The Real Lady Detective Agency: A True Story. Rebecca Jane

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СКАЧАТЬ next day Jess and Adrian went to the hospital to say goodbye to their mother and turn off the machine. A week before she’d been fighting fit and well, zooming around the house with the vacuum. Now, she was gone.

      Next came the funeral, and every part of the aftermath. There was no one left to take care of Jess. She was on her own except for her brother, who was married. One thing was certain: a bond formed between us during that period that won’t ever be broken.

      Anyway, back to my call to Jess.

      ‘I need your help. Where are you?’ I asked. She’d been roughly kept in the picture about my marriage for the past few months, but she didn’t know the full extent of it.

      ‘I’m at a football match. It’s brilliant! We’re winning 2–0!’ She was clearly inebriated, but I couldn’t have cared less.

      ‘I’m coming to get you – now,’ I said.

      Jess was confused but after a short debate, she was told I wasn’t taking no for an answer, and one way or the other she was leaving the match early.

      Fifteen minutes later I was parked up outside the football ground in my black Range Rover, which was my pride and joy. In my wing mirror I could see her running as fast as she could down the pavement. She threw herself into the car, asked what was wrong, and the whole sorry tale came bursting out. What I wanted to do was go to the pub where I suspected James was, and find out what he was up to.

      ‘Let’s go catch the bastard then,’ she agreed.

      Jess was always there for me, and there would be plenty more times like this to come. In the following weeks we often sat outside pubs, peering through the windows to see if James was there. Our first attempts were totally unsuccessful, though. It was time to raise our game.

      Jess wasn’t the only person roped in to help with the DIY detection plan. Stephanie and long-time friend Helen were also thrown in at the deep end. Stephanie and I met when I was a student, aged seventeen. We both worked a part-time job together at a call centre. The girl’s beauty makes me sick! I’ve seen her at her worst and still she looks perfect: a total natural beauty with long blonde hair and blue eyes. Very small, and slim too! Lots of girls know they’re good-looking, and use it. Steph doesn’t. There’s no part of her appearance that’s fake. She even refuses to wear fake tan on her face (which I simply don’t understand!). Men swoon over her. There aren’t many natural beauties around any more and they lap it up.

      Helen is a couple of years younger than me. She’s a cross between a sassy type of cool-looking girl and a traditional lass. When we met some seven years ago she was working in a call centre. If you had to sum up Helen in one word, it would be ‘complex’. Although definitely young at heart, she loves to entertain and behind closed doors she morphs into something else. In a former life, she was Delia Smith – I kid you not! The woman is a total home-maker, which is not what you would expect from her appearance. Helen lives on her own and has done since she was eighteen. There’s no real reason for it; she’s just highly independent.

      Over the next few weeks we girls got up to lots of things we shouldn’t. Nights were spent outside pubs in Barrowford with the car’s DVD replaying episodes of Friends, bags of Doritos on hand, and the obligatory pair of binoculars. Six times out of ten we found James. We would watch him snuggling up to girls at the bar, putting his arms around them, whispering in their ears – and when he kissed one in front of us I flipped.

      ‘That’s it, I’m going in,’ I said pulling on my stilettos when I was already halfway out of the car. By this point I was eight months pregnant and, if I’m being honest, it probably wasn’t a pretty sight. I didn’t care. I’d just had enough. How much more proof did I need? I’d heard the rumours and now I’d seen it. What he was getting up to behind closed doors, I didn’t need to guess.

      I pushed through the doors of the pub with a very frantic and disturbed bunch of friends in tow. James greeted me like I was something stuck on his shoe. He always gave me a look in those days that I read as one of disgust. Was it just my paranoia? I’ll never know now.

      I asked him what he thought he was doing, and he simply told me he was having a drink with his friend. The girl next to him was shooting me daggers, as if I was the one in the wrong.

      ‘Are you going to go now?’ he asked coldly.

      It was as if I was living in the twilight zone. Didn’t he realise I’d seen him kissing her? Did he care if I had? I don’t think he did.

      ‘Are you coming with me?’ I asked, still getting daggers from the girl. How could she do that when she could see my huge bump? So much for sisterhood …

      ‘No, but you’re going,’ he told me, standing up and ushering me towards the door.

      ‘He’s not worth it,’ Stephanie told me, taking a gentle hold of my arm.

      I wasn’t going to embarrass myself any further, so I turned around without a word and walked out, leaving my husband with the girl.

      When I was on my own, I questioned everything. If he was so unhappy, why did he not just end it with me? Why keep pretending it wasn’t happening? What was I doing that was so wrong? Should I leave, and admit failure? How could I bring up a child on my own? I wasn’t prepared for it when I found out I was pregnant, and now I was a month away from having the baby I still didn’t feel prepared.

      James and I had decided to start trying for a family six months before our wedding. I’d been on the contraceptive pill for years and we both thought it would take a good while to conceive. We were wrong. On holiday I started to feel sick very quickly, and I missed a period.

      Coincidentally, the weekend before that had been James’s first-ever vanishing act. He went on the Friday and returned on the Monday as if nothing had happened. It distressed me. He’d been at a concert and purposely ignored every call I made and text I sent. For all I knew he was dead under a bus somewhere. Was this a sign of things to come? I didn’t know, but it caused a blazing row. I am normally a pretty calm and laid-back person but it scared me.

      Now I was faced with the prospect of having a baby. Was it the right time, and was this still the right path for me? When I thought there was a chance it could be true, I wasn’t excited or happy the way I should have been. I was scared. I went to Sainsbury’s and bought a pregnancy test. I couldn’t wait for the result so I went into the public toilets and took the test, then as I walked back to the car I nervously looked at the result. It was positive. What did I do? I rang Stephanie. Not my soon-to-be husband. I didn’t do a little dance for joy in the car park. I rang my best friend. The whole process of this life-changing discovery was wrong.

      Stephanie knew I wasn’t very happy. If it hadn’t been for the vanishing act the previous weekend, I’m sure it would have been a different story. Alarm bells were screaming in my head, but what do you do in that situation?

      Steph said I didn’t have to go through with it. I didn’t have to tell him if I didn’t want to, but if I did she was happy for me.

      When I hung up the phone I sat for ten minutes in silence. But there was no question. I wanted this baby and I was having it.

      I went to tell James, who was at work at the time. We both sat down, I showed him the test and … nothing.

      ‘Great news,’ he said after a while. He hugged me, and went back to work. Life-changing moment – over.

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