The Trapped Wife: An absolutely gripping psychological thriller with a mind-blowing twist Read online

  The Trapped Wife

  An absolutely gripping psychological thriller with a mind-blowing twist

  Samantha Hayes

  Books by Samantha Hayes

  The Trapped Wife

  Single Mother

  The Happy Couple

  Date Night

  The Liar’s Wife

  Tell Me A Secret

  The Reunion

  Available in Audio

  Single Mother (Available in the UK and the US)

  The Happy Couple (Available in the UK and the US)

  Date Night (Available in the UK and the US)

  The Liar’s Wife (Available in the UK and the US)

  Tell Me A Secret (Available in the UK and the US)

  The Reunion (Available in the UK and the US)

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. Now

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  8. Then

  9. Now

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  13. Then

  14. Now

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  19. Then

  20. Now

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  25. Then

  26. Now

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  32. Then

  33. Now

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  37. Then

  38. Now

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  44. Then

  Epilogue

  Date Night

  Hear More From Samantha

  Books by Samantha Hayes

  A Letter from Samantha Hayes

  Single Mother

  The Happy Couple

  The Liar’s Wife

  Tell Me A Secret

  The Reunion

  Acknowledgements

  *

  For my family with love…

  The whole amazing lot of you

  Prologue

  Then

  The boy sits on the tarmac, knees drawn up to his chin, his feet crammed into scuffed black school shoes as he stares at the ground between them. Across the playground he hears the whoops and cries of the other kids at break time – charging about inanely as they shriek and scream in a steam-releasing chorus.

  He doesn’t need to let off steam. What a waste that would be. He likes to let it build up, to simmer inside until he feels his brain swell and his nerves jump. Nothing gives him more pleasure than feeling the twist in his guts, the pressure behind his eyes as his body builds and tenses. Why, he’s not sure, but he knows, as certain as those two insects scuttling between his feet, that he’s not going to play tag or football or swap trading cards like the others. That’s for babies. And he’s not a baby. No way.

  He hates this school; wants to burn it down. The other kids have barely spoken to him since he started a few weeks ago. Things were fine when it was just him and his mum at their old place, their old life, without Griff or his new baby sister.

  He wipes the back of his hand under one eye. Something is making it water, making his vision blurry as he stares at the iridescent beetle waddling one way then back the other. He puts out a grubby finger, stopping the bug in his tracks, wanting it to meet the ladybird. He doesn’t know if beetles eat ladybirds for lunch, but he hopes so.

  A thud resonates through his head as a football hits the wall next to him. He hates that he flinches – he can’t help it – and also doesn’t like that the fat kid from two classes above him lumbers over to fetch the ball, panting, sweating through his pale-blue shirt. His tie is knotted short, his trousers hanging low on bulging hips.

  ‘Idiot,’ the older kid spits down at him, laughing. Picking up the ball, he draws back his foot as if he’s about to launch it at his thigh but thinks better of it at the sound of the teacher’s voice. Instead, the big kid flobs on the ground, narrowly missing him, before striding off with the ball tucked under his arm.

  Fat fucker, the boy yells back in his head, imagining his foot sticking out to trip the other kid up, his nose bloody when he hits the ground, everyone laughing at him. But that’s not real life, not how it goes for him. He wipes his eye again as the feeling grows. Steam. More steam building as he turns his attention back to the insects.

  Not real life. Not yet, he thinks, fighting the tears, clamping his teeth together.

  ‘Go on, don’t be afraid,’ he whispers to the ladybird as she spreads her wings, showing a petticoat of wonder beneath her black and red coat. He had no idea. Didn’t realise she had so many delicate layers – each one vulnerable and fragile. Not like the beetle, he thinks, marvelling at the shiny green and blue of his armour plating, making him appear metallic. Invincible – just how he wants to be.

  He uses a twig to coax his new pets closer together. They’re a good distraction from his thoughts – the thoughts that pound the inside of his head from the moment he wakes up until the moment he struggles for sleep, trying to block out the noises coming from his mum and Griff’s room.

  ‘Maybe you’ll be my friends,’ he says under his breath, rummaging in his pocket in case that old Tic Tac container is still there to put them in. ‘’Cos I haven’t got no others,’ he whispers, his shoulders slumping forward.

  Something in his eye again.

  And that’s when he’s aware of a shadow – a presence looming over him, blocking out the sun from his private corner of the playground. He sees two tatty trainers on the ground in front of him, the grimy laces thickly knotted with no hope of ever being undone, and the once-white plastic a muddy brown. Hanging down over the trainers are grey school trousers, their hems frayed and crusted with mud.

  Before he knows what’s happening, one of the feet lifts up and stamps down hard on the tarmac where the insects have just met. He feels the involuntary gasp in his throat, shuddering as his nerves fire jolts through his body. He’s never felt pressure like it.

  Then the foot lifts up again and he can hardly believe that the flattened ladybird and beetle had so much stuff inside them. So much ugly stuff. It feels as if his brain is letting off fireworks.

  Slowly, his eyes track up the skinny legs – a hole in one of the knees exposing grazed and scabby skin beneath. One side of the boy’s pale-blue school shirt hangs untucked from the waistband, a button missing, and two arms dangle within a navy-blue padded anorak with the stuffing coming out of one elbow.

  The face belonging to the bug-squasher is smaller and paler than he’d imagined and, when their eyes meet, the feeling inside him is unlike anything he’s ever experienced before. It’s like a thousand happy playtimes all rolled into one. He feels like he might explode. A release.

  And then, as he stares up in awe, the boy above him smiles. Slowly at first but his own mouth soon follows suit, returning the grin as his cracked lips stretch wide – each of them unaware of what is yet to come.

  One

  Now

  Jen

  I stare at the pregnancy test strip, waiting for the results. My cheek
s still smart from the dank February air outside, even though it’s warm in my office. Too warm, I think, making a mental note to ask Peggy to turn the heating down. I glance at my watch. Fifteen minutes until clinic starts – my first day back at work since… since the accident six weeks ago. Since I lost Jeremy, my husband. And only three minutes to find out what the rest of my life holds.

  My hands are shaking, so I close my eyes and take a few deep breaths. It does little to ease the ache in my heart, the fear flowing through my veins. I miss him so much.

  Somehow, I have to pull myself together, get a grip, focus and block out everything churning inside me – at least while I’m at the surgery. Half a dozen patients were already queuing up outside when I arrived, some of them greeting me, offering their condolences, though I didn’t stop to talk – just nodding a small smile as I rushed past. Peggy will unlock the doors on the dot of eight thirty, allowing them all to file in, wait their turn for their allotted ten minutes with me or one of the other GPs here at Waverly Medical Practice.

  A precisely planned day lies ahead, filled with patients, meetings, reviewing test results, phone calls and occasionally a home visit, because I refuse to give them up entirely. Waverly is a community practice and our patients rely on us – on me – and our personal service, the relationships we’ve built through generations of families. Though, try as we might to run a tight ship, nothing ever goes to plan. Life gets in the way. Besides, I couldn’t stay off work any longer. I was drowning in the whirlpool of my own thoughts, bubbling under my grief just sitting at home alone. Kieran has already gone back to school, only missing the first week of term after the Christmas holidays – needing his friends, routine, some kind of normality. And now it’s time for me to do the same. Get back into some kind of life again. A life that will now always have a hole carved in it.

  I place the test strip down on my desk next to the sample I took on my way in, having dashed into the toilets without any of our three receptionists noticing me as I arrived. After I’d finished throwing up, I’d filled the little container and gone straight to my office with my head down. Apart from a vase of fresh flowers on the windowsill and a ‘thinking of you’ card from my colleagues (and the room having been cleaned), everything is just as I’d left it the day before New Year’s Eve – a time capsule from when my life was normal. When I’d forced it to be normal, even though I’d had my suspicions it wasn’t.

  ‘Please, please, please,’ I whisper, biting my lip and watching the liquid seep slowly up the strip, creeping ever closer to the control line, and then onwards to the second marker. ‘Human chorionic gonadotrophin,’ I say, unwinding the pale-blue scarf from around my neck, not taking my eyes off the strip. Three words with the power to turn a night of… of… I shake my head, shuddering and daring to take my eyes off the strip as I slip off my overcoat, hanging it and my scarf on the back of the door. Into a terrible mistake, I think, staring down at the test strip again.

  Another minute to go.

  None of this seems real.

  The phone on my desk rings.

  ‘Welcome back, Dr Miller,’ Peggy says through a swallow. She always brings breakfast in to work. The staff have been kind and understanding since it happened – not least Tim Blake, my fellow partner at Waverly. ‘Dr Blake wants to know if you can change the partners’ meeting to three o’clock instead of two.’

  ‘Change the meeting…?’ I say, distracted, not taking my eyes off the strip. If I could change anything right now, it would be that one stupid, reckless night a couple of months ago – a night I can barely even remember. Barely remember except when I wake from the terror-filled dreams, sweat pouring off me, fragments of it still stuck behind my eyelids – a bar, alcohol, a man. A warm hand on my shoulder – breaking through a psychological barrier that I’d convinced myself needed breaking. Payback. How could I have been so stupid, so reckless?

  Except I’m neither of those things; they’re so very far from who I am. And I didn’t want revenge, either. I would never have done anything to hurt Jeremy on purpose, to betray him – not even taking into account what I’d suspected about him for some time. But then how is this even possible, I think, still staring at the test strip?

  My head is filled with missing time, a feeling that something’s not right, a deep sense of fear about what happened that night. And whatever it is, I know I can’t tell a soul.

  ‘You’re not thinking ahead,’ I hear Jeremy say, the memory of his voice soothing as I picture him leaning over the chequerboard, a cut-glass tumbler of whisky in one hand, the fire crackling beside us as he waits patiently for me to make my move. ‘See the game as if you were me, as if you were in my shoes…’

  Then I’d be dead, I think, only realising I’ve whispered it out loud when Peggy says, ‘Sorry? You OK, Jen?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m fine,’ I reply, touching my head. I blink several times, trying to refocus on the strip. It’s as though a camera flash has gone off in my face, and the residual image is in stark negative. My mouth hangs open.

  ‘The meeting?’ Peggy repeats.

  Bodies squashed close, rounds of shots, more wine, laughter, bright lights, loud music – the thud of the bass hammering my skull. A face close… a man’s face, his hand in the small of my back…

  I suck in a breath, closing my eyes. ‘Yes, yes, that’s fine, Peggy. Move the meeting,’ I say before quickly hanging up.

  When I open my eyes again, I look at the strip.

  Two blue lines.

  I blink hard. Still two lines.

  Pregnant.

  Slowly, I pick it up, struggling to convince myself it’s even real as I hold it.

  ‘Christ,’ I whisper, my hand shaking as I stare at the result. I can’t deny that things had been tense between Jeremy and me in the months before he died, with him either sleeping in the spare room or us lying with our backs to each other. It breaks my heart that I can’t remember when we last made love, when my husband held me, the shape of our spent bodies curled into each other. But I know I’ve had a period since we last slept together.

  If the test is accurate and I am pregnant, it can only have been that one night at the medical conference in Oxford, early last December. But I don’t understand it; I simply don’t remember what happened. The only things I know for certain are the sense of dread I’ve been left with ever since, and that I woke up in my hotel room alone.

  Though you hadn’t been alone, had you, Jen? I think, dropping down into my chair, my inner voice both ferocious and fearful. What the hell had happened that night?

  I remember the two half-finished glasses of wine on the dressing table that morning – a crescent of lipstick on one. My underwear discarded on the floor, my new dress flung across the room, one shoe in the bathroom, the other under the bed (how did I even dance in those heels?). No other evidence – apart from the gentle thrum low down in my body, the embers of a fire reignited. Warm blood finally flowing through my veins. It had been a long time since I’d felt it. Yet it could easily have been a fantasy, a dream. An escape.

  I chuck the test strip down onto my desk and cover my face, my shoulders jumping in time with my silent sobs as I try to think back. All I know for sure is that something must have happened – something that my mind is intent on hiding from me. And after the couple of days away at the conference, I’d returned home to my husband without an inkling that in less than a month, he’d be dead.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking ahead,’ I say out loud, mainly for Jeremy’s benefit. If anyone is able to hear or communicate beyond the grave, it’ll be him. I reach across my desk for the photo frame – a picture of him and Kieran, shoulder to shoulder in the fishing boat we hired a couple of years ago on Loch Lomond. I find myself smiling. An unfamiliar act these last few weeks. They didn’t catch anything on the loch, of course. My boys. But we ate fresh fish at a local restaurant that night by way of compensation, Jeremy chatting to anyone and everyone, as he always did, that trademark smile of his with his dark eyes sitt
ing beneath a mop of messy curls, winning over even the most closed-off locals. He always had a tale to tell, an adventure to share, which was why he’d started writing the book in the first place. The book that never got finished.

  I run my finger gently over his face before opening my desk drawer and slipping the photo inside. News will have travelled fast in the village, and I don’t want patients asking questions that I can’t answer or offering sympathy I don’t want. They come here for me to help them, not the other way around. Getting back to work is meant to help me move on, to resume as normal a life as possible – for Kieran’s sake, too – and I don’t want to be reminded of what’s happened every day. Jeremy would have insisted on it. ‘Don’t bloody well sit around pining for me, you silly woman,’ he’d say in that gruff but amiable way of his. ‘Just get on with your life.’ I loved him for his straight talking, his no-nonsense honesty.

  I open my desk diary to today’s date, drawing a line through the partners’ meeting and rewriting it in the 3 p.m. slot. Then I turn a few pages, stopping when I get to Friday. My half day. Well, my three-quarter day in reality, but it meant I’d always be home by 4 p.m., maybe stopping at the butcher on the way back to pick up some steaks. That, plus a bottle of something red from Jeremy’s prized collection, some art-house movie he’d been hankering to see, and our night would be made. Kieran would usually be in his room or out with a friend. At sixteen, he rarely sat with us in the evenings now.