The Secrets of Winter

by Nicola Upson

  It came again, that familiar feeling of desolation that Penrose would have found hard to explain. ‘And what did happen eighteen years ago? Do we know the truth, or was there more to it?’

  Naylor ignored the question, lost in his thoughts, and Penrose knew that he would have to wait for the story to unravel in its own time. ‘My sister said you saved her life that day. I always thought I’d done that, but apparently not.’

  ‘What did she mean?’

  He shrugged. ‘That you’d given her a sense of purpose, I think. Do you remember? After you found us, we had to go back inside the house to wait for Hartley to come and collect us, and that policeman’s case was at the bottom of the stairs. You caught us playing with one of the cameras, and we thought you were going to tell us off, but you sat us both down and showed us how it worked. You’ll have noticed from my efforts this morning that Alex listened better than I did.’ His fingers moved restlessly, absentmindedly fastening and unfastening one of the buttons on his jacket. ‘You showed her how to take her first photograph, and you promised to bring it to her when it was developed. I didn’t believe you, but you kept your word – that time, at least.’ Naylor reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a tattered image of himself as a little boy, and the forced smile in the picture seemed out of place against the pale face and haunted eyes. ‘Alex treasured this. It killed her when you stopped coming to see us.’

  ‘It wasn’t my choice,’ Penrose said, compelled to explain himself by the guilt he had always felt for making promises that he could never keep.

  ‘No, I’m sure it wasn’t, but Alex hoped for a while that you’d take us in.’

  ‘I could never have done that.’

  ‘It doesn’t stop kids wishing, though, does it? We were split up not long after that. Alex was luckier than I was. The Fieldings were a nice family. Ordinary, but kind. They treated her well, and worked hard to give her what she wanted.’ It was what he didn’t say about his own fate that brought tears to Penrose’s eyes, that and the idea of two young, grieving children nursing secret hopes that a stranger would save them just because he had been kind. The regret was so sudden and so powerful that he had to look away, but not before Naylor had noticed. ‘Do you remember what I asked you when you found us?’

  ‘Yes,’ Penrose said immediately, the sadness of the question seared permanently into his memories of that day. ‘You asked me why you weren’t special enough to die with the others.’ The boy had been sent on an errand that fateful Christmas Eve, and Penrose could easily understand why the question would always haunt him: why, on the day that his mother chose to remove herself and everything she loved from the world, had he been sent away? ‘I couldn’t give you an answer then,’ he admitted, ‘and I can’t now.’

  ‘It’s all right. I have my answer.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It was going to be a special Christmas for us,’ Naylor said. ‘The vicar had found my mother a position – did he ever tell you that?’ Penrose nodded. ‘It was something to do with his wife and one of her charities. We were moving away, leaving that terrible place behind and starting again, outside London.’

  ‘Hence the note and the settled bills.’

  He nodded eagerly, still the child at Christmas that every adult yearned to be. ‘I was so excited. She sent me to pay the bread bill, and it seemed significant, like she’d trusted me with something that was symbolic of a new start. I remember running home that evening and thinking to myself that I wouldn’t want to be anyone else in the world. That was a change for me. Normally, I’d have been ready to swap places with anybody, and just for an hour or two I understood what it was to be happy.’ His face darkened and Penrose waited impatiently for him to continue, sensing that the narrative wasn’t going to be the one he had most feared. ‘I heard my ma screaming and shouting halfway down the street, and as I got closer, I heard Alex, too. She was crying, and I couldn’t get upstairs fast enough. All I could think about was how Maisie and Emily could possibly be sleeping so soundly with such a racket coming from the next room. Then I saw that they weren’t asleep.’ Perhaps it was because Penrose had seen the aftermath of the tragedy for himself, but the pictures were so clear that he felt as if he were there at the boy’s shoulder, watching the scene unfold. ‘When I went next door, Tommy and Alfie were already dead and Ma and Alex were fighting over the knife. She had it at Alex’s throat and Alex was trying to push it away. If I’d have been a couple of minutes later, that would have been it.’

  ‘So you did rescue your sister,’ he said, resisting the temptation to ask why you would save a life, only to take it years later.

  ‘Somehow I pulled her away. She was hysterical, they both were, and I was so frightened but I managed to get in between them. Ma just kept coming, though. She tried to get at Alex again, and I knew she was going to kill her.’

  He looked at Penrose, pleading with him to finish the story and say the words he couldn’t bring himself to speak. ‘Did you kill your mother, Jack?’

  Naylor nodded. ‘I didn’t mean to. I just wanted her to stop, so I grabbed her hand and pushed her against the wall. The next thing I knew, the knife was in her neck and everything was quiet. I couldn’t believe what I’d done. It all happened so quickly.’

  ‘But it was self-defence,’ Penrose insisted, trying to reconcile the remorse that was so evident in Naylor’s face with the ruthlessness it must have taken to kill Richard Hartley. ‘People would have understood. I would have understood.’

  ‘Really?’ He shook his head, unconvinced. ‘As it was, some people thought I’d killed all of them. You were thinking that just now, when you brought me in here. I could see it in your face – you didn’t want to believe it, but you did.’

  It was pointless trying to deny it. ‘I still don’t understand, though,’ Penrose said. ‘If your mother had a new life to look forward to, why would she do something so terrible?’ Naylor said nothing, challenging him to find the answer to his own question. ‘Tell me, Jack. Please.’

  ‘If I’d had the choice, I’d have died on the spot rather than be left behind. I remember thinking that on the day of the funeral.’ Penrose closed his eyes, remembering that bleak January day – hundreds of people crowded round a double grave as four tiny coffins were laid next to their mother, each with a bunch of snowdrops placed on top. ‘I’ve spent my whole life feeling guilty for what I did, wondering if that’s the reason Ma treated me differently that day. Perhaps there was always something bad in me, and she could see it. Alex did her best to heal that over the years …’

  ‘So why punish her?’

  ‘Because she didn’t tell me the truth, not until this week. She could have taken all that pain away, but she didn’t. She made me live with it, and rely on her to make it bearable.’ Again he waited for Penrose to catch up, then continued half impatiently. ‘You don’t have to be a photographer to know that your eyes can play tricks on you. When I went into that bedroom, I saw my mother trying to kill my sister, but perhaps that’s what I wanted to see. Perhaps it was better than the alternative.’

  ‘Which was?’ There was a long silence as the answer finally dawned on Penrose. ‘You mean that Alex killed the other children?’ he asked. Naylor nodded. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, she admitted it.’

  ‘Why now, after all this time?’

  ‘Because I drove her to it. She didn’t mean to say anything, but we were having a row and she said something in the heat of the moment that she couldn’t take back.’

  ‘What was the row about?’

  ‘Christmas, of course. What else, at this time of year? It’s a terrible time for us, for obvious reasons, but we’ve always got through it together.’

  ‘And this year she was going away.’

  ‘Yes, but it wasn’t that. Alex was looking forward to the weekend, and I was pleased for her – she’d let me into the secret about Marlene Dietrich, and I knew how important it was for her career. And if I’m honest, I was quite looking f
orward to being on my own for once – just an ordinary bloke on Christmas Day. I think I’d even kidded myself that the memories might go away if Alex wasn’t there to remind me.’

  ‘So what changed?’

  ‘I found out the truth. I heard your name by accident when I was in the editor’s office, and I knew straight away that it wasn’t Marlene she was excited about seeing. It was you. There was an old list of guests in the bin, so I read it to make sure that I hadn’t got it wrong, and there you were – you and the Hartleys. Alex kept all that from me, and I didn’t know why, so I confronted her with it when I got home. I asked her to take me with her, but she refused, and all those old insecurities came back. I was still the one left out in the cold, the one who wasn’t wanted. I’d always be the kid who was sent away, and suddenly that made me angry rather than sad. I told Alex that she owed it to me after what I’d done for her – one weekend didn’t seem too much to ask for saving her life. I wouldn’t let it go, and in the end she just turned round and screamed at me that she didn’t owe me anything because all I’d done was finish what she started.’ He closed his eyes and screwed his hands into fists, digging his nails into the palms of his hands to stave off the tears. ‘I couldn’t believe what she was saying at first, but then it all made sense. That’s why Ma turned on her – because of what she’d done to the others.’

  That part did make sense, and although Penrose still recoiled from the idea that a twelve-year-old girl – a girl he had cared for – could be a murderer, he was experienced enough to know that history suggested otherwise. ‘Do you know why she did it?’ he asked, wanting at least an explanation if he had to accept the fact.

  ‘Because she found out that the family was going to be split up. Ma could only afford to take the little ones with her, and we were old enough to stay behind and work. She hadn’t told us everything because she didn’t want to spoil Christmas.’

  Such a natural thing for a mother to do, Penrose thought: keeping a painful secret to protect the last Christmas they would share as a family. He tried to imagine the grief and horror that Mollie Naylor must have felt when she saw what her daughter had done, and realised why she had done it; had she been there to testify, he wondered if she would have thanked her young son for unwittingly putting her out of her misery. ‘People always said that violence was in our family,’ Naylor added. ‘My dad used to knock us around, so they thought it ran in the genes. Perhaps they were right, but they blamed the wrong kid – and Alex let them go on thinking it.’

  ‘And she destroyed your love for your mother,’ Penrose said. ‘You’ve spent your life hating her for things she hadn’t done, things she would never have done.’

  Jack nodded, grateful for his understanding. ‘I clung to Alex because she was the only person who could possibly know how it felt to have your family snatched away from you, the only person left alive who knew what I’d done and understood why, but even she wasn’t who I thought she was. It was all a lie.’

  ‘So you killed her in the heat of the moment?’ Penrose said, wishing it to be true.

  ‘No, not then, but I told her I was going to come here and tell you the truth – you and Hartley. She just laughed.’

  ‘She didn’t believe you?’

  ‘She said that Hartley knew already. Apparently she told him all those years ago while we were staying at the vicarage, and he promised to protect her. It would be impossible for me to tell you how much I hated her in that moment – how much I hated them both. I’ve spent my whole life resenting something I didn’t understand, but I’ve never felt a rage like that.’

  Could it really be true that Richard Hartley had conspired to keep the truth of that day a secret? Penrose wondered. It was hard to contemplate, and the vicar’s comments the night before had seemed genuine enough, yet he also knew how difficult it would have been for him to betray the girl’s trust if he had been put in that impossible position; he would have done it, but it would have destroyed him, and the Hartleys had known both children much better than he had. In fact, he had always wondered why they didn’t adopt the orphans themselves; perhaps now he knew the answer. ‘When did you confront Richard Hartley?’ he asked. ‘You were obviously the past that he hadn’t expected to see. Did he recognise you?’

  ‘No, not at all. I think she did, though.’

  ‘Mrs Hartley?’

  Naylor nodded. ‘She kept looking at me over dinner, like she knew me and couldn’t place me, but nobody took any notice. She obviously didn’t say anything to him, because it came as a shock when I told him. I did it as we were leaving the smoking room together, when you’d gone off to find Marlene. He’d just been telling us that he was going to preach a sermon about love, if you remember, so I thought I’d show him what love was really capable of.’

  ‘You asked to meet him in the church?’

  ‘Yes. After all that talk about the chair and St Michael, it seemed right that someone should judge him at the end. He spent his life deciding who to damn and who to save …’

  ‘Not consciously,’ Penrose argued. ‘He was trying to do his best. He didn’t deserve to die, especially not like that.’

  He could see that his words had disappointed Jack. ‘Neither did my mother,’ he retaliated angrily, ‘and she certainly didn’t deserve to be blamed for it – so who gets to decide what’s right and what’s wrong? Whose secrets are kept and whose reputations are destroyed? Whose lives are worth protecting, and whose can be thrown away? Everybody passed a judgement that day, including you, and some of us are still living with it.’

  And some are not, Penrose thought. ‘Did Richard Hartley admit that he knew what Alex had done?’

  ‘No. He swore she’d never said a word to him, but he’d have said anything last night. He was begging for his life.’

  A note of doubt had crept into his voice. ‘You could hardly bear to look at him this morning, when I asked you to photograph his body,’ Penrose said.

  ‘Of course I couldn’t. I thought it was a trap.’

  ‘There was more to it than that. You were worried that he’d been telling the truth, weren’t you? The more you thought about it, the more you began to suspect that Alex had fooled you into killing for her all over again.’

  ‘No! Why would she tell me that Hartley knew if he didn’t?’

  ‘To stop you coming here. To protect herself. She’d been lying for years to do that, so why baulk at it now? Richard’s was a horrific death, Jack. You didn’t just kill him. You tormented and humiliated him – a good man, who had always tried to do his best. How could you let yourself be manipulated like that?’ Penrose heard the fury in his own voice and knew that he had overstepped the mark; Naylor’s devastation was obvious, and nothing he said could make the man’s remorse any more profound than it was already. In truth, it was himself that he was angry with, not Jack Naylor: they should all have asked more questions about what happened that Christmas, and he should have got to the truth eighteen years ago – not now, when it was far too late.

  Naylor picked up the snowman from the table and looked at the bloodstained cotton. ‘I thought of myself differently after Alex told me the truth,’ he said. ‘Does that make sense? Until then, I’d killed but I wasn’t a killer. There was a reason for it, and I could always tell myself that it was for the best, no matter how terrible it seemed at the time. All that changed last week. I killed my mother, the person I loved most in all the world, who loved me. Nothing else mattered after that, or at least I thought it didn’t. By the time I got here, it was just the end.’

  ‘You didn’t kill Mrs Soper, though, did you?’ Penrose asked, and Naylor shook his head.

  He got up and walked over to the Christmas tree that stood in the corner, and Penrose watched as he rubbed the pine needles between his finger and thumb and smelt their scent. ‘My mother loved Christmas, did I ever tell you that?’

  ‘I don’t think so, but I remember the tree you had and how much love had gone into it. I remember the presents.’


  ‘We never opened them because of what we thought she’d done. She worked so hard to get them for us, and they were just thrown away. It’s funny, isn’t it, the things that haunt you. After Alex told me what had happened, all I could think about was how ungrateful that was, and how hurt Ma would have been if she’d known.’ He brushed a hand across his cheek and turned to Penrose. ‘Every year it comes back, you know. Every year, when the music starts and the lights go up, I can’t wait for Christmas to be over. It’s actually quite a comfort to know I’ll never see another one.’

  12

  As the afternoon wore on, Josephine and Marta decamped to the other bedroom, where there was a better view of the route across to the mainland. ‘Any sign of Archie?’ Marta asked as Josephine peered out into the semi-darkness.

  ‘No, not a thing. Even if there was a boat on its way back to us, I’m not sure we could see it from here. We’ll just have to wait and hope that he’s all right.’

  ‘I never want to hear the words “Christmas” and “house party” in the same sentence again as long as I live,’ Marta said with feeling, as she put the parcel she had brought with her down on the bed. ‘Still, at least I can finally stop lugging this around. It’ll be your responsibility once you’ve opened it.’ She tried to patch the wrapping paper where it had been torn in transit, but quickly gave up. ‘Go on, you might as well open it now and finish the job.’

  Intrigued, Josephine unwrapped the box and took out a black leather case which held an exquisite gold-plated Corona typewriter. ‘This is beautiful,’ she said, lifting it out and trying the keys. ‘What a wonderful present.’

  ‘I’m glad you like it, because it’s a selfish gift really. I thought if we have to spend some time apart while I’m in America, the least we can do is write to each other. I want a letter from you every day, and I can’t possibly read that much of your handwriting. It’s ruined my eyesight already.’