Her One Mistake

by Heidi Perks

  The two women each took an arm and helped me over to the farthest edge of the beach. My legs shook as they carried much of my weight. I was weak from a lack of food and drink, from the coldness of the sea, and the energy I’d used keeping myself afloat.

  Alice cried out to me when she saw me coming, pushing herself off the seat.

  “Sweetheart!” My voice broke as I pulled away from the women’s hands and stumbled the last few feet to Alice, finally able to wrap my arms around my little girl as I sobbed into her hair. Every other thought ebbed away, and in that moment I didn’t think about what had happened to my husband, or what the future held for me. It was enough just to be back with my daughter.

  When I finally looked up, I caught Charlotte’s eye. She was still sitting in the ambulance, anxiously balling the hem of her cardigan in her lap. Tears welled in my eyes at the sight of her. I opened my mouth to speak. I needed to thank her, but surrounded by people, what could I say? Charlotte nodded, a small movement of her head, but her expression was pained as she watched me.

  A paramedic told me he still needed to check me, but I assured him I was fine, and as soon as he went around the side of the ambulance, I turned to Charlotte. “Thank you,” I said at the same time she spoke.

  “Brian?” she said. “Is he— What happened?”

  I looked out to the water and shook my head. “I, erm, they’re still looking for him. I think they—” I broke off and bent down toward Alice. “Are you okay, sweetheart?” I couldn’t bear to think how much she was taking in.

  Charlotte stood up and gestured to the seat. “Let’s lie her down,” she said. “I think she’d have fallen asleep if she hadn’t been waiting for you.” She pulled a rough woolen blanket off the seat and, as I picked Alice up and lay her down, Charlotte draped it over her. Crouching down on the floor beside Alice, I stroked her hair.

  “They’re going to want to talk to you,” Charlotte said quietly.

  I nodded, still watching my baby. Already her eyelids were fluttering. It wouldn’t be long until she drifted off; she was obviously exhausted.

  “Harriet.” Charlotte spoke more urgently this time. “The police will want to speak to you any moment.”

  “I know,” I said, standing until I came face-to-face with her. “What have you told them? Why do they think you’re here?”

  “They haven’t spoken to me yet, but they will, and I don’t know what—”

  “Just say I asked you to come because I was scared. Say you knew nothing,” I told her, thinking quickly. “That way there’s nothing that links you. Where’s my dad?” I said. “Is he okay? Is he conscious?”

  Charlotte began scratching her wrist until bright red streaks appeared. I grabbed her hand and held it still. “Is he okay?”

  “He was unconscious when the paramedics got here,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Harriet, I know this isn’t what you need to hear. He didn’t make it,” she said. “I’m so sorry, but—”

  “No.” I shook my head manically. “No, that can’t be true.”

  “He wasn’t in good shape, but he didn’t know what was happening or was in any pain, and the paramedics did everything they could—”

  “No,” I cried out, clamping my hands over my ears so I couldn’t hear what she was saying. If I didn’t hear it, it might not be true. Just as I’d believed when I’d seen my mum’s empty hospital bed.

  My father couldn’t be dead. Not when I had so much I needed to say to him.

  “Harriet.” Charlotte pried my hands away from my ears. “You need to be careful,” she whispered urgently. “There’s too many people nearby.”

  “But I haven’t told him I’m sorry,” I sobbed. “He’ll never know.”

  He’d never know that if I could turn back time, I would in a heartbeat, and I’d go back to the day he walked back into my life. And this time I would never have asked of him what I did. I would never have put him in a position where he couldn’t say no.

  Grief balled in the pit of my stomach, expanding with every tight breath I inhaled. Not my dad. Not the man who’d put his life at risk for me and Alice. This was all my fault and now it was too late and there was nothing I could do to make any of it better. “He only took her to keep us safe.”

  “Harriet!” Charlotte said. “You can’t do this. Someone will be watching.”

  I knew what she was telling me. The police would be monitoring my every move. I wasn’t supposed to show remorse for the man who had taken my child. But I couldn’t help it. Bile rose so quickly, so forcefully, that before I could stop myself I threw up outside the back doors of the ambulance.

  Charlotte’s arms were instantly around me, stroking my hair, making me sit next to Alice, who had thankfully fallen asleep already. How much I wanted to lie down with her, have sleep take me away too, turn this into nothing more than a bad dream.

  “You cannot break down. He took your daughter, remember,” she said so quietly only I could hear.

  “But it’s all my fault,” I whimpered. She knew that, of course, but still she continued to stroke my hair and tell me I needed to pull myself together.

  Yet the pain wrenched at my insides, tugging them apart, scrunching them back together haphazardly until they felt like they weren’t a part of me. A searing heat spread through me like fire until I could feel nothing else.

  I couldn’t let them think my father was responsible. Not now that he was dead. I lifted my head up, surveying the scene that stretched around me. Taking in the chaos; the panic; the pain. Everyone was only here because of me.

  “How can I live with myself if I don’t tell the truth?” I murmured.

  “Harriet, look,” Charlotte snapped, turning my head to the left. Alice was curled up in the shape of a peanut. Her breaths slow and deep. Oblivious—as she should be. “How can you live with yourself if you do?”

  • • •

  I COULDN’T UNDERSTAND how, after everything I’d done to her, Charlotte was trying to protect me, but I never got the chance to ask her why. Or indeed whether she would be prepared to lie for me. At that moment a police officer appeared at the back of the ambulance, introducing herself as Detective Rawlings, and while she murmured condolences for nothing specific, she asked both Charlotte and me to accompany her to the station where she and her colleague would ask us some questions. Another officer would stay with Alice, she assured me, as she led me to the car waiting in the parking lot. I never got the chance to tell Charlotte how sorry I was before she was led in for questioning. And I never got the chance to ask how far she was prepared to go.

  NOW

  From the moment my dad agreed to this plan, I’d always known there was every possibility I’d one day find myself lying to the police. I tried convincing myself he would get away with hiding her for me and tried not thinking about the many ways it could go wrong, but I knew, of course I knew, how easily it could.

  Sometimes I imagined myself in an interrogation room—my only ideas of them conjured from TV dramas—and I’d stick to my story, persuading the police I had nothing to do with my daughter’s disappearance.

  What I never considered was that I’d also be lying about murdering my husband.

  Is it murder? I left him to die, but I didn’t actually kill him. Is there a difference? My fingers tap nervously on the table as I wait for Detective Lowry to come back into the room. I wonder what the detective was called away for and suspect there must be news of Brian.

  Maybe he isn’t even dead, I think, my fingers pausing as the door swings open. I move my hands to my lap so Lowry can’t see them twitching. He doesn’t look at me as he slides back into his chair and speaks into the microphone, well-rehearsed lines rolling off his tongue as he announces the interview has begun.

  I have already told the detective how my husband abused me for years, that he dragged me onto the boat tonight against my will, leaving my daughter alone on the beach. I’ve told him Charlotte will vouch for this, as she found Alice on the rocks.

  “W
hat I don’t understand, Harriet,” he says, “is why you never thought to mention that your dad was actually still alive when Alice first went missing.”

  I look at him, silenced briefly, because I’d expected him to continue asking me about Brian. But his words fire into the room like a bullet, loud and sharp as they echo around my head.

  I tell him the truth about my mother’s lie, that my husband believed my father was dead, and that I never could have contradicted Brian when he told the police this because I was so frightened about what he might do. And when the detective wants to know if I’ve seen my dad since he left, in the last thirty-four years, I admit he turned up at my door six months ago.

  Lowry raises an eyebrow and settles back in his seat, letting my admission linger between us. It isn’t the answer he’d expected. He is either excited or nervous by the turn this is taking—he certainly didn’t think I would so readily admit I’d seen him again, but I have no choice. Alice will tell them she knows him.

  “Harriet,” he says, pressing closer to the microphone. “Did you know your father had taken your daughter from the fair thirteen days ago?”

  I close my eyes and bow my head, taking a breath, slowly and deliberately.

  “Harriet?”

  My father made me promise him I’d deny my involvement. Betraying him feels so much more unforgivable now. “No. I didn’t know anything about it,” I say, Charlotte’s words reverberating in my head: How could I live with myself if I didn’t lie?

  Detective Lowry crosses his arms and leans back in his chair, cocking his head to one side as his eyes bore into me.

  In the twenty-minute journey from the beach to the police station, I’d stitched together a fragile story made from fragments of truths, creating another version of reality that I needed to believe. I may have learned to make up stories when I was younger, but it was thanks to Brian that I’d acquired the gullibility to believe anything.

  I take another sip of water, swallowing it loudly, and remind the detective what my husband was like and how scared I was of how he’d react.

  “Right. Your husband,” he says flatly. “Who no one else knew was abusive.”

  I ignore his tone. “My father was the first person I confided in.”

  The detective glances at my wrist. I’ve been rubbing it again, and a wide red circle now bands my arm. “It wasn’t physical.” I stop rubbing and gesture to my wrist. “Though he did grab me tonight. But no, what he did throughout our marriage felt much worse,” I say.

  “So what did your father say when you told him?”

  I tell Lowry my dad tried persuading me to leave Brian, but that Brian had made it impossible. And then I tell him the story my dad came up with when he said he couldn’t see me anymore. That he’d told me he moved to France and he was sorry he couldn’t do more to help. I tell Detective Lowry that I hadn’t seen him again until tonight.

  Lowry is still incredulous that I mentioned none of this to the police two weeks ago. That surely I would have suspected my father could have taken Alice.

  “Of course I wish I had now,” I say. “I haven’t seen my daughter in two weeks.” Tears trickle down my cheeks at the thought of Alice and how desperately I want to be with her again. I wipe them away with the sleeve of my T-shirt. I would change everything if I knew I could save my dad.

  “Are you sure there’s no news?” I ask him again. “Did they find Brian?”

  • • •

  DETECTIVE RAWLINGS FOLDS her hands, one on top of the other, on the table in front of her. Her shoulders are taut, her forehead now has a permanent crease along the length of it. She can’t hide her frustration as much as she tries.

  “I’m sorry, I just don’t buy that you didn’t know anything about Brian.”

  “Christ!” Charlotte falls back into her chair and looks away from the detective.

  “What’s the matter, Charlotte?” Rawlings’s interest is piqued.

  “I just can’t believe we are still going over this same thing. I didn’t know,” she says through gritted teeth. “Harriet never told me about her husband’s abuse. I didn’t know Harriet as well as I thought I did, I realize that now,” she snaps. “I don’t know why you’re trying to make me feel worse about it than I already do.”

  Somewhere along the line, tiredness has bled into exhaustion. But Charlotte’s heart is thumping, adrenaline is feeding her veins, and the more Detective Rawlings accuses her, the more Charlotte wants to shout, “Just bring it on.”

  “I’m not trying to make you feel bad,” the detective says, her face still void of emotion. “I just want to get to the truth.”

  “I’ve been telling you the truth,” she cries, feeling the blood rush to the surface of her skin. “And maybe I should have looked harder, but the fact is—” She falters. “The fact is, if you don’t want someone to know, they won’t.”

  The detective pulls back, her eyebrows pinched, seemingly amused by Charlotte’s outburst.

  Charlotte’s chair screeches back across the hard floor as she stands up. She rips open her cardigan and pulls up her T-shirt with one hand, lowering the waistband of her jeans with the other. “This,” she says, pointing to the puckered red scar on the side of her stomach, “is what I didn’t want anyone to know.”

  She lets her T-shirt fall and uses her hand to wipe the tears across her face. Not one person knew the truth: that one night her dad’s temper led to him ripping the hot iron off the ironing board, out of the socket, catching Charlotte as he swung it around in anger. It might have been an accident, but still, she never wanted anyone to know the truth.

  “And they never did,” she cries, falling back into the chair. “They never did. So don’t you dare say that this is my fault.”

  • • •

  “HARRIET, I KNOW this has been a distressing night for you, but I will tell you if there is any news.” Detective Lowry looks up sharply when we are interrupted by a knock on the door. An officer pokes her head in and calls him out of the room again. “Bloody hell,” he mutters, scraping his chair back. “Two minutes,” he snaps, glancing back at me.

  When he returns, he takes his seat and clears his throat, sitting slightly forward in his chair as his elbows reach out to find the table. “Let’s continue,” he says firmly.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  They found Brian. I know they did. He is still alive and telling them what I did to him.

  “Mrs. Hodder, I’m the one asking the questions,” he says as he shifts awkwardly and clasps his fingers together. “What made you come to Cornwall, Harriet?”

  Another deep breath. Another lump to swallow down. “I got a note,” I lie. “It came through the mail slot three days ago.” I lean forward and from my back pocket I pull out the Elderberry Cottage business card I’d written on earlier this afternoon, glancing at it one last time before I push it across the table.

  Lowry reads it aloud. “ ‘I’m sorry, Harriet, but I’m doing this for you. You’re both in danger if you stay.’ ” He turns the note over and reads out the address. “So you get this and decide to come to Cornwall and find Elderberry Cottage?”

  I nod.

  “Without even thinking to mention this to anyone?” He flaps the card in the air. “Not even Angela, who was practically living in your house at the time?”

  “I just needed to get to my daughter,” I say quietly. “I wasn’t scared of my father. I believed Alice was safe, and I was worried that if I told anyone else, something would go wrong.”

  Though I’m well aware of how very wrong everything went.

  “How much longer will I be here?” I ask him, draining the last of my water and letting him refill my glass.

  Lowry glances at the fat watch on his wrist but doesn’t answer me.

  “Did you find Brian?” I ask.

  Detective Lowry hesitates. “No, Mrs. Hodder,” he says after a beat. “We haven’t found your husband.”

  “Oh—” I sink back, trying to make sense of how the ne
ws makes me feel. I was convinced they had.

  Is he dead? He must be.

  Lowry is asking me more questions about Brian and what he did to me, in the same tone that suggests he doesn’t believe my story, when all of a sudden a thought hits me.

  “My diary,” I say, jolting upright. “It’s in my handbag. I left it—”

  Where is my diary? I had taken my bag to the beach because Brian had shoved it at me when we were at the cottage. “I dropped it, somewhere.” I shake my head, I can’t remember. I must have dropped it when I saw my dad. Maybe it’s still on the rocks. Or maybe it’s been swallowed up by the sea.

  • • •

  “PERHAPS YOU’D LIKE to take a break, Charlotte?” Rawlings seems to think she’s gotten me to admit something, but she doesn’t know what.

  Charlotte had never meant to have an outburst. She nods, and once outside the room, she turns left and heads for the bathroom. The detective walks off in the opposite direction.

  When Charlotte emerges five minutes later, she spots Captain Hayes at the front door with Detective Rawlings and a man she doesn’t recognize. She ducks into a doorway, out of sight, where she can only just make out the voices farther down the hallway.

  “How’s it going?” Hayes asks. “Progress?”

  “I don’t know about progress,” Charlotte hears Detective Rawlings say. “But I don’t think we’ll get any more out of Charlotte Reynolds.”

  “And Harriet Hodder’s convinced the husband’s going to turn up,” another voice pipes up. Charlotte leans forward and takes a better look at the short man with wire-rimmed glasses. She wonders if he’s the detective who’s been questioning Harriet. “It’s rattling her.”

  “ ‘Rattling her’?” Angela appears in the doorway and Charlotte pulls back before one of them spots her. “Do tell me what that’s supposed to mean, Detective Lowry?”

  “Well, I believe he’d have a very different story to tell us. One she doesn’t want us hearing.”

  “Oh, dear God,” Angela cries. “Are you kidding me? Harriet Hodder is scared. That woman’s been abused by him for years. Of course she’s rattled.”