Something In The Air

Chapter 20 - Forbidden Fruit

"Last time we spoke, I asked you how well you knew Sophie Morfakis. You told me you'd only spoken to her a few times in passing and only ever at the protest group meets. That was a lie, wasn't it? You've spoken to her so many times you probably couldn't count them even if I asked, and you've certainly met outside of the protest groups."

Florence waited for a moment before nodding.

"It's true," she said. "I knew her before the protest group. That's why it was up to me to always talk to her and make her feel welcome."

"You were also the one that encouraged her to join," Maddox added. "Never mind a 'sense of responsibility to the community' or however it was you put it, you were the leader of the group and so you told her to come."

"She was a friend and we needed members from the local area, I thought she might be interested..."

Maddox folded his arms and stared at her.

"And above all, Florence, Sophie wasn't just a friend. She wasn't even just a close friend..."

He paused and he noticed Florence close her eyes and tense as she braced herself for the exposé.

"She was your lover, wasn't she? You two have been seeing each other behind her husband's back for, well, at least three months, I'd say. That is until she suddenly went missing two weeks ago."

Florence's head rocked forward and she rested it against the dashboard, all the strength and all the built-up tension from having kept the affair a secret for so long draining out of her in one great flood. Her body convulsed as she fought back her emotions and Maddox leaned over the gearstick to rest a comforting hand on her shoulder.

"It was four months, actually," Florence mumbled into her arm before drawing breath and sitting upright again. "Four months. This week would have made it five."

She dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her cardigan and examined her reflection in the rear-view mirror. She'd managed to smear her make up whilst her head had been buried and it now looked like she had two black eyes.

"How did you know?" she asked, sounding more steadfast as she turned back to Maddox. "We promised each other we would be careful."

"It was just little things here and there," Maddox answered truthfully. "You did a good job covering your tracks and anybody else might have and probably were fooled. But I started to notice the signs as soon as I took on Sophie's case.

"From most of the photographs that I'd seen of her and from what I'd been told by her husband and sister, Sophie usually wore very little makeup. It would therefore have to take something pretty significant in her life for her to go out and buy several sets of everything, yet that is exactly what I found in her bedroom drawers. Was she trying to impress someone, I wondered? Several items were brand new and unwrapped so, of course, I considered the possibility that they were simply gifts which she'd never bothered to open. But then I checked her car and found several used items of makeup in the glove compartment. If she wasn't trying to impress someone, why need such a large reserve of makeup on the go?"

"I told her she didn't need it," Florence whispered. "She's so beautiful just the way she is."

"Having seen her pictures, I'd have to agree with you. On the same visit of her house, I found a box of chocolates which her husband claimed she'd gifted him for no apparent reason. For a woman working on minimum wage, with a husband who was already getting on the portly side, and with no obvious birthday or event to celebrate, there had to be another reason for her buying them. That reason, I decided, was guilt. Sophie was too nice of a person to go behind her husband's back without feeling some kind of remorse, and this I suppose was her way of paying him back.