The Stranger's Wife
The Stranger’s Wife
A totally gripping psychological thriller with a jaw-dropping twist
Anna-Lou Weatherley
Books by Anna-Lou Weatherley
The Couple on Cedar Close
Black Heart
Vengeful Wives
Wicked Wives
Pleasure Island
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Epilogue
Anna-Lou’s Email Sign-Up
Books by Anna-Lou Weatherley
A Letter from Anna-Lou
The Couple on Cedar Close
Black Heart
Pleasure Island
Wicked Wives
Vengeful Wives
Acknowledgements
For CB, DC and L&F D
‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here.’
– William Shakespeare
Prologue
Beth
June 2018
Something is wrong. The house is silent; too silent. It’s never quiet in Beth Lawler’s house, not with a boisterous four-year-old running amok. Even when her daughter is taking an afternoon nap – a habit she must get her out of before she starts school – there’s still always background noise of some sort; daytime TV, the radio station that Marta likes to listen – sometimes sing along – to or the low hum of white goods.
‘Hel-looooo?’ she calls out instinctively, throws her keys and handbag down on the console table in the hallway, kicks off her gym shoes, even though she hasn’t been anywhere near the gym today.
‘Marta? Hel-loooo…’ She feels a trickle of something inside the pit of her stomach; it’s not fear exactly, but it’s somewhere approaching it. ‘Marta?’
She calls out to her housekeeper again. Well, housekeeper-cum-nanny-cum-friend as it had turned out. The nanny part hadn’t been in the original job description though; neither had the friend bit, but both of these things had transpired quite organically, something she was now extremely grateful for. Initially it had been Evan who had suggested they hire in some help.
‘I want you to put all your focus on Lily,’ he’d said. ‘I don’t want you to have to worry about stacking dishwashers and keeping the place clean and tidy. We can pay someone else to do all the menial, day-to-day stuff.’ She was aware that usually this would be music to most women’s ears, but secretly she had been disappointed. She had hoped to return to her job as a nurse six months after giving birth, maybe just part-time to begin with.
‘You never need to go back to work, Beth,’ he’d said when she had gone on maternity leave. ‘Not now you’re about to embark on the most important and rewarding job of all. Besides, it’s not as if we need the money, is it?’
She had missed the sense of purpose her job had provided though, and her colleagues at the hospital, so having Marta on hand had turned out to be something of a godsend. Lily had been a tricky baby, plagued by colic and reflux, and she had spent the best part of the first year of her daughter’s life in a cranky, sleep-deprived fug as a result. She didn’t know how she would’ve coped without Marta back then and in truth feared she might not have coped at all. Now she was glad that Evan had insisted on an extra pair of hands because she had bonded with the kind and intelligent Norwegian girl who shared her dry sense of humour and happened to be blessed with the patience of a saint. She trusted Marta; trusted her with the things that were most precious to her. Including her secrets…
She calls Marta’s name again but the cold, unsettling silence remains. The pushchair is in the hallway and Marta’s Fiat 500 is still in the driveway. Odd. This is an indicator that something’s definitely not right. She takes the stairs, two by two, calling out her name intermittently. She’s not overly concerned at this point.
She moves along the landing towards the nursery. The door is shut and she opens it with an unfamiliar trepidation, the source of which she doesn’t fully understand. The room is dark, the ridiculously expensive handmade unicorn appliqué curtains are drawn, daylight straining to filter through them. Creeping towards the cot bed on the balls of her feet, she peers into it and is relieved to see her daughter sleeping. Lily immediately stirs as if she senses her mother’s presence, causing her to spring backwards. She studies her daughter’s perfect face from a safe distance, her eyes closed, like two ticks on a page, her lashes dark like her own, curling upwards. Lily is undoubtedly a beautiful child – everyone says so – and this makes her feel proud, she supposes. She wants to touch her tiny face but is scared she’ll wake her. The rush of love she feels watching her sleeping daughter soon dissipates into something else though; a terrible gnawing guilt that pulls at her lower intestines, tugging at her guts. Lily will forgive her, won’t she? She’s only four years old; she won’t remember this time in her life. She’ll understand when she is older, she tells herself in an attempt to appease her nagging conscience – and yet she can’t shake the feeling that she’s directly betraying her own daughter. She’s not a bad person, is she?
She takes a breath, snaps herself out of her maudlin moment as her eye wanders to the baby monitor on the changing table next to the cot bed. It’s not illuminated. It’s not switched on. Now that is odd. Marta wouldn’t leave Lily sleeping without turning the monitor on; it’s a big house and they always switch it on in case Lily wakes up startled and they cannot hear her call out.
A sense of unease is gaining momentum inside of her, pushing past the guilt and up from her guts through to her diaphragm. She calls Marta’s name again, loudly and more urgently this time. ‘Marta! Marrr–ta! Where are you?’ Nothing. Silence.
Leaving the nursery, she checks the bathroom as a matter of course, plus Marta’s bedroom, but it’s empty. She takes the stairs, her blonde hair swishing around her shoulders with her increasing momentum – and panic.
‘Marta!’ She pokes her head around the living-room door. It looks neat and tidy and smells freshly cleaned, but she’s not there. She checks the downstairs cloakroom. No joy. Her initial perplexion has morphed into something more frantic now and she heads into the large, open-plan kitchen diner, the hub of her home. Her laptop is open on the oak table where she’d left it that morning. Marta’s handbag – a colourful fabric hippie-type thing that she’d picked up in Camden Market – is still slung over the back of one of the kitchen chairs. She hasn’t taken it. She must be in.
She notices that the sliding doors that lead out onto the landscaped garden are open – another oddity, given that it’s chi
lly and drizzling outside, even though it’s well into June. She scans the garden: nothing. She slides the door shut behind her, locks it. Beth shakes her head, confused, concerned. Even in the highly unlikely scenario that Marta has nipped to the shops and left Lily alone for five minutes, she certainly wouldn’t have left the doors unlocked, let alone wide open. Were they open when she had left that morning, the doors? She doesn’t recall. She doesn’t think so. No. Definitely not, why would they be? Suddenly she feels cross. Marta would never be so irresponsible, would she? She trusted her friend with her child and her home. She trusted her with her life.
She tries to push back the nagging fear that something has happened. Something horrible. Maybe she’s left a note. She checks the kitchen table for one, but there is nothing; no note. Marta knows Beth’s schedule better than she does. And Marta knows where she has been today…
She stands still for a moment in a bid to gather her thoughts. Surely if there had been an emergency of some sort then Marta would’ve called her? Marta’s handbag… her phone! She fishes around inside the bag for it but it’s not there, nor her purse. She runs into the hallway, retrieves her own phone from her handbag and dials Marta’s number.
‘I’m sorry but the mobile number you have called is currently unavailable…’
Shit! She dials again and is greeted by the same parrot-fashion reply. Shit, shit, shit. Why is her phone off? Marta’s phone is never off. In fact, she cannot recall a time since she’s known her when she hasn’t been able to get hold of her – not once.
Suddenly a chill comes over her, like a cold knife against the back of her neck. Something has happened to Marta. Something awful.
As Beth contemplates her next move, she remembers that she didn’t check the master bedroom upstairs; her and Evan’s room – well, hers really because she can’t remember the last time they had shared a bed, not since Lily had been born anyway. Maybe Marta had gone to change the bedclothes and had lain down and fallen asleep. She knows it’s highly unlikely, but her mind is desperately searching for some sort of rational explanation.
With a trickle of hope, she rushes upstairs and crashes through the bedroom door. The bed has been newly made and there’s a basket of dried clothes on top of it, some of which have been discarded, as though she were in the middle of folding them and had simply abandoned them mid-task, but there’s no sign of Marta herself. She hears Lily stirring in the bedroom next door and inwardly wills her to stay asleep – she needs to get her head around the situation; she needs to think. Frustrated, she returns downstairs and sits down at the kitchen table, tells herself to keep calm and that Marta will be back any minute. Maybe she just had to rush off somewhere, some kind of emergency, but that doesn’t explain why her car is still in the driveway, or why she’s left her handbag behind but taken her phone and purse.
Beth puts a hand to her chest to steady the thud of her heart against her ribs and tries to envisage her friend walking through the front door, apologising for scaring her in her strange yet endearing accent. But her instincts are aggressively chopping through her positive thoughts like a machete. Something is wrong, very wrong and she senses it like an animal senses danger. She’ll make a cup of tea, no, coffee – it will sharpen her mind; help her to focus. She knows she should call the police but is fearful of what will happen if she does, if the police start sniffing around…
‘Oh God, Marta, where are you?’ She says the words aloud in desperation. ‘Please don’t do this to me.’ How long should she leave it before she dials 999? Another hour? A few? Should she wait until tomorrow? Will that look strange? After all, Marta’s an adult, isn’t she? Maybe she’s just gone for a long walk and she’ll be back soon, maybe… Beth knows she’s trying to convince herself of this unlikely scenario so as not to involve the police. And she knows why. Jesus Christ, what should she do? She’s fully aware that she has a moral duty to report her as missing but dreads what will inevitably come next. Perhaps it’s for the best; perhaps it was all meant to come out this way and Marta going AWOL was the cosmos’s way of telling her she needed to do it now, today.
She decides to check Marta’s bedroom, see if she’s taken anything. At first glance, nothing appears amiss. Marta’s a neat freak and keeps her bedroom as tidy as she does the rest of the house. The bed is made, pillows plumped and Marta’s small collection of beauty products remain neatly displayed on the dressing table. She opens the drawer, lightly fingers the contents – cotton pads, feminine products, some Norwegian face cream… She closes it, her eye noticing that the wardrobe door is slightly ajar. Inspecting the contents, she notes there’s some empty hangers… and Marta’s weekend holdall, a vibrant seventies-style carpetbag, is missing. Has she taken it? Perplexed, she thinks of calling up some of Marta’s friends. She hardly has any family left – a brother she thinks, back in Norway – but she can’t recall his name and certainly doesn’t have his phone number. Perhaps she’ll look him up on Facebook…
Returning back downstairs to the kitchen, she chews her lip as she stares out through the glass doors, trying desperately to get some clarity on her thoughts, only they’re all jumbled up and overlapping, not one of them quite reaching fruition and… something in the garden suddenly catches Beth’s eye, on the back lawn. At first she thinks it’s maybe something the builders have left; they’re having a swimming pool dug out at the moment and the garden is in a state of disarray, filled with equipment and tools.
She pushes her face closer to the glass and squints. Instinctively, she opens the sliding doors and goes outside. She strides across the lawn with urgency, still in her socks. It’s drizzling heavily, the kind of rain that gets into your eyes and makes your hair frizzy. She feels her heartbeat increase as she moves, adrenalin giving her an almost unbearable lightness under her damp feet. She can feel her trachea tighten slightly; fear creeping in like tendrils around her neck. She recognises it instantly. It’s Marta’s favourite scarf – that yellow silky thing with an odd pattern on it that she often wears. Why is it in the garden, abandoned like this?
She bends down to pick it up. It feels damp between her fingers and she can no longer stave off the feeling of terror that is threatening to engulf her.
The drizzle has turned into rain now – heavier drops splash spitefully against her skin. ‘Oh my God… oh my God! Marta!’ she says, as she runs inside to get her phone.
One
Dan
October 2019
I can recall it clearly. It was my day off when the call came in. I remember because I’d been on the sofa trying to sleep and my phone had woken me with a start. It wasn’t long after Rachel and our unborn baby had been killed in the motorcycle accident by that ‘man’ whose name I cannot bear to say. It had only been a few months – maybe six, maybe longer – but it still felt like just a few days had passed. I was in the grip of the first stages of grief and sleep, back then, was like a twilight zone I slipped in and out of. I’ve never had an unbroken night’s sleep since she died – but at least I can manage a few hours straight now, which in my book means I’m winning. At least it’ll stand me in good stead when Junior arrives. Fiona’s only a couple of weeks off giving birth, or ‘dropping’ as she prefers to call it. It’s not a term I’m particularly fond of. I’ve had nightmares about ‘dropping’ my imminent offspring already, but who am I to argue with a heavily pregnant woman – or any woman at all for that matter?
Anyway, back then I could never have imagined that I would be where I am now, about to become a father with a colleague-cum-friend-cum-lover who I managed to get in the club after a one-night stand. But as I of all people should know, life has its own agenda sometimes and takes you down a road you never planned to travel.
‘MP, boss, Buckhurst Hill area, possible foul play.’ DS Lucy Davis had been breathy on the phone, like she’d just run up some stairs, although I’d put it down to excitement at the time. Davis was – still is – brimming with enthusiasm for homicide. I like the fact she’s not yet jaded by the horr
ors we human beings commit towards each other. I hope she never changes or begins to see the world as I do now.
‘A Mrs Beth Lawler… she just called to say she returned home this morning and her 28-year-old nanny, Marta Larssen, is missing… left the little one asleep upstairs, alone apparently… back doors open.’
I’d rubbed the grit from eyes.
‘No note?’
‘Nope. Nothing. Left her bag, keys… car still in the driveway… just disappeared without a trace. Never done anything like it before apparently, says she’s highly reliable, would never leave the child alone, not even for five minutes… Delaney’s already there at the property.’
I’d groaned. It was all we needed. Davis knows I’m not Delaney’s greatest fan – and why. His presence always seems to put me ill at ease, like he’s always trying to get one over on me or trip me up.
‘Brilliant.’
‘Exactly,’ Davis had said. ‘So we need to get down there, gov, pronto.’