Only The Truth

Chapter 5

5

I stare, shock and fear taking over my whole body. I don’t know how long I’m standing there, as time seems to stop completely still. Every time I blink, every moment that passes, the panic and horror seems to grow. I don’t know if I’m even breathing, if I’m even existing. It’s too much for me to take in.

I really have no idea how to react. I veer violently between disbelief, anger, paranoia, sadness and the sense that my whole world has just come crashing down around me. I can feel my lower lip trembling, and I can almost hear my brain trying to kick into gear, searching through the mental files for the one that tells it how to deal with immense trauma. Until the right file is found, I appear to have defaulted to ‘freeze and go blank’. There’s just nothing there. Absolutely nothing.

I steady myself and try to think straight. It’s Lisa. It’s definitely Lisa. You aren’t married to someone for eight years without knowing what they look like, even in this state. Even when it’s obvious there’s absolutely no light left in their eyes. They say you can always tell when someone’s dead; they no longer look like a person. They become a shell, a husk, the body that once held a soul.

I force myself to look in more detail, to understand what the hell I’m seeing. She’s fully dressed, her hair slightly dishevelled, but otherwise looking like the Lisa I know and love. Her mouth hangs open, and I can see her tongue resting gently against the top of her bottom teeth. It looks as though she’s been strangled; there’s a red mark right around her neck that looks like some sort of rope burn. There’s no blood that I can see, which comes as a strange sort of relief. It’s an odd word to use, but somehow the lack of blood makes her seem more peaceful.

This is my wife. The woman I married. The woman I vowed to spend my whole life with. And now she’s lying dead in front of me. I feel my legs begin to wobble, struggling to hold me upright. I turn and lean against the sink, feeling it creak as my body weight pushes down on it, my chest heaving as I struggle for breath. It’s then that I realise I haven’t been breathing since I pulled back that shower curtain. My eyes begin to hurt, the blood pulsing at my temples.

But there’s one question that comes into my mind before any other thoughts: Why is she here? She’s meant to be seventy miles away back home in East Grinstead. She was there when I spoke to her this morning. She just doesn’t belong here. It’s like seeing an old friend or work colleague in the same resort on holiday. If they’re out of context, the brain struggles for a few seconds to deal with it. Now imagine that a thousand times worse.

I blink hard and scratch my face. None of this makes any sense. When I last spoke to her she was enjoying lazing in bed on her day off. She was going to get up and watch some TV, then get on the treadmill for a couple of hours. How did she end up in my hotel room in Herne Bay? Had she come to surprise me? That really doesn’t sound like Lisa at all; she’s not a spontaneous sort of person. It wouldn’t even cross her mind. No, I know from the way she sounded when I spoke to her this morning that she had no intention of coming here. I know my wife, and she couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended on it. She even managed to tell me about the surprise birthday party she’d organised for me last year. I pretended it didn’t matter and that it was the thought that counted, but secretly I was gutted. She’s just completely incapable of keeping her mouth shut.

The mark around her neck is what’s freaking me out the most. Knowing that’s what killed her. I hover the back of my hand in front of her nose to feel for any sign of breath. There’s nothing. My hand shakes with fear, and it brushes the tip of her nose as I draw it towards me. It feels cold. She can’t have been dead more than twenty minutes – I left the room barely half an hour ago – but her nose is already cold. It’s possible she was killed before she got to the room, but how on earth would someone drag a dead body through a hotel without anyone noticing? To me, it doesn’t look like she’s been dead long at all, so I can only assume she died here, in this room.

I think back to when I returned to my room. Was the door locked? Yes, I’m sure it was. They lock automatically from the outside anyway, don’t they? I don’t think it even has an actual lock that you can operate without the key card. There wasn’t any sign that anyone had broken in. No broken windows, no damage to the door. So how did she get in here? Who brought her here? Why did she come in the first place?

The realisation suddenly hits me – far later than it should have done – that Lisa died by someone else’s hands. It sounds stupid to say it, seeing as it’s perfectly clear, but it’s something I observed rather than registered and understood. And now it’s hit me. Not only that she’s dead, but that she isn’t coming back. And someone has killed her deliberately. I can feel the tears dropping down my face, the adrenaline pulsing through my limbs. But I know I need to think clearly.

There’s no sign of what she was strangled with, so whatever was used has been taken away. By the person who did it. My wife has been murdered. In my hotel room. Seventy miles away from where she’s meant to be.

It’s like a dream; nothing makes sense and yet I can do nothing but accept that it’s all entirely true. There’s no other option. It’s here, right here in front of me, laid out as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world, yet it seems to be completely and utterly random. It feels like there’s a huge electrical charge going through my brain as it tries to comprehend what’s going on in front of me, trying to find some sort of logic in what’s happened. But it really isn’t working.

I look at Lisa’s body more closely, slumped in the bath like a discarded rag doll. Many times I’ve watched her sleeping late at night when I’ve been unable to relax, but she looks completely different now. There’s something in her hand. Her mobile phone. I pick it up, gently, trying not to come into contact with her body, and I look at the phone. The screen is on. The screen’s never on – it’s set to turn off automatically after thirty seconds. I’ve been here much longer than thirty seconds already, so she must have disabled that setting. Why? She never fiddles with the settings on her phone. She’s a complete technophobe, and she’d be terrified of breaking it. She wouldn’t even take the protective plastic stickers off the front of it for a good four months after she bought it. That all seems so pedestrian now. Now that she’s dead.

The adrenaline is still surging through me and my hands are shaking, trembling as I look at what’s on the screen. It’s a text message.

Come up to room 112. I have something I need to tell you.

My eyes rise to the top of the screen as I look to see who sent it.

It’s from me.