A Mother's Secret

by T J Stimson

  Oh, God, where was the car? She just wanted to go home. Where was the damn car?

  She was running blindly now. A black Audi pulled abruptly out of its parking spot and she stumbled against it, sprawling across the bonnet. The driver swore at her and she backed away, spinning in circles as she scanned the car park. She still couldn’t see the Land Rover. She had no idea where she was or what she was doing. Her throat closed and she struggled to catch her breath. Black spots danced before her eyes. She had to get out of here.

  A silver-haired woman pushing a trolley stopped beside her. ‘Excuse me, dear, are you all right?’

  Maddie gave a hysterical half-laugh, half-sob. ‘No. I’ve lost my car. I’ve lost my baby and my car, and quite possibly my husband. I’m not all right.’

  ‘You’ve lost your baby?’ the woman exclaimed, looking around as if expecting to see a pram hidden among the cars. ‘How long has he been missing? Have you called the police?’

  ‘The police know all about it,’ Maddie said bitterly. ‘They think I did it. They think I killed him.’ She gazed at the woman, whose eyes were wide with disbelief. ‘He just died! I don’t know why. How could they ever think I did it? I loved him! Why don’t they believe me?’

  The older woman’s startled expression softened. ‘Oh, my dear. Your baby died?’

  ‘It wasn’t me!’

  The woman hesitated. ‘Let me put my shopping away and I’ll help you find your car,’ she said gently. ‘Wait here, dear.’

  Maddie was incapable of doing anything else. She stood like a child exactly where the older woman left her, oblivious to the curious stares of other shoppers eddying around her. Her good Samaritan returned and led her back to the safety of the pavement.

  ‘Now, dear,’ the woman said, surveying the car park. ‘What sort of car do you have?’

  ‘A Land Rover. One of those old ones.’

  ‘Well, that shouldn’t be too hard to find. Don’t worry, dear. I’ve done the same thing myself a dozen times. One of the joys of getting older, I’m afraid. I don’t suppose your car has one of those remote-clicker things so we can make it beep?’

  ‘It’s too old,’ Maddie said, pulling out her keys. ‘You have to unlock it with— Oh. Oh, God, I’m so stupid!’

  ‘My dear?’

  ‘These are my husband’s keys! I must have come in his car, not mine. I do that, sometimes, if he’s parked behind me.’ Her eyes filled. ‘I’m so sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’

  The woman smiled kindly. ‘Never mind. Let’s just find it, shall we? What is it, your husband’s car?’

  ‘It’s a silver Honda – wait, I see it. There, with the rug on the parcel shelf.’ Her words fell over each other in her rush to be gone. ‘Thank you so much for helping, you’ve been so kind. I really appreciate it. But I’d better get home now, I’ve been gone too long already.’

  She ran towards Lucas’s car, suddenly frantic to escape. She climbed in and locked the door behind her, then leaned her forehead against the steering wheel, her heart pounding like it would explode from her chest. It took her several minutes before she brought her panicked breathing under control sufficiently to be able to drive.

  When she was ready, she put the key in the ignition and reached beneath the seat to move it forward to a more comfortable position. Something was jammed in the mechanism. She gave it a gentle tug. A wedge of crumpled envelopes and bills addressed to Lucas spilled into her hands. He was hopeless with paperwork; his idea of filing was to shove everything into a drawer and jam it shut. She was about to shove it all back under the seat again, when something caught her eye.

  She unfolded the paper and flattened it out against the steering wheel, her disbelief mounting as she read the page.

  Chapter 22

  Saturday 11.30 a.m.

  She leaned on Candace’s doorbell, not lifting her finger even when she heard running feet inside. She’d driven here straight from the supermarket and was in no mood to calm down, her inertia finally dispelled by fury. She’d had enough of being lied to and taken for a fool. She wasn’t leaving until she got some answers.

  The door opened and Maddie pushed past her sister-in-law without waiting to be invited inside. She hadn’t been to Candace’s house for months and was shocked how dirty and untidy the place was. ‘Where’s Lucas?’

  ‘In the kitchen. Is everything all right?’

  Lucas leaped up from the kitchen table when he saw her, scattering paperwork. ‘What are you doing here? I took the children over to Jayne’s. She said she’d drop them back this afternoon.’

  ‘I know,’ Maddie said tersely. ‘I got your text.’

  Candace pulled out a chair. ‘Why don’t you sit down while I put the kettle on?’

  ‘I don’t want any more damned tea!’ Maddie erupted. ‘Jesus! I’ve had enough tea in the past week to float the Titanic! Why does everyone think a gallon of Typhoo is the answer to everything? Arm shot off, have a cup of tea! House burned down, have a bloody cup of tea!’

  ‘I don’t know what’s upset you,’ Lucas said soothingly, ‘but let’s calm down and talk about it sensibly.’

  She thrust the letter she’d found in the car at him. ‘All right, if you want to talk, let’s talk about this.’

  He scanned it, confused. ‘Why are you giving me this?’

  ‘What did you think you were doing, going behind my back like this? Did you really think I wouldn’t find out?’

  ‘Find out what? It’s just a confirmation letter from the insurance company. They insisted we increase our coverage when we got the loan, that’s the way it works. I know the premiums are more expensive, but we didn’t have a choice. We can drop them again when we pay off the loan. I thought I’d told you.’

  ‘The loan you took out behind my back!’ Maddie cried.

  He looked genuinely shocked. ‘What?’

  ‘You took a second mortgage out against the house without even telling me and then secretly doubled my life insurance!’ She snatched back the letter. ‘What are you up to, Lucas? Are you planning to bump me off? Or just drive me mad so you can lock me up and sell the sanctuary to developers?’

  ‘Are you insane? We discussed it! You signed the paperwork!’

  ‘I did no such thing!’

  He gaped at her. ‘Maddie, what the hell? Of course you did! We were at the bank for bloody hours! You bitched about it all the way home!’

  It was her turn to look startled. ‘I didn’t,’ she said, but her tone was suddenly less certain.

  ‘Maddie, I don’t know what you think is going on, but I’d never do something like this without telling you,’ he said vehemently. ‘You weren’t happy about it, neither of us were, but we agreed it was the only way to get the bank off our backs. Haven’t we got enough to deal with without going through all this again?’

  ‘When?’ she demanded. ‘When did all this happen?’

  He threw up his hands. ‘I don’t know. A few months ago, before Noah was born. Come on, Maddie. You must remember.’

  She felt as if she had vertigo. Lucas sounded so sure. She searched his face, looking for the slightest hint he was hiding something. He seemed tired, impatient, anxious – but if he was lying, he deserved an Oscar.

  Was she actually going mad? Not just ditsy, not just forgetful, actually mad? If Lucas was telling the truth, then she had signed off on the loan and she’d completely forgotten. How was she supposed to function if she couldn’t remember something this big, this important? What on earth was wrong with her?

  Candace was scrolling through her phone. ‘Here,’ she said, showing Maddie the screen. ‘Look. A text from you just before Christmas, asking me to babysit the kids while you went to the bank with Lucas.’

  Maddie stared at the screen. ‘I don’t remember!’ she cried, forcing down a surge of panic. ‘I don’t remember going to the bank, I don’t remember any of it. What’s wrong with me, Lucas?’

  She didn’t miss the wary glance he exchanged with his sister
. ‘It’s those damn pills. The doctor said this might happen. Come on, Maddie.’ His voice gentled, the way hers did when she soothed a skittish horse. ‘This is me you’re talking to. Do you really think I’d do something like that and not tell you?’

  Candace thrust a mug of tea into her hands as Lucas guided her to a chair. She sank into it, the room swimming around her. Even to herself, she sounded paranoid. Lucas had never let her down, never lied to her before. What reason did he have to do so now? It was the stress of losing Noah, it was sending her out of her mind. Nothing seemed the way it should. She took a sip of tea. Even that didn’t taste quite right. ‘Am I going crazy?’ she begged.

  Lucas squeezed her arm. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Why did we need the money, anyway?’ she asked desperately. ‘What was it for?’

  Was she imagining it, or was there the slightest hesitation before he replied? ‘I can’t buy into the partnership without it,’ he sighed. ‘We discussed it, remember? You didn’t want to sell any land at the sanctuary, so we decided to borrow against the house instead. We were going to clear our overdraft and use the rest for my partnership. The company will be able to expand and bid on bigger projects. We’ll be able to pay the loan off within the next two to three years.’

  ‘Why didn’t my accountant know about it, then?’

  ‘Why would he? It has nothing to do with the sanctuary.’

  He was right, of course. Her accountant had only discovered the loan when she’d asked him about using their house as collateral. There was no reason for him to have known about it otherwise. She was being ridiculous. She was accusing Lucas of fraud and embezzlement, but her only ‘evidence’ was her own very unreliable memory.

  She looked from Lucas to his sister. Something still didn’t ring true here. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but something wasn’t right.

  She closed her eyes briefly. She was so confused. She couldn’t seem to get anything straight in her head. She was going mad. It was the only explanation. The violence in the nursery and the supermarket, the blackouts like the one she’d had this morning, and now this.

  What else? asked a small voice inside her head. What else did you do?

  ‘Lucas,’ Candace said suddenly. ‘Lucas, I can’t do this to her anymore. I think it’s time we told her the truth.’

  Lydia

  The police don’t find Julia for four days. They do a ‘fingertip’ search of the area, covering every inch of ground for a mile around the Taylors’ house, they search the woods and alongside the railway line and the allotments, and even the derelict house on top of the escarpment, but they don’t find the little girl. (Heads will roll for that, later.)

  They waste days searching for the tall, thin man with his arm in a sling whom Lydia described hanging around the Taylors’ back gate just before she went inside to get Julia an ice lolly. They put out bulletins on the news asking for people to contact the police if they see the blue van with one door painted green that Lydia told them the tall thin man was driving. They sit her down with a police sketch artist and she describes the man’s odd eyes, the wall eye that looks right even when he is staring straight at you. She describes the scar above his eyebrow and his straggly grey moustache and the chipped front tooth, and the artist draws it all, just as she describes.

  It’s a good likeness. Too good, in fact, because Jimmy is recognised; several friends and neighbours grass him up and the police haul him in for questioning. But Jimmy is able to prove he was nowhere near the Taylors’ house the day Julia went missing, for once he has a cast-iron alibi: he was in the police cells in Birmingham, held on charges of GBH. He was safely behind bars hours before Julia disappeared, it couldn’t possibly have been him.

  Which suddenly makes the police consider Lydia’s story with fresh eyes.

  It doesn’t take long for it to fall apart. Once they know the tall, thin man with the sling is a lie, they view everything she has said with suspicion. They press her about when she last saw Julia, exactly, they demand to know everything she said and did in the time leading up to Julia’s disappearance. She covers up her lies with more lies, she says that Julia ‘might’ have gone out of the back garden chasing a lost puppy. At first she swears she didn’t follow her, she never left the garden, but then a neighbour comes forward and says she saw Lydia alone in the railway cutting that afternoon, and so then Lydia admits that, yes, she did follow Julia, just to bring her home, but she fell down and hurt her knee and the little girl ran on ahead without her and after that she never saw her again.

  It’s a tissue of lies and the police know it. They think she’s just trying to cover up the fact she wasn’t watching Julia, like she was supposed to; they think she sneaked away to meet a friend, they have no idea what she’s really hiding. But they search the local area again, more thoroughly this time, now they know Julia didn’t disappear into the back of a blue van with a strange man, and this time they find her, buried under the rubble in the basement of the derelict house.

  Until now, Lydia hadn’t quite believed Julia was actually dead. Hadn’t Lydia always woken up after Jimmy’s visits? Sometimes it’d taken hours, but she’d always woken up in the end. She understands dead is different from unconscious or asleep, she does know that, but until this moment some part of her had still believed Julia would wake up and come safely home.

  At least, that’s what she tells herself.

  A special detective comes in to talk to her, and she knows immediately he’s not going to be fooled as easily as everyone else. He’s older than the other policemen and he’s got a tired look in his eyes that reminds her of Frank, like he’s seen too many terrible, ugly things. He asks her so many questions, on and on at her with his questions. Asking the same thing in different ways, trying to trip her up. They get her a solicitor who they say is on her side, but when Lydia gets tired and asks if she can go home now, the solicitor gives her a sad look and says no, she has to answer the detective, she has to tell him everything if she ever wants to go home again.

  She sticks to her story, even when a policewoman comes in all excited and says they’ve found a button off her dress in Julia’s dead little fist, a button Lydia guesses the little girl must’ve torn off when … at the end. Mae hasn’t taught Lydia much, but she’s taught her when to keep her mouth shut. She swears on a stack of bibles, on her mother’s life, that Julia ran off after the puppy, she won’t be shaken from her story: she’d tried to follow her, to catch up with her, but she’d fallen and hurt her ankle—

  You told us it was your knee.

  It was my knee. My knee and my ankle. I told you. Julia ran and when I tried to follow her, I couldn’t find her, I looked everywhere and then I came home and told Mae and she called you.

  The detective doesn’t believe her, of course, but like Mae always says, it’s not what someone believes, it’s what they can prove. It’s Mae, not the stupid, sad solicitor, who finally storms into the interview room and tells the police enough is enough, they’ve got nothing, her Lydia hasn’t done anything wrong, this is police harassment, you can’t treat a kid like this, she’s got rights!

  It’s nearly two in the morning before they let her go home. She’s tired and scared but she likes the way Mae is looking at her now, like she matters.

  For a week she thinks she’s got away with it, she even goes to the Taylors’ house with Mae and Frank the day of the funeral to pay her respects, she stands with the huge silent crowds outside their big house. Julia’s in that box, she thinks. She’s in that box and they’re going to put her in the cold, hard ground and cover her with dirt and the worms will get her and I did it.

  Suddenly, the reality of what she’s done hits her and she’s seized with a cold, blinding terror. She can’t help it, she tries to stop it, but a dreadful, nervous snort of laughter bursts out of her, and she covers her face with her hands and pretends to be crying, but the detective sees her, she feels his sharp eyes on her, he knows, and she realises her time of reckoning is coming.
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  Chapter 23

  Sunday 2.30 p.m.

  ‘Would you have agreed to the loan if Lucas had told you what it was really for?’ Sarah asked.

  Maddie rubbed her temples. She hadn’t slept a wink all night; she’d had so little sleep in the last two weeks, she was almost starting to hallucinate. ‘I don’t know, Mum,’ she said wearily. ‘But that’s not the point. He lied to me.’

  ‘And I’m not excusing that, but his heart was in the right place—’

  ‘Why are you taking his side?’ she exclaimed. ‘He lied to my face, Mum! I knew there was something going on with him and Candace, and he made me think I was just being paranoid! If she hadn’t forced him to tell me the truth yesterday, he’d still be lying to me about it now!’

  Sarah lifted a cardboard box of donations onto her kitchen table and began to sort through it. ‘I’m not taking his side, Maddie. What he did was wrong, but surely not unforgivable? You agreed to the loan when you thought he wanted it to buy into a partnership at his firm, so it’s not about the money, is it? Is it the fact that he lied to you that’s bothering you, or that he gave the money to his sister?’

  Maddie hadn’t told her mother she didn’t remember agreeing to the loan in the first place. She was so tired of being on the back foot, of being a problem everyone else had to fix. ‘I love Candace, Mum, I do, but I’m the one Lucas is married to,’ she said. ‘He should never have done this without talking to me first, and he knows that or he would have told me the truth in the first place.’

  ‘I realise Candace isn’t the most reliable person, but from what you’ve said, they were very businesslike about it, drawing up a repayment plan and everything,’ Sarah said. ‘I’m absolutely not condoning the fact that he lied, but surely you can understand him wanting to help his sister?’

  Maddie did understand. That was part of the problem. As angry as she was that Lucas had lied, she was also hurt that he hadn’t had more faith in her. She’d never tried to come between him and Candace. If he’d told her he wanted to borrow the money to help his sister buy her flat, she wouldn’t have been happy about it, but she would have agreed. Candace was family, after all. And Sarah was right, they’d put it on an official footing, with Candace agreeing in writing to pay back the loan within two years, once her business had been up and running long enough for the bank to agree to give her a mortgage. But there was no getting away from the fact that Lucas had put the roof over their heads in jeopardy without telling her. Candace might have the best of intentions, but if she fell off the wagon permanently, what then? Regardless of how fond she was of her sister-in-law, Maddie was tired of always coming second to her needs. Now, of all times, she needed Lucas to put their family first.