Sally saw the woman approaching from a block away. Tall and elegantly dressed, with a purposeful walk and an erect, almost regal bearing, this was no local Tuckahoe housewife out for a Sunday-morning stroll. The woman slowed as she approached Sally’s fence, obviously looking for something.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for a Mrs. Sally Hamlin.”
It was the British accent that gave it away. Sally knew at once who the glamorous stranger must be. Brushing the soil off her pants, she stood up and proffered her hand.
“You found her. I’m Sally Hamlin. You’d better come in, Mrs. De Vere.”
The house was as neat as a pin. Alexia took off her jacket and hung it carefully on the back of a kitchen chair while Sally made them coffee. Pictures of Jennifer were everywhere, on the refrigerator, the bookshelves, even perched on top of the television set in the living room. There were none of Billy.
Sally sat down, and Alexia immediately noticed the deep grooves etched around her eyes. She was an attractive woman, perhaps a decade younger than Alexia herself, with carefully dyed chestnut-brown hair and a trim, girlish figure. But grief had taken its toll on Sally Hamlin’s face.
“You’ve come about Billy, I suppose,” Sally said. “I heard he’d been bothering you and your family in England, before he died. I’m sorry about that.”
“There’s nothing to apologize for, believe me.”
“He used to talk about you all the time. Alexia De Vere this, Alexia De Vere that. He was convinced he knew you. That the two of you were friends. I think he had you confused with an old girlfriend or something. But he was so ill.”
Alexia thought, So she doesn’t know the truth. She doesn’t know my past. Billy protected me right to the end. Protected both of us.
“I did see your husband briefly,” she said. “When he was in London.”
“Ex-husband,” Sally corrected her. “Billy and I divorced a long time ago.”
“And that is why I’m here, in a way. He mentioned something to me then about your daughter. I got the sense that he felt she might have been in danger. That somebody might have been trying to hurt her.”
At the mention of Jennifer, Sally Hamlin visibly shrank in her seat, her shoulders slumping. The pain was clearly still desperately raw.
“I’m afraid I didn’t take it seriously at the time,” said Alexia. “But after I heard about what happened to Jennifer, I . . . well, I wondered if I could have done more. It played on my mind.”
Sally Hamlin looked surprised. “Don’t take this the wrong way. I mean, it’s very kind of you to care and all. But I don’t understand why my family’s troubles would seem important to you. You didn’t even know Billy.”
“No,” Alexia lied, “I didn’t. But my encounter with him stuck in my mind. I’m retired from politics now—I’ve had some family problems of my own—so I had time to follow it up.”
Sally nodded. Her mind had already drifted away, to her daughter and the awful nightmare that had overtaken her.
“If it’s not too painful,” Alexia prodded gently, “perhaps you could tell me a bit more about Jennifer?”
“Of course.”
Once Sally started talking, she couldn’t stop. She told Alexia everything, from the story of Jennifer’s birth to the divorce and how it had affected Jenny, to her daughter’s happy relationship with Luca Minotti. She also spoke about the special bond that Jennifer had shared with her father. Despite the obvious problems posed by Billy’s schizophrenia, it struck Alexia that his ex-wife still spoke of him with sincere warmth and affection.
Thank God he married someone kind and selfless like Sally, and not someone selfish and ambitious like me. I hope they were happy, for a while at least. Billy deserved that.
When she finally ran out of words, Sally went upstairs and returned with a box file of Billy’s old papers and photographs. “For what it’s worth. It’s mostly business stuff, and I highly doubt it has any bearing on Jennifer’s murder. But it’s all I have.”
Alexia took the file. “Thank you.”
“I think Billy’s real psychotic break happened when Milo took off,” said Sally. “Milo Bates was his best friend. His only real friend, other than me. The divorce wasn’t easy on Billy, but Milo leaving the way he did, abandoning Billy to deal with the debts and the business collapsing on his own? That crushed him. That was when the voices started, and the paranoia. He developed these awful morbid fantasies.”
“What sort of fantasies?”
Sally shook her head. “Oh, it was crazy. At first he talked about Milo being ‘taken.’ Abducted, you know. He couldn’t accept the fact that Milo had left deliberately. Then it was that Milo had been killed. Eventually Billy started saying that he’d been abducted, that he’d actually witnessed Milo being murdered. The fantasy kept getting bigger and more elaborate. It was awful.”
“Did he ever say who he thought had taken Milo?”
Sally smiled. “Oh yes. ‘The voice.’ ”
“I’m sorry?”
“The voice. The voice was to blame for everything. We all knew it was in his head, of course, but to Billy it was totally real, as real as you or me. The minute he came off his antipsychotic drugs, boom: the voice was back. It started right around the time that Milo left town and it pretty much never stopped. He’d call the cops to tell them the voice was on the phone. He complained constantly about threatening calls.”
“But he never saw this person. Only heard them?”
“That’s right. Auditory hallucinations are very common with schizophrenics.”
“Did he tell you what it sounded like?”
Sally looked Alexia in the eye. “Like a robot. Like a machine. Synthesized.”
The hairs on Alexia’s forearms stood on end, like a thousand tiny soldiers called to attention. Her mind jumped back to another phone call. One she’d received herself two years ago, back home in Cheyne Walk. She remembered the call as if it were yesterday. The sinister, synthesized voice:
“The day is coming. The day when the Lord’s anger will be poured out. Because you have sinned against the Lord, I will make you as helpless as a blind man searching for a path.”
Her throat felt dry. “Did he ever say anything about the voice using religious language? Fire and brimstone, that sort of thing?”
Sally’s eyes widened. “Yes! That’s amazing. How did you know that?”
Alexia wasn’t sure how she made it back to her rental car. Climbing into the driver’s seat, she sat motionless, staring straight ahead.
The voice wasn’t in Billy’s head.
It was real.
It called me too.
What else had been real? Milo Bates’s murder? Had Billy really been forced to watch his friend die, like he told the police? And what about the threats to his daughter?
“Was that what you were you trying to tell me, Billy?” Alexia said aloud, her cracking voice echoing round the empty car. “Why didn’t I listen?”
She must find out who “the voice” really was. Not just for Billy and Jennifer Hamlin’s sake, but for her own.
Because whoever it is, they’re not done yet.
They’re coming after me too.
Chapter Thirty-six
Roxie De Vere looked out of the French doors that led from her room onto the gardens and took a deep, calming breath. There were few places more beautiful than Somerset in springtime. The gardens at Fairmont House, the stately-home-turned-exclusive-rehab where Roxie was currently living, were some of the most exquisite in the county. One couldn’t help but be uplifted by the blossom-laden buddleia bushes, smothered in butterflies, or the peaceful rose garden with its formal box hedges and gently winding gravel paths. There was a lake with a man-made island and folly in the middle, across which “guests” (Fairmont House wasn’t crass enough to have patients) could row for picnics or meditation or sunrise yoga sessions. All in all it was a bit like living in an illustration from a Jane Austen novel: tranquil, idyllic, and utterly unreal.
Opening the doors, Roxie allowed the warm air to flood her room and turned the radio to Classic FM. Today for the first time, she would permit a tiny slice of the outside world to intrude upon her safe cocoon. Summer Meyer was coming to visit her, the first friend Roxie had agreed to see in almost six months. The prospect was both exciting and nerve-racking.
“I feel like an Indian bride about to meet my arranged-marriage husband for the first time,” Roxie told her therapist, Dr. Woods, a gentle, professorial Canadian in his sixties who’d inevitably become something of a father figure. “The stakes seem so high.”
“They’re only as high as you let them be,” Dr. Woods reassured her. “Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. It’s tea with a friend, that’s all. You can do that, Roxanne.”
Roxie had thought she could do it. But now that Summer was actually coming, would be here any moment in fact, she felt all her old nervousness returning.