Two Dead Wives by Adele Parks
About the Book:
Lost. Missing.
Murdered? How do you find a woman who didn’t exist?
It's a case that has gripped a nation: A woman with a
shocking secret is missing, presumed dead. And her two husbands are suspects in
her murder.
DCI Clements knows the dark side of human nature and that
love can make people do treacherous things. You can’t presume anything when it
comes to crimes of the heart. Until a body is found, this scandalous and sad
case remains wide open.
Stacie Jones lives a quiet life in a small village, nursed
by her father as she recovers from illness, and shielded from any news of the
outside world. But their reclusive life is about to be shattered.
How are these families linked, and can any of them ever
rebuild their lives in the wake of tragedy?
Excerpt:
1
DC CLEMENTS
There is no body. A fact DC Clements finds both a problem
and a tremulous, tantalizing possibility. She’s not a woman inclined to
irrational hope, or even excessive hope. Any damned hope, really. At least, not
usually.
Kylie Gillingham is probably dead.
The forty-three-year-old woman has been missing nearly two
weeks. Ninety-seven percent of the 180,000 people a year who are reported
missing are found within a week, dead or alive. She hasn’t been spotted by
members of the public, or picked up on CCTV; her bank, phone and email accounts
haven’t been touched. She has social media registered under her married name,
Kai Janssen; they’ve lain dormant. No perky pictures of carefully arranged
books, lattes, Negronis or peonies. Kylie Gillingham hasn’t returned to either
of her homes. Statistically, it’s looking very bad.
Experience would also suggest this sort of situation has to
end terribly. When a wife disappears, all eyes turn on the husband. In this
case, there is not one but two raging husbands left behind. Both men once loved
the missing woman very much. Love is just a shiver away from hate.
The evidence does not conclusively indicate murder. There is
no body. But a violent abduction is a reasonable proposition—police-speak,
disciplined by protocol. Kidnap and abuse, possible torture is
likely—woman-speak, fired by indignation. They know Kylie Gillingham was kept
in a room in an uninhabited apartment just floors below the one she lived in
with husband number two, Daan Janssen. That’s not a coincidence. There is a
hole in the wall of that room; most likely Kylie punched or kicked it. The
debris created was flung through a window into the street, probably in order to
attract attention. Her efforts failed. Fingerprints place her in the room; it’s
unlikely she was simply hanging out or even hiding out, as there is evidence to
suggest she was chained to the radiator.
Yet despite all this, the usually clear, logical, reasonable
Clements wants to ignore statistics, experience and even evidence that
suggests the abduction ended in fatal violence. She wants to hope.
There just might be some way, somehow, that Kylie—enigma,
bigamist—escaped from that sordid room and is alive. She might be in hiding.
She is technically a criminal, after all; she might be hiding from the law. She
can hardly go home. She will know by now that her life of duplicity is exposed.
She will know her husbands are incensed. Baying for blood. She has three
largely uninterested half brothers on her father’s side, and a mother who lives
in Australia. None of them give Clements a sense that they are helping or
protecting Kylie. She will know who abducted her. If alive, she must be
terrified.
Clements’ junior partner, Constable Tanner, burly and blunt
as usual, scoffs at the idea that she escaped. He’s waiting for a body; he’d
settle for a confession. It’s been four days now since Daan Janssen left the
country. “Skipped justice,” as Tanner insists on saying. But the constable is
wet behind the ears. He still thinks murder is glamorous and career-enhancing.
Clements tries to remember: did she ever think that way? She’s been a police
officer for nearly fifteen years; she joined the force straight out of
university, a few years younger than Tanner is now, but no, she can’t remember
a time when she thought murder was glamorous.
“He hasn’t skipped justice. We’re talking to him and his
lawyers,” she points out with what feels like the last bit of her taut
patience.
“You’re being pedantic.”
“I’m being accurate.”
“But you’re talking to him through bloody Microsoft Teams,”
says Tanner dismissively. “What the hell is that?”
“The future.” Clements sighs. She ought to be offended by
the uppity tone of the junior police officer. It’s disrespectful. She’s the
detective constable. She would be offended if she had the energy, but she
doesn’t have any to spare. It’s all focused on the case. On Kylie Gillingham.
She needs to remain clear-sighted, analytical. They need to examine the facts,
the evidence, over and over again. To be fair, Constable Tanner is focused too,
but his focus manifests in frenetic frustration. She tries to keep him on
track. “Look, lockdown means Daan Janssen isn’t coming back to the UK for
questioning any time soon. Even if there wasn’t a strange new world to
negotiate, we couldn’t force him to come to us, not without arresting him, and
I can’t do that yet.”
Tanner knocks his knuckles against her desk as though he is
rapping on a door, asking to be let in, demanding attention. “But all the
evidence—”
“Is circumstantial.” Tanner knows this; he just can’t quite
accept it. He feels the finish line is in sight, but he can’t cross it, and it
frustrates him. Disappoints him. He wants the world to be clear-cut. He wants
crimes to be punished, bad men behind bars, a safer realm. He doesn’t want some
posh twat flashing his passport and wallet, hopping on a plane to his family
mansion in the Netherlands and getting away with it. Daan Janssen’s good looks
and air of entitlement offend Tanner. Clements understands all that. She
understands it but has never allowed personal bias and preferences to cloud
her investigating procedures.
“We found her phones in his flat!” Tanner insists.
“Kylie could have put them there herself,” counters
Clements. “She did live there with him as his wife.”
“And we found the receipt for the cable ties and the bucket
from the room she was held in.”
“We found a receipt. The annual number of cable ties
produced is about a hundred billion. A lot of people buy cable ties. Very few
of them to bind their wives to radiators. Janssen might have wanted to neaten
up his computer and charger cords. He lives in a minimalist house. That’s what
any lawyer worth their salt will argue.” Clements rolls her head from left to
right; her neck clicks like castanets.
“His fingerprints are on the food packets.”
“Which means he touched those protein bars. That’s all they
prove. Not that he took them into the room. Not that he was ever in the room.”
Exasperated, Tanner demands, “Well how else did they get
there? They didn’t fly in through the bloody window, did they?” Clements
understands he’s not just excitable, he cares. He wants this resolved. She
likes him for it, even if he’s clumsy in his declarations. It makes her want to
soothe him; offer him guarantees and reassurances that she doesn’t even believe
in. She doesn’t soothe or reassure, because she has to stay professional,
focused. The devil is in the detail. She just has to stay sharp, be smarter
than the criminal. That’s what she believes. “She might have brought them in
from their home. He might have touched them in their flat. That’s what a lawyer
will argue.”
“He did it all right, no doubt about it,” asserts Tanner
with a steely certainty.
Clements knows that there is always doubt. A flicker, like a
wick almost lit, then instantly snuffed. Nothing is certain in this world.
That’s why people like her are so important; people who know about ambiguity
yet carry on regardless, carry on asking questions, finding answers. Dig, push,
probe. That is her job. For a conviction to be secured in a court of law, things
must be proven beyond reasonable doubt. It isn’t easy to do. Barristers are
brilliant, wily. Jurors can be insecure, overwhelmed. Defendants might lie,
cheat. The evidence so far is essentially fragile and hypothetical.
“I said, didn’t I. Right at the beginning, I said it’s
always the husband that’s done it,” Tanner continues excitedly. He did say as
much, yes. However, he was talking about Husband Number 1, Mark Fletcher, at
that point, if Clements’ memory serves her correctly, which it always does. And
even if her memory one day fails to be the reliable machine that it currently
is, she takes notes—meticulous notes—so she always has those to rely on. Yes,
Tanner said it was the husband, but this case has been about which husband.
Daan Janssen, married to Kai: dedicated daughter to a sick mother, classy
dresser and sexy wife. Or Mark Fletcher, husband to Leigh: devoted stepmother,
conscientious management consultant and happy wife? Kai. Leigh. Kylie. Kylie
Gillingham, the bigamist, had been hiding in plain sight. But now she is gone.
Vanished.
“The case against Janssen is gathering momentum,” says
Clements, carefully.
“Because Kylie was held captive in his apartment block.”
“Yes.”
“Which is right on the river, easy way to lose a body.”
She winces at this thought but stays on track. “Obviously
Mark Fletcher has motive too. A good lawyer trying to cast doubt on Janssen’s
guilt might argue that Fletcher knew about the other husband and followed his
wife to her second home.”
Tanner is bright, fast; he chases her line of thought. He
knows the way defense lawyers create murky waters. “Fletcher could have
confronted Kylie somewhere in the apartment block.”
“A row. A violent moment of fury,” adds Clements. “He knocks
her out cold. Then finds an uninhabited apartment and impetuously stashes her
there.”
Tanner is determined to stick to his theory that Janssen is
the guilty man. “Sounds far-fetched. How did he break in? This thing seems more
planned.”
“I agree, but the point is, either husband could have
discovered the infidelity, then, furious, humiliated and ruthless, imprisoned
her. They’d have wanted to scare and punish, reassert control, show her who was
boss.” They know this much, but they do not know what happened next. Was she
killed in that room? If so, where is the body hidden? “And you know we can’t
limit this investigation to just the two husbands. There are other suspects,”
she adds.
Tanner flops into his chair, holds up a hand and starts to
count off the suspects on his fingers. “Oli, Kylie’s teen stepson. He has the
body and strength of a man…”
Clements finishes his thought. “But the emotions and
irrationality of a child. He didn’t know his stepmum was a bigamist, but he
did know she was having an affair. It’s possible he did something rash.
Something extreme that is hard to come back from.”
“Then there’s the creepy concierge in the swanky apartment
block.”
“Alfonzo.”
“Yeah, he might be our culprit.”
Clements considers it. “He has access to all the flats, the
back stairs, the CCTV.”
“He’s already admitted that he deleted the CCTV from the day
Kylie was abducted. He said that footage isn’t kept more than twenty-four hours
unless an incident of some kind is reported. Apparently the residents insist
on this for privacy. It might be true. It might be just convenient.”
Clements nods. “And then there’s Fiona Phillipson. The best
friend.”
“Bloody hell. We have more suspects than an Agatha Christie
novel,” says Tanner with a laugh that is designed to hide how overwhelmed and
irritated he feels. His nose squashed up against shadowy injustice, cruel
violence and deception.
“Right.”
“I still think the husband did it.”
“Which one?”
“Crap. Round and round in circles we go.” He scratches his
head aggressively. “Do you want me to order in pizza? It’s going to be a long
night.”
“Is anyone still doing deliveries? I don’t think they are,”
points out Clements. “You know, lockdown.”
“Crap,” he says again, and then rallies. “Crisps and
chocolate from the vending machine then. We’ll need something to sustain us
while we work out where Kylie is.”
Clements smiles to herself. It’s the first time in a long
time that Tanner has referred to Kylie by name, not as “her” or “the bigamist”
or, worse, “the body.” It feels like an acceptance of a possibility that she
might be somewhere. Somewhere other than dead and gone.
Did she somehow, against the odds, escape? Is Kylie
Gillingham—the woman who dared to defy convention, the woman who would not
accept limits and laughed in the face of conformity—still out there, somehow
just being?
God, Clements hopes so.
Excerpted from Two Dead Wives by Adele Parks. Copyright © 2023 by Adele
Parks. Published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
About the Author:
Adele Parks was born in North Yorkshire. She is the author
of twenty-one bestselling novels. Over four million UK copies of her work have
been sold, and her books have been translated into thirty-one different
languages. Adele’s recent Sunday Times number one bestsellers Lies, Lies, Lies and Just My Luck were short-listed for the
British Book Awards and have been optioned for development for TV. She is an
ambassador of the National Literacy Trust and The Reading Agency, two charities
that promote literacy in the UK. She is a judge for the Costa Book Awards.
Adele has lived in Botswana, Italy and London and is now settled in Guildford,
Surrey. In 2022 she was awarded an MBE for services to literature.
Keep in touch on
social media:
Author Website: https://www.adeleparks.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OfficialAdeleParks
Twitter: https://twitter.com/adeleparks
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adele_parks/
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/45427.Adele_Parks
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