The Other Woman’s House by Sophie Hannah Read Free Book Online Page A

giving in to my paranoia: I’ve chosen to torment myself with imaginary problems. He is sane and normal, therefore he sleeps well.
    How can I know him well enough to read his thoughts, and, at the same time, fear that I don’t know him at all? If I looked at an X-ray of his personality, would I see only the bits I know are there – his conviction that tea tastes better from a teapot and if you put the milk into the cup first, his ambition and perfectionism, his surreal sense of humour – or would there be an unfamiliar black mass at the centre, malignant and terrifying?
    â€˜Why a property website, and why Cambridge?’ Sam K asks me. ‘Are you thinking of moving there?’
    â€˜Definitely not,’ says Kit with feeling. ‘We’ve only just put the finishing touches to this place, six years after buying it. I want to spend at least that long enjoying it. I’ve told Connie: if we have a baby in the next six years, it’ll have to bed down in a filing cabinet drawer.’ He grins and reaches for a biscuit. ‘I didn’t do all that work only to sell up and let someone else get the benefit. Plus we run a business that’s based here, and Connie got a bit carried away with the headed stationery, sowe can’t move until we’ve written at least another four thousand letters.’
    I know what’s going to happen before it happens: Sam K is going to ask about Nulli. Kit will answer at length; it’s impossible to explain our work quickly, and my husband is nothing if not a lover of detail. I will have to wait to talk about the dead woman.
    Connie got a bit carried away.
    Did he say that deliberately, to plant the idea in Sam K’s mind that I’m an easily-carried-away sort of person? Someone who orders six times more headed notepaper than she needs might also hallucinate a dead body lying in a pool of blood.
    I listen as Kit describes our work. For the past three years, Nulli’s twenty-odd full-time staff have been working for the London Allied Capital banking group. The US government is in the process of prosecuting the group, which, like many UK banks, has a long history of breaking American rules about dealing with sponsors of terrorism, and unwittingly allowing blacklisted people and companies to carry out wire-transfer transactions in the US in dollars. London Allied Capital is currently bending over backwards to right the wrong, ingratiate itself with OFAC, the American office of foreign asset control, and minimise the eventual damage, which will almost certainly be a multi-million-dollar fine. Nulli was taken on to build data-filtering systems that will enable the bank to unearth all the questionable transactions that lie hidden in its history, so that it can come clean to the US Department of Justice.
    Like everyone Kit tells, Sam K looks impressed and confused in equal parts. ‘So do you have a base in London, then?’ he asks. ‘Or do you commute?’
    â€˜Connie’s based here, I’m half and half,’ says Kit. ‘I rent aflat in Limehouse – a box with a bed in it, basically. As far as I’m concerned, I only have one home, and that’s Melrose Cottage.’ He glances at me as he says this. Does he expect a round of applause?
    â€˜I can see that a small flat in London would have a job competing with this place.’ Sam K looks around our lounge. ‘It’s got bags of character.’ He turns to study the framed print on the wall behind him – a photograph of King’s College Chapel, with a laughing girl sitting on the steps. Does he know he’s looking at a picture of Cambridge? If he does, he says nothing.
    The print was a present from Kit and I’ve always hated it. On the mount, at the bottom, someone has written ‘4/100’. ‘That’s not a very good mark,’ I said when Kit first gave it to me. ‘Four per cent.’
    He laughed. ‘It’s the