Your Guilty Secret

by Rebecca Thornton

  And how I’d done nothing to stop it.

  I was certain Ava hadn’t run off but now the possibility that she may have done, just as a little defiance, had started to intrude into my thoughts. Maybe she just wanted to scare me a little. Get me back for the way I’d spoken to her the night before. Or maybe I was reading too much into it. Projecting my own fears about my parenting on to the situation. I felt sick.

  All these things crowded into my mind as I thought of my little girl, unable to find her way home. Frightened, alone. Hyperventilating as it got dark. It’s OK, I thought. I’d put the fob back where it belonged. Everything would be back to normal and she’d come home. I knew it. The fob had started to represent some sort of talisman – a symbol as to what was going to happen next.

  But when I got up to the bedroom, the fob wasn’t there.

  I opened all the drawers around me slamming them closed. ‘Everything OK?’ I heard Matthew shout.

  ‘There you are,’ I said, after I hadn’t been able to find him earlier. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Here,’ he replied, ‘in the upstairs den.’ I was going to ask him if he’d been downstairs to see if he’d admit to having spoken to Joan, but I couldn’t concentrate. ‘You OK?’ he called. ‘What’s with the banging sound?’

  ‘Everything’s fine.’ I opened the drawers of the beautiful mahogany chest that had been shipped over from Provence. The silver and enamel ornament tray that had been given to me as a thank you present for appearing on The Larry Bauer Show. I threw all the contents into a pile in the middle of the room. But I couldn’t see it anywhere. Where the hell was it? I crawled under the furniture, the swinging hammock chair that looked out onto the view outside. I clawed my hands into the carpet, my nails digging into the thick, cream fibres, but it wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

  ‘Nothing,’ I screamed. And then I remembered his father. I hadn’t told him that Manny had found out about him being in prison. One tiny lie and now all this.

  ‘By the way,’ I called, pulling at my hair. ‘Manny’s onto us about your father. He’s found out that he’s in prison. And weirdly.’ I took a breath to shake myself of the memory and the paranoia. ‘Detective Mcgraw was asking about it too.’ I expected that Matthew would dismiss it, given there were more important things at hand. But he turned to me then, his eyes blazing.

  ‘What the fuck—’ He ran into the bedroom from the den, his T-shirt collared with sweat. ‘What the fuck do you mean?’

  ‘Matthew.’ I tried to calm him down but I felt petrified that he was going to smash up the room. His whole body was tense, a criss-cross of veins rising up from his neck.

  ‘Shut it down.’ he ripped off the silken oyster-coloured eiderdown from the bed, and held it to him. He was shaking. ‘Get it shut the fuck down, or someone will pay.’ I realised then why he was so angry. I kicked myself for not having seen it earlier.

  ‘Fine,’ I told him calmly. ‘I’d like to remind you that my daughter is missing. So please, let’s just concentrate on what matters.’ He sat and put his head in his hands. ‘OK?’ But he didn’t reply, he just shook his head and cried. I was watching everything collapse. Me. Matthew. My daughter had vanished and I was now being put under pressure to get Matthew’s dad out of the limelight. I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to put myself under scrutiny instead.

  So now, more than ever, the key fob had become fixated in my mind. If I found it, then Ava would come home. That’s all there was to it. It sounded irrational. I knew that. But nothing about this situation was rational.

  If it was in the house somewhere, it meant she hadn’t been taken. There was no weird link between her going missing and the events of three days earlier. She had got lost at best. She was coming home soon. And if I alerted Detective Mcgraw to the fob and the fact it had gone, they’d start getting unnecessarily distracted.

  She hadn’t run off, I told myself over and over. We’d had so much fun, I remembered telling Detective Mcgraw. She was in a good frame of mind. Singing, laughing, chatting.

  Matthew left the room. ‘I’m going to my room,’ he said. ‘Don’t disturb me unless necessary.’

  ‘Fine.’ I picked up the eiderdown and folded it up. Then I bent down to see if the fob had slid underneath the bed but it wasn’t there. I reminded myself to check if Marcy or Rosa had seen it. I gave myself an hour. If I hadn’t found it then perhaps I’d tell someone. It had to be around. It had to be somewhere in the house. It became all consuming. Overtaking all the previous paranoia, or perhaps because of the paranoia.

  Just the thought of getting the fob back filled me with a sense of relief and control. Ava had had it before now. She was, or so I thought, the last person to have touched it. I thought of the way her small hands had clasped it so tightly in her bed.

  And then it crossed my mind that perhaps Ava had found the fob in my bedroom after I’d taken it from hers. Perhaps she’d found it in the morning before we’d left, when she came up to my room. Perhaps she’d carried it with her on our day out. I thought back to when we’d left the house. What Ava had been wearing: one of our designs, the navy dress. It had one pocket on the front of it that she could have slipped it into. The thought that I wouldn’t be able to find it in the house filled me with such a sense of foreboding that I had to sit down.

  Just as I was working out what to do next, I heard the doorbell. Joan answered. I could hear echoes of Conor’s voice.

  ‘Detective. Hello. Yes. She’s behaving . . . oddly . . . definitely sinking in now.’

  And then the house intercom went.

  ‘Lara? Detective Mcgraw’s arrived,’ said Joan.

  ‘Send him up. I’m not coming down,’ I said although I wasn’t really aware of what I was saying at that point. I would never, ever normally let anyone near my bedroom. But I wasn’t interested in anything, other than the damn fob.

  I held my breath as I heard Detective Mcgraw coming up the stairs. I jumped, and pushed everything back beside my bed. I didn’t want anyone to see what I’d been doing. It was my little secret. Everyone clearly already thought I was losing the plot. And maybe I was. I wanted to scream, Wouldn’t you? I thought I’d been pretty sane so far. But perhaps Conor was right. Perhaps it was only just sinking in.

  Detective Mcgraw knocked on the door. It felt all wrong: him being in my bedroom, his black lace-up shoes soiling my luscious carpet, but I didn’t say anything. I just continued to push all the items I’d ripped out from my dressers under my bedside tables in case I found the fob.

  It appeared that, just like my daughter, it had vanished into thin air.

  England, December 2004

  ‘Follow the red light,’ one of the production crew with spiky hair and baggy trousers told me. He held up his finger. ‘There. Just look into that.’ I stared at it as he moved the camera up and down the stage. ‘For the record,’ he said. ‘I think you’re going to win.’

  ‘Ten million people,’ he shouted after me, as I left the stage. I needed some water. ‘That’s the forecasted viewing figures for tonight. So . . . break a leg.’

  I had not been thinking of any of that when I had been prepped that they were going to announce the winner of Idolz. Two finalists. I had been chosen from over ten thousand entries and sixteen contestants. Me and Sarah Dunne.

  My mind was blank as I stood on the stage, holding Sarah’s hand. Looking down at the floor whilst Daryl, the show’s host, waited for the final public vote to be counted. We listened, the air heavy, waiting for his voice to tell us that the numbers were in.

  He started to speak but I knew before he’d even opened his mouth to make the announcement. A shift in my energy. And then he called it.

  Your winner.

  Lara King. I felt my eyes go first. Drawn across the crowd. Watching arms pumping the air from the audience. My ears rang, hot with the screams, the roars, the heavy bassline.

  ‘And now up,’ he said, ‘singing for the very last time, your champion, the girl you voted to win
Idolz, please give it up for . . . Lara King.’

  I felt the tears press heavy against my lids. Then the golden glitter rained down over me and I looked at the silhouetted figures, raised in their seats, and I felt truly, totally invincible. Afterwards, when I’d left the stage, people were pulling at me from every angle, until I felt someone tugging at my sleeve. It felt familiar and when I looked up I saw Ben. I moved over to one side and hugged him.

  ‘We did it. You and me, Ben. We did it.’ And just as I was about to tell him what had happened on stage, he stopped me.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. He had a serious look on his face. Shit. My first thought was that they’d somehow found out I’d not quite been so truthful about my past. But then I knew they wouldn’t care about that anyway, given how much money Ben had estimated I’d make them.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Don’t freak out. But I’ve got to leave.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Go. It’s late. Don’t be silly.’ Although I had expected him to come and celebrate with me.

  ‘No. I mean, I really have to leave. I’m so, so sorry. My fiancée, Kaycee, has gone into labour earlier than expected. I’ve got to leave for a while. But I’ll make sure the team look after you well.’ He stopped and tilted his head back. ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’ The show had already catapulted me into the public sphere. The free stuff, the team of people, the work on my appearance, it was all getting out of control. And now I’d actually won and Ben was deserting me.

  ‘It’s OK.’ He held his arm out, not quite touching my shoulder. ‘I’ve asked Joanne to look after you.’

  ‘My publicist? But that’s not her job, is it? I mean, she does my publicity, right?’

  ‘We’ve made a deal with her and the record company that she’ll divvy up her job brief between doing your publicity and managing you. The reason I’ve sorted that with her is because I’ve worked with Joanne on other things. She’s fantastic. Knows what she’s doing and will be supporting you one hundred per cent. She’ll become a true friend.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. I ended up speaking to her, and Ben was right. She was great and I knew we’d get on. But something sat uneasily in me. I wasn’t sure what it was. A sense that something was going to go wrong.

  ‘It’s all OK,’ Joanne soothed, after Ben had sent his paternity out-of-office email to everyone. ‘I promise, I’m here to help. We’ll have a laugh – there are some amazing Christmas parties coming up – but we’ve got some serious business, too, and we’re going to get you the best publicity known to man. OK?’

  I had laughed and told her I was going to hold her to her word but still, I felt uncomfortable about Ben going.

  And I was right. It had all started to go wrong. Slowly at first. The first thing was a beauty treatment. I suppose, that’s when it all really went tits up. It sounds ridiculous. A beauty treatment. So innocuous. But it had some dreadful consequences. And just when I was least expecting it, which is how it goes for most things.

  ‘Just a treat,’ Joanne had told me. I had heard her tapping on her computer whilst she was talking to me, which annoyed me. ‘I’ve booked you in for a small session before your big interview on This Morning.’ I wanted to tell her to focus on me. That if the interview was so big, that she should not be doing two things at once. But then I gave myself a talking-to. Don’t get ahead of yourself. She might have had important stuff to do. It might have been to do with me. So instead, I told myself to relax. That I hadn’t had a moment to myself since I’d started this whole thing.

  I had a driver to take me straight from the hotel where I’d been staying.

  ‘The Beauty Clinic?’ he said, tapping at his SatNav. ‘I’ve got it here, let me see.’ He looked at his screen. ‘Just off Chiswick High Road.’

  ‘Yup.’ I shut down the conversation, ignoring him when he told me his twelve-year-old daughter was a huge fan. The air was freezing when I got out the car, and everyone had that pumped-up energy they get just before Christmas. I walked in to the warm, jasmine-scented beautician’s, where Joanne had booked me in for an ‘all over pampering session’, as she had called it, ‘somewhere quiet and out the way.’

  The lady behind the counter got off her stool when I walked in. She was dressed in a crease-free white uniform, with a row of silver pens lined up in her front pocket.

  ‘I’m Iris. So lovely to have you,’ she sang, taking my coat. ‘Please, come in.’ She looked at a bunch of notes she had on a clipboard. ‘Right, you’re booked in for eyebrows, hair extensions, botox, and I’ll be doing a facial technique today too. It’s a new laser therapy treatment.’

  ‘Are you sure, I’m only just coming up to nineteen,’ but then I shut my mouth thinking about conquering the world. I had a sudden thought that it must be my birthday soon. I had been so tied up in the competition that I wasn’t even aware of the date. I let Iris work on my body, toning my face, adding extensions to my hair, laying me down on a reclining chair, the smell of antiseptic filling the air.

  ‘Now for the small injections in your forehead. Just the tiniest of sensations,’ she said, pricking at my flesh. ‘Ten tiny injections. That’s it. You won’t see the effects for about ten days,’ she told me. ‘But then you’ll look much fresher. My clients love it. It just means that you’ll stave off the wrinkles later on and, well, the camera loves you anyway but it’ll love you even more now.’ She wiped at my skin with a tissue. ‘Don’t touch your forehead or massage it until tomorrow.’

  I left feeling rejuvenated. Like the old me had been swallowed up and a new one had taken its place. I could take on the world now, as I made my way to the dental surgery.

  When I arrived at the red-brick building in Harley Street, I was ready, gunning even, for more work to be done. I walked there, strolling along the back streets of the West End with the Christmas lights twinkling above the buildings, hoping that no one would recognise me. A brown Vauxhall Astra stopped and started alongside me. I turned, facing the road, trying to peer in the front window, when someone wound it down. A large camera lens pointed in my direction. Wow. I was being papped. I rushed the rest of the way to the dental surgery, careful to keep my hair in one place, and not to trip up. Everything was different now, I realised. I had to think about my actions, and every single movement I made.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I told the receptionist. ‘I’m early. I was going to walk around a bit but . . .’ I stopped myself explaining the full story.

  She sat up straight when she saw me, pretending to look at her computer screen, but I could see her glancing at me every few seconds.

  ‘I’ll see if Dr West is free now before the next patient turns up,’ she whispered. I started to say no, I’m not in any hurry, but then a feeling came over me. The first feeling like it and my stomach felt all airy and light, and then I felt strong.

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied, tossing my hair out of my face. I had just been papped after all. I deserved a bit of special treatment. ‘Yes, that sounds ideal.’

  I texted Ben.

  Just got papped. I think. Not at any showbiz event.

  He replied:

  Congratulations, then. You’ve made it big.

  Hope everything going OK at the hospital!

  Elation hit, followed by a slump of emptiness that leached into me. I was called upstairs. Exiting the old-fashioned lift, I was welcomed into a huge, airy room. I put down my bag on a large brown leather chair by the door.

  ‘I’m a bit frightened of needles,’ I told the nurse but she patted me on the back and laughed at me.

  ‘You got up there and performed in front of all those people and you can’t hack a small thing like this?’ She pointed at a tray full of wrapped syringes. ‘Don’t you worry. Lynn here is the best dentist around so you’re in safe hands. Anyway, go on then. I’ll give you something so you won’t feel a thing.’ She had unwrapped a small pill, putting it in my hand. I took it and waited for five minutes. ‘Nothing’s happening,’ I told her.

  ‘It won’t. Not q
uite yet but . . .’ She patted me on the arm. I liked being around her, so I allowed her to inject a tranquilliser into my veins. ‘This will do the trick.’

  Just as my limbs had started to relax, my phone went off. I tried to lift it, but my arms felt like jelly. I let out a small giggle. ‘Jeez,’ I told the nurse.

  ‘Good. You won’t feel a thing now for your procedure.’

  I looked at the screen, struggling to lift the phone to my face, squinting at the message.

  It was Hannah.

  Coming out tonight? Come on. You owe me. You’ve ditched me the past three times. You told me you’d kept it free. So you and me. You can get us a table at that new place that just opened last week? Be Squared? I’ve got something I need to tell you. Something mega important. I would lure you with the promise of loads of celebs. But you are one.

  Fine,

  I texted back. I’d been looking forward to a night in the hotel, but I had started to feel like I could go out and have some fun.

  But I’m recording tomorrow. With that hottie Mark. So gotta be on top form.

  Whatever.

  Fine, Missy. You’ll be on top form. But tonight, we’re going to cause some havoc. You and I – cocktails and shots.

  I texted back:

  C u later x.

  I didn’t even notice the sound of the drill. Or the sawing of my teeth. ‘First phase,’ the dentist had said, ‘that smile of yours will be just brilliant.’ I could barely feel my head moving. It felt like it was sliding all around the black leather headrest.

  When we finished I saw Hannah had texted again.

  Book the table. We need to celebrate. Holy shit. I’ve just seen you on the TOP OF THE MAIL ONLINE PAGES! Getting your teeth done? Snazzy! You’ve properly made it now. U’ll be on the front of all the mags soon.

  Top billing of the Mail Online for walking to the dentist. I couldn’t believe it. I’d made the headlines when I’d won the show, but I never in my wildest dreams thought this would happen.