Misjudgement

It had come as some relief to Alistair when he found out, but it also brought feelings of anger. He’d been through all the stages of denial, rage and final acceptance. Now all that heartache seemed to have been unnecessary.

He’d lost Tamsin almost a year ago. The grief had been a strange process. Although he’d never have described their marriage as ideal, the extreme violence with which she was suddenly taken from him meant that all those times of feeling distant and unsettled were forgotten, and there was nothing he wanted except to have her back.

But after a few months he began to think about moving forward. She had made him feel inadequate, hemmed in, never really allowed to just be himself. He used the memory of these feelings to justify getting over her, when it looked a bit too soon from the outside. No one had known how he felt, but now he held forth at protracted length to his friends during long sessions in the pub. They nodded sympathetically but didn’t offer much comment.

In his new viewpoint, the marriage would probably have ended soon anyway. Obviously he would never have wanted it to end the way it did. The body was found in woodland, in an area he didn’t know. It was outside a village, about twelve miles away from home. He assumed it was just some random attack. What had she been doing there? Jogging? But she wasn’t dressed for jogging. It was a jogger that found her, about five in the morning. Forensics declared that she had been dead for at least eight hours. So she had been wandering in an area of remote woodland at nine o’clock at night, in November, with her best coat on, designer jeans and heels. Alistair could make no sense of it. But she had been prone to disappearing in the months before her death. The day it happened, she hadn’t been there when he got home, so the last time he saw her was the morning.

This had happened before, and he’d been conditioned not to worry about her. When he’d phoned, she’d been harassed in the extreme, using her harping voice to inform him that she’d just met up with some of the girls, and could she be left to enjoy herself without him breathing down her neck? The implication being, time spent with him wasn’t enjoyable. It didn’t seem to occur to her that he had a right to know where she was and that she was OK. But she didn’t see it that way, so he’d told himself to give up worrying as a waste of mental effort; she didn’t appreciate it, as seemingly with anything he did.

But he’d been proved right to check on her. What he couldn’t understand was
what she had been doing there. They didn’t know anyone who lived round
there, and her friends replied when questioned that they hadn’t been with her that night.

He had to assume that she had been taken there by the attacker, either being killed at the locus or some point beforehand. The injuries were brutal – apparently multiple blows to the back of the neck with a machete or cleaver, the first hit obviously not having been effective – and what she must have gone through was unimaginable. It was the pain Tamsin had suffered that prolonged Alistair’s initial period of mourning.

What was puzzling was that the killer had not taken steps to conceal the body. If she had been brought here, you would have thought the culprit would have taken the time to bury her. He had also left fingerprints on her clothing, but they matched none on police records.

These factors pointed back to the random assault scenario, but that again begged the questions of what she had been doing there, and why nothing had been taken: she was still in possession of her handbag, with credit cards and cash.

After the period of shock had worn off, Alistair’s main preoccupation was having the killer brought to justice. Not so much out of a sense of duty to his wife, as he could now see clearly the imbalances in the marriage and that he probably did not love her at the end, but to quell his morbid obsession with these questions. He felt prevented from moving on fully until he knew what really happened. It wasn’t so much that it was his wife, but a human being had died after intense suffering and he wanted to know the full story.

When he found out the answer, it made perfect sense, although it would never have occurred to him. All the police enquiries had petered out and the chances of a resolution were looking pretty slim, when a man suddenly handed himself in. He claimed to have been having an affair with Tamsin, and wanted her to leave Alistair and be with him. They had been out for a woodland walk near his home – as it turned out, her real location when she had purported to have been out with the girls – and he had been pleading his case particularly vehemently. When she had refused, he had suddenly “totally lost it” and swung at her with the machete, the unfocussed nature of his attack requiring several blows to finish the deed. Asked why he had been carrying the machete, he said that he always did so in self-defence as he lived in a rough area, although this was clearly not the case. Tamsin had known about it and had no problem with it, he said. Pleading guilty, he was sent down for twenty-five years, but was also sent for psychiatric reports.

When this all came out, Alistair felt pretty justified in his feelings of having got
over his wife’s death. He had clearly meant nothing to her if she had kept up this affair with a borderline psychotic, while treating him as the part of her life she’d rather forget about. When someone pointed out that she had refused to leave him and paid for her life with it, he reasoned that she probably didn’t want to be tarnished by any sort of scandal, and she probably enjoyed the frisson of danger and drama the affair provided.

It didn’t occur to him that the truth might be very different, and she could no longer speak for herself. She might have wanted to finish the affair long before, but been unable to do so due to threats of death from the machete-wielder. This state of anxiety could undoubtedly have had effects on the way she treated Alistair – and despite knowing how dangerous her lover could be, she had paid the ultimate price in her refusal to leave her husband.