What to Do When Someone Dies by Nicci French Page B

where Greg was. It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?’
    ‘Yes, but –’
    ‘A couple of times a week Greg drove to visit a client. But I pretended to be Greg’s assistant, rang up and said that for tax reasons I needed an exact time for when the meeting had taken place. People were very helpful. I’ve marked all those in blue. Even then I was left with the gap between him leaving the office and arriving at the client. But I found a website. If I type in the postcode of the office and the postcode of his client, it gives an exact driving distance and even an estimated journey time. I’ve marked those in red. Obviously, driving in London traffic during the day, it’s not an exact science, but even so it fits pretty well. It took me a day and a half – and look.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘What do you see?’
    ‘Lots of colours,’ said Gwen. ‘Lots of stickers.’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s what you don’t see. There’s barely a gap over four weeks when I don’t know where he was and what he was doing.’
    ‘Which means?’
    ‘Look at the chart, Gwen,’ I said. ‘It shows Greg working very hard, travelling, eating, buying stuff, going to the movies with me. But where’s the bit when he’s having an affair? Where’s the space for him even to meet the woman he died with?’
    There was a long pause.
    ‘Ellie,’ she began, ‘for God’s sake –’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘Stop. Listen for a moment. I talked to Mary about this – not about this,’ I gestured at the charts, ‘I mean my feelings about Greg. She wasn’t sympathetic. She was even angry with me, as if it was some insult to her that I wasn’t immediately accepting that my husband had been having an affair and had had a crash with the woman he really loved.’
    ‘No one’s saying that,’ said Gwen. She looked at my charts almost with an expression of pity. ‘I don’t really know what to make of this.’ She took my hand. ‘I’m not an expert but I’ve heard that there are stages of grief and at the beginning it’s anger and denial. It’s completely understandable that you feel anger. I think the point of mourning is to get through that and reach some kind of acceptance.’
    I pulled my hand away. ‘I know all of that,’ I said. ‘I read a piece about it once in Cosmo . And you know what I was thinking when I was doing all this crazy stuff with coloured stickers and ringing people up under false pretences? What would make it easy would be to find just one deleted email, just one scrap of paper in a pocket, that would show Greg had been having an affair. Or even just one occasion when he wasn’t where he was meant to be, or a missing afternoon when nobody knew where he was. Forget denial. Then I could just get angry and be sad, and my life would continue. There’s no trick to proving somebody’s having an affair. You catch them at it, just once. But how do you prove somebody’s innocent? What do you suggest?’
    Gwen shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.
    ‘You have to do something like this,’ I said. ‘Something obsessive and excessive. You have to fill in all the gaps, then the gaps between the gaps so there’s just no space for this relationship. You know I went to see the police?’
    ‘Ellie, you didn’t!’
    ‘I told this woman officer I was convinced my husband wasn’t having an affair. She didn’t seem to believe me. I don’t think she thought it even mattered whether he was or not. The case was closed. This wasn’t something she wanted to hear about. But if I showed those charts to the police, do you think it would make a difference?’
    Gwen frowned at the charts for a long time. ‘Honestly?’ she said.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘This is amazing,’ she said. ‘Scary but amazing. I don’t think the police would pay much attention to it, but if they did, they might say, “Perhaps he was seeing the woman while he was doing other things. Perhaps she met him while he was buying his sandwich, perhaps she went with him in