Page 46 of The Mistake

‘Justsay it, Eve. Whatever it is, just say it and then get out.’

Eve lifts her chin, and meets Natalie’s gaze head-on. ‘OK. Pete’s a liar, Nat, and you know it. If he’s so innocent in all of this, then where has he been lately, while you’ve been at home alone, struggling to keep going? Maybe he should have been spending more time at home with you and the children, and less time at Montpellier Square.’

Pete

Pete has been in the office with the two police officers for well over half an hour and they don’t seem to be showing any sign of wrapping up the conversation. He shifts in his seat; the temptation to just get up and tell them he’ll speak to them later is overwhelming, but he’s pretty sure it won’t go down too well.

‘I’m sorry,’ Pete says eventually, ‘but is this going to take much longer? I’m sure you can understand I’m waiting to hear if my daughter is going to be OK …’ He breaks off, his throat thickening. ‘Sorry, it’s just that the doctor will go to the waiting room if there is any news and I won’t be there. They won’t know where I am to tell me.’

‘The doctors already know where you are, and they’ll update us as soon as there are any developments.’

Pete’s eyes go to the clock on the wall, registering it’s just gone one o’clock in the morning. How much longer before they’re able to tell them how Erin is? He doesn’t know what time they arrived at the hospital, but it feels like hours ago.

‘We’re trying to build up a picture of what happened tonight,’ DI Travis says. ‘It’s important we collect as much information as we can.’ She glances down at her notepad, at the indecipherable writing there. ‘Tell us about Vanessa, Pete. The woman from your office. What’s her surname?’

Pete feels his heart stutter in his chest. He thought they were done discussing Vanessa. ‘Taylor. Vanessa Taylor.’

‘Do you have a contact number for Vanessa? We’ll need to speak to her, seeing as she was at the house this evening.’

‘No, I don’t,’ Pete says, running his thumb over the locked screen of his phone. He doesn’t. He blocked her number. ‘Shelives at Montpellier Square, though.’ He gives them her address. Will they think it’s odd that he knows her address, but doesn’t have her number in his phone? His palms are sweaty, and he can feel a muscle begin to twitch in his upper eyelid. He wonders if this is what guilty people feel like.

‘Vanessa isn’t just a woman from your office, is she, Pete?’ Travis asks. ‘The two of you have history together.’ DS Haynes looks up now, his face drawn. He has pockmarked skin, as if he suffered badly with acne as a teenager, and his hair sticks up in little tufts all over his head. He’s young, barely more than Emily’s age, and Pete can’t seem to take him seriously, not when he sits beside the immaculate DI Travis. ‘Eve Sanders told us she believes you and Vanessa Taylor are having an affair. Is that why the affair started? Because you were unhappy with the fact your wife was pregnant?’

Pete feels as though someone has punched him in the stomach. He leans forward, gasping a little as he reaches for the plastic cup of water and takes a sip. He was a fool to think that the police wouldn’t find out he’d had an affair with Vanessa.Eve knew about Vanessa all along – even if she didn’t have proof, just raising the idea of it with the police is the ultimate revenge on me for everything I said to her.He wonders if she enjoyed telling the police about her suspicions, if she relished the thought of making him look like a terrible husband and father.

‘I didn’t … No.’ Pete falters. ‘That’s … That’s not why I had an affair with Vanessa.’

‘No one could blame you,’ Travis says, with what appears to be a sympathetic smile. ‘I mean, a baby you didn’t want, your entire family life disrupted, a wife who didn’t want to know you. Men have done far worse for less.’

‘No,’ Pete says, his voice rising. ‘It wasn’t like that. That’s not how it was.’ He pauses, trying to gather his thoughts into some sort of order so he can explain to Travis exactly what it was like. ‘I didn’t actively choose to have an affair with Vanessa, I didn’t wantto at all. It just kind of … happened. She invited me – us – to the pub at Easter and Natalie didn’t want to come.’

‘Is that when it started?’

Pete shakes his head. ‘No, not that night. It was a couple of weeks later. We went for drinks at a leaving do, and I walked her back to her flat after – it was late. She invited me in for a coffee. We kissed that night, nothing more. I thought that was it, just a silly, drunken mistake, but then …’ He trails off. He’d thought that was all it would be, but now that he thinks about it, maybe Vanessa wasn’t thinking the same way.

‘It all felt … organic, I suppose, at the time, but now I think of it, I think Vanessa … I don’t know, set her cap at me? Like she was determined for something to happen between us again. She would turn up in my office when I was working late, talking about the past, the things we used to do, the people we used to hang out with, and she would listen to me when I … well, when I complained about Natalie, I suppose.’ Pete swallows, his throat jagged and sore as if he’s swallowed glass. It was bad enough Natalie finding out about the affair, but to have it aired to strangers – topolice officers– makes him feel like the lowest of the low. He looks away, unable to make eye contact as a slick wave of shame washes over him, leaving him feeling greasy and tainted somehow. ‘It felt like it was inevitable something more would happen between us, and now I think about it, I feel as though Vanessa engineered it all.’ He feels like a mug, Pete thinks. That’s how he feels. Manipulated by his dick, like thousands of other men before him.

‘Are you still seeing Vanessa?’ DI Travis asks, an eyebrow raised.

‘No,’ Pete shakes his head vehemently. ‘Definitely not.’

‘And how did she take it? I’m assuming you broke things off with her?’

‘Not well.’ An icy draught blows over Pete, even though there is no air conditioning in this room. ‘Really badly, actually. She turned up at my house with a file containing … ahh, naked photographsof herself.’ A violent heat creeps up Pete’s neck, staining his skin a bright pink. ‘I told her to get out, that I didn’t want anything to do with her any more. She started on at me about Natalie, telling me she was a terrible wife and a shit mother, and that was the last straw for me.’ Pete remembers the gleeful look on her face as Vanessa spat the words at him, almost as if she relished the idea of Natalie struggling, drowning in her attempts to keep them all above water.

‘And then she turned up uninvited at your daughter’s birthday party.’ DI Travis jots a note in her book, chewing her bottom lip as she does. ‘What about access to the party – did you have to physically let people into the house? Or were people coming and going as they pleased?’

Pete pauses for a moment, trying to remember. Stu and Mari had knocked, but once the party was in full swing neither he nor Natalie had the time to keep answering the door. ‘We let the first guests in, but once the party got underway most of the guests were using the side gate to let themselves into the garden.’ Pete remembers seeing Dave and his wife coming in that way. ‘The patio doors were open from the kitchen out into the garden, so if people needed to use the loo or get drinks that’s the way they would have gone in and out.’

‘So no one would have had any access through the front door?’

Pete shakes his head. He had let Jake out that way after the argument with Emily, but everyone else had gone through the side gate – he’s sure of it. ‘The front door is the kind that slams closed and locks itself, unless you put it on the latch. Natalie is forever worried Zadie will lock her out one of these days.’

‘Any other exits from the house besides the front door and the side gate?’

Pete nods. ‘The back gate. The gate at the back of the garden leads directly out into the woods. That gate was locked, though, up until I went out to have a cigarette. I unlocked it to go out,but I don’t remember if I locked it again. The gate was open when I went out to look for Erin.’

‘Do you have a Ring doorbell, any cameras up around the house?’

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