Their Little Secret

by Mark Billingham

  ‘How do you know the note came from her?’

  ‘Oh, wake up, Conrad. Who the hell else is it going to be?’

  He had stepped out into the garden as soon as he’d seen who was calling and now he looked back towards the house to see Sarah watching from the kitchen. He raised a hand to wave and she turned away.

  ‘I could go to the police,’ she said.

  ‘And tell them what?’

  ‘I could go … that’s all I’m saying. I should go.’

  He looked back at the kitchen, but Sarah had left the room. Instinctively he raised his eyes towards the windows at the top of the house, convinced she would be watching him from one of the bedrooms, but he saw no sign of her. ‘You won’t go to the police. How can you?’

  ‘I haven’t done anything.’

  ‘A woman killed herself.’

  ‘How is that my fault?’

  ‘You’re involved,’ Conrad said.

  ‘Not with this, I’m not. Not with her …’

  ‘Look, I’ll … deal with it, all right?’

  ‘How?’

  At that moment, Conrad did not have the faintest idea, but he knew that whatever he was going to do would need to wait until he had finished shaking with rage or fear, he could not be certain which. He began to pace around the small lawn. His car keys were on the kitchen table and, if Sarah was upstairs, he guessed that he could grab them and get to his car without seeing her.

  A drive might calm him down a little, would give him time to think.

  He said, ‘I’ll deal with it.’

  FORTY-NINE

  Tanner was sitting with a glass of wine and had already ordered by the time Thorne joined her in the bar of the Travelodge on Queen Street. Passing a menu across, she told him she’d gone for the tuna salad. Having clocked a tempting meal-deal, Thorne hailed a passing waiter and asked for chicken wings, a burger and a bottle of Stella.

  ‘Pretty good for fifteen quid,’ he said. ‘Not a lot more than we paid for two coffees in that place in Enfield.’

  ‘How’s your room?’ Tanner asked.

  ‘There’s a bed and a TV,’ Thorne said.

  ‘It’s only one night.’

  ‘Shocking lack of porn, though.’ He began to check his phone for emails and texts. ‘I mean, that’s one of the perks of staying in a hotel, right?’

  Tanner smiled. ‘I prefer to use my imagination.’

  ‘Mine’s a bit limited,’ Thorne said. The waiter arrived with his beer and Thorne took a swig.

  ‘So … what about this “other woman” Denise Fry mentioned?’

  Thorne set his phone down on the table. ‘Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that.’

  ‘You think it could have been Sarah?’

  ‘Well, we don’t want to discount anything, but I don’t really see how it could be.’

  ‘Because it doesn’t make sense time-wise?’

  ‘Right. Denise hooked up with this bloke a year and a half back, but the Brooklands Hill parents seem pretty certain that Sarah met him for the first time in the coffee shop about six weeks ago.’

  ‘What if that was all part of it?’

  Thorne took another drink and waited.

  ‘I’m thinking out loud, really, but what if this other woman was actually an accomplice of some sort? Someone he was working with to target his victims. Easier for a woman to get close to other women, I would have thought, sound them out a bit. Easier to identify the vulnerable ones, the ones with money.’

  ‘Sounds reasonable,’ Thorne said.

  ‘So, what if that meeting in the coffee shop was staged? Maybe they were actually going after one of the mums from school.’

  Thorne shook his head. ‘Doesn’t make sense. For a kick off, yeah … I reckon some of those women have probably got money to spare, but I don’t think any of them are single. Besides which, they said Sarah made it very clear to them that Conrad was her boyfriend, that they were all loved-up and living together. How could he work a con on one of those mums when they all knew he was involved with another one? I mean, we both know Sarah wasn’t actually a parent, but you see what I’m saying.’

  ‘Yeah … like I said, thinking out loud.’

  ‘I don’t believe Sarah had anything to do with the work Conrad was doing before, because she’s a very different sort of individual. I mean, for all we know she might have been his target … when they first met in that coffee shop, at any rate. Before he knew her.’ Thorne let his beer bottle swing gently between two fingers. ‘Something happened once those two got together.’ He remembered Hatter casually weighing that rock in his hand on Margate beach, the look of shock and horror on the faces of Gemma Maxwell’s colleagues. ‘Something a damn sight nastier.’

  ‘OK, so if the other woman wasn’t Sarah, who was she?’

  Thorne shrugged, then leaned back as the waiter arrived and began laying down their food. ‘Maybe Denise imagined it. She said herself, she was the jealous type.’

  Tanner said, ‘She sounded pretty certain to me.’

  Dipak Chall had called while Tanner was in her room, and as she and Thorne ate, she gave him a progress report on the expanded house-to-house enquiries; filled him in on the conversations with estate and lettings agencies local to Brooklands Hill and the house where Gemma Maxwell had been murdered.

  It didn’t take very long.

  ‘We keep plugging away,’ Thorne said. ‘All we can do.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘And hope that, in the meantime, nobody else gets in Conrad and Sarah’s way.’

  Tanner nodded and downed what was left of her wine. She was about to say something when her mobile rang. She answered the call, listened for a few seconds then mouthed to Thorne, Denise Fry.

  Thorne put his knife and fork down and listened, but the look on Tanner’s face and the platitudes she was trotting out made it clear that the woman they had spoken to earlier was not calling with crucial information of any sort. Making sympathetic noises, Tanner stood up and wandered out into the reception area.

  Thorne had all but finished eating by the time she returned to the table.

  ‘What was all that about?’

  ‘I think she was pissed,’ Tanner said, sitting down again. ‘Pissed and weeping.’

  Thorne grunted and went back to what was left of his burger.

  ‘Do you think we take it for granted, sometimes?’ Tanner was moving bits of wilted salad around her plate. ‘What victims go through.’

  Thorne looked up, chewing. ‘No, but … well, looking after the victims isn’t really our job, is it? There’s Family Liaison for all that, Victim Support teams.’

  ‘I’m not saying we don’t think about them, obviously we do … too much, sometimes, but maybe we should talk to them a bit more.’ Tanner pushed her plate away and leaned towards him. ‘Nine times out of ten, we interview them and that’s it; we don’t set eyes on them again until it gets to court. If it gets to court.’

  ‘It’s our job to catch the people responsible, that’s all. To do whatever we can to see justice done.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s not looking promising, is it?’

  Thorne looked at her. ‘Where’s this going?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Just thinking out loud again, really.’ She sat back and watched Thorne finish his meal. ‘You got much on tomorrow?’

  ‘We’ll spend half the day travelling back.’

  ‘After that.’

  ‘Well, I’ve still got a stack of Court Disposal files to complete and a Protective Services questionnaire to fill out, so if you’ve got anything more tempting on offer …’

  Tanner told him what she had in mind. When Thorne raised no objection, she fished in her handbag and took a coin from her purse.

  ‘I’m glad we’re doing this scientifically,’ Thorne said.

  ‘You call it,’ Tanner said. ‘Heads, you get Margate, tails you get Walthamstow.’

  Tanner tossed the coin and, once she had removed her hand, Thorne
looked down and said, ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘Can’t hurt, can it?’

  Thorne wasn’t altogether sure about that, but he wasn’t thrilled at the idea of more paperwork either. He reached forward and picked up Tanner’s empty wine glass. Said, ‘One more before we turn in?’

  They carried their glasses across to a small table in the corner of a bar in which they were now the only customers and sat there saying nothing. It was as though they had said everything there was to say about the crimes that had brought them there – the frauds and the murders – and now, as the two of them drank and avoided eye contact, the silence that grew between them gained a little more weight with every minute that passed. Ominous, in direct proportion to the cheery, plastic jazz that spewed from a tinny speaker in the corner of the room.

  ‘What happened last year,’ Tanner said, eventually.

  There it was.

  This thing that had happened …

  Nothing ever any more specific than that. Never a name or a place. No mention of stabbing or scissors, no blood and broken skulls.

  Thorne turned to look at her and nodded, inviting it.

  ‘It feels like you’re waiting for me to say thank you.’

  ‘I’m really not,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Every minute of every day.’

  ‘Like I said—’

  ‘And the truth is I can’t, because I’m not actually grateful.’

  Thorne stared down into his beer, then drank some of it.

  ‘I know how ridiculous that sounds after what you did … what Phil did … but the fact remains that it was wrong and I’m still struggling to get past that.’

  ‘What do you mean, struggling?’

  ‘I mean that just about the only thing stopping me marching into Russell’s office as soon as we get back and coming clean about what actually happened, is you.’ She found Thorne’s eyes for the first time, but only for a moment. ‘You and Phil. I know it would mean your careers … would mean a damn sight worse for me, probably, and that’s fine, but I can’t. Because even though what you did was wrong too … wrong and seriously … stupid … I can’t drag the pair of you down with me, can I?’

  Thorne looked at her.

  ‘Of course I can’t.’ She shook her head quickly. ‘I’m just saying. I can’t ever tell the truth and however ungrateful and disloyal it sounds, there’s a part of me that resents you for it.’

  Thorne had just begun to rub absently at the soft flesh of his right hand when Tanner reached over and grabbed his fingers. She opened his hand fully and stared down at the ragged line across his palm, the scar for which she was responsible. ‘And I’m not going to apologise for that, either,’ she said. ‘It was your idea, remember?’

  Thorne pulled his hand away. ‘I’m not likely to forget, am I?’

  They said nothing for half a minute or more. A pair of be-suited businessmen wandered in and stood at the bar waiting to order. The muzak had become even cheerier.

  ‘You weren’t yourself, Nic.’ Thorne saw that she was about to argue and raised a hand, his left, to stop her. ‘When you did it.’

  ‘I’m myself now though, aren’t I?’ She glared at him. ‘Waking up with it every day and knowing that I can’t do the right thing.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Sure about what?’

  ‘That telling the truth would be the right thing. Maybe what we did was the right thing. It certainly felt like it.’

  Tanner winced slightly at the laughter coming from the pair at the bar and closed her eyes for a few seconds. They were wet when she opened them again. She said, ‘I’m truly sorry about what happened and that you got caught up in it. I might find it hard to say thank you, but I can certainly manage that. And I’m sorry for … all this, for spouting off.’ The sigh rattled in her chest. ‘I don’t know …’

  ‘Just thinking out loud again?’

  ‘Something like that.’ Suddenly, Tanner looked every bit as wrung out and haunted as one of those victims she had been talking about at dinner; as wretched as Denise Fry had looked when they’d left her in Kelvingrove Park a few hours earlier.

  ‘It’s not a problem,’ Thorne said. ‘It won’t ever be a problem.’ He leaned across and laid a hand on her arm. ‘As long as I’m the only one around to hear it.’

  FIFTY

  Sarah was in the bathroom, so Conrad sat on the bed and waited for her.

  He was certainly a little calmer than he’d been earlier, after taking that call in the garden, but was nonetheless grateful for the few extra minutes he now had to prepare himself. He still had no idea at all what he was going to say to her. Driving around, he’d rehearsed a host of different lines, and even though that was something he was well used to – the sick daughter, the greatest film script he’d ever read – nothing had come to him that he felt confident about. The first thing out of his mouth was going to be all-important, he knew that, but anything he’d thought of just felt stupidly inane or else simply … dangerous.

  We need to talk.

  Listen, I’m sure you’ve got a good explanation for this, but …

  You’ve gone too far this time.

  He could hear her tuneless singing coming from the bathroom, that stupid Hall and Oates song he’d told her about. Listening to her, clattering around in there with her creams and oils like she didn’t have a care in the world, brought a rush of anger back and he fought to keep a lid on it, for both their sakes. If he lost it, then so would she, and the last thing he needed was a repeat of what had happened three nights before.

  Or worse …

  He found himself looking quickly around the bedroom, seeking out anything she might grab and hit him with if she lost her temper. Anything he might use to defend himself if that happened, because he wouldn’t stand for being a punchbag again.

  A thick glass candleholder; a stiletto shoe with a heel that could certainly do a lot of damage; the framed photograph of the two of them she kept on her bedside table. His gaze shifted to the pink stick of rock lying incongruously next to a paperback thriller and the anger flipped suddenly into terror; or a memory of it, every bit as intense, rising up from his guts like acid.

  ‘Because it’s nice to have a souvenir, isn’t it?’ What she’d said when he’d asked her about it. ‘Margate running all the way through it, and now it runs all the way through us …’

  He could always say nothing, of course.

  Wouldn’t that be the easiest option, the path of least resistance?

  He could just get undressed, slip into bed and pretend to be asleep.

  Yes, he’d told the woman on the phone that he’d sort it, but if he just pretended it had never happened, it would sort itself eventually. She would calm down, given enough time, and he would come up with some story to cover his arse. He was good at that—

  Conrad heard the bathroom door open, Sarah’s footsteps in the corridor outside, and suddenly she was coming through the door, wearing a towel wrapped tightly above her breasts and a grin that made his decision for him and brought him to his feet.

  He said, ‘What the fuck did you think you were doing?’

  If her grin faltered, it was for no more than a moment. ‘Well, I’ve just been doing something rather naughty in the bathroom, but I promise I was thinking about you.’

  They looked at one another for a few seconds.

  ‘You followed me the other day.’ Conrad was breathing like he’d just done an hour at the gym.

  ‘I wouldn’t have needed to if you’d told me where you were going.’

  ‘You followed me.’

  ‘You’re very angry.’ She spoke as though she was paying him a compliment.

  ‘And you delivered a note to someone.’

  ‘To someone?’

  Conrad stepped suddenly towards her, but she did not flinch. ‘You know what you did. What you threatened her with.’

  ‘You should have told me you were seeing her.’ Sarah raised a hand and clawed fingers through her wet hair. ‘N
o secrets, we said.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘So, tell me.’

  ‘I didn’t want to see her …’ Conrad stopped, because he understood suddenly that he was cornered, that telling her the truth would be the very worst thing he could possibly do.

  ‘Why not?’

  Conrad lowered his eyes and watched a single bead of water slide along her collarbone and when he raised them, the look on her face confirmed his worst fears. If he told her that he was being as good as blackmailed, that this woman she was now threatening knew exactly what he and Sarah had done, it would only be a matter of time before it became another problem Sarah needed solving. He had seen how she did that at the teacher’s house, how efficiently she had gone about it.

  He could not be part of that again. Would not.

  ‘You’ve gone very quiet,’ she said.

  Did she already know?

  Conrad could not immediately see how she would, but he could not be sure how long she had been watching him or the woman he had been seeing, and he had long accepted the fact that he had no idea what went on in Sarah’s head.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, the strength gone from his voice.

  ‘For being angry with me? Or for something worse?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have lied.’

  ‘No, you really shouldn’t.’

  ‘But it’s not what you think.’

  She nodded, pleased. ‘I was only doing what I thought was best for us, you get that, surely? For you, me and Jamie.’

  And suddenly, the control, the indulgence Conrad knew he had to summon at moments such as this was not within his reach. Or perhaps he had simply lost the desire to exercise it. ‘Jamie?’

  ‘He needs stability—’

  ‘What are you talking about? How can someone you’ve made up need anything? What the fuck’s the matter with you?’

  For ten or fifteen seconds, Sarah looked as though something had been ripped from her, as though she were fighting to stay upright. Conrad could only watch, transfixed, until her expression began to harden and set, and he found himself thinking about how quickly he might get to that candleholder or the stiletto a few feet away at the end of the bed. He tensed, waiting for it, then saw something else wash slowly across her face, as though she’d reached a decision of some sort.