else had done it.

The second part was easy enough. Daniel always took Rachel’s cash out in Rory’s name anyway, used Rory’s security pass to get on and off the site where he would hand it over to her. Just a basic safety precaution, to distance us from questions about it.

I know all Rory’s passwords – he’s had the same ones since university, never changes them. I gave them to Daniel and let him get on with it. When we realised we needed a fall guy, Rory was the only real choice. It already looked like he’d been taking out vast sums of cash from the company account and making secret trips to deserted sites to bung her the money. Now we just needed to give