I MARRIED A CHARMING MAN… AND THEN HE TRIED TO KILL ME
HER CHEATING HUSBAND PLANNED A DEADLY PARACHUTE ACCIDENT
Iwas sitting at the kitchen table, feeding Ben his bottle, when I heard Emile run down the stairs in a panic. “I’m late for work,” he announced, popping his head into the doorway. “I’ve got to go but I’ll see you later.”
“OK, I’ll see you tonight,” I replied, listening to him open the front door. “Bye!” he called out, slamming the door shut behind him.
“Looks like it’s just us today,” I cooed. “We’ve got the day to ourselves before Daddy returns.”
But Emile never came home. By the time he was due to arrive back from work, I was watching cartoons with April when there was a knock at the door.
“Come on,” I muttered to her as I heaved myself to my feet. “Let’s see who that could be.” I slowly made my way to the front door, a crutch tucked under each arm.
“Good evening, Mrs Cilliers,” one of the two men on my doorstep said as soon as I opened the door. “I’m Detective Inspector Paul Franklin from Wiltshire Police.”
“Oh,” I paused for a second, taken by surprise. “Hello.”
“May we come in?” he asked. I looked around at the chaotic house that a day spent looking after two children while in a spinal brace had left me.
“Um, sure,” I led them into the living room and perched myself on the sofa. What on earth could this be about?
I wondered, my mind racing with horrible possibilities. God, I hope Emile is OK. It suddenly dawned on me that I hadn’t heard from my husband since the morning and, watching the officers sit down to face me, I started to panic.
“We’ve come to visit you this evening, Victoria, because your husband has been arrested,” DI Paul Franklin told me, and I was stumped.
“What?” I asked, confused. “What for?”
“He’s been arrested on suspicion of your attempted murder.” Each word hit me like a train.
“He’s what?” I asked, trying to process what they were telling me. “Are you joking?”
“I know it must be a shock. He’s currently being questioned at the station.”
What the hell? I thought, playing the officer’s last sentence over and over again in my head. Emile’s been arrested for my attempted murder.
I didn’t even suspect foul play, let alone that Emile would try to kill me.
I heard the words but they just didn’t make sense.
“I need to speak to my husband.” The words fell from my mouth without thinking. “I need to speak to him.”
“I’m sorry, Victoria, but you can’t talk to your husband.” He glanced at DI Franklin, then back to me. “He’s a suspect in an open investigation.”
“Why?” I asked, confused as to how this could have happened. “Why do you suspect him?”
“Well, we have to talk to everyone that might have been
involved, but that’s all we can tell you right now.”
I didn’t feel like any of this would make sense until I spoke to Emile. He’ll explain the misunderstanding, I told myself. We just need to sort this out. He was my husband. I had married him and had children with him. I couldn’t even begin to entertain the concept that he would be able to do something so inherently evil to me. I knew about his faults, but this was so far removed from them that it was unbelievable.
“How do you feel?” the detective asked, offering me a tissue. “Empty,” I admitted.
I paused, wiping the tears from my eyes. “Alone, angry. This whole time I have had my little suspicions and niggles, and Emile made me feel really bad and blamed my past insecurities. My intuition was right – that makes me angry and upset.”
“The reserve parachute’s error came from the failure
“YOUR HUSBAND HAS BEEN ARRESTED ON SUSPICION OF YOUR ATTEMPTED MURDER”
of two crucial loops,” the detective said, reading through paperwork from the investigation. “Could this have been an accident?”
I thought it through, trying to find a feasible explanation, but I couldn’t. I shook my head.
“I don’t think it can be an accident,” I replied with a heavy heart. “Slinks do not break, they really do not.”
“Has anything else odd happened recently?” the officer interviewing me asked.
“Anything strange besides the incident?”
Suddenly, my mind flashed back to the gas leak. Emile reacted so oddly over it, I thought, recalling how uptight and defensive he had been.
“Actually, yes,” I answered after a couple of seconds. “Something strange happened about a week before the jump.”
I told the police everything they wanted to know about the gas leak. Through all of the questioning, though, I just wanted to speak to Emile. I had to know what was going on. Why was he having an affair? I wondered. Why wasn’t I good enough? Emile had known about the infidelity in my first marriage and yet still saw fit to treat me badly and destroy our family unit.
“How long before I can speak to him?” I asked as I left the station.
“It’ll be at least a couple of weeks,” an officer replied, and I nodded. Just get through the next two weeks and then you can make sense of everything, I told myself, but the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach felt like a warning that any minute now, everything was going to fall apart.
• The above is an edited extract from I Survived by Victoria Cilliers, available in Australia on September 30th.