Tanya Farrelly - The Girl Behind the Lens - A dark psychological thriller with a brilliant twist

‘What’s your name?’ Joanna asked.

‘Rachel. Rachel Arnold. You can tell your mother it’s about Vince.’ She was busy plucking off one leather glove as she spoke. Joanna nodded and told her to sit down.

As she climbed the stairs Joanna wondered who Vince was, and how he was connected to her mother. When she’d reached the top of the stairs she turned on the light in the landing and eased open the door to her mother’s room. It was in darkness and she could hear her breathing heavily in sleep.

‘Mum.’ Gently, she touched her shoulder. Her mother stirred slightly and Joanna whispered to her again, louder this time.

‘What? What is it?’ Angela said, partially sitting up. Her voice was thick with sleep.

‘There’s a woman downstairs. She says she needs to talk to you about somebody called Vince?’

Joanna’s mother sat up suddenly and pushed the duvet from her. ‘Vince?’

‘Yes, her name’s Rachel something. She’s waiting in the living room. Do you know her?’

Angela ran a hand through her hair. ‘What time is it?’ she said.

‘After eleven … I didn’t know whether to answer or not … it’s so late and … do you know someone called Vince?’

Her mother stood in the middle of the room and cast about her. She picked up a blouse from the back of the bedroom chair and then put it down again. Joanna took her dressing gown from a hook on the bedroom door.

‘Here – put this on,’ she said.

Her mother slipped into the dressing gown and tightened the belt. She sat on the edge of the bed and stuck her feet in her slippers. ‘She’s in the living room?’

‘Yes. I had to invite her in. She looked kind of upset … and I couldn’t leave her on the doorstep … not like that.’

Her mother nodded, took a deep breath and ran a hand through her hair again to flatten it. Joanna followed her from the room. Her mother paused at the top of the stairs and she almost walked into her.

‘Look, maybe you should stay here,’ her mother said.

Joanna hesitated. ‘Will you be all right? I mean … who is that woman? Why would she call so late?’

‘Just someone from the past … please, wait in your room, Joanna. I’ll explain everything later.’

Joanna nodded, but her mother didn’t look at her. With one hand on the banister and the other lifting the end of her robe she hurried down the stairs.

‘Rachel, you’ve rung me twice already. I’ve told you, I haven’t heard from him.’

‘I know. I’ve come to tell you … Vince, he’s … he’s dead.’ The woman’s voice wavered.

‘What … what do you mean? How could he?’

The living room door closed, and Joanna crept down the stairs in an effort to hear what followed.

‘They found him. This morning the guards came. They’d found his body in the canal, trapped beneath the ice. Some man out walking saw him.’

Joanna moved further down the stairs until she was almost in the hallway.

‘What happened? Did he fall in? Jesus, I … Did you see the body?’

‘No … Patrick went to identify him … he said it was better if I didn’t … the body had been in the water for at least a week, they said. It’s not how I want to remember him.’

Joanna listened, but she heard no comforting words from her mother. Instead there was silence, broken finally by the other woman. ‘That’s … that’s her isn’t it. That’s …’

‘Joanna, yes. My daughter.’ Ice in her mother’s voice. Then: ‘Why have you come here, Rachel?’

‘Because I thought you should know … because of her … it seems like the right thing, doesn’t it? I mean now that …’

‘Now that he’s gone, you mean? No, I don’t think it does. She need never have known, but you’ve decided to see to that, haven’t you? I think that’s why you’ve come here … to cause trouble … some kind of revenge, now that you don’t have Vince to stop you. My God … have you been saving it up all these years?’

Joanna descended the last few steps of the stairs. She had never heard her mother so angry. She wanted to intervene, to know who the woman was, and why the death of this man should concern her. She stood in the hallway and stared at the living room door, reluctant, yet willing herself to open it.

‘How could this possibly be revenge?’ Rachel Arnold said. ‘He’s dead, Angela. Don’t you get it? If you must know, then yes, there is a reason why I’ve come. It’s because of this … it was among his things and there’s only one place he could have got it.’

‘I don’t know anything about it.’

The woman said something else, but Joanna didn’t hear. There was silence then for a few minutes. Joanna wondered what they were doing, her mother and the woman. Were they carefully avoiding each other’s eyes? Was the woman wishing she’d never come?

‘What’s this?’ she heard the woman ask.

‘They’re Joanna’s. She studies photography. She’s putting a collection together for an exhibition.’

‘They’re good, very good. Did you encourage her?’

‘No. Must be in the blood, mustn’t it?’

‘Will you tell her?’ the woman said.

‘I don’t have much choice now, do I? If I know Joanna, she’s probably already heard half the conversation.’

Joanna moved back from the door and furtively made her way up the stairs. She was trying to understand what she’d heard. She had a feeling that she knew who Vince was, but she needed to hear her mother say it. She sat on the top step of the stairs and waited to hear the living room door open. She wanted to listen to the rest of the conversation, but she didn’t dare. It was unlikely that the two women had much more to discuss now that the woman had said what she’d come to say.

When the door eventually did open, Joanna withdrew into the shadows of the landing. Her mother spoke in a low voice as the woman stepped into the cold night.

‘I’m sure you wish I hadn’t come,’ the woman said.

‘Too late for that now, isn’t it?’

‘He’s being released tomorrow. The funeral’s on Tuesday if you want to tell her … I don’t expect you to come.’

‘No, I’m sure you’d rather I didn’t.’

The woman said nothing to deny it, and the next sound Joanna heard was the woman’s shoes on the tarmac before her mother closed the front door. Joanna waited for her to call her, to say something, to explain, but there was silence from downstairs and when she looked down through the banisters, the hall was empty.

Slowly, she descended the stairs. Her mother was sitting in her armchair in the living room with her head in her hands.

‘Are you all right, Mum?’ Joanna said.

Her mother shook her head and looked at her hands clasped in front of her.

‘How did you know this Vince then?’

She waited for an answer. Her mother cupped her hands to her mouth and exhaled a breath that she must have been holding. It hissed through her fingers and a sound like a sob broke from her throat.

‘He was your father,’ she said.

Oliver picked up one of his wife’s blouses and folded it carefully before tossing it in a bin liner. He had taken all of Mercedes’s clothes from the wardrobe and they were strewn in a pile across the bed and in the black bags that lay scattered at his feet. He picked up a sweater and held it to his face. It smelled of Mercedes’s perfume – a rich, woody fragrance that had seemed always to linger in the room long after she’d left it. It was that scent as much as the sight of Mercedes’s clothes that evoked, unbidden, the memories that tormented him. He threw the sweater in an almost full bin liner, and knotted it tightly, trapping the scent of his wife inside.

That morning, when he had opened the wardrobe to take out a clean shirt, he was accosted, as he had been every morning for the past three weeks, by the sight of Mercedes’s clothes. He had decided at that moment that the only way for him to move on was to rid the house of any sign of her. Immediately after breakfast, he’d begun the clear-out. Apart from her clothes, which he would donate to a charity shop, Mercedes had owned few possessions. There was a music box that had belonged to her grandmother and a collection of porcelain dolls that she’d had since she was a child. Both had been of sentimental value to her and, because of this, he didn’t have the heart to pack them away with the rest, so he left them on a shelf in the living room where they had always been.