The Holiday

by T. M. Logan

  Can’t stop thinking about what you said

  I meant every word

  ‘Lucy didn’t realise he was filming, did she?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And does she know Jake was the one who knocked Alex off his bike?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘She doesn’t even know about the video of her asking him to do it. Only Jennifer, him and me know that footage exists.’

  ‘And me.’

  ‘And you. So now you know, what do we do? What about Jennifer?’ He checked his watch. ‘The police will be here soon.’

  I looked at my husband, my brave, kind, protective husband, my heart overflowing.

  ‘You know what we have to do, Sean. You’ve known all along.’

  After a long moment, he stood up.

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘I do.’

  One last thing niggled at me.

  ‘Why did you have the condoms, Sean? I found them in your suitcase.’

  He looked confused.

  ‘I didn’t put any condoms in there. I swear.’

  ‘Who used that case before you?’

  Even before the question had left my mouth, I knew the answer.

  ‘Lucy,’ I said. ‘She took it on the German trip.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said slowly. ‘Summer term.’

  He looked around. ‘Where are the kids, anyway?’

  ‘Games room?’

  ‘I’ll go and have a look.’

  He headed for the basement room and I picked up my phone, scrolling to the Find iPhone app.

  The app loaded, displaying my children’s mobile phones as the two devices it could locate.

  I selected Lucy’s phone and waited for the location finder to work its magic.

  After a few seconds, the map showed Lucy’s location on the west side of the property, near the gorge. There was no good reason for her to be down there in the middle of a thunderstorm. I felt a sudden plunge of panic at the thought of her standing at the edge of the cliff, full of self-loathing over how she’d been treated, feeling used and dirty and worthless, choked with remorse over what she’d set in motion. I sent her a quick text and stood up, preparing to head out into the rain.

  Sean came back into the room, his face lined with worry.

  ‘The kids aren’t in their rooms, either of them.’

  I held my mobile up, showing him the icon for Lucy’s phone on the map.

  ‘For some reason, Lucy has gone back down to the gorge. She’s going to get drenched.’

  Lucy appeared in the doorway, her eyes red from crying.

  ‘Don’t suppose anyone has seen my mobile?’ she said. ‘I left it charging in the lounge and now I can’t find it anywhere.’

  I looked at my phone again, selecting the icon for Daniel’s handset, feeling my heart thumping against my ribs as I waited for the app to locate the signal.

  It zeroed in on the location of my son’s phone, and my heart rose up into my throat.

  79

  Daniel

  Daniel ran.

  The rain was a pounding torrent that made a thick wall of noise as it struck the leaves on the trees around him and the ground at his feet. He was properly soaked now – he may as well have jumped into the pool, there wasn’t a bit of him that wasn’t totally drenched. Hopefully Lucy would have an umbrella, and they could both go under it and wait for the rain to stop.

  He squinted through his rain-smeared glasses. She was up ahead. Near the edge where . . . He didn’t want to think about what had happened to Izzy, it was too sad. Why his sister had wanted to come down here again, he couldn’t figure out. But she had a present for him, and she’d texted him specially, so he’d come. Remembering the bag of Haribo in his hand, he held it up behind his back so that it would be a surprise.

  He slowed his pace as he came into the clearing next to the big fallen tree. She was right on the edge of the cliff, with her back to him, long blonde hair plastered to her head. He slowed to a walk, trying to catch his breath. Slowly, she turned around.

  He gave her his best smile. Here she was: his sister.

  Oh. No she wasn’t.

  It wasn’t Lucy.

  It took a moment for that to sink in, for his thoughts to catch up, as he blinked up at her through the downpour. Not Lucy. It was Jake and Ethan’s mum, Jennifer, her make-up smeared and smudged in the rain, black lines running down from each eye.

  She was here too, that was a bit weird. And she had a phone that looked just like Lucy’s. Like, identical.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Have you seen my sister?’

  Jennifer smiled at him.

  ‘She’s on her way.’ She indicated the hand he held behind his back. ‘What have you got there, Daniel?’

  He brought the bag of sweets out to show her.

  ‘A present for Lucy.’

  ‘Aren’t you sweet? Guess what – I’ve got a present for you too.’

  ‘What is it?’

  She reached into her pocket.

  ‘A surprise, honey.’

  Daniel took a step nearer. Her smudgy make-up and her smile reminded him of the clown he’d had at one of his birthday parties once when he was little. The clown had smiled all the time but it was sort of fake, like it was supposed to be nice but was actually just creepy and scary. He’d been scared of clowns ever since.

  ‘How do you know Lucy’s on her way?’ he said.

  ‘She told me.’ She beckoned him closer. ‘Don’t you want your surprise?’

  ‘Umm, OK.’

  She held out her hand, opening her palm to reveal a clear yellow plastic lighter.

  ‘It’s yours, isn’t it? Not much fuel left now, sorry. Gives a heck of a good flame though, doesn’t it?’

  Daniel blinked raindrops out of his eyes, the words coming out before he could stop them.

  ‘Was it you that made the fire?’

  She held the lighter closer to him, her smile widening.

  ‘Hope you didn’t mind me borrowing it.’

  ‘It’s fine, it doesn’t matter. Thanks.’

  As he reached out to take it, Jennifer’s other hand shot out and grabbed his arm tight, her grip like steel rods squeezing the bones of his wrist.

  She dropped the lighter and dragged him towards the edge of the cliff.

  80

  I heard him before I saw him, his cries cutting through the roar of the storm on the hillside.

  ‘Ow, you’re hurting me! Mum! Dad, help—’

  Then nothing.

  Rivulets of rainwater poured in streams towards the gorge and I stumbled on as the rain lashed down, catching a glimpse of figures through the trees before losing my footing in the wet and crashing onto all fours. Scrambling back to my feet, mud smeared up my arms and legs, I plunged on until I reached the clearing.

  My heart stopped beating.

  Jennifer was holding Daniel right at the very edge of the cliff. His feet were half on, half off the rocky promontory, the front of his sandals hanging in thin air above the drop, arms held out for balance. The back of his T-shirt was bunched in her fist, gym-toned muscles standing out on her strong right arm.

  One quick shove would send him over the edge.

  Daniel turned to look at me over his shoulder, eyes bulging with terror, cheek blazing red from a fresh blow. Next to Jennifer’s tall frame he looked tiny and thin and vulnerable.

  ‘Mummy!’ he gasped, his voice strangled with panic.

  I tried to speak but no words would come, my jaw locked with fright. The terror was rising up inside me, filling my chest, filling my throat, bile rising into my mouth. I felt sick. With my hands held up in a gesture of surrender, I took another step towards them.

  ‘Stay where you are!’ Jennifer barked. Her eyes were wild, with a strange intensity that gave a cold, hard edge to my fear. She looked mad. As if something inside her had been stretched and stretched over and over again until finally, decisively, it had snapped.

  I stopped.

  ‘Jennifer
, please, please don’t hurt him, I’m begging you.’ My voice seemed thin and distant. ‘It’s OK, Daniel. It’s going to be all right.’

  Jennifer glared at me.

  ‘He told you, didn’t he? Sean told you everything.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So I need to make you see. Make you understand.’

  ‘Please just come away from the edge a little bit.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Remember when we first came out here, Kate? When Jake was here, on this spot, right where I’m standing now?’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘Do you remember what I said to him?’

  I searched my memory. It seemed like a hundred years ago.

  ‘I don’t know . . . we just wanted him to be safe, for all the children to be safe.’

  ‘I told him something important: whatever you do, don’t look down. Because if you look down, you fall.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said breathlessly, ‘I remember now.’

  ‘Well, my son is looking down now, Kate. My boy is looking right into the abyss, just like yours. And you’re the only one who can save him. How does that feel? To have the power of life and death over someone’s child?’

  ‘We can both save him, Jen. I know your boys mean everything to you. Just like Daniel does to me.’

  ‘Your son. My son. They’re the same, aren’t they? The same to each of us, anyway. They mean the same, to us. So I had to find something to make you understand.’ She gestured towards my terror-stricken son with her free hand. ‘To persuade you to keep our secret. You’d do the same for your kids, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Believe me, Jennifer, I understand what you—’

  ‘This is what you’ll do to my Jake if you tell the police, your colleagues.’ She shook the handful of Daniel’s T-shirt that was clutched in her white-knuckled fist, and he wobbled on the edge, arms windmilling crazily to keep his balance. His glasses fell off, spinning end over end into the gorge. ‘This is what it means. You’ll ruin him. He won’t be able to cope with it. You’ll kill him, just as surely as if you’d done it yourself.’

  Bile flooded my throat again and I almost gagged. The rain, pounding and incessant, hid my tears.

  ‘Please, Jennifer!’

  From the trees on our right, Rowan emerged slowly with a man I didn’t recognise at her side. He was young, maybe early twenties, slim and clean-shaven, holding a police ID wallet open in front of him so that Jennifer could see it. He said something in French to Jennifer but she gave him barely a glance before turning her attention back to me.

  ‘Promise me, Kate.’

  ‘I promise,’ I said, my voice cracking. ‘I’ll do anything, please.’

  ‘Swear it on your son’s life.’

  ‘I swear on his life. I won’t say a word, not to anyone.’

  Daniel suddenly seemed to wobble on the edge and for a second I thought he would pull her over with him, but she braced herself and pulled him back at the last second.

  ‘Oh God, please just let him go, Jen!’

  I would have told her anything, anything, to step away from the edge and give my son back to me. She seemed to sense it too.

  The young policeman said something to her in rapid-fire French again.

  Rowan said, ‘The detective says step away from the side, Jennifer.’

  But Jennifer was staring at me.

  ‘Izzy was going to tell you, she was going to lay it all out for you. I couldn’t let that happen, but she wouldn’t listen to reason. She just refused to see my side of it, Jake’s side of it.’ Her voice took on a hard, unyielding tone. ‘I didn’t mean to . . . what happened wasn’t what you think. She just slipped.’

  ‘I believe you, Jennifer. I do.’

  ‘Do you really?’

  ‘Absolutely. Of course.’

  She smiled, just for a second, before it faltered and died on her lips. ‘You know what, Kate? You’ve always been too honest. Too straight-laced. And you’ve always been a crappy liar.’

  ‘I’m not lying!’

  The sky flashed with lightning, another blast of thunder ripping over our heads.

  In that instant another figure burst from the trees on our left, a stocky, bearded man in a jacket and jeans, sprinting hard at Jennifer and Daniel with his arms outstretched.

  Everything seems to slide into slow motion.

  The bearded man’s jacket flies up to reveal a pistol and handcuffs on his belt. Commands shouted in French. Now he’s losing his footing on the sodden ground, stumbling forward, lunging with open hands, trying to grab something, anything, to stop the child going over – but he’s too slow, too late, the yards between them too far. I’m starting forward, my feet leaden. Jennifer turns towards the bearded man, flinching backwards. The other policeman lunges forward too, hands grabbing at her, grasping her arm and reaching across her chest.

  Jennifer’s releasing her grip on Daniel’s T-shirt. Hands are flailing towards him, grabbing at the empty air. But he’s already overbalancing, tipping, arms extended, reaching out to grab something, anything. He is dropping too fast, too fast, and we are too slow.

  All I can see is my son’s face. All I can hear is one word.

  ‘Mummy!’

  Turning towards me at the last second, his skinny arms outstretched, hands grasping, eyes wide with terror. Disappearing over the edge. There, and then gone.

  My boy.

  Falling.

  ONE MONTH LATER

  81

  We shuffled slowly through the churchyard under a slate-grey English sky.

  Hundreds of black-clad mourners, faces pale with grief, moving in silence, conversation rendered meaningless, pointless on this day, in this place. Friends and family gathered, babies and toddlers, children and teenagers, parents and grandparents, old and young. Too many who were young. Far too many.

  Like a blade sliding into my heart, I remembered the last time I had been inside this church.

  Daniel’s baptism.

  The tears came again and I felt Lucy’s arm slip through mine, holding me up. We filed in through the arched stone doorway and took our places at the front, soft organ music playing beneath the hubbub of shuffling feet and whispered conversations. It was impossible, inconceivable that we should be here, having to endure the unendurable. It was not right, not natural, that we should be here in grief for one so young. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. The normal order of things was turned on its head.

  And yet, here we were. Ready to say goodbye for the last time.

  I had cried every day since it happened, set off by anything and everything. Every morning I woke from restless nightmares, my cheeks wet with tears. I was numb from crying, hollowed out with shock and grief. I couldn’t work, couldn’t eat, barely slept. Everything I thought I’d known had turned out to be wrong, and nothing would ever be the same.

  Rowan appeared at my side and we hugged each other. Her pregnancy – the secret she had been keeping from her husband, from her potential new business partners, from everyone – was just about starting to show. It was her pregnancy test that I’d found at the villa, discarded somewhere she thought Russ wouldn’t find it. She handed me a fresh tissue and squeezed my hand before going to a pew with Russ and Odette. I could hear the low voices of people in the row behind, asking each other where Jennifer was, snatches of whispered conversation passed back and forth:

  Why isn’t she here?

  Haven’t you heard?

  Oh, that’s just awful.

  Can it be true?

  I can’t believe it.

  And then the abrupt silence as they realised we’re sitting right in front of them.

  Jennifer was not here. Of course she wasn’t. She was where she had been ever since the day it happened, in jail in Béziers, and she was not expected to get bail while prosecutors argued about the charges she should face. We had agreed a story, a narrative of what had happened, to ensure that Lucy and Jake were shielded from blame – in exchange
for our silence on everything else.

  The thought of her made me cold with fury.

  Ahead of us, a small coffin covered in white lilies was laid gently on a stand by the altar. Sean stepped back with the other pallbearers as they turned to the cross and bowed, as one. How he found the strength to do this, I will never know.

  He returned to me, his face ashen.

  Lucy cried quietly beside her father. She had finally opened up to me about Alex Bayley, about what went on between them and what he did to her. She has shown me the old scars under her ribs, the fresh ones on her forearms that followed the news about his death. For today she has agreed to play the piano, a piece by Debussy, but I wondered if she would be capable when we reached that part of the service. I was certainly in no fit state to do a reading, or a tribute, or anything so private in such a public forum. Sean would speak for us both.

  We have talked about what he will say. The words he will choose when he walks to the front of the church and stands at the lectern. There is so much to say, a world of emotion and experience and shared life, and yet words are supremely inadequate. Words are clumsy and blunt, hopelessly crude as a means of expressing our love, our loss, our heartbreak. But words are all we have now.

  My mind drifts back to France, and I think of a boy. My brave boy, the day before that fateful day. I had found him with cuts and grazes on his hands and arms, mud and blood on his knees, tears on his face. His T-shirt torn. Still shaking with adrenaline but refusing, steadfastly, to tell me what had happened. Only later did I find out about the dare: to jump across the crescent gap at the cliff edge.

  An ‘initiation ceremony’ to be part of an older boys’ gang.

  A jump that fell just too short.

  A moment of pure panic, his hands scrabbling for a lifeline.

  A thick looping tree root below the edge, just strong enough to hold a small boy’s weight.

  It is this fragment of knowledge that saves his life the next day, in a thunderstorm, when I watch him disappear before my eyes at the very same spot. When Jennifer releases her grip and I watch him dropping into the gorge, turning at the last second as he falls, but he’s not turning to see me. He’s turning to grab onto that tree root, onto life. His scared eyes never leave mine as the two French policemen haul him back to safety.