Page 72 of Don't Let Him In

“Well, we think your husband saw you ringing our doorbell yesterday morning. Two hours later, he left in a hurry. Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”

Martha takes a moment to turn her swirling thoughts into words. “He saw me?” she repeats. “He was there?”

“Yes. And listen, Martha, I don’t know what you think is going on, but it’s all much more complicated. Your husband—what do you call him?”

“Call him?”

“Yes. His name.”

“Al. Alistair. His name’s Alistair. That’s his name.”

“Right,” says Nina, “well, Alistair came into my life a year ago, claiming to be called Nick Radcliffe. He wrote to me to offer condolences after my husband died. He said he lived alone in Tooting and had shares in a wine bar in Mayfair, that he’d never been married and never had children. We’ve been dating since October, and he’s been living with me since December the twenty-seventh. My daughter tracked you down via a box of soaps he bought her for Christmas that he told her were from a shop in Mayfair, but which, it turns out, came from here.”

Martha’s mouth is suddenly dry. She shakes her head just once, trying to settle these new facts into some semblance of order. “I…,” she begins, but can’t go any further.

“I’m really sorry,” says Nina. “Really, really sorry. And listen. I’m afraid there’s more.”

Martha’s mind swoops through the last four years of her life—the holes, the gaps, the weirdness—and she looks up at Nina again and says, “Right. OK.”

Then Nina tells her about other wives, other children—abandoned children!—police reports of women being stalked on the streets, a missing wife, suspected murder.

Martha breathes in when Nina stops talking. She blinks slowly and then says, “You know, my husband, Al, he had a thing about your late husband.”

“Sorry?” Now it is Nina’s turn to look confused.

“Yes. He took me for dinner there, to your husband’s place in Whitstable.About two or three years ago. Your husband was there. He was very friendly, going round chatting to everyone. And then he came over to talk to us and I was a bit starstruck, I don’t know why. I mean, he was just a guy, just a chef, not famous or anything. But you know, being in his restaurant, everyone was so excited to talk to him. Your husband was super friendly, possibly a tiny bit flirtatious, he put his hand on my shoulder, though really it was nothing? But Al was so weird after that. I never really worked out why, but then, yesterday, when I came to your house and realized who you were, it came back to me. He bought your husband’s cookbook for me for Christmas that year, said something like, ‘Thought you’d like it. It’s full of pictures of him.’ I thought that was weird at the time. But still, none of it fell into place until yesterday. Did he ever tell you that he’d been there? To your husband’s restaurant?”

“Well, yes, he did, but he described it like it was a reunion, because he and Paddy had worked together in London in the nineties when Nick—sorry, Al—was a chef.”

“Al told me he’d worked in restaurants when he was young—but he was never a chef. Or at least, not that he told me.” And as she says these words, Martha remembers that lovely, slightly dreamy, wine-softened lunch with Grace two days before Christmas, when Martha had thought her life was perfect again, and she remembers what Grace had said:“I thought it was going to end up that he was one of those blokes you read about. The ones who marry loads of women and lie to everyone and steal all their money.”

And now it turns out that Grace had been right. Her friend’s instincts, her spider senses, they’d been spot-on, because unless this very pleasant woman sitting in front of Martha right now, looking at her with compassion and concern, is spinning her a crazy web of lies, then the man she’s loved for four years, been married to for two, the father of her daughter and stepfather to her sons, is a con artist and a fantasist and a liar and a freak.

But he is also the best man she has ever known.

The cognitive dissonance floors her. She’d been ready to deal with an extramarital affair. Her heart had been hardened, ready for the fallout. But she had not been ready for this.

A lie made of everything.

Every last thing.

“You know,” says Nina, “Nick—Alistair—I think he might have been trying to scam me. He asked me if I wanted to invest in a restaurant venture down by Folkestone.”

Another wave of nausea passes through Martha. Another tainted memory. That perfect, beautiful day when she and Al took Nala and the dog to the seaside and Al showed her the old ice cream pavilion, the beach huts, he’d held her in his arms and talked about fairy lights and fishing nets and Greek villages and dreams. And then he’d disappeared just before lunch, hadn’t he? Dropped them at the pub and driven off to see a client. But it was not, she now knows, a client. It was Nina Swann. This woman, right here.

“What did you say?” she asks quietly.

“I said no way. I’m just about coping with the three restaurants that Paddy left me to deal with. The last thing I want is another one.”

“He took me there too,” Martha says softly. “Told me we should buy it, turn it into another Martha’s Garden, with a tea shop, pop-up restaurant nights, Airbnb rooms. All of that. He said I should remortgage my house to pay for it. I’ve already spoken to my accountant about it, he was getting me the forms to fill out. I was halfway to doing it.” And then, finally, at the thought of the dreams she’d had about the café on the beach, the hours she’d spent obsessing over what color she’d paint the walls, whether she’d have tablecloths or not, how she’d display her crockery—on open shelves or in antique haberdashery cabinets—the tears come.

Nina puts her hand across the desk and cups Martha’s inside hers. Her face is pale but set with grit and determination. “We’re going tofix this,” she says. “We’re going to fix all of it. And we’re going to get this man put where he belongs, OK? For a very long time. Are you up for it?”

Martha wants to say no. She wants to say,Leave him alone, he’ll come back, he always does. We’ll carry on. My lovely life. My lovely man. Our beautiful daughter. Our dreams.She wants to say this, but she is far too broken to say it and so, instead, against all her basest and most guttural instincts, she says, “Yes. I’m up for it. Let’s bring him down.”

SIXTY-SIX

A few days later, I receive a message from Martha.

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