Page 9 of The Stranger in Room Six
‘There’s a woman outside. She’s telling everyone that you murdered Dad. Did you?’
A woman. Karen. The mistress.
‘No, I promise. It was an accident,’ I choke.
I try to explain but none of it makes sense. Why isn’t Gerald here to answer the questions that crowd my head? How could he do this? How could I have missed the signs?
There’s a knock on the door. ‘You’ve got another visitor, but you’re only allowed two at a time. They will have to go,’ the policewoman says, nodding at my daughters.
‘Who is it?’ I ask.
‘A Mr Imran Raj.’
I didn’t expecthimto come – just the lawyer.
‘Who?’ asks Elspeth.
Gillian scowls. ‘He’s the one who wrote the letter.’
My stomach sinks with apprehension.
‘What letter?’ asks her sister.
‘The letter she was hiding in her underwear drawer. I found it when I was putting laundry away. Don’t deny it.’
‘I’m not,’ I whisper. ‘But it wasn’t what you think. Honestly.’
8
If I’d married Imran instead, we’d be making love every morning just as we did in halls. We’d talk, really talk, in a way that Gerald and I had never been able to. The touch of Imran’s hand would still send electric shocks of excitement all these years on. His voice would melt both my body and soul.
But now those chances have gone. I am here, a widow, on my way to the magistrates’ court to plead guilty to manslaughter.
‘That’s my advice,’ the lawyer had said. ‘There were witnesses who saw you do it.’
‘But I didn’t mean to kill him,’ I’d kept repeating numbly.
‘That’s why it’s manslaughter and not murder,’ he’d replied softly. ‘With any luck, you’ll only get ten years.’
Ten years? This can’t be happening.
But I do what I’m told and am taken back to my cell for another night. Tomorrow, I’ll be taken to the crown court to formally enter my ‘guilty’ plea.
It all seems so complicated, but I am too exhausted, too shocked, too worried about the girls, to hear some long-winded legal explanation. Instead, I sit on the stained mattress in the police cell, head on my knees, too stunned to cry. My daughters’ faces swim into my mind: Elspeth with her ‘please say this isn’t happening’ look; Gillian with her reprimanding glare and cold voice, as she interrogates me about Imran’s letter. ‘Is that why you killed Dad? So you could be with him?’
In vain did I try to explain that the letter had meantnothing. Yes, it had been signed off with a kiss, but he’d meant it in a purely platonic way. People do that nowadays, don’t they? He was just an old friend – fine, ex-boyfriend – from university days who had got in touch out of the blue.
‘But why did you ask him to find you a lawyer?’
‘I don’t know,’ I’d said.
How could I explain to an eighteen-year-old – the same age I’d been when I’d first met Imran – that I needed someone who hadreallyknown me? Known the person I was before I’d married Gerald and tried to be someone else.
It doesn’t make sense, not even to me.
I think now of Imran’s face when I told him to leave the police station. The face I’d barely had time to take in: those same compassionate eyes; his aquiline nose; lips that had pressed mine so passionately all those years ago.
‘Please,’ I’d said. ‘Go. I shouldn’t have called you. The girls have got it wrong. They think you and I are having a thing.’
