The Other Woman

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  www.panmacmillan.co.uk/bello

  Contents

  Jill McGown

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jill McGown

  The Other Woman

  Jill McGown, who died in 2007, lived in Northamptonshire and was best known for her mystery series featuring Chief Inspector Lloyd and Sergeant Judy Hill. The first novel, A Perfect Match, was published in 1983 and A Shred of Evidence was made into a television drama starring Philip Glenister and Michelle Collins.

  Chapter One

  Melissa Whitworth shook hands and said thank you to the woman who had just told her that she was having an affair with her husband.

  The powerful floodlights lent the late October sky an intense ice-blue glow; the trees that ringed the sports ground were thrown into relief, black against the almost ethereal light, still and silent.

  The scattering of vehicles belonging to Stansfield Town’s hardy, ever-optimistic, but limited support, were parked behind the still unfinished leisure complex in a small tarmacked area hidden from the main road by high, mist-enshrouded hedges. In the privacy of her car, Melissa blinked away tears. She was two weeks short of her thirty-third birthday; she checked herself in the mirror to see how she compared.

  Her thin, oblong face was devoid of make-up save for what remained of the lipstick she had hurriedly applied before making her rendezvous; the cheeks were slightly pink, but only from the same anger that had prompted the tears. Her short brown hair was brushed back from her brow in a style that could withstand wind and weather and the office central heating. The woman she had just left was a make-up manufacturer’s dream come true, a hairdresser’s nest-egg incarnate, and ten years her junior.

  Of course, she hadn’t known that she was talking to her lover’s wife; she had just been giving an interview to a local journalist. Melissa had always used a professional name, and the girl had no reason to suppose that she knew Simon from a hole in the ground. Melissa took the tape from her bag, and wrote the interviewee’s name on the label, as she had done with all the others.

  Sharon Smith. It had intrigued Melissa when Sharon had replied to the ad that she had placed in the personal column, asking:

  Are you the Other Woman? This newspaper is doing a series of articles on marriage and morals, and would like to hear from women whose men belong to someone else. Your contribution would be held in the strictest confidence, and nothing will appear in print which could in any way identify you or your partner.

  It had been Melissa’s idea. Why should the woman’s page – recently retitled ‘Life’ – always be about fashion and cookery, she had asked. Women had other things on their minds at times. At first, the editor had hummed and hawed, uncertain about it on several fronts. It might be seen to be encouraging immorality; it would encourage all sorts of nuts to contact them (it had); it was a little risqué for a local paper – more your Sunday stuff, or a TV special – Melissa had worked for too long on women’s magazines, if you asked him; anonymity would have to be paramount – the paper might cover a large area, but in his opinion no area was too large for brawling women; it would have to be made absolutely clear that the paper was in no way condoning or condemning, merely examining the social manners and mores of the nineties … and so on, until he had talked himself into it.

  The ad had appeared six weeks ago; to start with only the nuts had replied, but eventually a trickle of genuine replies had redeemed Melissa’s reputation in her editor’s eyes. By the time Sharon had responded, Melissa had been working on the wording for the next one: Are you the Wronged Wife? But her interview with Sharon had driven all thoughts of the series from her mind.

  Sharon Smith. Melissa should, perhaps, have declared her interest, so to speak; Sharon might not know who she was, but she knew of Sharon. Simon had mentioned her, naturally, for she was his secretary, in the time-honoured fashion. But the universal enjoyment of a bit of gossip on which she was counting for the success of her series had made Melissa decide to see her. She was not, after all, a judge; she was more in the position of a priest. She would hear Sharon’s confession, and if it was raunchy enough, bizarre enough, or touching enough, it would appear in the paper in heavy disguise; if not, it wouldn’t. She would never have told Simon or anyone else.

  But, as things turned out, Simon didn’t need to be told. Melissa pushed the tape into the cassette recorder again out of a masochistic desire to hear her say it again, and listened to the woman whose unsuspected influence over Simon explained so many of the things which had worried and bewildered her over the past few months.

  To start with it had just been another interview, different only in that Sharon did not present herself, as the others had, as the helpless victim of a doomed love; in answer to Melissa’s standard query as to why a married man, she had spoken with a refreshing candour about the situation.

  ‘I give him what he needs, he gives me what I want.’

  ‘And what is it that he needs?’

  The excitement. He says his life’s always been too safe. Too tame. It adds spice if you risk being caught.’

  ‘Don’t you worry about being caught?’

  ‘Me? Why should I? I’m not answerable to anyone.’

  ‘But his risk is real?’

  Her own voice, still just interested because it was her job to be interested.

  ‘Oh, yes. He doesn’t want to lose what he’s got. It’s a bit like kids playing chicken. You have to be running a real risk. And you have to wait longer and longer each time before you run across the road. It’s like a drug, really.’

  ‘So … what’s in it for you? What is it that you want?’

  ‘Him.’

  Sharon had smiled then. Melissa could see that smile again.

  ‘But he wants to hang on to his marriage?’

  Melissa heard her own voice, so confident and glib, asking the right question at the right time, looking for the offbeat, the interesting answer, the piquant situation that would make a good column.

  ‘Oh, that’s all right. I prefer married men. Single men think they own you.’

  The silence was Melissa’s now, hissing from the tape, as she had formulated her next question.

  ‘Love doesn’t come into it, then?’

  He says he loves me.’

  ‘And how do you feel about him?’

  Not a breath of wind stirred the still leaf-laden branches of the trees as the fog began to collect and gather and weave its way through the harvested fields with their regimented bales of corn, round the hedgerows, heavy with berries, rising up from the earth and the grass and the wide flat streets on the outskirts of Stansfield, insinuating itself through the semi-constructed buildings of the sports and leisure centre, to where Melissa sat reliving the moment, as though this time it might not happen.

  ‘I want him. And he needs me. He does have a problem with that. He wishes he didn’t need me. I think sometimes he hates me.’

  ‘Do you mean that? Sometimes he hates you?’

  ‘Hates the need, anyway.’

  Melissa could see again the thoughtful look, then the brisk nod.

  ‘Hates me. Yes, sometimes. And himself. I don’t know which of us he hates more when he feels like that. He feels guilty, I suppose.’

  ‘And that doesn’t bother you?’

  She could see again Sharon’s shrug.

  ‘It gives him a high. And you come dawn off a high, don’t you? That’s when he feels guilty. But it doesn’t last.’

  The conversation had been taking place in Melissa’s car; it was as though Sharon hadn’t left, as though she were still sitting there beside her. Melissa had asked her next standard question then.

  ‘Why did you reply to the advertisement?’

  ‘I just wanted to talk about it to someone. That’s the drawback with married men. I don’t like the secrecy. Not being able to mention him to your friends, or have him at the house.’

  ‘I wondered about that. When you agreed to this interview, you suggested that we meet here – does that mean you can’t have privacy at home?’

  Melissa listened to the silence which had followed her question as the fog curled up at the car windows, like some silent creature trying to come in.

  ‘I live with my mother, and my sister.’

  ‘So where do you go for privacy?’

  The office, usually.’

  Melissa switched off the tape, the pain even sharper now than when Sharon had originally said it.

  The office. Not his office, or my office. The office. The shared office. It explained everything that she had found so baffling and so hurtful about Simon’s attitude to her lately, all the things that had started going so disastrous
ly wrong between them. And she felt foolish that it had never occurred to her, not once, not even after Sharon had answered the ad.

  Sharon had said that she didn’t know who Simon hated more, her or himself. But Melissa knew where she stood. Especially now that she knew, having had time to get her breath back, exactly what Miss Smith had really done.

  ‘Yes, well,’ said Mac, acutely aware that his landlady was listening to every word. ‘ It can’t be helped.’

  Donna apologised again, and he ran an embarrassed hand through thick but greying hair. ‘Yes, right,’ he said. ‘ Well, fine. I mean – don’t worry about it. See you.’

  He hung up, his hand resting on the receiver. If she hadn’t wanted to come, why hadn’t she just said? Damn it, he’d only asked her out for the evening. Easy enough to say no thanks. Well, that was that. He had to go; it was work. He left just as his landlady came to enquire if everything was all right, and closed the door behind him, affecting not to have heard the question.

  The dampness invaded his bones as he walked along the quiet side-street to the main road, but he checked his automatically raised arm as the taxi went past; he wanted to walk, despite the weather. The first woman he’d asked out for years, and she’d stood him up. Well – as good as. He’d forgotten how to ask a woman out, that was the problem. He should have taken her for a drink at lunch-time or something first. But damn it, it was only an invitation to the opening of the new leisure and sports centre – hardly a big seduction number. Anyway, lunch-hours weren’t long enough to go anywhere decent, not when you didn’t have a car.

  Once, there had been a time when not having a car would have been like not having legs; he wouldn’t have known how to get from A to B without one. But now he was getting used to it; he rather liked walking. Even in the fog. Perhaps especially in the fog, which folded itself round him, secret and dark, and he could simply disappear.

  The hum of conversation in the executive box was soothingly pleasant when Mac finally popped his head round the door, trying to be unobtrusive. It didn’t work.

  ‘Mr McDonald! Glad you made it. I’d just about given up on you – thought the weather had put you off.’ Parker snapped his fingers as the girl passed, and Mac was instantly offered hospitality. He took a soft drink, and tried to retire to a safe distance, but once again, it was not to be. He found himself being introduced to Lionel Evans, Parker’s solicitor, without whose firm’s tireless efforts there would apparently have been nothing to celebrate. There didn’t seem to Mac to be much to celebrate anyway; most of the complex still had to be begun, never mind finished.

  ‘This is Gil McDonald,’ Parker was saying. ‘‘We tried to get him to play for the All Stars tonight, but he decided the old legs weren’t up to it.’

  Evans nodded, unable to shake hands since he was holding both a drink and a plate of food, a stocky figure with what had once been muscle but which was, in early middle-age, running to fat. A frame more suited to the boxing ring than the legal office, it seemed to Mac. He knew a little about Evans; his family had had a practice in the old village of Stansfield since the turn of the century, and the office from which its business had always been conducted was now a listed building. They seemed an odd choice of firm for the brash Mr Parker, but Mac supposed that it lent his operation some credibility that it might just otherwise have lacked.

  Parker had been talking for some time; Mac thought that he had better pay attention, but it soon became clear that the sales-pitch was not meant for his ears. The Chronicle, for which Mac was covering the opening, had already gone into premature (in Mac’s opinion) raptures about Parker’s plans, and could really be of no further use to him. Parker’s soliloquy was for the ears of potential investors, who had been invited in force.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Parker was saying. ‘I got some funny looks when I said I was developing this site. But it’s perfect. Central, easy access on A-roads – in a town that is beginning to thrive again, and right on the edge of real English countryside.’

  Mac chewed and drank, and smiled and nodded. Parker was in his late thirties, a self-professed financial whizz-kid with a dubious past. His short, light-brown wavy hair was held in too-immaculate place with just a touch of hair gel; his skin was tanned, his teeth were white, his clothes had designer labels. If Evans looked like a boxer, which he had never been, Parker looked like a street-fighter, which he was, and sounded like nothing more than a market trader barking his wares. Most of his audience, however, were leaving, trying to beat the weather before it closed in.

  ‘And Stansfield Town will be playing League football next season, with any luck,’ Parker went on, with a nod over to the window overlooking the ground. ‘Once they’re in, the sky’s the limit. I believe very strongly in our national sport.’

  He did indeed, thought Mac. When he had bought the Stansfield Town ground, the planning permission to develop it as a sports and leisure complex had been contingent on maintaining facilities for the football club, against which proviso Parker had fought tooth and nail, but lost.

  The result was borrowed surroundings which would hardly have disgraced a First Division club, never mind one struggling to break free of the sort of league that suddenly pops up on football coupons at Cup Final time. The building they were in was so newly finished that he felt he had to be careful not to touch the paint. It was also the only entirely complete building on the site.

  ‘I’m doing some homework on tennis,’ Parker said. ‘A clay court or two would cost money, but if I could swing it, we could quite possibly get sponsorship for a pre-French open tourna—’ He broke off as a telephone rang, which was just as well, as Mac felt that even the most gullible of people with more money than sense would not have swallowed that one. One of his few remaining guests apologised in the smug way that portable telephone users do, and answered it.

  ‘See that?’ said Parker, nodding out of the window towards the floodlit pitch. ‘That’s an all-weather running track round that pitch. Athletics is big business these days. Not to mention doing laps for the sake of your health.’

  Mac fancied his voice had risen a decibel or two so that the merchant banker’s friend on the other end of the line could hear what a good deal he was offering. But his unsubtle methods worked; he had already persuaded a great many people and businesses to invest millions in his much-touted dream of the future.

  ‘And that …’ He nodded over to the dark bulk of the other, semi-constructed building. ‘That is going to be a leisure centre with every facility you can think of, and more. When that’s open, they’ll be queuing up to get in. Bars and restaurants – a gymnasium, indoor tennis courts, basketball, squash – maybe even a shopping complex in time – you name it, I’ve got plans for it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lionel, his voice equally carrying. ‘ Simon showed me them. Very impressive.’ He turned to Mac. ‘Simon Whitworth,’ he said. ‘My partner – he really looks after Mr Parker’s business. I’m here for the beer, as they say.’

  Mac smiled politely, and thought he had better move around before he actually fell asleep in the smoky atmosphere. He wandered over to the windows, which slid back to enable the executives to wander out into the elements and actually watch the football. He stepped through the open window, where the night air damply kept the temperature at a tolerable level in the room, and looked at the misty figures as they ran through churned-up mud, heard the shouts of the players, and the thud of the ball, watched moisture bead the rail round the balcony. If play moved to the far side of the pitch, he couldn’t see it at all. He didn’t want to see it anyway.

  He went back inside, and wondered how soon he could escape. Parker was seeing some of his guests off; Evans was tucking into the buffet. Mac positioned himself in a darkened corner where air from the window could be breathed, and waited until he was pretty sure that no one was aware of his presence, then slipped away.

  Parker returned, and Lionel Evans found himself being led to the open window. Together they went out on to the balcony, and the window was very firmly closed.

  Lionel sighed inwardly. It was Simon who ostensibly looked after Parker’s dealings in the town; Parker’s business had been the sole reason for Lionel’s having taken on a partner. Parker really shouldn’t be seen conspiring in corners with him.