The Ex-Wife Read online

  The Ex-Wife

  A nail-biting, gripping psychological thriller

  Jess Ryder

  Also by Jess Ryder

  The Ex-Wife

  The Good Sister

  Lie To Me

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part I

  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

  Part II

  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

  The Good Sister

  Jess’ Email Sign-Up

  A Letter from Jess

  Also by Jess Ryder

  Lie to Me

  Acknowledgements

  For my husband

  Prologue

  There’s an angel sitting at my bedside, her blonde hair spun in a halo of light. Heavenly music is playing above my right ear – a pattern of high-pitched bleeps. The air is warm and strangely scented. I am floating on a soft, white cloud of pain.

  She looks so beautiful, my angel. Her eyes are shining with joy. I don’t know who she is, but her features are familiar. I recognise her from some other place, some distant time – in the past, perhaps, or even the future.

  Could this be Emily?

  Emily.

  I say her name, but the sound doesn’t leave my head. My mouth is crusty and there’s an obstacle in my throat. In my dreams, I thought it was a snake thrusting its way down to my stomach. It’s not a snake, though, it’s a tube.

  She’s holding a hand in her lap – my hand, I suppose. It looks like a limp, dead thing, belonging to someone else. She squeezes it gently, then looks at me, waiting for me to squeeze back. I would if I could, my darling girl. I would tell you the whole story in squeezes if I could.

  ‘You’ve come back to us,’ Emily says. But she can’t be Emily, not unless I’ve been asleep so long she’s grown into a woman.

  The fierce light is blurring my vision. I blink several times and she leans forward, her face dissolving into tears. Two watery circles and a slash of smiling pink are all I can make out. She feels like she is part of me. Like we’re the same flesh.

  Take out the tube, please, please, take out the tube. But my words have no voice.

  She strokes my forehead with her free hand, pushing back a few stray hairs. How long has she sat here, wasting her precious life, waiting and hoping that one day I might wake up? Have I woken up, or is this another dream?

  My angel bends her head towards me. I can feel her sweet breath on my neck as she whispers into my ear.

  ‘What did they do to you?’ she says.

  Part I

  1

  Now

  Anna

  * * *

  Usually I walk home the pretty way, crossing the river by the iron bridge and skirting what’s known as the Rec, several large fields divided into sports pitches. But there’s a music festival going on this weekend and my route has been cut off by temporary fencing and plastic tape, the sort you see at crime scenes. Lingering by the paling, I watch the kids queuing up to collect their wristbands. A hippy couple – colourful tattoos and matted dreadlocks – are waiting with a little girl in a pushchair piled high with camping equipment.

  Time to go home – not that it feels like home yet. Time to go back, anyway.

  There’s no way across the fields, so I’ll have to retrace my steps over the bridge and take the road instead. But when I get there, it’s closed – festival traffic only. A steward in a high-vis waistcoat tells me I’ll have to go ‘round the back’. The back of what? I wonder.

  Unlike most of the people who live here, I wasn’t born in this town. I’ve only been here for a few months, restricting my movements to the walk to and from work and the bus ride to the big supermarket near the rugby club. Margaret in Finance has promised to take me to a match when the season starts up again. Unfortunately I can’t stand rugby, or any kind of sport for that matter, but Margaret’s taken me under her wing and it’s going to be hard to refuse. I need to start making some new friends, preferably closer to my own age, but I’m not ready yet.

  ‘Round the back’ seems to mean via the industrial estate – a maze of flat-roofed units, most of them for rent, with grilles at the windows and ragged grass growing through their tarmac frontages. Metal fences line the dismal streets, rusty padlocks clustering at the gates. I pass security cameras, Beware of the Dogs signs and laminated notices boasting twenty-four-hour patrols. All lies. The units are deserted and there’s nothing left to steal.

  As if on cue, a man walking a vicious-looking dog comes around the corner, heading my way. He looks straight ahead, but the animal strains at the leash to give me a good sniff as we pass each other. I turn the corner and almost collide with a group of teenagers sitting on a low wall with their legs outstretched. A couple of them are circling the road on small-wheeled bikes, hands cocky at their sides, their skinny bodies draped in football shirts. They follow me for a few yards, then race back to their mates.

  I shouldn’t have come this way. Nobody else has. Locals clearly know about the industrial estate and give it a wide berth.

  The dull thud of a bassline rises on the yeasty air – the first act has started playing, by the sounds of it. I walk on in time to the beat, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, letting the rhythm envelop me. Not the sort of music I like to dance to – too heavy and insistent – but it makes me feel less alone. Comforts me.

  Where am I exactly, in relation to my flat? I take out my phone and search for my location on the map. I am a lonely arrow among blank grey squares and nameless streets, the blue line of the river the only recognisable feature. Hmm … Next left, then follow the road round the bend …

  The smell from the breweries is growing stronger, even though most of them are north of the town centre and I’m walking south. It depends on the way the wind’s blowing, or so they say. Sometimes I can smell the yeast in my hair, my clothes, in the dark of my nostrils. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll soon get used to it,’ my boss said when I remarked on it at the interview. That’s how I knew I’d got the job.

  It’s not a bad town. I could have landed somewhere a lot worse. There’s a small shopping centre with the usual chains, a cinema, a brewing museum and an arts centre converted from an old bottling plant. I picked up an events brochure the other day and saw that they ran classes – ceramics, jewellery making, life drawing, t’ai chi, Zumba. The usual stuff, and a lot cheaper than I’m used to. I ought to give one or two a try. I can’t stay in the flat every evening on my own, I’ll go mad.

  Correction. I’m already mad. It’s my new normal. I’m supposed to be ‘learning to love myself’ again, but it feels impossible.

  As the road curves round, a low single-storey building comes into view. It’s painted red, white and blue, with
a battered sign above the metal-shuttered door: Morton Mechanics – MOT Wile-U-Wait. A black BMW with tinted windows is idling outside; the passenger door is open, and I can see a pair of bare legs hanging over the edge of the seat. White, hairless calves. Girl’s legs. Yellow flip-flops dangling from her dirty-soled feet. She’s lying on her stomach and it looks like she’s got her head in the driver’s lap.

  Aggressive grime is blaring out of the car’s sound system, drowning out the comforting beat of the concert, claiming all the available airspace. Another girl, wearing baggy combat-style trousers and a parka, is sitting on the ground, her back against the garage door. She’s swigging a can of Special Brew and toking on a joint; dressed for winter, even though it’s late June. Two men are close by, standing in a huddle facing the wall, heads bent over something. One of them is tall and heroin-thin, wearing loose jogging bottoms and a baggy vest. The other is shorter and looks better fed – hair in rats’ tails, torn jeans hanging off his backside, his jacket filthy with mud and splashes of paint. The whole picture comes into focus. So this is where you come if you want to score in the pleasant market town of Morton on Trent.

  Don’t pause. Don’t stare. Move on but don’t run. Just look ahead and walk past at an even pace.

  As I approach the garage, the girl sitting on the ground barks something and the men turn around. Their eyes immediately settle on my phone, like flies on jam. I’m stupidly still holding it, trying to follow the map – it’s too late to put it away now. The shorter one stays back, shrinking into the shadows and turning his face to the wall, but the tall one lurches forward.

  ‘Oi!’ he shouts. ‘Oi! You! What you doin’?’ He stands in my way, blocking the pavement, his shaved pinhead nodding, hands on scrawny hips.

  ‘Lost, are ya?’ the girl in the parka cackles, getting to her feet and tottering over.

  My mouth goes dry, my knees are wobbling. I step to my right, but he jumps in front of me, so I go left and he does the same. My way across the road is blocked by the parked BMW, and there’s no point in turning around and running. I’m wearing my work heels, and even though he’s a junkie, he’d still be able to catch me. Then there’s the pissed girl, and the skulking guy, not to mention the prostrate flip-flop wearer and whoever else is in the car. I don’t stand a chance.

  He holds out his hand. ‘Come on. Make it easy.’

  I know I should just hand everything over. The phone, my bag, my purse with the credit cards and fifty pounds in cash and, most important of all, that precious photo I’ll never replace. A voice inside me is pleading, Don’t protest, don’t fight, just let him have the lot. But I can’t. I just can’t.

  ‘It’s not fucking worth it,’ the other guy shouts from the shadows. ‘She’s seen your face, tosser.’

  I gasp, recoiling as if something’s just hit me hard in the chest.

  That voice.

  I’d know it anywhere.

  But it can’t be him. Impossible. It’s just my brain tricking me. The stress of the moment bringing everything back, mixing the past with the present. It’s a coincidence, that’s all. There’s no way it can possibly be him.

  ‘It’s the festival, right?’ the voice calls out again. ‘Pigs swarming all over the fucking place, man.’

  I should be terrified, but my senses are distracted. It’s the same slight rasp in the back of his throat. Same intonation. Same slow rhythm. I peer into the shadows, but all I can see is the back of his head. No … the hair’s too long, he’d never let it get that filthy. And his clothes are disgusting. It can’t be him. No way would he have sunk that low.

  I suck in my cheeks to find enough saliva to speak. ‘I don’t want any trouble. Just let me walk on, and I promise I won’t go to the police.’

  The familiar voice pipes up again. ‘Let her go, man.’

  The pinhead guy steps aside grudgingly. ‘Go on, then. Fuck off.’

  I walk past him with my head held high. I’m shaking violently, but I keep my balance and don’t speed up, even though I’m desperate to kick off my shoes and run.

  Nobody follows me. As I put space between myself and the garage, the music from the car fades and the sounds of the concert take over again. Boom, boom, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4. I walk for another couple of hundred metres, then turn the corner.

  The real world comes back into focus and normality resumes. I emerge from the industrial estate and cross at the traffic lights. To my left is a roundabout I recognise, its centre decked with a gaudy display of flowers for Morton in Bloom. Thank God, I’m only a quarter of a mile from the house.

  I turn onto Ashby Lane, climb the gentle hill, pass the short parade of little shops and then take the third street on the right.

  Mine is the ground-floor flat in the middle of the terrace. The house is gloomy and meanly proportioned; I have two narrow rooms and a tiny bathroom. Nobody seems to live above me – at least I’ve never met anyone, or heard them moving about. Mail arrives every day addressed to a dozen different people, and I put it in a pile on the bottom stair.

  When I moved in nearly two months ago, the front door of my flat only had a simple Yale lock. I had a deadlock added and two bolts put on the inside. I pull them across, then draw the curtains at the windows, front and back. My stomach is too full of acid to eat, so I make myself a mug of peppermint tea and take it to bed.

  That was close. If that other guy hadn’t spoken up, who knows what might have happened. I take the photo out of my purse and kiss it. Tuck it under my pillow. No more taking it to work, no more secret glances in the toilet cubicle at lunchtime. It can live here from now on, where it’s safe.

  The voice of my rescuer keeps replaying in my head. I mentally place a graph of his voice pattern against the one I remember. Are they really a match, or am I imagining it? Thinking about it, that guy looked thinner, and he was a junkie, a homeless person. If only I’d managed a proper look at his face, it would have put my fears to rest.

  Was he just being kind, or did he recognise me? Maybe he already knew I was here and had come looking for me. I shove the thought brutally to one side. Get real. That makes no sense. Nobody knows where I am. I’m two hundred miles away from where it all happened. Besides, if it was him and he did recognise me, he’d have been egging his mate on, not trying to save my skin.

  So it wasn’t him, okay? I bang my mug on the bedside table and pick up my bedtime novel, my fingers hesitating at the folded-down corner of a page.

  But what if it was?

  2

  Then

  Natasha

  * * *

  I always knew when he was speaking to her, even if I hadn’t heard the ringtone he reserved for her calls. It was the way he cradled the phone against his cheek, containing her voice so that I didn’t have to listen. And the way he never engaged, not even with an ‘okay’ or ‘hmm’. Not that she ever noticed. He could have stuck the phone under the cushion, finished his meal, washed up and made a cup of coffee and she’d have been none the wiser. On and on she went, hardly pausing for breath. She was always interrupting our evenings. I understood why, and to be honest, I didn’t blame her. I’m sure I would have been the same if our places had been swapped. But once, just once, I wished that Nick would say, I can’t talk right now, I’m in the middle of eating, or I’m watching a film, or even just, I’m really sorry, Jen, but I’m spending the evening with my wife.

  I took his half-eaten meal back to the kitchen. The oven was still warm, so I popped his plate back in and closed the door. I lingered for a few moments, listening to the silence from the sitting room and wondering what it was she wanted this time. Was it help with some domestic crisis, or did she just need to hear his voice? It was Friday evening and she was obviously on her own, probably halfway down a bottle of gin, too. We’d been here more times than I could remember, and the situation wasn’t getting any better. As far as Jen was concerned, time was not the great healer it was cracked up to be.

  The conversation was still going on, so I tiptoed upstairs an
d gently pushed open the door to Emily’s bedroom. She was fast asleep, her face dappled with plastic snowflakes as her night light whirred above her head. Her strawberry-blonde hair was sticking to her sweaty pink cheeks, her arms clasped tightly, as always, around Gemma Giraffe. I bent down to kiss her forehead, inhaling the smell of no-tangles baby shampoo. She was my first and only, my dearest treasure. Life without her was unimaginable. When I thought of the friends who’d turned their back on me, of the rift with my mother, the disapproval of Nick’s family, the endless issues with Jen – when, let’s face it, I started to have regrets – I always thought of Emily. Whatever price I have to pay, I told myself, she will always be worth it.

  She let out a small cry, then settled back into her dreams. ‘Love you,’ I whispered, before creeping out, squeezing the door shut.

  To my surprise, the phone call had already come to an end and Nick was in the kitchen, trying to remove his plate from the oven without mitts. He cursed as he bounced it on the granite worktop and sucked his burning fingers.