Page 80 of Don't Let Him In

Hers has not been a life of bad decisions and poor choices. Hers has been a healthy life, a functional life, a life of pleasure and joy. Her first husband was a good man, a good husband, and a good father. They split up because they’d outgrown each other and that was all there was to it. Her friendships were solid, her home was beautiful, her children were happy (well, on the whole), her business was successful. And yet, into this pretty picture, somehow, stage left, silently and without Marthaasking one single question, a beautiful man had appeared. And Martha had made the first bad decision of her life.

How, she asks herself now, had she lived for four years with a man who claimed to have a job but never took a business call, never introduced her to a colleague, never took her to a work function, a man who went on business trips that required him to switch off his phone for days on end, a man who claimed to have severe ADHD yet managed to hold down an important job, garner respect, be given promotions. How did she not ask more questions? Push him? Corner him? Who was she? And more important, who the hell is he, this man smiling into the winter sun, with his loose body language, telling her he loves her? And why, she asks herself, does she still want his love? What does she want it for? What is wrong with her?

But now she knows she is not alone, that many more women have allowed themselves to be manipulated and used by this man, and in some ways she feels she may have had the best of him. He has not stolen from her, at least, not until recently and even then not very much, not compared to how much he has stolen from others. From Laura, from Amanda, from Tara. She thinks, secretly, privately, that Al loves her more than he loved any of the others, she really does. She thinks, even as it pains her to do so, that Al gave her the best of himself, the less sleazy side of himself, the side of himself that wanted a normal life and a normal marriage. She suspects that she is fooling herself to think these things, and she pictures Nina Swann sitting in her office at the flower shop, strong and formidable in black. Nina Swann would not have put up with a moment of this treatment, she thinks, and as she thinks this her phone buzzes and she pulls it out to see that there is a message from Nina, except it does not say Nina, it says “school,” and the message, she sees from the preview in her notifications, says:All ready. ETA?

She types quickly.Eight minutes. Then puts her phone away before Al can see it.

A moment later, Al pulls the car over into a lay-by. Martha looks at him anxiously.

“Just need a pee. I’ll be right back.”

He gets out of the car and Martha watches him curiously. She has never, in all the four years she’s been with him, known Al to pee outdoors. Literally never. Her heart rate quickens, and her breathing becomes tight and uncomfortable. What is he doing? she wonders. Is he running? Escaping? Does he know? But a moment later, he reappears from the undergrowth, smiling genially.

“You OK?” he asks, looking at her strangely as he gets back into the car.

She nods and smiles hard. “I’m just excited,” she says breathlessly, to hide the adrenaline rush brought about by the subterfuge. “This is going to be incredible.”

Al turns to her and smiles, and still, even now, she is blown away by the way he looks when he smiles, this handsome, charming man, the father of her child.

“It is,” he says warmly. “It really, really is.”

SEVENTY-FIVE

The car park at Bangate Cove is completely empty and the sun shines milky white through a thin veil of clouds, while the air is full of salt and promise. A new year, a new start. No more, I think to myself, no more running away. No more women. I’ve learned my lesson. I will dedicate the rest of my life to making Martha happy. And somehow, and I do not know how, we will find a way to make this dream come true, this dream of both of ours. And then it will be me who turns heads when I walk into the establishment, me who causes people to say, “It’s Alistair himself.” There will be photographs of me in lifestyle coffee-table books, pictures of me and my beautiful wife and our beautiful daughter in our iconic beachfront café and flower shop. And fuck everyone else. Fuck all of them, especially the Swann family. They can keep their money and their house and their restaurants and their perfect lives. I have one last parting gift to the Swann family and it’s in a letter posted yesterday, addressed to Aisling. Fuck them. Fuck their dreams and fuck their self-delusion.

I wait for Martha to get out of the passenger seat, and then I close her door behind her and hold my hand out to her. She smiles and lets me take it. Together we walk through the path between the dunes and onto the beach.

SEVENTY-SIX

The old ice cream pavilion is cold and damp, the air still and pungent with disuse. They sit, all of them, on the cheap wooden chairs that had been stacked into piles around the edges of the room. Ash looks at each woman in turn.

First there is Emma Greenlaw, sitting next to Nina. Then there is Laura, who is with Lola, the elder of her two daughters. There are Sam and Joel, Amanda’s grown-up sons, and there are the two girls from the neighborhood app who accused Nick Radcliffe of stalking them. And then there are the others, the ones who found out about the Facebook page that Nina, Emma, and Ash set up a few days ago called DON’T LET HIM IN.

It had been Ash’s idea. She’d read a story in the news about some women in America who’d set up a Facebook page when they realized that they’d been the victims of a serial scammer and had eventually uncovered about fifty victims of the same man, each one knowing him by a different name, each one being caught in a web of lies and untruths so convoluted that they could barely think straight. And so, as well as the key players, there are other women here who claim to have been stalked by him: a girl called Kadija, who had to report him to her boss for making her feel uncomfortable in the coffee shop in Tooting where she worked four years ago, and another girl who’d been stalked on thestreet in Hastings by the same man just over a week ago. She claimed he’d followed her for five full minutes and then “sniffed the back of her neck.” There are women here who claim he scammed them out of savings by offering them life-coaching training, women he dated for a few days, a few weeks, and left with their cash, their jewelry, their pride. And more incredibly than that, there is a woman called Jessica Bland, who was assaulted by a man she knew as “André” just a few days ago and blackmailed out of £20K of cash. The most remarkable thing about Jessica Bland is that she claims that “André” was a male escort who charged £500 a night for his services and traveled all around the country, with, she claimed, at least twenty or thirty other regular clients.

And then there is the issue of Joe Kritner’s “Silver Man.” Paddy’s case is currently being investigated again by the police who’d done the original investigation, and they are looking afresh at the CCTV footage from that night and the eyewitness reports.

The Tara Truscott case has also been reopened, and the police are now looking into the disappearance of Amanda Law too.

This is their moment, these people here, now, who have been abused, manipulated, stolen from, lied to, and broken by this man. It ends now. And each one of them wants to bear witness to it.

There is a sound, just audible over the crackle of the surf against the beach, of tires over gravel.

Ash and her mother exchange looks. Her mother squeezes her hand hard and smiles. Ash smiles back and looks at the time on her phone.

He’s here.

SEVENTY-SEVEN

I suppose you’d like to hear from me, directly, about how it feels to walk into that place, that space, with all those women looking at me, all those faces, those eyes, those expressions of distaste, dislike, fear, curiosity, rage. Well, the first thing I can tell you that I feel is like a fuckingidiot.

I turn to Martha. I see what she has done. She has lured me into a trap with her lackluster sex and her talk of dreams and her stupid messages that,God, I cannot believe I fell for. I am better than this, is what I think when I walk into that space. I am better than this, and I am better than all of you. I cannot imagine for a moment what they want with me. What? I think. What do you want? What do you want me to say, want me to do?

You all wanted me, I want to say.You all had gaping voids in your lives, and you all invited me to fill them. I did not force one of you to choose me. Not one of you.

But I don’t say anything, I merely stand with my arms folded and look from one to the next. I see my sons. Sam eyes me warily. Joel eyes me challengingly. They are both so handsome. I feel a kick of pride at the sight of them. And then I see Lola, my elder daughter with Laura, and my stomach lurches. I have not seen Lola since she was six. She is now a young woman, long and lean, dressed in black, unableto look at me at all.Wow, I want to say,look at you! Just look at you!But again, I say nothing. I see, much to my disgust, the girl called Kadija from the café in Tooting. What on earth, I think, isshedoing here? And that’s when I break my silence.

I turn to Martha and issue a small laugh. “What’s going on, darling?” I ask her, in my softest, most vulnerable voice. “What on earth have you done?”

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