The Secrets You Hide

by Kate Helm

  So he has been keeping track of me.

  ‘You lied to me about Robert. You said he’d left of his own free will. But he’s been declared dead and—’

  ‘Robert deserved to die.’

  I stare at him. There it is: a confession, of sorts. But I’ve no recording, and he knows it. It’ll be his word against mine.

  If I even get out of here.

  ‘What did Robert do to you, except get in your way because you wanted to be with Emma?’

  Jim scoffs. ‘You think you get it but you really don’t. I should have known from your drawings – you’ve a warped view of people, of the world. You shouldn’t be let anywhere near people who’ve suffered.’

  He takes a step back towards me. I cringe.

  ‘And what about Copse View? You’ve lied about that too.’

  ‘Don’t you fucking dare judge me. You weren’t there.’

  And you swore you were never there either.

  But I say nothing.

  ‘One painting. That’s all you had to do. My Amy had her suspicions about what you were here for, but I felt sorry for you. I could tell you were lost and I gave you the benefit of the doubt. Never again.’

  ‘I did only come here to paint you. I wanted you to be good. I never expected to find out—’

  ‘Find out what?’

  Pink stares at me from over Jim’s shoulder.

  ‘That you’re as bad as the rest of them. Worse, because you pretend to be a hero.’

  ‘I’ve never claimed to be anything special,’ he says. ‘It’s everyone else that decided I was someone they should look up to.’

  He’s less angry now. Could I call for help? Not without a battery.

  He nods. ‘Go ahead, Georgia, call whoever you like – the cops, the media. Use my landline, be my guest. But what will you tell them? You came here, remember. You badgered me for this last sitting. And, seriously, if you want me to unlock the gates, I will. But first, let me explain what happens after you leave here.’

  He’s going to let me go.

  ‘You are never to come back. The commission is off, and you’ll leave the canvas with me. Don’t worry, I’ll burn it, so your artistic reputation won’t be harmed. What’s left of it, that is. All right?’

  I nod.

  ‘And you forget me and Daniel and Robert fucking O’Neill. For your own sake as much as mine. Stop hijacking other people’s pain, and deal with whatever makes you so bloody damaged.’

  I stare at him.

  ‘All right. I’ll go.’

  But already I’m thinking of how I can take what he’s said and use it to fuel the next online search for evidence, to track down the people who know what he’s hiding.

  He comes closer, his face a blur, his breath acidic with white wine.

  ‘Don’t think I won’t know if you keep asking questions,’ he whispers. ‘I’ve stayed on top this long by knowing what people are going to do before they do it. And if you don’t stay out of my life, I will ruin yours.

  ‘I’ll tell people that you harassed poor, damaged Charlie and visited the spot where my wife killed herself. That you spied on me. And for what? To get a story that doesn’t exist. To build your career.’

  I say nothing.

  But I don’t even have a career. I only have this.

  ‘One last thing you should know: I don’t hurt women. Never have, whatever you think. But if violence is what it will take to protect the people I love, that’s what I’ll use. Do you believe me, Georgia?’

  My body feels limp. Behind Jim, Pink has turned her back on me and is walking away. I thought I was brave – that being hurt was something I could endure. But the fear I feel now shows I was lying to myself. I was a coward before, and I haven’t changed.

  ‘I believe you.’ I breathe. ‘Open the gate and let me go.’

  ‘You agree?’

  I nod.

  He turns and goes into the house without speaking. I feel a metallic whirr behind me. The bolts retract. The gate opens.

  I lean down to grab my bag and wait until the gap is just wide enough for me to squeeze through. Once I am on the other side, I don’t look back.

  *

  I run to the town square. Only when I see people again do I slow down, though God knows, I shouldn’t be reassured by that. No one in this town has ever borne witness to what Jim Fielding did.

  My breath returns and finally my heart stops thumping, as sweat runs down my back. He’s not coming after me. Why would he? I have nothing on him except one old photo, a few unsubstantiated rumours – and my hallucinations.

  But I don’t feel relieved that I got away. Because I’ve failed.

  I sit on a stone seat underneath the greying war memorial, the only place with any shade. My hands tremble with energy as a taxi pulls up next to me. I could get in that cab, tell it to take me home to Brighton, sod the cost, but how do I know the driver wouldn’t report straight back to Jim with my address.

  He probably has it already.

  The next bus leaves Ashdean in thirty minutes. It’s time to admit defeat.

  *

  It’s after midnight when I get home. I tried to sleep on the train, but Jim’s story and my own twisted through my thoughts like tree roots. We have guilt in common.

  He doesn’t know who I am, but he senses what I am. A coward who hid behind a door when I should have faced my father, whatever the consequences. And, yes, a vulture who picks over other people’s dirtiest secrets instead of facing her own.

  57

  I knew from the day of the murders that I’d failed my brother once. I didn’t know about the second time until my father’s trial.

  Every day I went into the public gallery, next to the rubberneckers who turned up, rain or shine, for their free entertainment. They knew who I was, even though I’d been hidden by a screen while I was a witness. Each morning, they shifted along to let me take the one seat where I wouldn’t be able to see my father, and he wouldn’t see me.

  I remember watching the pathologist swear on the Bible. He seemed too young and ordinary to spend his working life coaxing secrets from the dead.

  ‘And would you describe your impressions when you first attended the house?’ the prosecutor asked him.

  ‘I arrived at just after 7 p.m. on the Saturday, after receiving a call from the coroner. The scene had been cordoned off and a forensics team was already in attendance. The layout of the house itself was standard. I grew up in a similar private estate myself.’

  The pathologist knew I was in court. He glanced up at me in the gallery, as though he was asking permission to carry on. I nodded.

  We’d both seen the same things, but with different eyes. The family bathroom, the first room the pathologist was shown to, had blood spatters across the bath and tiles, ‘consistent with venous flow’.

  That was the first room I entered too: the place where my father had attempted to take his life. To this day, it’s the only thing he’s done that suggests he regretted his actions.

  The next room was my parents’ bedroom, where the pathologist found my mother’s body on the bed, dressed in her slouchy weekend jeans, her ‘I Heart Falmouth’ T-shirt and her cooking apron.

  ‘There was no obvious sign of injury. I noted however that her partially opened eyes had petechial haemorrhages – usually a sign of asphyxiation by suffocation.’

  The next room was mine – empty by then, of course. The pathologist noted ‘a large fresh solvent stain to the carpet, which I noted but later disregarded as irrelevant to this case.’

  The first secret I kept: the argument over that spill was what set everything in motion.

  Pip’s room in the loft was the last one the pathologist came to, the smallest in the house.

  ‘The scene here was rather different, due to the resuscitation efforts made by members of the ambulance service.’

  ‘Can you describe what you saw there?’ the judge asked.

  ‘In the centre of the room, on the stripped pine floor
, there was a male child I estimated to be around eight years old. He was deceased. His T-shirt had been cut open to facilitate access for chest compressions and other interventions. But the child had sustained some injuries prior to medical attention. There was blood pooling on the floor surrounding his head – see photograph A372 in the jury bundle, and further stains on the duvet cover, item A388. I didn’t form an immediate opinion about how these might have been caused, but certainly, there had been trauma.’

  Trauma.

  There had been some comfort in knowing my mother’s death had not been brutally violent, and that she was already gone by the time Dad pushed the key under my door.

  But now I sat rigid on the fold-down seat, my fingernails biting into my palms, as the pathologist described my little brother’s final minutes on this earth.

  ‘When the paramedics arrived, they did detect a faint pulse. However, the child went into cardiac arrest and though there were extensive efforts to restore spontaneous circulation’ – the pathologist looked at the jury members – ‘that is, to make the heart beat again, alas these failed.’

  As the pathologist went on to describe the post-mortems, I heard nothing more. Instead his words repeated in my head.

  A faint pulse.

  It meant that while I was staring at the key on the floor, wondering whether to disobey my father, and imagining I could hear men arguing outside, my brother was clinging on to life in the room above mine.

  Second by second, beat by beat, Pip was bleeding out. His heart was trying to pump oxygen to dying cells, but instead making him weaker and weaker until . . .

  I couldn’t hear any more. I thought I might be sick. I rose, the seat of the chair slapping up, making everyone look towards the gallery. As I turned to close the door, I glanced down and saw my father for the last time.

  He saw me – I know he did – but he didn’t even acknowledge me.

  In the street, Marion held back my hair as I vomited bile into the gutter – I hadn’t eaten for days. As we drove back to the farm, I decided that as soon as I was old enough, Suzanne would be gone. No one would know who I’d been before, what I’d done. What I hadn’t done.

  After the trial, I began to recreate myself, layer by layer. The executors of my mother’s will did the same to my old house: it was steam-cleaned and redecorated, ready for a buyer who could overcome squeamishness in return for a bargain family home. The money raised was carefully invested by trustees and it’s what enabled me to become new: it paid for me to go to art school, to find myself. It paid for most of this flat.

  But deep inside Georgia, there’s always been Suzanne.

  I’ll email the publisher tomorrow, finally admit that I can’t finish the portrait after all. I expect he’ll be relieved. He’ll find Maureen another celebrity case to paint. She will be the star of his book. His cover girl.

  And Jim will get away with everything: whatever he did to the girls, to his wives, to Robert. The photos and cuttings are on the floor, from the work I did before my trip, but they’re not evidence. They just led me into a place of even deeper darkness.

  Wine isn’t enough. I pour a huge slug of gin into a glass. No tonic. I’ll have to find a more permanent way to forget about the Fieldings, and what they did to each other, but for now, this will help.

  Except the worst thing Jim showed me has nothing to do with the Fieldings. All these years, I thought I could see evil, make justice happen, make the bad people pay.

  When really there was one guilty person who would never be brought to justice.

  Me.

  58

  I don’t wake until after nine, and the residual taste of gin is cloying. The temperature is already in the high twenties. I push the sash windows open with a screech, letting even hotter air into my living room. What now?

  I pick the Ashdean papers off the floor and cram them into a box file. Then I fetch my rucksack and tip everything into the same box: the sketches, the crumpled sheet of mind mapping, the lot. I close the box, put it in the armoire, slam the door shut and lock up.

  Done with.

  Just like my career.

  I’m wired, restlessness coursing through me. What am I meant to do now? Today, tomorrow, for the rest of my life? The Ashdean stuff helped me to put off facing what my disease means. But now I can’t do that any longer.

  *

  I go to the beach. The tide is out, so I turn right and walk along the sandy stretch where the water meets the shore. It doesn’t matter if I can’t see properly here. With the sea on my left, at least I won’t get lost.

  I walk faster than I have dared to since my diagnosis, not caring if I trip and fall. The waves splash against my bare legs, the cool water welcome when everything else is relentlessly hot.

  People glance at me suspiciously as I pass. It’s not normal to rush in this weather.

  ‘Where’s the fire, love?’ a man calls out as I stride between him and his son, playing football together.

  I only begin to feel tired when I reach the cranes and warehouses of Shoreham Harbour. I once covered a murder trial that revolved around these vast docks: an everyday love triangle only made interesting by the fact the victim died a slow death in a storage container that was meant to go to sea but was held in port by a strike in another continent.

  The killer claimed the victim had done it to commit suicide: locked himself in, so he couldn’t change his mind. The jury didn’t believe him, of course: suicide should be fast, allowing no time for regrets. It’s only murderers – and particularly vengeful ones at that – who want to prolong the suffering.

  I think of Sharon, on that bridge. Did she change her mind after she jumped? If she jumped at all.

  Don’t.

  It won’t help.

  I’ve run out of beach, so I turn to go back the way I came.

  How did Sharon feel as she fell? I wouldn’t do it that way. Drowning is better.

  My feet look shrunken and bloodless under the shallow water. This part of the beach is empty. I could lie down now and let the sea first cool, then take me. No one would miss me.

  Right now, I can’t think of one good reason why I shouldn’t. No more questions or memories. No more guilt. It’s so tempting . . .

  But then I realise: there is one thing I must do first.

  *

  At home, I gulp down a pint of water, and unlock the armoire again. There’s a folder right at the back that has nothing to do with my cases, and everything to do with my past.

  I take out this year’s birthday card and reread Marion’s carefully measured note. I could pick up the telephone right now; I know her voice would make me feel everything can still turn out OK.

  But I turned my back on them. It’s not fair to burden them now.

  I open my laptop, the font on the screen now set to a larger size. I copy the email address of my father’s prison worker into a document, then lock the birthday card away again.

  Among all Jim’s lies, he told one truth: it’s time for me to stop hijacking other people’s pain. Facing up to my own isn’t something I relish, but once I’ve done it, I will have fulfilled the last duty anyone could expect of Suzanne Ross.

  And as for Georgia Sage . . . She died the day she lost her vision.

  I get the gin ready. When I’ve finished this, I intend to drink myself to sleep for a second night running.

  Dear Ms Penney, I type. I believe you’ve been trying to contact me on behalf of my father . . .

  59

  I am being shaken awake, not violently, but firmly.

  In the last tumbling moments, I feel hands on my arm. And then I am awake.

  ‘What? Who are you?’

  The touch is gone though I am sure I still sense warm breath on my cheek. I remember: I’m in my own bed, in Brighton. Alone. I dragged myself in here at 2 a.m. after passing out on the couch.

  The room is so hot.

  Fire?

  No, I can’t smell burning. But something does feel ver
y wrong.

  Now I see her.

  ‘Pink.’

  She has her back to me, tiptoeing towards the door. She holds her finger up to her lips.

  It was her that woke me, I’m suddenly sure of it. But how could she have? She is always silent. She doesn’t exist outside my head. She can’t have touched me because she isn’t here.

  I look for my phone. I’m sure I left it on my bedside table, the battery taped on after the clip broke when Jim threw it at the floor. My eyes adjust to the darkness enough for me to notice something else.

  My front door is ajar.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  Pink’s eyes widen; glitter sparkles on her cheeks. She slips through the door into the hallway and I follow.

  I turned the lights off last night but a sickly green tinge leaks into my flat from the FIRE EXIT sign in the communal stairwell.

  My instinct is to shut the door.

  But what if I shut an intruder inside with me?

  Pink is tiptoeing past the kitchen – I glance inside but can see nothing out of place. I follow her. The door to the living room is closed. I never do that: the last time I closed it was when I brought the teacher back.

  A lifetime ago.

  Goosebumps cover my skin, despite the heat. Is there someone on the other side of that door?

  ‘I’m calling the police,’ I shout.

  I can hear something. Someone. Rustling, and then footsteps on the parquet.

  I look around for something to defend myself with. A knife? But fear has paralysed me.

  Pink leans her head against the door. She turns and nods at me.

  ‘Is it safe?’

  She nods again.

  As I creep forward, I wonder whether I should trust a hallucination. And when my hand tightens around the Victorian door handle, I flinch at the memory of another door I hesitated before opening. Another choice I had to make.

  That time, I got it wrong.

  I fling the door open. There is nowhere to hide in here, no furniture big enough to conceal a person.

  I run to the windows. They’ve been pushed open as far as they’ll go. Did I leave them like that? I can’t remember.