by Jane Holland
ALL YOUR SECRETS
Jane Holland
Copyright © 2017 Jane Holland
All rights reserved.
Published by Thimblerig Books
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
No part of this book can be reproduced or transferred by any means without the express written permission of the author.
All characters in this story have no existence whatsoever outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to any person or persons coincidentally bearing the same name or being employed in the same profession or living in the same area. Everything in this story without exception has been conceived in the imagination of the author and no person or event in the story is even remotely inspired by real life.
Thimblerig Books 2017
Other thrillers by Jane Holland you might like to try include:
GIRL NUMBER ONE
LOCK THE DOOR
FORGET HER NAME (out early 2018)
GIRL NUMBER ONE (UK Amazon)
GIRL NUMBER ONE (US Amazon)
LOCK THE DOOR (UK Amazon)
LOCK THE DOOR (US Amazon)
PROLOGUE
I like to imagine you waking in the night to the sound of someone screaming.
It’s pitch-black, the early hours. You’re nude, lying in the attic room with the window open and all the covers kicked off because of the suffocating heat. You struggle up on one elbow, listening for what woke you. But the silence is heavy and oppressive.
Perhaps you dreamt the scream.
You are disoriented. Perhaps your mouth is dry, your head pounding from the huge quantity of red wine you drank tonight. You smoked a few joints on the beach, Emily taking each heady cigarette from Robin’s long fingers, taking a couple of deep drags, then handing them on to you. Trance music playing, your favourite tracks.
No doubt you wonder if the scream came from outside.
You sit up, then swing your legs out of bed and stumble to the balcony window, staring out at the Cap. Beyond the dramatic silhouette of umbrella pines, the lighthouse beam sweeps across the sky like a pointing finger, rhythmically whitening the dark sea and land.
The main road around Cap d’Antibes lies only a few hundred metres from your aunt’s chateau. But it might as well be a mile away.
With broken glass and razor-wire topping the high stone walls around the chateau, a guard permanently on duty in the gatehouse, Chateau Tamsin feels more like a prison than a home. That’s how celebrities live, and those around them simply have to accept it, just as you have done this summer.
Some nights you hear drunks singing as they wander home from bars along the Riviera. Or other Cap kids racing each other in open-top sports cars, risking death at every bend.
Tonight the road is silent.
You had visitors tonight. But they’ve all gone now. Emily will be asleep in her room below, perhaps dreaming of Robin, also asleep in his father’s neighbouring villa.
Tonight was such a chaotic evening, wasn’t it?
Wild young things out of control, partying on the private beach below the chateau. Swimming out together in the dark, some in trunks or bikinis, others skinny-dipping, enjoying cool water against bare breasts and buttocks. Listening to music from the nearby Hotel Du Cap-Eden-Roc, and the gentle lapping of water against the expensive white hulls of yachts. Watching each other and burning with unrequited love. Part delight, part torment in your perfect faces. With no idea what tomorrow is going to bring.
The scream comes again, startling you.
I imagine you reaching for a dressing-gown to cover your nudity. Then hurrying down the attic stairs barefoot, unsteady from the evening’s pleasure.
The corridor below is dark and still, except for a strange gasping sound.
Emily, suffering the after-effects of tonight’s excesses?
Your cousin and your aunt Tamsin have vast, palatial bedrooms on this floor, gold-plated fans in the ceilings and double windows overlooking the bay and gardens. Beautiful rooms for beautiful people.
They have guests on this floor too, otherwise you would never have been given the attic room on this visit.
Though secretly you love being apart from the others.
The attic room is your safe haven up above the rest of the world, out of sight, smoking cannabis and playing your music without worrying about disturbing anyone.
Also in the chateau tonight is Robin’s father, a film producer who stays most nights when his wife is away, not caring if that means leaving his son alone in their villa. A famous American actress and her taciturn husband, who was recently discovered in bed with his personal trainer – but she’ll forgive him. Some skinny German model who arrived a few days ago, knowing barely a word of French, embracing the American actress like a long-lost lover. An African cameraman who’s only there for the night, on a stopover to Morocco to make a documentary, but who seems to have known Tamsin forever from the way he was welcomed at dinner, with tears and lavish kisses.
So which of these beautiful people is making that ugly noise?
The door at the far end of the corridor is ajar.
There’s a light on inside.
It’s the guest bathroom. Marbled floor and wall tiles, gold taps and fittings you can see your face in, a Jacuzzi bath deep and broad enough for two at a time.
You creep along the corridor, probably wondering if you should wake Lucille. Lucille does not seem to like you, but she’s a good housekeeper for a celebrity. Efficient, discreet, loyal. She always knows what to do – and what not to do – when there’s a problem. Though if it’s Emily being sick after binge drinking, she’ll freak out if you tell Lucille.
By the time you reach the bathroom, the awful gasping noise has stopped. As though whoever is on the other side of the door is aware you’re there and is listening too.
Listening to you listening to them.
‘Emily?’
The darkness, or the drugs you took tonight, or perhaps the unexpected visitors you had, makes you bold. You give the door a little shove until it creaks open.
You peer around the bathroom door, and start to scream …
CHAPTER ONE
FILM STAR LOSES DAUGHTER TO ACCIDENTAL DROWNING – OFFICIAL VERDICT
I don’t want to look, but the photograph and its accompanying headline – in French – are impossible to ignore. Horrified, I study the photograph: a woman in her sixties, on the steps of some French public building, one hand up, trying to hide her puffy, red-eyed face from the cameras, her distress palpable.
The sensationalist caption beneath reads: Actress Tamsin grieving for her only child. Her desperate question: Why?
The Frenchman reading the newspaper next to me senses my gaze. He rustles the front page impatiently, then turns over.
Embarrassed, I look away, staring out over the sparkle of the Mediterranean as the plane approaches the runway at Nice airport. We are very close to the sea here; I see the shimmer of a heat haze on the tarmac, and am glad I chose to wear shorts and a T-shirt to travel, despite the rainy British summer I left behind in London.
That’s what we all want to know, of course.
Why?
My cousin Emily had everything: beauty, talent, admirers, and a promising career in film ahead, following in her mother’s footsteps. Yet she had too much to drink one night, recklessly went swimming off the Cap after midnight, and drowned.
An accident, apparently.
According to online reports, the police believe she was alone. Except Emily wasn’t the type who w
as ever alone. And there’s an outdoor pool at Chateau Tamsin. So why not swim more safely there if it was late and she was under the influence?
Suicide seems a likelier verdict. Many of the tabloids agree. Yet the reports also say night swimming had become a habit of Emily’s in recent years, and the amount of alcohol in her bloodstream makes it possible that her drowning was entirely accidental.
I don’t know what to think.
Except that Emily is dead, and I can’t imagine how Aunt Tamsin, who doted on her daughter, her only child, is coping.
At first, it seems not much has changed in the South of France since I was a teenager. The security at Nice airport is much tighter, of course, but I’d expected that. Grim-faced policemen in black uniforms and dark glasses, cradling automatic weapons and examining every passer-by with unsmiling suspicion. Passport control takes longer too, the immigration officials scrutinising me from behind glass panels as I collect my bags. And the ID checks for the car hire station seem to take forever.
But once clear of the airport, the French Riviera itself feels as laid-back and crowded as it always was. I hadn’t expected that, given the recent terror attacks in France. It’s business as usual, it seems.
The traffic cruises along at a necessarily stop-go pace, halting every few hundred yards for tanned and scantily-clad holidaymakers with buggies and beach inflatables to cross to and from the sandy beaches all along this stretch of coast.
I drive in my open-top hire car along the coastal road from Nice, the wind in my hair, my first proper break from work in several years.
I was too young to drive last time I was here, though I rode pillion on a moped several times, and remember the roads fairly well. Especially once I hit the quiet surrounds of Cap d’Antibes, with its palm trees and exclusive villas, its cameras and guards.
Even though I’ve come for a funeral, I begin to feel almost relaxed, enjoying the sunshine on my face, the bitter-sweet familiarity of the Cap. The open-top BMW was expensive to hire, but I intend to treat myself while I’m here. God knows it’s been years since I had any kind of holiday. But that’s what happens when you work in a resort town.
I round the last bend, approaching the turn to Chateau Tamsin, and slam on the brake pedal.
‘Shit.’
The paparazzi are here, camped outside my aunt’s house in their hordes.
There are television vans everywhere, with well-known logos on the sides, satellite dishes on top, and huge numbers of people packing the road on either side. Police officers have been stationed here to keep back the crowd, but are only doing so in a desultory fashion. One gendarme is chatting with an attractive female television presenter; another is on his phone in the shade of a police van; a third directs me through the chaos without really looking at me.
The photographers come running to stare in at me, and then turn away, shrugging and muttering amongst themselves. The open-top BMW attracted their attention. But they’re disappointed by my less than glamorous appearance, dismissing me as a person of no importance. Which, of course, I am.
I turn up the steep slope to the gatehouse, struggling with the tight clutch. Halting at the barricade, I manage to stall the BMW, much to the guard’s amusement.
He steps out of the gatehouse to study me and the car close-up.
A camera, perched high on a pole beside the gatehouse, turns towards me. I look away, suddenly self-conscious and uncomfortable, under scrutiny.
‘You can’t stop here, mademoiselle,’ the guard says in French, his southern accent thick and countrified, and waves me to turn the car around. His light brown uniform is pristine, silver buttons gleaming in the sun. ‘This is private property.’
‘I’m family,’ I reply in rusty French, and hand him my passport. ‘My aunt’s expecting me.’
He takes the passport and returns to the gatehouse with it. I see him on the phone inside, nodding. A moment later, he returns and hands my passport back.
This time he is smiling.
‘Welcome to “Chateau Tamsin,” mademoiselle,’ he says, and presses a gadget in his hand. Slowly, the barricade begins to rise. ‘You may park to the right of the entrance door.’
‘Thank you, monsieur.’
I start my car again and drive through the gate, aware of paparazzi suddenly running up the slope behind me, scrambling to grab a last minute photo of this visitor.
They must have changed their minds about my importance. Quite wrongly, of course.
I’m nobody. Nobody at all.
CHAPTER TWO
I tug on the ornate bell-pull and listen to the familiar echoes inside the chateau, standing on the top step with my rucksack and suitcase.
Chateau Tamsin hasn’t changed much either, at first glance. It’s been fourteen years. Yet the black-turreted, nineteenth-century chateau and its formal gardens look exactly the same as they did on the day I left. The umbrella pines are as vast, sombre and dusty as I remember. The sun on the nearby Mediterranean still dazzles my eyes like it’s made of blue crystal.
I recall the first time I stood on these steps, unsure what to expect on my first solo visit to France. Then I was young and unconfident, overawed by such lavish surroundings. I knew my aunt only from the odd glimpse at family gatherings, and of course by reputation. She was still headline news in those days, a big movie star and frequently in the papers.
So a few things have changed, at least.
For a start, I’m not the same shy, awkward girl I was as a teenager.
Also, my aunt has been out of the limelight for the past few years, coming to terms with a diagnosis of early onset dementia. Dad and I only recently learned of her illness ourselves, after it was leaked to the press by a nurse at the specialist clinic she was attending. Tamsin had been hiding her condition from everyone, it seems. Even Emily.
And when I look more closely, paint is peeling from the door frame and the white marble top step has cracked across. It’s no longer the perfect fairy-tale castle I’ve held in my heart all these years.
Other than that, it feels as if I’ve gone back in time. Back to my heady mid-teens, to acne and beach parties and heartache, to moonlit swims with Robin and Emily and all the other rich kids who lived on the Cap in those days.
The sense of familiarity is so powerful, I half expect Emily herself to jerk open the door and laugh at my shocked expression, exclaiming, ‘Of course I’m not dead!’
Except she is.
Now I can hear heeled feet noisily crossing the hall inside. Lucille opens the door to me, my aunt’s housekeeper.
She looks older and heavier, her face a little strained, but is essentially unchanged. Same knee-length dress with a nondescript chequered pattern, same white frilled apron, same way of styling her hair in a bun, though it’s threaded with silver now.
‘Bonjour, Lucille.’ I am unsure if she will remember me. ‘It’s Caitlin.’
The housekeeper’s smile is dry and meagre. ‘Bien sûr,’ she says, and steps back to let me inside, saying to someone in French, ‘She’s here, Madame. Your niece.’
‘Oh, Caitlin,’ my aunt murmurs, somewhere behind her.
Tamsin is standing in the doorway to what I remember as being the sunny front room, the best place for a view of the bay. The light is behind her head, like a halo. I think she is a ghost at first; she barely seems to be there at all, drifting out of the shadows towards me, her own hair also silvery, yet somehow perfect, tiny wisps curling out of the elegant chignon on the back of her neck.
‘How good of you to come all this way,’ she says, her watery gaze searching out my face.
I shake my head. ‘I had to come, Aunt Tamsin,’ I tell her, and my voice catches on her name, husky with emotion. ‘I wanted to come. I’m so sorry about Emily. I … I still can’t believe it.’
‘Dear little Caitlin.’
Tamsin holds out her arms. I hurry forward, embracing her warmly. She kisses first one cheek, then the other, very much in the French manner.
Sh
e smells of floral perfume and expensive face powder, and is wearing a floaty cream chiffon dress with capped sleeves and matching heels with thin ankle straps. When she pulls back, her gaze wanders unsteadily over my face, making me suspect that she has been drinking. Not that anyone could blame her if she has.
Her only child, the beautiful and talented daughter on whom she relied utterly, has just died. She must be utterly distraught. I can’t imagine how she is not distraught.
‘Your father isn’t with you?’
Close up, I can see now that her skin is deeply wrinkled, her eyes a little sunken, the lids creased and papery. She looks almost elderly, which shocks me. I have always thought of Tamsin as my glamorous and vivacious aunt. But she had Emily quite late on, as I recall. Her ‘little miracle’ as she used to say, kissing her daughter. She must be in her late sixties now.
‘He didn’t feel well enough to travel. Didn’t he say on the phone?’
She seems bewildered, and I suddenly realise that Dad has not told his sister about the cancer diagnosis. Or perhaps she has forgotten the conversation.
‘But for Emily’s funeral, surely …?’
I look back at her helplessly. If my father has concealed the full significance of his illness from her, then I doubt he’ll want me to explain.
Besides, if I do tell her, will she even remember later?
‘I’m really sorry,’ I say. ‘He sends his love, and his condolences. You know how fond he was of Emily.’
There’s an awkward silence, then Tamsin nods. There’s a look of resignation on her face. Her lip curls as she remarks, ‘Gerald never changes. Typical vicar. Always there for others, never for his own family.’
‘I really am sorry, Aunt Tamsin. I thought he’d told you on the phone that he couldn’t come.’
‘Maybe he did.’ She shrugs, looking away. ‘My memory isn’t what it was. But it’s fine. It doesn’t matter. He hadn’t seen her in years anyway. Hadn’t seen either of us.’
