“Of course. Poor Mark. How could she do this to him? And those boys. They’ve always been like grandsons to me. She’s an ungrateful girl.”
Another couple of calls unearth the fact that Kylie did not have a high-powered job as a management consultant. She had done until four years ago, when she resigned. “We were surprised when she resigned, sad, you know. She was really good at her job. Great team member,” explains her old boss.
“Did she give any explanation?”
“She said she wanted to spend more time with her family. Said it was getting too much for her. There is a lot of traveling. Women with families often find it hard to strike the balance.” Clements bites her tongue to avoid asking if men with families also struggled to find the work/life balance. She considers her jab is less likely to score considering Kylie had two lives to balance with work. That sort of ambition is hardly laudable.
Obviously, both the sick mother and the flash job were fictions, created to allow Kylie to move between the two men, the two homes. Clements wonders how she financed it if she wasn’t working. Mark Fletcher had said that there was a salary going into their joint bank account every month. Daan Janssen isn’t stuck for cash, but was Kylie going as far as to allow Janssen to pay for the mortgage with her other husband? Was this what it was all about? Money? That thought turns Clements’s stomach. Weirdly, she sort of admires the woman who independently flouts the rules, flicks the finger to the patriarchy and finds her own path, but if it is just for money it somehow seems more layman, normalized. More criminal. Was she simply exploiting one man to prop up the other? That position was pitiful. Understandable, but lacking the exciting notoriety of rebellion.
Clements and Tanner pore through the bank accounts and phone statements. They discover that Kylie is independently wealthy. Her father had died very close to the time she met Daan Janssen. The father left her a fortune. Clements is immediately intrigued once again. This woman wasn’t doing it for the money. She didn’t need Daan Janssen to prop up the Fletcher household finances. She didn’t need either man at all.
She wanted them.
Clements calls both husbands again to bring them up to date on her findings. Mark Fletcher sounds fraught, broken. Daan Janssen sounds maddened, peeved. They both claim that she hadn’t told them the truth about the timing and circumstances of her father’s death. Mark knew he had died, but had no clue about the inheritance she’d benefited from. “They always had a very difficult relationship. She barely spoke of him. Why would he leave her money? Are you sure?”
Daan thought the father had died many years ago, when Kai was a child. “She didn’t often speak of him. She said she couldn’t remember him. Hardly knew him.”
Kylie Gillingham carried around alone the grief of losing her father, in order to finance her double life. Clements doesn’t know whether to be disgusted by the woman, pity her or what. She marvels at the case. She has seen the weird and wonderful in her line of work—well, mostly weird really—but this! The audacity of the woman was almost admirable; the planning involved certainly was. Clements sometimes struggled to keep her one, relatively straightforward life ticking along—she can’t imagine the logistics involved in being two women.
Clements is aware that she feels something faintly unsavory toward this woman too. Unlike the male officers, it isn’t judgment, it is something she tries to avoid in her life—jealousy. Not full-blown, tie-you-in-knots, green-eyed monster but something akin to what she might feel when she saw a picture in a magazine of a celebrity with a perfect life and a perfect figure, a couple of perfect kids. And Clements would ask herself, why her? Why that woman? Why not me hanging out by a swimming pool?
But then DC Clements reminds herself that Kylie Gillingham’s life wasn’t perfect, was it?
It couldn’t be if she’s run away from it. Or worse, been taken from it.
Clements calls two of Kylie’s three half brothers （she can’t yet track the third, apparently he’s on holiday in Malaysia）。 They don’t have much to add. They haven’t seen Leigh since their father left her the bulk of his wealth. They offer assurances that they will contact the station if she gets in touch. They sound remote, disinterested. Again, Clements doubts that these family members would offer a sanctuary to Kylie if she needed one.
Clements rings a few of the numbers recently dialed on both phones she had owned. Leigh’s last tracked phone calls included a call to the school secretary to ask if she could rummage through the lost property box to try to locate Seb’s missing school coat. She’d also rung the dentist to book regular checkups for both the boys. They were scheduled for next week. Kai had called her hairdresser, to make an appointment for a trim, an appointment she’d failed to show up to. “Is that unusual?” Clements asks the woman who answered the phone.
“Yeah, I can’t remember her no-showing before. She’s really nice—tips well. Is she okay? I hope so.”
“Most likely. Did she seem okay when she spoke to you?”
“Yes. Totally.”
Everyone Clements talks to agrees that neither version of Kylie Gillingham was showing any obvious signs of stress, nothing out of the ordinary.
Finally, at just before 7:00 p.m. Clements calls the best friend, Fiona Phillipson; 7:00 p.m. is her cut-off on a Friday for making enquiries. She plans to stay for a few more hours at the station, get a takeaway delivered; there isn’t anything to rush home to because she isn’t midseason on any TV show at the moment, but she doesn’t like calling people too late on a Friday because other people have lives.
“You didn’t see any change in her behavior?” Clements asks. As the person who last saw Kylie, Fiona’s testimony is key.
“No, none, but then, we’ve established that she has quite the poker face,” Fiona comments sharply, not able to hide her anger. “Who knows what she was thinking.” Clements gets it, Fiona is hurt. She thought they were close. Besties. All Kylie’s friends and family are reeling, coming to terms with the fact they don’t know her, no one knows her. They are, naturally enough, enraged. Clements is just sad. In her experience, the unknown are the most vulnerable. And dangerous.
“Leigh is one of those really busy women—you know, never still for five minutes, two minutes, always dashing about somewhere to go, someone to see, something to do,” offers Fiona. “It made the rest of us feel left behind. Sort of rooted.”
“Being rooted can be a good thing,” comments Clements.
“True, yes, of course it can,” Fiona rallies. Her voice has a defensive edge to it. Clements recognizes it, empathizes with it. A single woman exhausted with justifying her choices. Her lot.
“I suppose it must have finally got to her. The deceit and everything. Years of it, from what you say. Maybe she just couldn’t handle it anymore,” murmurs Fiona.
“So, you think she’s run away?”
Fiona falls silent. Clements wishes she was conducting this interview face-to-face. She is good at reading people and knows that often a lot is said inside silences. “I don’t know. It’s one thing to think, isn’t it? Possibly the best thing.” Fiona’s voice cracks. Not just angry then, worried for her friend too? The police are unfortunately used to bearing the brunt of people’s worry in the form of aggression. It doesn’t surprise Clements when Fiona throws out the heated challenge, “Isn’t it your job to take the educated guesses?”