by Heidi Perks
“We only have her word for it,” Lowry says. “And I’m not sure I believe her version of what happened on the boat.”
“Well, this makes for interesting reading,” Angela snaps. “She’s been writing this diary for the last year.” She falls silent, and for a moment all Charlotte can hear is the blood swishing in her ears.
“Yet you didn’t pick up on it?” he asks. “You were practically living with them and you didn’t see that side of Brian Hodder?”
Silence again. None of us did, Charlotte wants to tell Angela. None of us saw it.
“I didn’t,” Angela says eventually. “You’re right. At the time I didn’t see what he was doing, but look in this notebook. What he did was subtle. Brian Hodder was a clever, manipulative, patient man. He did it in a way nobody would ever notice.”
“Well, whatever happened on that boat we might never know the truth—” Lowry says.
“Angela?” Captain Hayes speaks her name. Charlotte leans forward, chancing another glance at the four detectives. Angela is looking the other way. “Is there something else?” Hayes says.
“Angela?” he asks her again when she doesn’t respond.
“No,” she says firmly and looks back at the others. “Nothing else.” But Charlotte’s sure there was something else Angela wanted to say.
• • •
“DO I NEED a lawyer?” I ask when Lowry comes back. He has been gone for more than ten minutes and it’s felt like a lifetime, wondering what he’ll decide to do next, whether he’s going to charge me or not. My chest is burning and I scratch at the thin cotton of my T-shirt until I feel my skin sting. “Am I under arrest?”
“No,” he says, though I don’t believe he’s happy about that.
“Then I can go?”
He nods slowly and watches me warily as he says, “Yes. Though we’ll need to speak to you again. And we’ll need to talk to your daughter in the morning.”
I can’t believe it. I’m free to go? Does that mean they believe me, or at least have no evidence? Does that mean Charlotte lied for me?
“There’s someone here for you.” Lowry’s voice is low and I look up to see Angela in the doorway. I stand up and fall into her arms as she hugs me, then slowly walks me out of the room.
“I’m really free to leave?” I say to her, my words no more than a whisper.
“Yes you are.” She smiles as she maneuvers me down the hallway toward the reception area. “I’m taking you to a safe house for the night. Alice is already there,” she says as she opens the front door. “She was fast asleep when I left her.”
Outside, the chill of the night air hits me. Angela stops at the bottom of the steps and, when we’re alone in the parking lot, turns to me and says, “Your bag was found at the beach. I read your diary, Harriet. Why didn’t you tell me what Brian was doing?”
I stare past her. I’d wanted everyone to see what Brian was doing, no one more than Angela. “I wasn’t sure you’d believe me. I needed you to see him doing it with your own eyes.”
I feel Angela tense and I can’t be sure if it’s because she’d fallen for Brian’s lies too, or because she’s still not certain if she can trust me.
“He’s very clever,” I say. “I’d hoped with a bit more time you’d have seen what he was doing. I’ve no doubt you would have, it’s just that things went wrong before then.”
“Did you plug your phone in?” she asks. “The day it fell into the bath? You were adamant it wasn’t you, but Brian was so—” She brushes a hand through the air.
“Convincing?” I finish for her. “No I didn’t. That was him.”
We pick up our steps again as Angela leads me to the taxi waiting at the far side of the lot. “He killed my father,” I say. “He attacked him, completely unprovoked.” After everything that has happened, I still feel numb. Grief has rooted itself inside me, a part of me now, and it terrifies me that somehow I just need to accept it.
“I’m sorry, Harriet,” she says. “I’m very sorry about your dad.”
“I know what everyone will think of him, but what he did was out of love for me and Alice.” It breaks my heart to be uttering these words. I have a feeling I will be saying them a lot in the future, but I suspect they’ll fall on deaf ears.
“You know you’ll be questioned again, don’t you?” Angela says. “Detective Lowry wants to ask you more about what happened on the boat.”
I nod.
“It’s just—just make sure your story’s clear, Harriet.”
I glance at her quizzically. “I don’t understand.”
“He’ll want to dissect what happened at sea between you and Brian.” She pauses as we reach the taxi. “I know you said you couldn’t swim,” she says, “but I know that’s not true.”
“What do you mean?”
“I saw your swimming suit at the bottom of the laundry basket once,” she says, shaking her head. “Don’t answer; I don’t need to know any more.” Angela’s eyes drift to my stomach and my hand that’s rubbing it in circles. “I missed that, though, didn’t I?” she adds.
My breath catches as my hand immediately stills. I look down at my feet.
“How many weeks?” she asks gently.
“Seven,” I mumble. “There was one night.” I feel the need to explain the time to her, to make her understand why I slept with my husband when the act itself had become such a blessed rarity. I didn’t want Brian upset about anything so close to the fair, and feared saying no would have triggered doubts that everything was normal. “How did you guess?” I ask. “There haven’t really been many signs yet.” So far this pregnancy has been so different than Alice’s that often I forget I’m pregnant, or wonder if I still am.
“A bit of guessing, but there was something in your last diary entry. You wrote, ‘Surely I’m doing the right thing for all of us.’ It’s a small detail, but it stuck out because you usually wrote both of you. And you haven’t stopped rubbing your tummy tonight,” she adds. “I was looking for it though.”
I found out about the baby two weeks before the fair and, as much as I’ve tried putting the fact I’m carrying his child to the back of my mind, I knew the timing meant I had to go through with my plan. If Brian found out I was pregnant, I’d have no chance of escaping him. Especially if it’s the son he always dreamed of, the one he always hoped might turn out just like him. I shudder at the thought as Angela opens the door to the cab. I begin to climb in when I spot someone waiting by the far wall.
“Actually, can you hold on for just a moment,” I say. “There’s someone I need to speak to.”
• • •
CHARLOTTE’S PALE FACE is lit against the dark sky by the harsh white light floodlighting the front of the station. Underneath her eyes the skin is red and smudged with makeup. She blinks rapidly as she looks at me and then away, and neither of us knows what to say, but I know I have to find something. “I can’t begin to say how sorry I am. I should never have done what I did.”
“No,” she says plainly. “You shouldn’t.”
Angela is watching us and I angle myself so she can’t see my face. “Thank you. I didn’t deserve you coming to Cornwall. I shouldn’t have asked—” I stop, because even to me my words sound hollow.
“You should have always known I’d have done anything for you. You could have told me what was happening. I was your friend, Harriet. It’s what friends do,” she says, her voice tired.
I don’t even know what to say. She’s right.
“For the last two weeks I’ve been blamed for losing Alice,” she goes on. “I blamed myself too. Tonight I’ve had to listen to them blaming me.” She gestures toward the police station. “For hours they’ve been asking me why I didn’t know my best friend was in trouble, why I didn’t act as soon as you called me this morning, and I couldn’t tell them, could I?” She shakes her head and looks away, her eyes glistening. “This evening I still felt guilty, can you believe that? I felt guilty that I hadn’t been a good enough friend to you
.”
“No,” I say, “don’t ever say that. You’ve been the best—”
“Don’t,” Charlotte stops me. “I can’t hear it. I just want to get back to my family.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say, reaching out for her, but she moves her arm away.
“I can’t forgive what you’ve done, Harriet,” she says quietly.
“I understand,” I say, and I do. I truly do, but I can’t help thinking this is exactly what Brian would have wanted.
ONE YEAR LATER
Audrey pours a hefty amount of red wine into Charlotte’s glass, cradling her own. Charlotte waits, but she knows Aud has no intention of speaking first.
“I don’t know what happened.” Charlotte rubs the stem of her glass between her thumb and finger.
“This isn’t the first time,” Aud says. “You made an excuse to leave Gail’s two weeks ago and obviously didn’t want to be at book club. But tonight you drove off before you even made it through the door.” Audrey sighs, taking Charlotte’s hand. “Talk to me.”
Charlotte takes a large gulp of wine and puts the glass back down on the coffee table, too heavily. Well, Audrey, here’s the thing. I feel like I’m on the brink of a breakdown.
“There’s this black cloud hanging over me,” she says eventually. “I can’t shake it.”
“It’s been a year now.” Audrey’s tone is a little softer.
“I know, and I realize I should have moved on, but I can’t.”
Audrey looks at her quizzically. Charlotte can’t expect her to understand when she doesn’t know the truth. “You still feel responsible,” Aud says.
“I don’t.” Not for what happened to Alice, anyway.
“Then I don’t get it. You don’t like coming out anymore. I watch you on the playground and your mind’s somewhere else completely. Charlotte, look at you. You look permanently panicked. And you’ve lost weight, too,” she adds. “Too much.”
Charlotte picks her glass up, swilling the red liquid around until she almost spills some. It’s true, a lot of her clothes hang off her now.
“Talk to me,” Audrey says again.
“You know when everyone found out Alice had been taken by her grandfather?” Charlotte says. “Within twenty-four hours every one of the people I’d felt had shunned me turned up on my doorstep, each of them telling me how wonderful it was that Alice had been found and how relieved I must be.”
“But you were.”
“Of course I was relieved she was safe, but only days before, they’d all distanced themselves from me, pulled their kids away from mine. Then they all got a neat resolution, which meant they could brush over what had happened and pretend like it never did. I felt like they were forgiving me.”
“You’re losing me.” Aud shakes her head.
“Their forgiveness meant they thought I was guilty in the first place. And they’d been happy to victimize my children because of it too.”
Audrey looks down at her glass but doesn’t answer. They both know there’s truth in what Charlotte says.
“None of them apologized because they didn’t want to acknowledge that they’d acted horribly. And I never confronted them. I just let it go.” Charlotte shrugs. “The elephant in the room is always there, though. The other day Gail started talking about that TV drama, The Missing, and I was genuinely interested, but then she just suddenly stopped, looked at me, and it felt like the air had frozen. Someone changed the subject and we were all talking about hairdressers or some other crap and I thought, it’s always going to be like this, isn’t it?”
“If this is what’s eating you up, you should tell them how you feel,” Aud says. “You can’t expect them to understand if you don’t.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Charlotte sighs. What would be the point anyway? She couldn’t tell them everything. She couldn’t tell anyone that.
“Is that what this is really about?” Audrey asks. “There’s nothing else on your mind?”
Charlotte leans her head against the back of the sofa. She’s often come close to telling Audrey the whole truth, but she’s always stopped herself. She wonders how Aud would react if she knew Harriet had set her up and that Charlotte had perjured herself to save her.
Maybe talking to Audrey would help lift the black cloud, because recently it’s been drawing so close she expects to one day wake up and find it’s smothered her completely. It’s not easy pretending life has returned to normal.
Yet there are no gray shades with Aud. She’d undoubtedly tell her to go to the police and tell them the truth. Harriet would be arrested and tried, Alice would be taken from her, and what would those same people say then? What kind of friend would that make Charlotte?
No. She made her decision a year ago and needs to learn to live with it.
“I’m thinking of going to see Harriet,” Charlotte says.
“Good. I never understood why you lost touch, especially when she was so eager to see you.”
“Well, she moved away—”
“Oh, don’t give me that again,” Aud says. “You pulled away from her before she moved back to Kent. You haven’t even seen the new baby. Is that why you’re going now?”
“That’s part of it,” Charlotte says. She doesn’t add that the bigger part is to get things off her chest. To ask Harriet about something that’s been bothering her since that night on the beach. “If I go next week, could you watch the children?” she asks.
• • •
A WARM PUFF of air explodes into Harriet’s kitchen as she opens the oven door. She leans in and jabs a knife into the cake. It looks done but she hesitates, her head practically inside the oven as she decides whether to take it out or give it another five minutes. In the end she closes the door and glances at the clock, stretching her back and rubbing her stomach. It feels knotted. A feeling that comes and goes, but it’s tighter today, which isn’t surprising since Charlotte is due in one hour.
Harriet picks up the baby monitor and holds it to her ear. She can hear a faint babble, a heartwarming sound. As she places the monitor back on the windowsill, her gaze drifts to the yard where Alice is wandering alongside the small flowerbed with a watering can. The leasing agent told her the yard was a good size for ground-floor flats in the area, especially so close to the school. The moment she saw the place she said she’d take it. After the other fifteen, Harriet knew she’d struck gold and wished the agent had shown her this one first.
Moving back to Kent had been an easy decision. They couldn’t stay where they were, in a house filled with memories where Brian still lingered in every corner. Each morning when Harriet woke, the first thing she imagined was her husband lying in bed beside her. And then the last memory she had of him, in the sea, would flood her thoughts and that equally wasn’t a good way to start the day.
There was nothing left for Harriet in Dorset. Nowhere she could take Alice without crushing reminders of what she’d lost. Once she’d stood in the café of a National Trust house and felt herself sinking to the ground, the world evaporating around her as the memory of her talking to her father in that very same room blinded her. When Alice pulled at her sleeve, Harriet looked around and realized she was crying. A couple was staring at her from their corner table.
In that moment she understood they needed a fresh start, a chance to make new memories rather than reliving raw and painful ones every day. The flat in the tall Victorian semi around the corner from Alice’s new school became the perfect base.
Harriet takes a deep breath as a waft of smoke fills the air. “Oh no,” she mutters, pulling the oven door open. The cakes are burnt around the edges, a dark brown crust that she knows without touching will be crispy and hard. She throws the cake pans to the side and fights back tears.
“Mummy, what’s that smell?” Alice comes into the kitchen, her nose screwed up as she drops the empty watering can on the floor.
“I burnt the cake.”
Alice totters over and peers at the treats. “They’ll still tast
e nice, Mummy.”
Harriet smiles and ruffles her daughter’s hair. “What are you doing in the garden?”
“Watering Grandpa’s rose,” she says matter-of-factly.
“Good girl.” She pauses. “Have you watered your daddy’s, too?”
Alice nods and Harriet changes the subject, asking if she’d like a drink. She has no idea if she’s doing the right thing when it comes to talking to Alice about Brian. Counselors advise her not to ignore him, to make sure Alice knows she can talk about her father, ask questions whenever she wants. But she often wonders if it does either of them any good.
Harriet hadn’t wanted to get Brian a rosebush. In the garden center, she’d originally only picked out one with the intention of planting it for her dad. It wasn’t until they were at the cash register that the thought hit her that Alice should have one for her own father. “Let’s go and choose one for Daddy, too, shall we?” she’d said, and Alice had followed her back through the store at least three paces behind. Harriet had pointed out pretty bushes until eventually Alice had agreed to one.
At first Harriet would pick a bud and put it in a bud glass on the windowsill. She told Alice that sometimes they were from Grandpa’s bush and sometimes Daddy’s, but over time she couldn’t bear having anything of Brian’s in the house and stopped picking flowers from his.
It’s only a plant, she would tell herself. But it wasn’t. It was a constant reminder that he was out there watching her, and one day she feared she’d end up ripping the damned bush out of the ground.
“Do you want to take this outside?” Harriet fills a tumbler of water and hands it to Alice. She still needs to tidy the kitchen and change her clothes and lay out the new napkins with the cake she’d bought as a backup. Make it all nice.
She hasn’t spoken to Charlotte since telling her there would be no trial. By then this was no surprise, but the confirmation was still a relief. Harriet understood there was no evidence of her involvement, no proof that anyone but her father was involved, whether others believed it or not.
