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

‘She’ll be back,’ he said, touching Oliver’s shoulder before going home for the night.

The truth was Oliver couldn’t stand being in that house. He’d begun to take the phone off the hook in the evenings so that he didn’t have to listen to Carmen Hernandez’s messages. Sooner or later he knew that he would have to come up with something to put Carmen off for good. He’d considered sending her a letter. He’d even spent time copying Mercedes’s handwriting in order to send Carmen a note that said she never wanted to see her again, but then he’d given up. He knew that it wouldn’t be enough, that there had to be something else, but without Mercedes he couldn’t think of anything else. He could say that she had left him. Carmen would believe that, but he knew that Mercedes’s disappearance would motivate her family to contact the police – and he wanted to avoid that for as long as he possibly could.

Oliver was about to leave the office when there was a long buzz on the intercom. He looked at his watch. Could Colin Byrne have forgotten his keys? Cautiously, he crossed to the window and looked down into the street. A man in a dark-coloured coat stood below. He didn’t recognize him until the man stood back and looked up at the window. Curious, Oliver lifted the intercom and told Patrick Arnold to come up to the office.

Joanna’s mother was seldom home. At first, she thought her absence an attempt to avoid her but, when she thought about it, her mother had been out a lot recently, even before Rachel Arnold’s visit. She hadn’t asked Joanna about the funeral nor had Joanna volunteered any information about it. What she had decided to do was take Rachel Arnold up on her invitation in order to find out about her father.

She stood outside the front porch of the Arnolds’ house and leaned on the bell. It buzzed, a sharp, insistent sound. There was movement in the hall, and through the amber glass next to the front door she saw a figure move down the hallway, and she braced herself for the meeting. The door swung open, but instead of Rachel Arnold, Joanna found herself face to face with the man she had seen at the funeral – the one that Rachel had told her was Patrick.

Joanna stammered, disconcerted. ‘I’m here to see Rachel.’

Patrick Arnold seemed to scrutinize her. ‘Joanna, isn’t it? I saw you the other night at the church, but you disappeared before I’d a chance to say hello. I’m Patrick, your … Vince’s brother.’

He extended his hand; it was warm as it gripped hers. He had been about to say ‘your father’ Joanna mused, but had thought better of it. She wondered how close this man had been to his brother – if Vince had confided in him all those years ago about the affair with her mother. He stood back and Joanna stepped into the warmly lit hall, acutely aware that she was entering her father’s house.

She glanced round. Both walls and carpet were a deep cream colour. A large Monet print hung above the stairs, and a man’s navy sports jacket lay draped across the banister. She wondered if it was Patrick Arnold’s, or if it had been her father’s. Patrick led her into the living room, and she resisted the urge to touch the coat as she passed.

Rachel’s expression as she entered the room was a mixture of pleasure and surprise.

‘Joanna, I’m so glad you’ve come. I see you’ve met Patrick.’

He stood by the fireplace looking slightly amused but he didn’t say anything. None of them did, they stood round in the bellowing silence until Rachel finally spoke.

‘Odd meeting like this, isn’t it? But then it’s been an odd few weeks. It’s hard to know where to begin. Thank you for coming the other night. I wasn’t sure you would but I imagine she’s told you everything, your mother?’

‘She told me some things.’

Rachel’s blue eyes were not without sympathy. ‘It must have been a shock to find out like that. I’m sorry.’

Joanna straightened. ‘That’s what Mum said. Bit late to be sorry now though, isn’t it? It seems no one wanted me to know.’

Rachel didn’t deny that. ‘And what did she tell you?’ she asked.

‘I know about my mother’s affair … that he didn’t want anything to do with me when he found out, that you forbade contact.’ The words cut even as she said them, the wounds deeper than she’d thought.

‘Well, I should have known she wouldn’t leave that out.’ There was anger in Rachel’s tone, but she checked it. ‘I don’t suppose she told you that I wanted to adopt you, bring you up as our own.’

‘What?’

Rachel nodded. ‘Vince and I had been trying for a child for a number of years – then he had the affair with your mother and … well, she refused to give you up, of course. Why wouldn’t she? I hated her. She had Vince’s child and I didn’t. How fair was that? So yes, I told him if he had any part in your life, our marriage was over. I suppose you think that was selfish … maybe it was, but it would never have worked. I wasn’t about to be part of any triad. I was his wife.’

Patrick, having stood by listening, spoke suddenly. ‘So you see it wasn’t that easy … for anyone, not for my brother either.’

Joanna felt light-headed. She wished her mother had told her everything and not left her open like this. She turned on Patrick Arnold. ‘Oh, it seems it was easy enough. He cut himself off – never bothered to find out anything about me – his only child. Just as well he didn’t have any others, isn’t it? If that’s the kind of father he was.’

This was aimed at Rachel, who looked taken aback by her sudden anger.

‘I’m sorry, Joanna. And I don’t blame you for being angry. I’m not going to pretend that it isn’t my fault – all our faults – it must seem everybody conspired against you. We did think about you … I wondered if he’d one day want to find you. I knew where you lived; your mother was in the phone book, so he knew it too. And it seems he did wonder because I found this among his things.’

Rachel crossed the room and took a book from the shelf. As she did so, Joanna saw a silver-framed photo of her father on a cabinet; it was the same photo she’d seen when she’d typed his name into a search engine the night that Rachel had come to the house. Vince Arnold smiling into the camera at what looked like a racetrack. He wore a white shirt open at the neck and a sports jacket, his hair was thinning, eyes creased with laughter lines as he squinted into the sun. Most of the national newspapers had printed the picture next to the article reporting his death. A tragic accident, they had said – Arnold was the latest victim of the biggest freeze to have gripped the country in almost forty years.

Rachel returned and Joanna found herself looking at another picture, which Rachel held out to her.

‘This is the reason I went to your mother’s house that night. I thought that maybe she knew something; that she’d had some contact with him before his disappearance, but she denied ever having seen it.’

It was a picture of Joanna on her confirmation day, posing outside the church in a little skirt suit that her mother had bought her for the occasion. There were many like it in the family album at home.

‘Where did he get this?’ she asked.

Rachel shook her head. ‘I’ve no idea. I thought maybe you could help me to find out?’

Joanna looked at her. ‘Well, it couldn’t have been my mother; she said she hadn’t seen him in years.’ Even as she said the words, she knew that it was the only possible way such a picture had come into her father’s possession. She looked at Patrick and again wondered how much he knew.

‘Did you know my mother then?’ she asked him.

‘No, I was just a kid. Vince didn’t exactly want me hanging around back then.’