Page 14 of Don't Let Him In

On the train, I turn on my phone and see five missed calls from my wife and a series of voicemails, all saying the same thing: “Where are you? You need to come home. It’s urgent.”

I don’t call her. I don’t want to hear her voice in my ear, the ear that still tingles with the feel of Martha’s breath. I’m not ready to face her yet; if my feelings toward her were diminished before this weekend, they are now annihilated. There is nothing left. Anything I ever felt for my wife is dead. So I pull up some music on my phone and I put in my earphones and for the rest of the journey, I listen to songs that make me feel alive.

My wife greets me at the door of our sad house in our sad road. She’s wearing a sad jumper with sad trousers and her hair, after my weekend lost in Martha’s wild curls, looks so defeatedly and disappointingly straight. I feel sure I once loved her hair, the hints of hazel and gold in it when it catches the light, the way it sometimes flicks inward toward her mouth, like a comma or a speech mark, before she peels it away with a fingertip. But not now.

Her face is contorted and I feel a blunt thrill of excitement, and then a tang of fear. For a moment I think she is going to start crying, or worse, that she is going to make a scene, lambaste me in some way, pull down the crumbling edifice of this awful marriage.

But she does neither of these things. Instead, she opens her mouth just a crack and half whispers the words: “Jonathan, the police are here.”

I feel the blood drain away from my face, away from my heart, away from my stomach. I feel weak for a moment, as if I might pass out, and then the adrenaline kicks in, the fight-or-flight response, and I know that I can do neither of those things. If I run, it looks like I have something to run from; if I get angry, it looks like I have something to be angry about. So, instead, I feign wry surprise and say, “Oh dear, what have you been up to now?”

My feeble joke does not, of course, elicit a laugh, it wasn’t meant to, but it does neutralize the moment and means that when I step into my home my breathing is steady and I appear the very picture of a decent, upstanding human being.

There are two of them, both women, one very young, the other one fortyish. They stand up and I tell them not to, a wide smile across my face.

They introduce themselves: the older one is called Beth and does all the talking. My wife passes me a cup of tea and I touch her hand, affectionately. “Thank you, darling.”

“Mr. Truscott. We would like to talk to you about complaints made by two women who have come forward separately to report a man matching your description following them at night.”

The slight I feel is real and raw and my voice is surprisingly emotional as I put my hand against my chest and say, “Me?”

“Yes, sir. One of the women involved asked a neighbor whose house she passed while she felt she was being followed if she could see her doorbell footage the following day. The man following her is seen very clearly at close quarters to the woman in question and does very much match your appearance. The woman in question posted the clip to a neighborhood app and another woman saw it and recognized the man on camera as a man who had behaved the same way a few weeks earlier. And then someone posting under what appears to be a false name claimed that they know you well and offered the women your name and address in private messages.”

I blink furiously. “Sorry. This is…”

The woman’s eyes go to my shoes, my suede desert boots with the contrasting tan elasticated side panels, my long legs, my distinctive, black-framed glasses. She sighs and shows me a still on her phone of a man who does indeed look a lot like me, but who is not definitively me, not by any stretch. It’s dark and the footage is fuzzy and really, I could be any leggy man with white hair and black-framed glasses.I analyze the photo for something that will make it clear that this cannot possibly be me, but then I notice the distinctive shape of the elasticated panels on my desert boots, and I gulp silently. “This is not me,” I say. “I don’t even know where this is.”

“The boots, Mr. Truscott, look at the boots.”

Her fingertips sit against the screen of her phone as she pulls the image wider, zooming in on the boots, and I breathe a sigh of relief. “Those are not my boots,” I say. “Look. They’re black. These are gray. And that man has much smaller feet than me. Mine are a size thirteen. His are…” I shrug dismissively. “A ten?”

The policewoman called Beth cocks an eyebrow. “Are you a detective, Mr. Truscott?”

“No,” I say, “but I do have an eye for detail. And everything about that image is wrong. The shape of his shoulders. His height. All of it. And like I say, I have no idea at all where that footage has been filmed.”

“Where were you, Mr. Truscott, at two minutes past six on the night of the twelfth of February?”

“God, I have no idea.” I turn to my wife, hoping that she’ll say something helpful. Or at least not say something that will entrap me or trip me up. “Darling? Do you remember?”

She glances at her phone and scrolls back to the date on her calendar. “You were in Gloucester.”

I turn back to the police detectives and blink, nodding my agreement with my wife’s information. “That’s right,” I say.

“And what were you doing in Gloucester, Mr. Truscott?”

“Business. I’m a hospitality trainer. I was working with a young team at a boutique hotel.”

“And can you prove that’s where you were?”

“Well, yes,” I say. “Of course. The whole team was there. They’d be—”

“Oh,” my wife interjects suddenly, dreadfully. “That was the day you came home. Now I think of it. Because I remember going to collectyour shirts from the cleaners that day, so they’d be hanging up for you…”

I blanch. Everything about this is terrible. The fact that she has now placed me back here in Reading on the day in question, and the cringey way she talks about my shirts, as if she is my housekeeper, my lackey. I feel the mood shift, the eyes of the two female officers on me in a way that feels a little less neutral.

“How did you travel home, Mr. Truscott?”

“On the train,” I say.

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