The Secrets Between Us

by Louise Douglas

  I walked slowly up to the house. A large, ornate wreath of holly leaves and berries and ribbons was nailed to the wooden door. It must have been there before but I hadn’t noticed. As I admired it, a gust of wind caught me from the north; it was icy cold, like a punch against my face. I steadied myself, reached out my hand and pressed the bell, and that set the dogs off barking inside the house.

  After a moment or two, Bill opened the door. Blue jumped up at me, but I was ready for him – I caught his huge front paws and set them back on the ground. Bonnie came more slowly from around Bill’s legs. She was stiff with arthritis. I stroked her head.

  Somewhere inside the house, I heard the strains of operatic music – a woman was singing something terribly sad in a faltering soprano.

  Bill looked terrible. He had aged a decade in the handful of days since I’d seen him. There were bags under his eyes, and jowls beneath his stubbled cheeks. His hair stuck up and he was wearing a baggy old pair of jeans beneath a striped shirt. He smelled faintly sour.

  ‘Come in,’ he said, and I stepped through the door. He closed it so that the dogs stayed outside.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

  He looked at me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Of course you aren’t.’

  He took my coat and gestured with his hand that I should go into the living room.

  ‘Did Claudia get my message?’

  Bill ignored the question.

  ‘Isn’t she here?

  ‘No.’ Bill shook his head. ‘She doesn’t want to see you.’

  I opened my mouth and closed it again.

  ‘Where is she?’ I asked quietly.

  ‘It doesn’t matter where she is. She won’t see you, Sarah.’

  He followed me into the living room. The milky-coloured carpet was grubby, so many feet had passed through the house in the last days. I perched on one of the sofas, on its edge. The Christmas decorations were tired and rather pathetic in the empty house. Nut shells were scattered in the fireplace.

  Bill cleared his throat. He said: ‘Claudia asked me to give you a message.’

  I brightened a little. ‘Oh?’

  ‘She wants you to leave the family alone. She wants you to go away and never come back. She wants you to forget about us. OK?’

  I shook my head. ‘I can’t do that. I can’t forget about Jamie.’

  ‘You have to.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  Bill paced over to the window. He scratched his head.

  ‘The thing you have to understand, Sarah, is that I am prepared to do anything it takes to make my wife happy. If she doesn’t want you here, I’ll make sure you aren’t here.’

  ‘I didn’t come about Jamie today,’ I said. ‘I came to tell Claudia that Alexander didn’t kill Genevieve.’

  Bill laughed. ‘Nobody cares what you think.’

  ‘There’s proof.’

  Bill came back over and stood in front of me, leaning over me. I shrank away from him.

  ‘You aren’t listening to me,’ he said. ‘Claudia doesn’t care what you have to say. I don’t care. Nobody does. We don’t want to know about your little fantasies, your games.’

  ‘No, it’s not like that. I …’

  Bill spoke slowly and calmly.

  ‘We know that you’re – how can I put it? – fragile, Sarah. Everyone knows you’ve had problems, and even you would probably agree that you’re somewhat obsessed with Genevieve.’

  ‘No, I …’

  ‘Your own sister told us that you’re still being treated for postnatal depression. Your mind’s addled. We know you tried to abduct Jamie. We have absolutely irrefutable evidence.’

  I felt myself go cold inside. My mouth was dry as dust, and the old feeling of terror rushed through my bloodstream.

  ‘You wanted him to be your son, didn’t you?’ Bill asked. ‘You wanted to be Genevieve.’

  ‘No.’ I shook my head, still afraid to say anything that might incriminate me, because I didn’t know what Bill knew. Had May mentioned something to him, or to Claudia? Surely she wouldn’t have.

  Bill must have seen the confusion written on my face.

  ‘CCTV,’ he said. ‘We installed CCTV over the gates when we knew Damian was back in Burrington Stoke. Just to be on the safe side. When we played the tapes back, we saw you, Sarah. I saw you, Claudia saw you, the police saw you. We have digital recordings. Several of them.’

  I shook my head in despair.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking straight that night,’ I said.

  ‘You haven’t been thinking straight for months,’ said Bill.

  I was trying to keep calm and at the same time think through the implications of what he was saying. Had I done anything to jeopardize Alex’s chances of gaining custody of Jamie? What if the Churchills made a case that he’d employed somebody mentally unfit to care for Jamie? Wouldn’t that make him a bad father?

  Bill said: ‘We’ve spoken to the police and taken legal advice. You’ll never be allowed access to Jamie, Sarah. Not while you’re considered a threat to him.’

  ‘I’ll never do anything to hurt Jamie!’ I cried.

  ‘No,’ Bill agreed, ‘you won’t. We’re arranging an injunction so that you can’t go anywhere near him.’

  ‘Please let me talk to Claudia,’ I said. ‘Please let me explain …’

  Bill shook his head. ‘Stop it, Sarah. Give it up. It’s over.’

  He said: ‘I’m going to straighten up, then I’ll drive you back to the train station. I want you out of here before Claudia returns.’

  I was feeling so panicked and upset I could hardly think. I knew the family was powerful and wealthy, and my position could hardly be more tenuous, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because Alex would soon be free and he’d let nothing stop him from getting Jamie back.

  ‘You can keep me away, but you can’t stop Alex from being with his son,’ I said. My voice was brittle. I knew I sounded desperate.

  Bill sighed, as if he were bored now.

  ‘Alex is going to be in prison for a long, long time.’

  ‘He went to Sicily looking for Genevieve. He was preparing to fight her for Jamie’s custody. Why would he have done that if he knew she was dead?’

  ‘It was a way to cover his tracks. He’s not stupid.’

  Bill turned and went to leave the room.

  I took a breath. ‘And we know that Genevieve had a lover and that she believed he was going away with her that day. We know his name.’

  Bill hesitated.

  ‘Well, part of his name,’ I said.

  He held up a hand to stop me.

  ‘I’ll be two minutes,’ he said. ‘Stay there.’

  He left the room. I sat where I was for a moment or two, my head falling forward. I twisted a piece of hair around my finger like I used to when I was a child; it used to calm me. I thought I’d let Bill take me back to Temple Meads then I’d get a taxi to the prison. I doubted I’d be allowed to see Alex, but it was possible. At least I’d be close to him and perhaps I could get a message to him. The very thought of being near to Alex made me feel a little better. Only bricks and mortar would be between us. We had been apart so long. I felt almost faint at the memory of Alex’s body, his presence, his face.

  I stood up and wandered over to the window. A stack of post had been left on the sill. I leaned over to look out at the dogs in the garden and, as I did so, I must have disturbed the pile, because the mail fell to the carpet. I picked up the letters. There were a couple of handwritten envelopes that I could tell were condolence cards by the gravitas of the writing and the colour of the envelopes. They were addressed either to the Lefarge Family or to Bill, Claudia and the Girls. There was a circular, a brown envelope addressed to Claudia, and a white one addressed to Mr William Lefarge.

  I put the letters back where they had been, on the window ledge, and straightened the pile again. I heard Bill’s footsteps on the stairs.

  I went back to the settee, and sat
down where I had been, in the same position.

  Something was bugging me, but I couldn’t chase it down.

  Something was wrong.

  I fiddled with my bracelet.

  Bill came back into the room. He looked neater. He was fastening the cuffs on his shirtsleeves. I shrank back from him.

  He had washed and shaved and changed. He looked better now, presentable. I stood up, and went behind the settee, keeping an arm’s length between us.

  ‘Shall we go?’ he asked.

  I nodded. He walked towards me. I moved away again, towards the door into the hall. Bill picked up the post from the window ledge, and that’s when I realized.

  I felt as if I were an upturned bottle full of icy water and somebody had just unscrewed the lid. I felt everything – all my emotions, my optimism, my conviction that we would be all right in the end – drain out of me, and I could almost feel the future puddling about my feet, disappearing.

  Mr William Lefarge.

  Mr William Lefarge.

  William.

  Liam.

  Lee.

  It was Bill! Of course it was Bill! Someone Genevieve met at university – probably the person who pulled the strings to admit her in the first place. A married man who was close. A family man whose wife had been pregnant a few years before Genevieve was. Someone with everything to lose and only Genevieve to gain. A man whose identity nobody must know. Someone who knew about the quarry. Someone who loved Genevieve but loved his wife and family even more. The man who had said to me only ten minutes earlier that he would do anything to protect Claudia.

  I thought my knees would give way beneath me, that I would simply faint and fall and the next thing I would feel would be the smack of the hall floor against my skull, and maybe that would be a good thing because then Bill wouldn’t be able to see that I knew.

  Genevieve had warned me.

  You next, she had said.

  I turned my head away from Bill and stepped into the hall so my back was to him. I hoped he hadn’t seen the recognition dawning on my face but, even if he hadn’t, there was a smell about me, a smell I recognized from years back, from school, and the smell was coming from my skin, from my glands, my neck, my armpits, the hot place between my breasts. It was the hormonal, primeval smell of fear. As I saw the dull sunlight falling through the windows, I knew that Bill must smell it too.

  ‘Come on,’ he said with a little sigh. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  I MOVED VERY slowly towards the front door. I patted my pockets, looking for my phone, and then I remembered it was in my coat pocket and my coat was hanging up in the hallway.

  I tried to rationalize and reason, but thoughts were chasing through my head so chaotically that I could not sort them. I was safe: Neil knew the truth. No, he didn’t, he didn’t know that Bill was Lee; he might work it out at some point, but he didn’t know now. He might never work it out.

  Maybe Bill wasn’t going to kill me. Perhaps I was being paranoid. Probably he was just going to do what he said and drive me to the station. I couldn’t bear to be with him that long. I’d ask him to drop me at the nearest bus stop, that’s what I’d do. Everything would be fine.

  Bill took hold of my arm and squeezed.

  ‘Come on,’ he said again.

  He pushed me in front of him out of the house. One hand was in the small of my back, the other held my elbow. He wasn’t exactly being rough, but I knew I did not have a choice. He grabbed my coat from the hook in the hall as we went past and, as he did so, the mobile phone clattered out of the pocket and slid across the floor.

  Bill passed me the coat, and put the phone in his pocket.

  ‘I’ll look after it for you,’ he said.

  He wasn’t looking at me. It was as if his thoughts were miles away.

  I glanced around, but there was no obvious escape route. The gates were still slightly open. That didn’t make any difference; there had never been anywhere to run. The lane to the left led directly up to Eleonora House, but it was a good half-mile away and mostly up a steep hill. I was wearing boots with heels that weren’t designed for running. The lane to the right led back down to the main road, and to the gated junction to the quarry, but that sheered sharply downhill and was much further and there were patches of black ice amongst the mud and rainwater. Ahead was farmland, but it was hedged, a thick, dense hedge that was impenetrable; even the nimble little deer could not find a way through. Behind was the old quarry.

  If I ran, Bill would catch me. If I screamed, nobody would hear me. Bill had my phone and the phone was switched off so it would not be transmitting a signal. The taxi driver had dropped me off at the Spar. That would be the last anyone knew of me.

  If I disappeared, nobody would ever know I had been here.

  I gave a little involuntary cry of distress.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Bill. ‘Please don’t do that. I have such a headache.’

  ‘You don’t have to take me anywhere,’ I said. ‘I’ll walk down to the bus stop. I’ll go on my own.’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘No, Sarah, I can’t let you do that. I need to be certain that you’re gone.’

  ‘Please …’ I begged, holding back.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but you brought this on yourself. Nobody made you come to Burrington Stoke. Nobody made you get involved. Now you have to face up to what you’ve done.’

  He opened the passenger door of his black four-wheel drive and hefted me up. The seat was cold and hard beneath my buttocks.

  ‘Is that what you said to Genevieve?’

  ‘What?’

  Why did I say that? Why did those words come out of my mouth? I was trying to survive, I wanted to save myself, not rile Bill, not turn him against me.

  He slammed the door shut. I leaned my head back against the headrest, trying to quell the dizziness that was overwhelming me. My fingers were trembling. I grasped my hands together in my lap. I knew it was important not to show how afraid I was. I had to pretend I was calm.

  Bill got into the car beside me.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Bill sat and stared at me for a moment or two.

  ‘Don’t put your seatbelt on,’ he said, although I had made no move to do so.

  ‘You know, don’t you?’ he said.

  It wasn’t a question. I looked at my hands on my lap.

  ‘Was it you all the time?’ I asked. ‘Did Genevieve steal the money for you? Did she have the baby for you?’

  Bill shook his head.

  ‘I told her not to give Damian a penny,’ he said. ‘Nobody believed a word he said. And she fell pregnant on purpose, to pressure me into leaving Claudia and the twins. I told her. I told her from the very beginning that nothing would make me break up my family. She wouldn’t listen.’

  The dogs were clamouring to get into the car, their paws scratching against the side. I watched them through the window glass. Blue’s big paws scrabbled at the pane, leaving streaks of mud and claw marks. Bonnie paced behind him.

  Bill sounded terribly tired. ‘Please would you sit forward.’

  I did as he asked. I think I was in shock. My brain couldn’t come to terms with the possibility that this gentle, softly spoken American was a threat. He bound my wrists together with his scarf, and then fastened it to the car’s armrest. It was tied so tightly I could feel the blood pooling behind it, and my hands immediately ached. There was no doubt in my mind then. I knew what he planned to do – but still I couldn’t believe it.

  He put the car into gear, turning it slowly towards the fancy wrought-iron gates. He picked up a small black remote control from the dashboard and aimed it at the gatepost. The gates swung open. The wheels squeaked on the pink fishbone paving as Bill lined up the car to go through.

  ‘Why did you have to kill her?’ I asked. He inclined his head towards me. He did not notice the small lavender pot, although the wheel of the car knocked it sligh
tly as we passed. It rocked on its base, but did not tip over.

  ‘To make her quiet,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t stop screaming. I asked her, I warned her, but she wouldn’t stop.’

  My heart slowed a fraction.

  We were through the gates, the nose of the car pointing out on to the lane. Bill turned right, downhill, towards the old quarry. In the wing mirror I saw the gates slide to behind us. The left one stuck on the pot. I saw the dogs watching from the other side.

  ‘Were you in the old quarry when she died?’ I asked.

  He nodded. ‘It was our place,’ he said. ‘Where we used to go. It was convenient. Private.’

  Bill swallowed as he spoke and I noticed that the whites of his eyes were red and glassy. He drove the car carefully downhill.

  ‘She couldn’t be happy with what she had. She always had to have it all, everything. And even if she had had everything, if she had everything in the world, she still wouldn’t have been happy.’

  ‘Bill …’

  ‘Please don’t talk,’ he said.

  We drove, slowly, down the lane. In the wing mirror I saw the dogs watching. They had come through the gap in the gates and were hesitating. They knew they weren’t supposed to go out of the garden on their own.

  ‘That morning,’ he said, ‘she turned up all bright and breezy, but she was in one of her moods. She said she’d left a letter for Alexander, and one to her parents, so there was no going back. She asked what Claudia had said when I told her I was leaving …’

  He wiped his cheek with the back of his hand.

  ‘And I said I couldn’t do it to Claudia, I couldn’t destroy her like that. So Genevieve said she would tell her herself. She meant it. It wasn’t a threat. She said she’d been trying to tell her for weeks.’