Home for Truths: The stand-out domestic suspense thriller for 2020

by Alan Agnew

  ‘OK, what is the occasion, sympathy, apology or I have a secret crush on you for years and I want you?’ Her tone suddenly flirtatious. The girl reads the horror in my face. ‘Oh sorry, I did not mean to offend you, my boss is on the phone out the back, let me leave you alone to browse, and she will be right out to help to you.’

  I don’t need to say anything, but it is rare to meet a shop assistant with a sense of humour and a smile, so I feel obliged to say something to defend my awkwardness.

  ‘I am sorry, I just was not prepared for the questions, truth is I am about to meet my sister for the first time, so I am a little nervous and a little vague when it comes to knowing her favourite flower.’ I surprise myself with my open confession to a complete stranger.

  The assistant’s eyes light up. ‘Oh, how exciting for you both, no more questions from me, I suggest tulips, everybody likes tulips, and they don’t sell these at the petrol station so she will recognise the effort, I will wrap them up for you.’

  I get little change from £30, but then the guy she describes buying flowers from the petrol station is me, or sometimes the supermarket if it has a reduced yellow sticker on it. I thank the assistant for all her help, and as I trigger the bell for a second time opening the door, she shouts after me, ‘I hope it works out, good luck with everything.’

  He parting wishes stay with me as I walk to the house, unsure if she is referring to meeting Rachel or the rest of my life. Maybe they are intertwined, as if my life is about to be mapped out in the next hour.

  I check my watch for the fourth time, yet I can be neither early nor late. I study each house number as I pass, yet I already see my destination. I walk past number 26 in slow motion and come face to face with the red door of number 24. My heart beats faster, and I feel my grip tightening on the plastic wrapping around the stems, noticing for the first time the spicy aromatic smell of the tulips. I take a deep breath and knock loudly. I hear the approaching footsteps from shoes on a wooden floor, in perfect tandem with my beating heart, a twist of the lock and the door opens.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  ‘Hi Rachel Evans,’ I say, sounding like I am half-questioning, half-making a statement.

  ‘Yes.’

  My eyes are drawn to her high cheekbones straight from photographs, and her wavy blonde hair. She has deep-set hazel eyes and a warming smile dominating her face. She moves an inch to her left blocking out the sunlight from the window behind her and morphing into a silhouette showing her tall slim body and frills from her floral dress. I feel the cold air filling my mouth and realise I am standing with my jaw open and muted.

  The flowers escape my grasp, my hand empty of purpose, she pulls them towards her, and I hear a ‘thank you.’ I look up just in time to see the door closing, plundering me into shade which snaps me out of my trance.

  ‘Rachel.’ I say too loudly, causing her to swing the door open once again. ‘Hi, again, I have come to see you,’ I say slowly and pronounced, sounding creepy.

  ‘Who are you?’ she quizzically asks with a growing concern etched across her face.

  ‘My name is Phil Jenkins, son of John Jenkins.’

  I pause and wait for a reaction but nothing. ‘He was close friends with your mother once upon a time,’ I say, biting my lip at the fairy tale reference.

  Her eyes widen, and she brings her hand to her mouth, muffling, ‘Oh my God.’ Her shocked recollection ignites my smile, my relief.

  ‘John, the fisherman from Devon?’ She asks.

  Fisherman? I replay her question in my head. She must be momentarily confused. ‘He wasn’t a fisherman, and he was from Dorset, not Devon.’ Holding my smile, hiding my creeping insecurity, willing her acceptance.

  Rachel’s hand falls back to her side, and her shoulders drop, her bubble burst before fully inflated. It is clear from her reaction that the description she offered means something to her.

  ‘Rachel, who is John? The fisherman from Devon? I ask because we may still be talking about the same man.’

  It is Rachel’s turn to stand motionless, reflecting and calculating before responding. ‘I am sorry, nothing, err no-one, I don’t know you and I do not know a John from Dorset, why are you here and what do you want?’

  I see the irritation growing, none of this was how I envisaged our meeting, and I too feel myself getting flustered, my train of thought rocked. I can’t think. I reach for my pocket, knowing the photograph is not there.

  A shriek behind me breaks our silence; we both turn. ‘Oh my god, it’s you,’ screams a girl standing on the pavement pointing to me.

  ‘Mum, this man has just been in the shop, Ella served him, but I heard their conversation, he says he is your brother.’

  Her pointing finger shining the brightest of spotlights on me. She looks familiar, but I pull my eyes away and turn back to meet Rachel’s as the fill with emotion.

  ‘She is right Rachel, we share the same dad, John Jenkins, and I am very sorry to be telling you like this, via your daughter and standing on the street.’

  Rachel stares at me, looking straight through me, her smile long gone. The girl from the florist walks past me, to her mum and gently guides her inside the house to a room, she glances back to me, beckoning me with her hand. ‘Come in,’ she says softly.

  We sit opposite each other, both perched on the edge of deep sofas. I allow myself a glance to the mantelpiece and notice framed pictures of a family of four. I return my eyes quickly to Rachel. I sit tight allowing her to make the first move, unsure of her temperament and respecting her space. She takes her eyes away from the flowers she still holds and focuses on me once again.

  ‘How do you know? How can you be certain?’

  I lock my hands together. What did I rehearse? ‘I recently returned to my childhood home. Dad passed away last month, and his friends told me about you and Robbie.’ I look for a signal at the reference to Robbie, but Rachel sits motionless.

  ‘I was as shocked as you are right now. I had no idea. I found a couple of old photographs and tracked down your uncle Derek. He knew my dad, the two of them had an altercation once, and then there was all the court stuff, and I am assuming the years of cover-up.’

  The girl hands Rachel a glass of water and turns to me, placing a drink in my hand before quickly leaving the room again. ‘Do you have the photographs?’ Rachel asks.

  I curse to myself under my breath, with frustration all over again. ‘No, not with me, I know I should have brought them, I left in such a rush. The most recent one was with you, Robbie, and dad on a walking trip, you looked about 12 or 13, and there were others when you were much younger on a beach, maybe Brixham, that’s why you thought of Devon.’ I raise my arms more in hope than confidence.

  Rachel takes a cautious sip of her water, not taking her eyes off me. ‘And how do you know my uncle Derek?’

  ‘He found my dad through his freemason network and warned him off your mum, he and a guy called Pete or Peter. They were quite persuasive.’

  A nod of understanding. ‘That does sound like Derek and Pete, quite the pair of thugs in their day.’

  I tense up again and grit my teeth preparing to tell the worst of my findings. ‘Well, my dad was hardly a saint, he was not honest with your mum, and she discovered that all the time he was with her, and you, he was also married, living with us and playing happy families in Dorset.’

  I watch the horror unfold on Rachel’s face. She gulps her water and cradles the empty glass. ‘I am so sorry Rachel.’

  ‘This does not sound right.’ She pauses and allows her heavy eyelids to close for a moment, recalling a scene from the past. ‘Robbie and I always talked about tracking him down, but we never had much to go on, and mum went ballistic at the mention of the idea. She was never the most stable of people as it was.’ A resigned shake of her head.

  ‘My mum told us that our dad walked out when we were very young. He was a fisherman who later went missing at sea, presumed dead. Apart from an old picture we once found,
we knew nothing about him.’

  A crashing wave of doubt floods my whole body, scaring me.

  ‘But Rachel, the picture of you and Robbie with dad walking on the moors was taken when you were a teenager, yet you said he left when you were very young without further contact?’

  Rachel edges forward with purpose on her chair, I see the realisation passing across her body, ‘Yes, that’s right,’ a sternness in her voice at odds with her troubled eyes.

  My heart begins to throb at the cage of my chest, fear racing through my veins which I mask by tightening my lips shut to hide my trembling.

  Rachel leaps to her feet and stands suddenly very tall, cheeks flaring red, her eyes narrowing on me. ‘Just who do you think you are?’ she yells down on me.

  ‘You expect me to believe that you would tell a stranger the most emotive of secrets, in my shop, and by sheer coincidence, my daughter can hear every word from the back room.’

  She jabs her finger towards me. ‘Then you march over to my house with a couple of basic facts that anybody with half a brain cell can find on the Internet, and your only reference is your good friend Derek. I have never trusted Derek or his low life friends.’

  ‘What is in it for you?’ She snarls and talks through her gritted teeth.

  I sit muted, trying to process, wanting to deflect her anger, wanting to get out.

  ‘You have some nerve coming here expecting me to believe a complete a stranger. And you messed up. New information for you, my father left when we were young, maybe he did go missing at sea, maybe he didn’t, but I am certain of one thing, and that is I never saw him after he left us and certainly never went on weekend rambles with him and my brother as teenagers!’

  Rachel slumps back down in her chair, like a balloon collapsing to the floor after the air released. Her head buries into her hands, and the muscles in her chin tremble. Her cries carry a rawness, the opening of a wound.

  I try my best to make sense of everything she has just said. My shop? My eyes are instantly drawn to the flowers wrapped in plastic decorated with the name ‘Love R Flowers’. My lungs burn, I am gasping for air. A million new thoughts going through my head, the florists, the blonde girl, the photograph, is this a set up? Who would do this? Donald?

  I stand, but buckle under the weakness of my legs like spaghetti. I stagger slowly out of the room, through the hallway and out the front door, all thoughts numbed.

  The fresh cooling air transports me to another place, the traffic on the road silenced but I sense its motion, the figure approaching me does so slowly, my vision blurred, my eyes fixed to the ground. I grab hold of the gate, and it holds me in return.

  ‘Hi again, I am Annie, you know, you look so familiar.’ My mind takes an age to register the voice and translate the words. I raise my head slowly, and our eyes meet.

  ‘Hi Annie.’ And now I remember that warming smile.

  ‘We met at my dad’s funeral in Baysworth.’

  ‘Wow. Yes.’ Her eyes widen, and eyebrows raise.

  I see her all over again, standing in front of me at the funeral, her discrete fringe covering her eyebrows, her silent features, high cheek bones, soft handshake, ‘I wish I had known this man.’

  ‘Love R Flowers did the flowers for the funeral, or to give our full name, Love Rachel’s Flowers. And I am guessing that this is not all some weird coincidence?’

  ‘Which one? Me calling in today to buy flowers? I did not notice the shop name or see your face in the back room. But you hand delivering flowers to my dad’s funeral? I guess my dad no longer trusted fate or believed in keeping secrets beyond the grave.’

  ‘Wow, this will make a good dinner party story one day,’ Annie nods her head back to the house where her mum sits in silence. ‘Family is an emotive subject to her. She always wants with us what she didn’t have growing up, the family days out with mum, dad, and the kids, meals around the dinner table, board games on a wet Sunday afternoon. It drives my brother and me insane sometimes, but we know it means so much to her. She always closes up when we ask her about her childhood. I know Grandma was no saint and used to leave her and Robbie for days at a time to fend for themselves. Once, she even made mum lie to the police about being smacked around by an old boyfriend so that she could get some revenge on him. The guilt has lived with her ever since.’

  Her words shake life into my body, my brain ignites once again, and my focus returns. I think of the consequences of lying to the police, and I see my dad sitting in his chair reading the restraining order.

  ‘Here, check this out,’ Annie invites me, holding her phone in front of me showing a picture of an older woman sitting at a bar with a pint of lager, and a cigarette in her mouth, wearing a cowboy hat and a grimace towards the camera. ‘I bet your Grandma does not look like this.’ I focus on the picture, not on her Grandma, but the quality of the image.

  ‘Excuse me a moment Annie, I’ve got an idea.’

  I pull out my mobile. ‘Hello Roger, thank goodness you’re in. I have a problem and need some help.’

  I talk through my request and pace up and down the street telling Annie about Baysworth to pass the time. I am too apprehensive about returning to Rachel without first receiving a response. I stare down at my phone, pressing a button to illuminate the screen, willing the notification of a reply.

  My phone pings with the incoming message ‘sorry had to smash two windows to get in’ followed by two attachments loading on my phone.

  Annie and I walk back into the house. She continues straight to the kitchen, and I walk back into the living room.

  ‘I am so sorry Rachel. In all my excitement and rush to meet you, I did not think about how turning up like this, so ill-prepared would look from your perspective.’ I crouch down next to her. ‘I have something to show you,’ holding my phone in front of her to display the picture from my dining room, the one taken on the moors.

  She stares intensely at it before turning to me, her face devoid of colour once again, as if she has seen a ghost. ‘This is your dad, this is John?’ she asks, her face pure white.

  ‘Yes, but why do you look so concerned?’ I ask.

  ‘Because I don’t know this man as John, I know him as James, a friend of my uncle Derek’s from the Navy. We met up with him a few times, and I always thought it was a little weird. Derek was with us on this day, he took this photograph.’

  She knowingly taps the screen of the phone. ‘I remember this man, James or John or whatever his real name was, took a big interest in us, asked Robbie and me lots of questions about school, about our friends, what we liked doing. He was nice to us, but we thought it was creepy. We thought for a while that he and Derek could have been gay, but all that time Derek knew and was arranging these secret meetings.’

  Rachel twists her wedding ring back and forth, casting her mind back again, and her voice much softer now. ‘We used to meet every month or so for about a year then one day he disappeared. It was after my mum and Derek had a huge falling out, and that was that, no more days out with Uncle Derek, no more bumping into his friend James in town, on the seafront, or the moors.’

  We exchange a nervous smile, some familiarity giving us some common ground.

  ‘I promise Rachel, I only met Derek for the first time yesterday, trying to find you. But can you see what this means? My dad tried. He tried to re-connect, in any way he could while tied by the restraining order which your mum inflicted on him. He was risking jail by just being there.’

  ‘Oh my god.’ Her eyes widen, pulling her hand over her mouth. ‘The police interview. She, she…’

  ‘It’s okay, I know, your mum made you talk to them.’ I rest my hand on hers.

  A wave of relief passes through me, giving way to gratitude. Derek was risking the wrath of his sister and violating the court order to help my dad. My mind wanders back to his confused state and soulless room at Jubilee House, and I know exactly how to thank him. I picture the paintings of horse racing’s three classic winners, Nijinski, D
ancing Brave, and Shergar, all of which are gathering dust at home. They’d do far better on the walls of Jubilee House.

  I focus once again on my phone held in front of us. I slide my thumb across the screen, revealing the next picture, my dad and the young blonde-haired girl at the beach. Rachel pulls it closer, its light beaming on her face. She springs to her feet and runs out the room, her exaggerated steps ascending the stairs crashing above me. I stand up, alone in the living room, confused. I take a few steps to look closer at the photographs on the mantelpiece.

  ‘This is us,’ Annie says from behind me, pointing to a family picture from a beach holiday. ‘My dad, Andrew, is a surgeon at Bournemouth Royal Infirmary, obviously mum and I, and the cheeky face next to me is James, my little brother. All he does is play football, plays for Bournemouth youth team so he must be good, but probably not half as good as he says he is.’

  I smile back at Annie, the description resonating with me. My eyes are drawn to an older picture at the end of the mantelpiece of a younger-looking Rachel and younger-looking man.

  ‘This is my uncle Robbie, no recent pictures of him I am afraid. He went travelling to New Zealand after college and never came back.’ I freeze, searching in her eyes for more.

  ‘He met a girl there and opened up a bar in Wanaka on the South Island, still lives there with his now wife and two boys, we FaceTime a lot though, you will like Robbie, he is a fun guy.’ I breathe out the air in relief.

  We are disturbed by the sound of footsteps and turn to see Rachel at the door. Both hands in front of her, holding against her chest the same old photograph of dad and the little girl at the beach. I look back up at Rachel, her eyes drowning as pearl-shaped tears roll down her cheek, we take a step towards each other, and she throws her arms around me, holding me tight..

  ‘Tell me about him, Phil,’ she asks, and I take a step back to compose myself. My mind thinks back to dad and the funeral, stopping on the two eulogies I wrote, the two accounts of his life.