The Second Woman Read online

  Harry listens, without reaction.

  ‘Gabriela has been with the same man since they were in their early twenties. A guy called Tom. As far as I knew, they were happy together …’

  Harry looks at her sidelong. She doesn’t meet his eye. ‘We worked together at the FCO. Anyway, Gabriela and Tom have kids – a girl and a boy, they’re seven and five now. Then one day, almost two years ago, she met this Russian guy, Ivan Popov. Popov is Vasiliev’s main man in the UK. Vasiliev is wanted around the world but she barely leaves Russia now, other than to countries deemed safe, i.e. anywhere untouched by Europol or Interpol, or any of the other agencies braying for her blood. Popov met Gabriela at a café in town and they started a relationship. They had a baby together.’

  Harry raises an eyebrow. ‘So if she’s already split up with this Tom guy, how come he’s going with her?’

  Madeleine pauses. ‘She didn’t split up with him. They were still together. It seems she’s been living a double life, moving between the two families for months.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Harry exhales through his teeth. ‘Wow, that takes some balls. And no one noticed?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of.’ Madeleine clears her throat. ‘Popov’s phone was tapped … These recordings connect Vasiliev and Popov with a number of crimes.’

  ‘And Gabriela is going to testify?’

  ‘That’s the plan. Except Vasiliev knows about Gabriela. She had her investigated, found out about the children and Tom … Still, when Vasiliev confronted Popov with the information, he chose to stay with her.’

  Harry reaches into his pocket and pulls out a cigarette, offering her one.

  ‘Fuck me, this is really not what I expected you to say when I agreed to meet you …’

  ‘Well, you can be sure that it came as something of a shock to me, too.’

  Harry holds out the lighter to Madeleine as she leans in. They are interrupted by the sound of Harry’s phone. As he pulls it out, he sees the name Maria flash on the screen.

  Pressing reject, he slips it in his pocket.

  ‘Are you sure you’re up to this?’ she says. ‘I mean, if you have other stuff going on …’

  ‘No,’ he says firmly. ‘I’m up for it. So where am I going?’

  Artemis

  London, the Eighties

  Clive had lived in the house alone since his father’s death. He had suffered a heart attack within a year of losing Clive’s mother, Elisabeth, who had fled to this pocket of North London from Austria during the war. She and Bernard had met at nearby Keats House library not long after she’d arrived and together they had bought this house in the early Fifties.

  Artemis knew she was lucky to be here – Clive had already impressed on her Hampstead’s cultural and geographical significance – and yet the terraced houses, so many lives wedged in against one another in the midst of the city, the lack of sky, made her feel hemmed in.

  Sometimes, when she looked out through the kitchen window, she would blink and imagine the ghost-like silhouette of a woman hunched over a sketchbook. In that moment she couldn’t be sure if it was Elisabeth she was imagining, or herself.

  Clive took that first week in London off work. Arm in arm, they spent their days walking the streets he had described – puffs of smoke wafting in front of them as they navigated the towpath beside the canal lined with grubby, multicoloured boats, past the zoo and on to Little Venice.

  They spent the Friday walking over the Heath, the tips of the leaves turning from green to orange, giving the illusion of a fire burning somewhere in the distance. They stopped for a drink on the way home, at the Magdala pub. It was an institution, apparently – this was a word Clive used a lot, as if to pre-empt her inability to understand the importance of some seemingly insignificant place or bizarre custom – and the place where Ruth Ellis famously shot her lover before becoming the last woman in the country to be hanged.

  Looking around her, Artemis lifted her fingers to her throat as a cloud of cigarette smoke rose up from the table next to theirs.

  ‘We better hurry up with these,’ Clive said as he drained his glass. ‘People will be arriving soon.’

  Artemis sighed, inwardly. She couldn’t think of anything she less wanted to do than have Clive’s friend’s over. She was so tired.

  Since arriving in London, her sleep had been broken. It was partly the growing bump in her belly that was preventing her from getting comfortable, but mostly it was the dreams that came for her as soon as she drifted off, the cracking sound, like something inside her breaking, and then the scream …

  She pictured Jeff and May, him with his overly personal manner and wandering eyes; her with the impenetrable gaze, her entire being shrouded behind layers of fake tan and an excess of perfume. May had been friendly enough the couple of times they had met, but there was a tartness about her, something almost untrustworthy, though Artemis would have struggled to say exactly what, or why this woman made her feel so uneasy. A mother to a baby herself, May should have been just the person Artemis wanted to talk to, the kind of friend that might have become a kindred spirit, but it seemed impossible to connect; besides, May never brought her own child with her when they came out. She didn’t know much about Clive’s best friends, but what she had understood immediately was how little she had in common with them.

  From a distance, through Clive’s stories, this world of his had seemed dreamlike and inviting. Up close, she felt like she had been catapulted into someone else’s life. Surely when his friends looked at her, they too would see, with all their shared history, that she was not one of them. They would be within their rights to assume that she, a small-town girl from a remote island with nothing to contribute to the relationship other than her womb, was a gold-digger, but she wasn’t. For all its initial allure, Clive’s relative wealth was something she had come to resent for the imbalance of power it created between them. Even without it, she was already in a position of weakness: in another country, without any friends or family, pregnant, her body transforming into a version of itself she didn’t yet understand.

  She wished she could speak to Athena. Athena would know what to say, even if her comfort came laced with back-handed compliments and coated in expletives. Artemis had arrived with no autonomy, no real sway in any aspect of their lives. In order for their relationship to work, it was she who had to mould herself to Clive’s world, without asking him to adjust in the slightest. His money only added a further layer of dependency – not that he made her feel guilty when she asked for cash for groceries or whatever it was she needed.

  And yet, she had never fitted in back on the island either, had she? When she thought of it, she pictured the sun brushing against the path meandering behind her house, the sea glistening at the edge. The horizon filled with a familiar sky that had watched over so many traumas and done nothing to stop them. The truth was, she had never fitted in anywhere.

  Although that wasn’t strictly true. She had felt a sense of belonging, for a while, she and Clive hemmed in their own little world in that pocket of land just beyond the old village, during those long, intimate summers on the island, before anyone found out. They may not have known each other in the way that only time would allow, but she felt right with him, back then. Together, alone, she and Clive had made sense; she understood then how their disparate worlds folded into one another’s. But everything had changed so quickly. Once the circle opened up, everything had poured in – the friends, the new city – so that she felt like she might drown.

  ‘Artemis?’

  When she looked up, she saw Clive regarding her with an expression she couldn’t quite fathom.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, blushing, as though she had been caught out.

  ‘What are you sorry for? Is everything OK?’

  She smiled tightly. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Good,’ he replied, picking up her wine glass and knocking it back. ‘We better get a wriggle on; the guests will be here before we know it. You’ll need to make a
start on lunch.’

  Madeleine

  London, the day Anna dies

  Madeleine has been trying hard, in the hours since her meeting with Harry, to distract herself from the mental image of Gabriela, with remarkably little success. She hasn’t called to say she is on her way to Devon and Madeleine knows better than to ring her and risk raising an alarm. According to the plan Madeleine had conveyed in the restaurant, Gabriela was to go straight to her North London family home, spend the night there, then head to Richmond the following morning to collect the baby. From here she should instruct Tom to meet her in Devon with the children.

  When Madeleine pictures her friend now she still sees the old Gabriela, sharing gossip and fags in the street outside the offices at King Charles Street. Though it’s a terrible thing to think – and of course she would never say it – Gabriela was better before the kids. Some women blossom in motherhood, others wither. Maybe it’s simply a matter of confidence. If she was being kind, Madeleine could put it down to a lack of conviction in herself and her decisions that meant Gabriela was constantly questioning her plausibility as a parent. She cared too much what others thought, but more to the point she could never seem to enjoy it. She would never let herself recognise what she had, or what she could have had if she had given in to it a little.

  But this? She doesn’t deserve this. Not even after what she’s done.

  If she’s honest with herself, Madeleine resents her friend for never having confided in her. When Harry raised the question of how no one noticed what had been going on with Gabriela, Madeleine had felt defensive. Because she hadn’t noticed either, had she? Sure, she had felt something was off, but she had thought it was probably something to do with the drudgery of domestic life that Gabriela was forever complaining about. There were aspects of her friend’s existence that Madeleine simply hadn’t paid too much attention to. When Gabriela had said she planned to stay at home rather than find a new job after leaving the FCO, Madeleine had known it wouldn’t have been her choice. She had imagined it was Tom’s decision, or that being pushed out by their boss, Guy Emsworth, after she had rejected his sexual advances, had knocked her confidence so badly that she was struggling to find her mojo again. But equally it just wasn’t the sort of chat they had; their friendship was different, better than domestic small talk, Madeleine had thought at the time. Or maybe it was that she was wary of talking to Gabriela about family life. It grated on her how often she complained about the tedium of motherhood – Madeleine wouldn’t go so far as to claim motherhood was a sacred gift, but it was a choice. This wasn’t the Fifties; Gabriela had freedom to choose whether or not she wanted to have children. It wasn’t a choice everyone had the luxury of.

  Her mind moves to Harry. She knows he had simply been asking the questions he needed to ask – the ones she, too, would have posed in his position. But how well does she really know him? Enough to think that she has no reason to distrust him any more than anyone else that she could get to do the job. People are fallible. She relies upon this fact, and pays for it, in her line of work; that people are corruptible is a gift as well as a curse.

  There are few people Madeleine trusts entirely; and now with Gabriela, there is one fewer. At least, she reasons sardonically to herself, this latest unravelling proves that she is right to remain vigilant. So no, she doesn’t wholly trust Harry, but in this moment she needs someone, and for a job like this it has to be someone outside the agency. Vasiliev is too well-connected; there have been too many leaks over the years, too many evasions. Besides, Harry is a pro. Since their first meeting at an international conference on people trafficking years ago, which he was covering for a newspaper, they have worked together numerous times, always in an unofficial capacity – her offering him leads in return for favours, the sorts of transactions it is best to keep off paper. Harry has never failed to deliver, though admittedly what she has asked of him has never been anything approaching this scale.

  ‘You free?’ Sean appears holding two cups of coffee.

  ‘If one of those is for me then I might be. How’s it going?’

  He hands her the cup. ‘Pretty bloody good actually.’ He waits for a minute, taking a sip, enjoying the build-up to whatever it is he’s about to reveal. ‘I’ve just been having a chat with an old pal, MI6, thinks she might be able to give us some intel on this case.’

  ‘Nice,’ Madeleine replies, wondering what this has to do with her – she was only brought in to make contact with Gabriela and arrange the next steps in terms of her vanishing. The case itself is nothing to do with her. For a horrible moment she wonders if Sean is using it as a means to chat her up, but she discards the idea as quickly as it arises. She knows when a man is imagining he might be able to get into her knickers, and Sean isn’t one of them. You could say a lot about him, but at least he understands his own limitations.

  ‘Apparently one of the companies Vasiliev is involved with – TradeSmart, it’s a multi-billion-pound trading company run by this British guy, Clive Witherall – they were under surveillance for a while a few years back,’ he continues. ‘Something to do with a chemical spillage they were involved in over in Central Africa. The case was dropped mid-way through, but in the process they had human informants inside the house as well as inside his business, who managed to plant probes and also, I believe, cloned a computer drive. Tons of recordings, emails, you name it. It will take some digging but it looks like we might have some work to do.’

  ‘Right,’ Madeleine says.

  ‘She’s going to give me a call later today, and, well, because of your connection to Gabriela and the fact that another of the companies we’re watching appears to be a front for human trafficking …’

  ‘You want me to work with you on the case?’

  Sean smiles pleadingly. ‘What do you say?’

  Madeleine leans back in her chair, taking a sip from her cup. ‘I thought you’d never ask. But you might need to buy me something stronger than a coffee.’

  They head to Pico’s on the Embankment after work, casting their eyes around for anyone from the office, but there’s no one there apart from a couple of stragglers they don’t recognise.

  ‘So Felicity’s background is in fraud,’ Sean explains, once they are seated opposite each other, drinks in hand. ‘A few years ago, when she was with MI6, she was pulled onto this case involving three corporate criminals. The original reason for looking into them was that they were using offshore companies to commit fraud – all pretty standard stuff. But there was also particular interest in TradeSmart because of its apparent involvement in this chemical spillage in Central Africa. You remember hearing about it? Never made headlines as there wasn’t enough evidence, but there were rumours …’

  Madeleine shakes her head. It isn’t that surprising that she missed it; she’s spent so much of the past few years abroad, either in Eastern Europe or Asia. When she was here in London, she was head-down in various ongoing trafficking cases.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Sean continues, unperturbed. ‘Anyway, according to Felicity, it looked like there was a hell of a lot more going on in those shipments. One of the guys involved, an African by the name of Francisco Nguema, was using his shipping business as a means to trade arms.’ He takes a sip of his lager. ‘But then the investigation was suddenly pulled because it transpired that one of the men involved was FCO. They got rid of him in the end, falsified some claims of sexual harassment and sent him out to pasture.’

  Madeleine’s mind moves instantly to Guy Emsworth, her former FCO boss who had put so much pressure on both her and Gabriela that they had both eventually left, Madeleine for a career in law enforcement, Gabriela for—

  ‘Oh my God.’ She feels her heartbeat rise. ‘Did your friend tell you this man’s name?’

  Sean shakes his head. ‘Doesn’t really matter. The point is she was working with informants tracking everything that was happening in and out of the house of our new mate, Clive Witherall, up until that point, including the w
oman who looked after his son’s kids. Same as Popov and his housemaid. I tell you what, if I was up to some dodgy shit, I’d be a bit more careful choosing who I made part of the family.’

  Harry

  Plymouth, the day after Anna dies

  The car he collects, following Madeleine’s instruction, is an old VW Touran. The traffic is light and it takes just over three hours from London to the remote café, hidden behind a seemingly abandoned dairy farm, near Plymouth. The car park is empty other than a small Nissan and a Volvo estate, stationed several metres apart. As Harry pulls up beside the larger vehicle, he spots a woman seated at the picnic table in the forecourt with a baby dozing on her lap, the barely touched remains of two jacket potatoes curling on their plates in front of her.

  He recognises her instantly from the photo: the same dark curls and full mouth. From the hats and tinsel it must have been taken at a Christmas party.

  For a moment he wonders if she is alone with her youngest child but then he sees the man in the makeshift playground a few metres beyond, pushing a girl absent-mindedly back and forth on a plastic swing. The boy is climbing the steps to the freestanding slide, taking each tread with care as if scared the whole thing might collapse.

  Watching Harry warily as he pulls up, the woman sits straighter, supporting the baby’s head with a cupped hand. As he steps out of the car, she untucks her legs from the bench and stands.

  ‘Gabriela,’ he says and she nods, taking his extended hand with obvious caution.