Picture of Innocence. TJ Stimson
2.00 a.m.
Maddie couldn’t sleep. The first night since he was born that Noah hadn’t been up with colic and she was awake anyway, tossing and turning in bed, wishing Lucas wasn’t away tonight of all nights, so she could simply ask him, face-to-face, about the loan.
She needed to look him in the eye when she asked him why he’d done it. Because there was no getting around the fact that her signature on the mortgage application form had been forged. She’d seen it with her own eyes. It was a competent attempt, but the signature on the paperwork Bill had sent her clearly wasn’t hers.
Until now, she’d have said she knew her husband inside out. Maybe not his entire personal history; there was much about his life before they’d met that she didn’t know. But they’d survived some testing challenges in the six years they’d been together and she had a pretty good idea of the mettle and character of the man she’d married. That’d been evident from the day they’d met in the jury box at Lewes Crown Court.
They’d been empanelled for the trial of a haulage contractor accused of murder. It hadn’t been the glamorous Law & Order melodrama she’d secretly hoped for when she’d been called for jury service, but a rather pedestrian tale of embezzlement, bad luck and bad choices that had ended with a blow to the head from a wrench in a half-built swimming pool.
Maddie, along with the rest of the jury, had initially been inclined to side with the prosecution. The haulage contractor had admitted he’d been on the building site where his auditor’s body had been found. He’d acknowledged they’d had a blazing row on the morning of the day of the murder. The wrench had come from his own set of tools and bore his fingerprints. As they started their deliberations, the foreman, a retired doctor, had repeated everything the Crown had laid before them as if it were undisputed fact, and sat back, job done.
It was Lucas who’d made them all think again. ‘Where’s the forensic evidence?’ he’d demanded. ‘Where’s the motive?’
‘Fraud,’ the foreman said, folding his arms. ‘It’s obvious.’
Lucas had looked round the jury table, holding each of their gazes in turn. They were a pretty uninspiring crew, Maddie had to admit, seeing them through his eyes. Five men, seven women, all but two of them white, most on the fringes of what her mother called the ‘real’ working world: the unemployed, the retired, stay-at-home mums. Lucas had been the exception. She later learned he’d passed up the chance of a major design commission to do his jury service, and he’d taken the responsibility seriously.
‘Where’s the proof?’ Lucas had asked. ‘The police investigation found nothing to back up the prosecution’s fraud theory. I’m not saying the man’s innocent, but it’s not enough for us to think he probably killed his auditor. The prosecution has to prove it. The question is, have they done that?’
Lucas had achieved what the defence had signally failed to do and made them put aside their prejudices and actually consider the case before them. The evidence was all circumstantial, he argued eloquently, and set against it was the accused’s previous good character. This was a man who’d never had so much as a parking ticket, a committed churchgoer and family man. To convict him of cold-blooded murder, of picking up that heavy wrench and smashing in the skull of another human being, they had to be sure. Not just fairly sure. Not just on-the-balance-of-probabilities sure. They had to be absolutely sure beyond any reasonable doubt.
His reasoning was calm and logical, but he’d exuded a fierce, suppressed energy Maddie found mesmerising. She could almost see the neurons firing in his brain. She hadn’t been the only member of the jury to fall a little bit in love with him.
Thanks to Lucas, the haulage contractor had been found not guilty, and less than three months later, an ex-boyfriend of the victim had been picked up in a routine traffic stop and confessed to the crime.
Lucas deserved the same benefit of the doubt as the haulage contractor, Maddie told herself now, tossing onto her back and staring up at the ceiling in the dark, her eyes dry with exhaustion. Thank God Noah was giving her some peace, for once. She didn’t have the energy to deal with his crying.
Lucas was the most honest, principled man she’d ever met. She had never once caught him in a lie in all the years they’d been married; not even a little white one. He’d lost commissions because he refused to compromise his principles and use sub-standard materials to cut costs. He’d stood by the head of the local junior school when the man had been falsely accused – in a venomous and anonymous poison-pen letter – of sexually abusing a child, insisting the school board not rush to judgement without proof.
Maddie rolled restlessly onto her side. She was desperate to sleep, but her mind raced frantically, like a rat seeking its way out of a trap. Was it possible there was a darker side to her husband? How did she even know he was in Poole, as he’d said? His own secretary had told Candace he was working from home. You read stories in the papers about people who led secret lives – men with two wives at opposite ends of the country, serial killers who prowled the streets picking off prostitutes before going back home to eat Sunday lunch with their families. Their nearest and dearest always claimed to have had no idea what was really going on. Maybe the signs had been there, but they’d been too blind and too trusting to see them. In the end, how much did you ever really know anyone?
Lucas was forty years old, and she had only been part of his life for six years; of course there were things she didn’t know about him, just as there were things about her life that she hadn’t shared. Maybe there were aspects of his past he wasn’t proud of, things that had no bearing on the man he’d become. She could only speak to the Lucas Drummond she knew, and she didn’t believe that man would ever deliberately deceive her.
But she was beginning to wonder if she knew him as well as she thought. The subtle pressure he was putting on her to sell the sanctuary, for example, so that he could buy into a partnership with his architectural firm. It had started to feel like emotional blackmail. And he’d been wonderfully supportive when she’d been depressed, but during her illness he’d been very firmly in charge, and she couldn’t help noticing that’s the way it’d stayed, even when she’d got better. He’d decided to take Emily out of her private primary school, for which Sarah paid, and send her to the state school down the road, so that Emily and the boys would have exactly the same education. Maddie didn’t know why, but he wasn’t terribly fond of Jayne, either, and had quietly vetoed dinners and get-togethers with her husband for so long that she’d stopped even suggesting them. It was almost as if he didn’t want her to have any friends, and for the first time, Maddie wondered why.
She sat up again and punched her pillow into shape. Maybe there was a perfectly good reason why Lucas had faked her signature and taken out a loan without telling her, though she couldn’t think of a single one. But in the end, it didn’t matter why he’d done it. It meant she couldn’t trust him; she’d always be wondering what was going on behind her back. It’d be like taking back a man who’d cheated on you. Wouldn’t you always be wondering when he was going to do it again?
Maddie woke with a start. It’d been almost light when she’d finally fallen asleep, utterly exhausted. She was grateful Noah had slept through the night, but she’d almost have welcomed the distraction. At least it might have stopped her mind spinning.
She reached for her phone on the bedside table and gasped when she saw the time. Seven-thirty! No wonder her breasts felt like they were going to explode. Noah had gone for nearly eight hours without a feed. He must be absolutely exhausted himself to have slept for so long. However awful his colic was for her, it was worse for him, because he had no idea why he was in pain.
She struggled out of bed, grabbing her dressing gown and