Chris Curran - Her Deadly Secret

He took a chance and sat on the bed with a mug in his hand. Still not looking at him, she pulled out a handful of tissues and dabbed at the slops, then took the other mug, went to sit at her little dressing table, and stared out into the street. They drank in silence for a few minutes.

When she put her mug down – she always drank her tea really quickly, they used to joke about her asbestos tongue – he knew he had to speak before she disappeared again. He gulped at his own drink, coughed, as a few drops went down the wrong way, but forced himself on.

‘I went to see them at The Children of Light.’ Her head jerked up. ‘They said Lily was involved. Called her Sister Lily, for God’s sake. Did you know about it, Hannah?’

A nod was all he got.

‘Why, love? Why would you let her go there after all you said about them?’

Her hands were in her hair and her voice was croaky. ‘I couldn’t stop her.’

‘Was it this boy? Did he get her involved?’

‘It was nothing like that, Joe.’ It was the first time she’d said his name for so long. And he waited for her to go on, hardly daring to breathe. She still had the wet tissues in one hand and she looked down at them dripping onto the dressing table. Finally, she placed the soggy mess in front of her, shaking her head and wiping her hand on her skirt. When she turned her eyes were glassy.

‘She went looking for her real father. Wanted to find her biological dad.’ He couldn’t breathe. Just waited. Her voice was so quiet he had to strain to hear. ‘She thought it was one of them – at The Children.’

Breathe, say something . ‘And was he? Did she find him?’ He’d never asked her about this other man. It never seemed to matter – before . ‘You’ve got to tell me, Hannah. And tell the police. If she found him, you must know what that means. Talk to me, Hannah, please.’

She stood, but her face was blank again and she was staring past him, shaking her head. ‘I can’t. I can’t talk about that.’

He was on his feet too; part of him wanting to hold her, to tell her it was all right. Another part wanting to shake her, to wake her up and make her think of Lily.

He was so tired.

She clutched herself and pushed past him, and he heard the click as she locked the bathroom door.

Rosie

‘Oliver and I are planning to move abroad.’ Rosie expected her mother to turn to her, say something, start to cry even, but she just trudged onwards. Rosie had called her that morning, suggesting a walk and, knowing what she was going to say, she had winced at Marion’s obvious delight.

‘Oh, darling, yes, that’d be lovely. Let’s go to Rye Harbour. The wild flowers at the nature reserve will be beautiful just now. I’ll come and pick you up.’

They didn’t talk much during the drive and it wasn’t until they were walking along the main path towards the sea, the salt marshes on their right and the river on their left, that Rosie broke the silence. It had turned chilly and their only company was a couple of small boats chugging down river to the sea and some little black-and-white seabirds shrilling overhead. The flowers her mother had hoped for were there, but their colours were muted in the mottled light, their petals bothered by the breeze.

Rosie pulled her collar around her throat, but Marion, in only a light jumper and cotton trousers, seemed oblivious to the cold. She had been tall and curvy when Rosie and Alice were young, but the weight had dropped off her when all the trouble began, even before the murder. She had become a little healthier-looking in the last few years. But to Rosie’s eyes she seemed almost frail today.

They walked on, until they reached the beach, its shingle falling in a steep slope to the sea. On the opposite side of the river, the sands of Camber stretched into the distance. When they were little, Rosie and Alice always wanted to go there instead of walking the ‘more interesting’ route their dad preferred on this side. At Camber Sands, even though they couldn’t see them from here, were ice cream kiosks and shops selling blow-up boats and plastic buckets and spades. But she didn’t want to think about that, so she looked along the sands to the horizon and stared hard at the nuclear power station crouched over Dungeness.

‘Did you hear me, Mum?’

Marion had been gazing in the other direction, over the marshy nature reserve to the wooden birdwatching hide and the Martello tower. ‘Sorry, darling, what?’

‘I said, we’re going to live abroad.’ She told herself to say it all, get it out. ‘With him living so close, and you sheltering him, it doesn’t feel safe, especially for Fay.’

Marion lurched down the shingle bank towards the water and Rosie followed, pushing her heels into the stones to stop herself from slithering too fast. She raised her voice. ‘It’s no good running away. You need to listen.’

When Marion turned back her mouth was a tight line, her hands clutched under her armpits. Her voice fierce. ‘No, Rosemary, you need to listen. I was so angry when Alice died that I had to find someone to blame and, when they told me it was your dad, I believed them because I hated him at that moment. Our lives were a mess and, after all I’d done to support him, I thought he was having an affair.’

Rosie slid down to her, grabbing the tops of her arms. ‘What?’

Her mother gave a harsh laugh. ‘The big argument we had was because I was sure he had another woman.’ She pulled away, trudging off along the pebbly bank as Rosie stood staring after her, trying to understand what she had heard.

During the trial, and immediately afterwards, the papers were full of rumours about her dad’s secret life. As well as stories suggesting he might have been abusing Alice and possibly some of his pupils, there was stuff about her parents’ marriage being in a rocky state because of his infidelity. Rosie and her mother had never discussed any of it.

Rosie followed her. She could hardly get the words out. ‘Why did you never tell me this, Mum?’

Her mother spoke slowly as she struggled to keep her footing on the shingle slope. ‘The way he was behaving made me sure there must be someone else, but he denied it. I told him he had to move out anyway, and I went away that weekend so he could tell you and Alice.’ She stopped, looking down at the pebbles, churning them with her foot and clutching herself. Her back looked so fragile as the breeze pressed the thin wool of her jumper against the ridges on her spine that Rosie’s throat ached.

Her dad’s story had been that he was at two different supermarkets at the time Alice must have been killed, but there was no evidence to place him at the first shop, which meant that forty minutes or so were unaccounted for. Rosie had known her mum and dad weren’t getting on in the months before the murder. But she and Alice had had no inkling about a mistress. Apart from the hints in the papers, the first real suggestion of it was six years ago. A television programme set out to prove he was innocent and raised the possibility that he was with another woman during those missing forty minutes. But it wasn’t very convincing because he refused to speak to them and, although two of his friends told them they suspected he was having an affair, they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, name the woman. So, the TV people couldn’t even guess at her identity.

‘Was he? Having an affair, I mean.’

‘Apparently, although he only admitted it to me recently. When I went to see him in prison.’

‘And I suppose he told you he was with her when Alice was killed. Just like that TV programme said, but he didn’t think to mention it to the police at the time? You don’t really believe that, do you?’