The Third Wife by Lisa Jewell Read Free Book Online

smiled.
    ‘But’, she said, curling creamy pasta around her fork, ‘if it’s just the mystery you’re pursuing and you haven’t got any dirty-old-man intentions towards this woman, I’d def be up for helping you to track her down.’
    ‘Would you?’
    ‘Yeah. Love a good mystery.’ She turned on the phone again and used the side of her thumb to scroll through the messages while she deposited a forkful of pasta into her mouth with the other hand. ‘Here. This one.’ She turned the phone towards him. ‘She said she was coming from a kick-boxing class in Highgate. I could do some research into kick-boxing classes. If you like?’
    ‘That would be great, thanks, Cat.’
    ‘No probs.’ She smiled at him. ‘But no romance, Dad. No more bloody wives. Please.’
    Adrian walked back to his office after lunch. He took the long route through the back streets of Farringdon, noticing for the first time that it was properly spring, that the restaurants had put their tables out on to the pavements and opened out their windows, that people were wearing sunglasses and girls had on open shoes. He felt the inside pocket of his jacket for last year’s sunglasses. They weren’t there. He had no idea where they might be. He could not remember if he’d even worn sunglasses last summer. He couldn’t remember last summer at all.
    A young woman walked past with a tiny baby in a sling. The baby was fast asleep, its head flopped at ninety degrees. He smiled at the baby. Then he smiled at the mother. She smiled back at him and Adrian went on his way. Something was shifting inside him. Something that had been lodged in his gut for months. It was the grief. It was starting to melt around the edges, like a tub of frozen ice cream left on the counter, the mass of it still there, hard and cold, but almost soft enough to be able to scoop it out without bending a spoon.

Seven
    ‘I think that woman came to see me when I was skating.’
    Adrian turned from the hob where he was heating tomato soup and looked at Pearl. ‘What woman?’
    ‘That woman we saw on my birthday. Jane.’
    Adrian felt his colour rise a little at the mention of her. ‘Hmm,’ he said, turning down the heat as the soup started to boil.
    ‘I knew you wouldn’t believe me.’
    He gave the soup one last stir and turned to face her. ‘I didn’t say I didn’t believe you.’
    ‘You said “hmm”.’
    ‘I just meant, when? How? I mean, are you sure?’
    Pearl scratched at the wood of the tabletop with her fingernails. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not sure. She was just sitting there, in the bleachers at Ally Pally, and it was like she was watching me. And I turned round and when I looked back again she was gone. And then we saw that woman, on my birthday, and I realised that it was the same woman. From Ally Pally.’ She stopped and looked at Adrian anxiously.
    Adrian pulled out a chair and sat down opposite his daughter. ‘How sure are you?’
    ‘I don’t know. About seventy-five per cent sure. Roughly.’
    He nodded.
    ‘Do you believe me?’
    ‘I don’t know. Why are you only bringing this up now?’
    ‘Cat told me about the phone. That’s what made me think I wasn’t being mad and that I could tell you.’ She looked at him with those frosty blue eyes of hers, challenging him to disagree with her. ‘Why is she following us about?’
    ‘She’s not following us about. She’s disappeared.’
    ‘OK, then why
was
she following us about?’
    ‘I don’t think she was …’
    ‘So’ – she looked at him pityingly and counted points off on her fingers – ‘first, she turns up here to look at a cat she doesn’t want,
twice
. Second, she’s watching me at skate training and third, she weirdly just
happens
to be there the night of my birthday dinner—’
    ‘Coincidence.’
    ‘
Not
coincidence, Dad. It’s written on the whiteboard.’
    Adrian half opened his mouth to respond and then closed it again. He got to his feet and walked into the hallway.