A Mother's Secret

by T J Stimson

  How long will I have to stay in prison? she asks, but he can’t answer that.

  This is all my fault, he says, for getting your hopes up. I was so sure, after Marion. But you’ll go forth as Font Hill’s ambassador. You’ll show them, you’ll show all of them. It’ll be all right, you’ll see.

  She doesn’t believe that any more than he does. Font Hill is her home, the people here are her family. She’s been in the system long enough to know what she can expect in an adult prison. She’ll be the youngest again, a fresh teenage girl in a world of isolated women. There’s no time or money in jail to educate and encourage prisoners. Inmates are there to be contained and punished, not pampered and rehabilitated. She can forget about A-levels and college. She can forget about a flat in London with Davy.

  She’s back where she started.

  Chapter 29

  Tuesday 9.30 p.m.

  Maddie’s eyes darted to the kitchen door. There was no way for her to reach it with Lucas blocking her way. ‘The children are upstairs,’ she said hoarsely, trying to dodge around him. ‘Please, Lucas. Let me go.’

  He stepped back suddenly, throwing his arms up in disgust. ‘For God’s sake, Maddie! I was just trying to show you how ridiculous you’re being! What do you think I’m going to do? Batter you to death with a frying pan and bury your body under the patio?’

  She fled to the other side of the kitchen table, although the menace that had been such a tangible presence in the room just moments ago was already dissipating. ‘Stay away from me!’

  Lucas stopped in his tracks. ‘I don’t get it. Do you really think I’d ever do anything to hurt you or the children?’ He sounded genuinely confused. ‘Where is this coming from, Maddie? Why are you acting like I’ve suddenly turned into a monster?’

  They stared at each other from opposite sides of the table. Maddie couldn’t quite believe it’d only been three weeks since they’d sat at this same table, his arm affectionately draped around her shoulder as they’d planned their summer holiday. Her head filled with white noise, questions buzzing so loudly in her mind she could hardly think.

  Despite everything, she couldn’t believe he’d murder their own son. But she knew his loyalty to his sister ran deep. And their marriage had been sorely tested in the year after Jacob’s birth, and she knew her depression had pushed him to his limits. She’d thought they’d emerged stronger than ever, but was that when the damage had been done? Their marriage may have seemed unharmed on the outside, but inside, had it been silently haemorrhaging? In the end, was his bond to Candace stronger than his ties to her?

  He started around the table towards her again, but she moved to keep it between them. ‘You think I’d protect anyone, even my own sister, if they’d hurt our son?’ he asked. ‘Please, Maddie. Look at me. Look at me. You know me. I’m still the man you married. I don’t know what’s going on in your head, but I haven’t changed!’

  She was so confused. Every time she thought she’d touched the bottom, the seabed shifted. He seemed so sincere, but wasn’t that what psychopaths did? ‘I don’t know what to think anymore,’ she said weakly.

  ‘Then don’t think,’ he urged. ‘Trust your instincts. Trust me.’

  ‘I want to,’ she said slowly.

  ‘Please, Maddie. I know how much you’re grieving. We lost our son. But you need to stop lashing out and looking for someone to blame. I don’t know what happened to Noah, but it had nothing to do with me or Candace. You have to know that, deep down.’

  ‘I don’t even know who you are,’ she said hollowly. ‘I’ve searched, but I can’t find any record of you or Candace that goes back beyond twelve or thirteen years.’ She suddenly found her voice again. ‘There’s nothing, no old address, no college friends, nothing. It’s like you were beamed down from outer space. There’s only one reason you’d appear out of nowhere like that, and that’s if you’d changed your name. Why would you do that, Lucas?’

  He shrugged. ‘Because Candace asked me to.’

  She was taken aback. Of all the responses he could have made, she hadn’t expected him to come straight out and admit it.

  He saw her surprise. ‘I’ve never tried to hide it, Maddie. If you’d bothered to ask me about it, I’d have told you! I hate to burst your conspiracy bubble, but there’s no dark, dreadful secret in my past. I’m not in witness protection or running from the law, if that’s what you’re thinking.’ He smiled wryly. ‘I changed my name because Candace asked me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It was this thing she had.’ He hesitated a moment, lost in the past. ‘After our parents died, my mother’s sister took us in, but she never formally adopted us. When Candace was about twelve, she got a bee in her bonnet about the three of us not being a proper family because we had a different surname. She wanted both of us to change ours to Drummond, Aunt Dot’s name. But Aunt Dot said Candace had to wait till she was eighteen, in case she changed her mind.’

  Maddie felt herself weakening in the face of his calm, rational explanation. He made her fears seem like night terrors exposed as nonsense by the cold light of day.

  ‘When she turned eighteen, she switched her name by deed poll and asked me to change mine, too.’ He sighed. ‘I didn’t care. The name I’d been born with, Carter, had nothing but bad memories for me. Lucas Carter was the thirteen-year-old boy who watched his parents burn to death. I was happy to leave him behind. So I agreed to change my name to Drummond, too. It made Candace and Aunt Dot happy and cost me nothing. The only reason I didn’t tell you before is because it had nothing to do with us. You and me. It never even occurred to me to mention it. Why would it?’

  She searched his face, alert for the false note that would tell her he was lying. He seemed genuine, but she no longer trusted either him or her own judgement. She’d believed him when he’d lied to her face about the loan. ‘Even if this is true—’

  ‘Of course it’s true!’

  ‘You’ve just admitted you’ve been lying to me for six years,’ she said in a rush. ‘I don’t even know who you are.’

  ‘I’m Lucas Drummond. I haven’t lied to you! I’ve never pretended to be anyone I’m not, Maddie. I don’t understand why you’re making such a big deal about this. Drummond is my legal name. Maybe I should have told you before, but I honestly didn’t even think about it. I’ve been Lucas Drummond for so long. It’s who I am now.’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘It’s just a name.’

  ‘You have pretended to be someone you’re not!’ she cried. ‘I’m not talking about the different name, Lucas! You made me think you were honest and trustworthy, that I could rely on you. But you lied about the loan, you’ve lied about your name – what else have you hidden from me? Is your birthday your real birthday? How do I know Candace is even your sister?’

  He looked repelled. ‘Of course she’s my sister. I don’t know where this paranoia is coming from, but you can’t keep using me as your punchbag, Maddie. I’m not a robot. I’m grieving too.’ His voice grew bitter. ‘You were the one there that night, you lied about how Noah got those bruises, but never once did I blame you when all the evidence pointed in your direction. I gave you the benefit of the doubt. I cleaned up your mess when you trashed the nursery so the kids didn’t see it, and the only thanks I get for it is to be accused of wrecking it myself. You’re twisting and turning like a rat in cage so you don’t have to face the truth, which is that the only person who’s a danger to this family is you!’

  She flinched, as if the blow had been physical. Never mind the business with the nursery. She’d been the one there the night Noah had died, and she hadn’t been able to keep him safe. She’d dropped him, given him those bruises, and even now, despite the fact the pathologist had said they hadn’t caused his death, she still felt guilty about it. She might not be a danger to her family, but she hadn’t been able to protect her baby when it mattered.

  Lucas looked suddenly contrite, his anger draining away as quickly as it had arrived. ‘Maddie, I’m sorry, I didn’t m
ean that—’

  ‘I think you should leave now,’ she said, her voice wobbling. ‘I want you out of the house tonight.’

  ‘Maddie, please. I’m sorry. I should never have said that. I don’t know what I was thinking—’

  His phone rang suddenly, startling them both. Lucas ignored it. A few seconds later, it rang again. The third time, he pulled it out of his pocket, glanced at it and ended the call.

  ‘It was her, wasn’t it?’ Maddie demanded.

  ‘Maddie—’

  ‘Go on, go to her! I’m calling my mother. If you’re not gone by the time she gets here, she’ll call the police.’

  ‘No, she won’t,’ Lucas said tiredly. ‘Fine. I’m too exhausted to argue anymore. If this is really what you want, I’ll go. Just for tonight. We can talk about this tomorrow, when you’ve had a chance to come to your senses.’ He grabbed his coat from the hook by the back door and turned to face her. ‘You know, I never thought you were crazy before, whatever you might think. But I do now.’

  Lydia

  They summon her to the Governor’s office. She’s twenty-two years old now; she’s been in prison more than five years and hauled in to see the Governor at least three times a year, every time her mother sells a story or some do-gooding campaigner decides to launch a petition to set her free. They have no truck with her celebrity in here; not the screws, anyway.

  Among the inmates, it’s different. She’s faced her share of hostility, especially from the younger women, the ones inside for drugs or theft, who call her a monster and spit in her food; but the older women and the lifers have always been kind to her, protective, really. They don’t see her as a child-murderer. She was only eleven, they say, a child herself. She can hardly be held responsible for what she did.

  She doesn’t believe that, though. Not anymore. The one good thing about prison is that they made her see a shrink, a proper shrink, not a kid-gloves soft-touch counsellor like she saw at Font Hill. She ran rings around that woman, feeding her the whole sob story about Mae and Jimmy and all the rest. It’s not your fault, the counsellor used to say, oozing liberal understanding and handing her a box of tissues. It’s your mother who should be in jail.

  But the prison shrink isn’t having any of it. She has to take responsibility for what she did, he says. Plenty of kids have a shit-awful childhood, just take a look around you, half the women in here came from similar backgrounds to you, or worse, and they don’t go around strangling toddlers. Maybe it’s my bad blood, she says, glibly parroting what she read in the papers, Mae’s wicked and she passed it on to me, along with my blue eyes, I can’t help it, it’s in my genes. Bullshit, he says unsympathetically. You made a choice when you strangled Julia. You’re not a helpless little puppet. Which is a good thing. It means you can choose to be different, going forward. You can choose not to be like Mae.

  She kicks over the coffee table when he says that the first time, storms out of the session. But she comes back. Even so, it’s not Damascene, her change of heart, it doesn’t come as a sudden lightning bolt from the blue. She sees the shrink every week for years, and most of the time, it’s two steps forward, one step back.

  The realisation that she took a life, that all of this – being spat at, prison, everything – isn’t something that happened to her, it’s something she caused, is hard to face. She suffers panic attacks, nightmares, she finds it almost impossible to sleep. The prison doc offers her antidepressants, but she refuses to take them. As hard as this is, she knows she has to square up to what she’s done or she’ll be no better than Mae.

  Even so, she still shies away from the savage reality of what she did. When the shrink asks her to describe the fatal moment, all she sees is darkness. But she has at least accepted that Julia died because she made the choice to kill her. It doesn’t really matter why: she can blame her mother, she can blame her genes, her ‘bad blood’, but like the shrink says, in the end, the only person who had control over what happened that dreadful day was her.

  She isn’t the monster the press makes her out to be; she refuses to see herself as a murderer, even now. But she killed a child; she is, in fact, a child-killer in every sense of the phrase, and she will have to live with that knowledge for the rest of her life. That’s her real punishment.

  She knows she won’t ever be let out. There’s too much public anger and hatred towards her, even now, over a decade later. Thanks to her mother’s frequent forays into print, she’s a household name. They’ll never let her go free. She’d probably be lynched if they did. She doesn’t crave her freedom anymore, not like she did when she was at Font Hill. She’s given up hope. She’s been in the system now for as long as she was out of it, and frankly, she’s not sure how she’d cope if they did let her go.

  So when the Governor says, without preamble, without even looking up from her desk, your parole has been granted, we’re moving you to a halfway house tomorrow, you need to go and pack, she simply sits there, uncomprehending. The Governor might as well be talking Dutch, for all the sense she makes.

  She’s suddenly eleven years old again, bewildered and disoriented as she’s smuggled out of the courthouse beneath an itchy grey blanket.

  Parole? she repeats, stupidly.

  You’ll be on licence, the Governor says tersely. She has never liked Lydia and she doesn’t trouble to hide it. You’ll be at the halfway house for six weeks, and they’ll find somewhere permanent for you to go after that. They’ll set you up in a flat. Find you work. You can’t go back home, she adds. Someone’s bound to recognise you. Even with a new name, it’s too much of a risk. You’ve got to stay away from the area. Once news breaks you’ve been let out, the world and his wife will be looking for you.

  A new name?

  You can hardly keep the old one, the Governor says derisively. In case you hadn’t realised, you’re not Miss Popular out there. We can’t have someone taking matters into their own hands, she adds, sounding regretful.

  Lydia walks back to her cell in a daze. Her solicitor has applied for parole every year since she became eligible, but she never thought she’d ever get it. Not after they took her out of Font Hill and sent her here. She thought they’d locked her up and thrown away the key, like all the newspapers said they should do. She’d thought she’d die in here.

  She doesn’t know what to feel as she sits on the edge of her narrow bed and stares blankly at the wall. She’s had no time to prepare for this. All her friends are here, on the inside. She’s never had a real home outside prison; she hasn’t had a friend who wasn’t an inmate. Davy is her only family, and even though he’s visited her every month without fail, she knows he has his own life now.

  How is she supposed to function outside? She’s never even caught a bus on her own, much less driven a car. The last time she was free, she was eleven years old. She hasn’t bought a packet of cigarettes or gone to the cinema or ordered a drink in a pub. She’s never been to a library or gone out dancing or even shopped at the supermarket. How’s she supposed to juggle electricity bills and rent and doing her own laundry, never mind get a job? What’s she even qualified to do? She never finished her A-levels, not after they dragged her out of Font Hill. She’s not trained for anything. For eleven years, she’s never had to worry about where her next meal is coming from or what to do with her day. It’s all decided for her, even what clothes to wear. She feels a rising tide of panic just thinking about being cut loose from everything she knows.

  And it won’t be real freedom, will it? She’ll be looking over her shoulder for the rest of her life. The Governor is right: there’ll be plenty of people who’d be happy to see her swing and would consider lynching her a public service. Even with a new identity, she’ll never really be safe.

  But she doesn’t have a choice. She has twelve hours to pick a new name and say goodbye to all her friends. She has been oddly popular in prison and her talent for friendship has given her a feeling of self-worth.

  As she passes out through the prison gates,
it all drains away, leaving nothing but a hollow void.

  She arrives at Wellington House with one small bag that contains everything she owns. She feels more angry and abandoned and frightened now than she did even when they sent her down. She has six weeks to learn what she’s missed out on for the last eleven years. A new name isn’t going to fix that.

  She stares at herself in the mirror as she brushes her teeth that night. She doesn’t look broken, though she knows that, deep down, nothing has changed. She sees without vanity that she’s beautiful, with her slanting blue cat’s eyes and creamy skin. She’s kept her fair hair cropped short out of convenience ever since Font Hill, but it gives her a delicate, Audrey Hepburn air. Much good her looks have ever done her, she thinks bitterly. If she’d been ugly, maybe Jimmy and all the rest would’ve left her alone.

  She’s twenty-two, and she feels a hundred. She could live for another fifty years, seventy, and she’ll have to carry around what she did for every single one of them. How is she supposed to make friends, when she can never tell anyone who she is? At least in prison she could be herself.

  Hastings, they tell her. That’s where they’re sending her. Some dull little town on the south coast where old people go to die. London is out of the question, as is Manchester or Edinburgh or anywhere lively she might actually want to go. No to the West Country, too; she’ll stand out a mile, they say; she needs to go somewhere no one’s going to ask questions. They veto the new name she chose, too, they tell her it’s too similar to her old one, nothing with the same initials is allowed. They give her another one, a name that doesn’t feel like her, doesn’t sound like her, feels foreign on her tongue; that’s the point, they say, we want it as far from Lydia Slaughter as we can manage.

  At first they tell her she’s to have no contact with Davy, she’s effectively going into witness protection. It’s for her own good; the first thing the journalists will do once they find out she’s free is put a tail on her brother, but she throws a complete fit at that, says she’d rather slit her wrists or strangle another kid so they have to put her back inside. They listen to her then.