The Secrets You Hide

by Kate Helm

  ‘I’ve been awake already?’ My voice is hoarse, my throat dry as paper.

  ‘Three times now. But you haven’t noticed me before. You remember who I am, though, right?’

  ‘Of course.’

  But still the then is sharper than the now. What I saw.

  What I did.

  He nods. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Tell you what?’

  There have been so many lies and secrets.

  ‘About coming to see Daniel. And the . . . stuff in the forest.’

  The light beyond the ward window is dawn-coloured, the palest rose madder behind the grimy pane. I try to do the calculation in my head. Is it the day after? Twelve, sixteen hours since Little Pike?

  Since I killed a man.

  I see him again: Robert, the ghost. His eyes as he realised what was happening. His slowing motions. The stillness.

  He didn’t deserve that.

  And now I remember exactly what he did: to Rosanna, and Sharon, and maybe to other women since.

  No. He deserved worse.

  ‘Am I under arrest?’ I ask.

  I can’t make out Oli’s expression, but I know he will find a way to break it gently.

  ‘They do want to question you. They . . . found the knife.’

  It’ll be the word of a dead man against mine. I try to work out which of the things he admitted to me might be verifiable somehow.

  ‘And the bloke, too. But he’s in ICU so I’m guessing you’ll get to tell your story first. I can be with you, if you want. Apart from anything else, I really want to know what the hell has been going on. And who he is.’

  ‘He’s alive?’

  ‘He’s had surgery but they don’t know if he’ll wake up.’

  ‘It’s Robert,’ I say. ‘Robert O’Neill. Charlie’s father.’

  Now he leans forward. ‘What?’

  ‘I was meant to be meeting this girl – Rosanna. From Copse View. But she’s dead, Oli, Robert told me he killed her. But the police won’t believe me unless I can find evidence and I can’t—’

  ‘Shhh.’ Oli reaches out, grasps my hand. ‘Don’t get upset. Whatever’s happened, we’ll sort it. I know you’d never hurt anyone unless you had no choice. You’re safe, now.’

  He smiles, and I try to smile back.

  ‘Daniel. He found me, right?’

  Oli nods. ‘Yes. He’s back under arrest.’

  Oh God. ‘He didn’t . . . Is Jim all right?’

  ‘As far as I know. Shouldn’t he be?’

  I open my mouth to explain, but I don’t know where to start. Yet I want Oli to know before I talk to the police.

  ‘Georgia, don’t worry. I won’t let them talk to you until you’re in a fit state.’

  ‘As my lawyer?’

  ‘As your friend. Your very cross friend. You were lucky. Your ankle is knackered, you’ve got two rows of stitches in your head, but you’ll mend.’

  ‘Will you be struck off or something, if I tell you? Before the police?’

  ‘No. You’re not a suspect.’ He pulls the curtains around the bed, even though the rest of the bay is empty. The sound of the rings against the metal rail reminds me of court. Of me on one side of the fabric, my dad on the other. ‘You tell me whatever you want to.’

  ‘There are so many things,’ I say. ‘But this part begins at Copse View.’

  77

  After lunch, the police come to talk to me. An older man and a younger woman, like this is a TV crime drama.

  They set up a video camera to record what I say. Their faces are indistinct, but I try to read their body language as they get organised, to work out if I am a suspect or a victim, or both.

  Even as the male detective states the date, time and place, I can’t tell. But Oli sits next to the bed, ready to step in if they push me too far.

  ‘Miss Sage, can you tell us why you went to Little Pike?’

  ‘I went there to meet a girl,’ I begin. ‘A woman. But it was about what happened when she was a girl. I thought I knew something. As it turned out, I knew nothing at all.’

  ‘Who was the woman?’

  ‘Rosanna Chapman. But she wasn’t there. Instead, it was a man who was supposed to be dead.’

  As I speak, it feels as though those few hours happened to someone else: crossing the deserted playground; falling into the hollow . . .

  Fighting for my life.

  ‘Do you know the man’s name?’ the woman asks.

  ‘I believe he is Robert O’Neill.’

  She writes it down.

  ‘How do you know this Robert O’Neill?’

  ‘I don’t.’ Nobody does, I realise. Not really. He’s as illusory as my hallucinations. ‘But I knew of him. He’s the father of the children Jim Fielding rescued from the fire in Ashdean. O’Neill was gone by then. I don’t know what he’s done since. But I think I do know what he did before.’

  ‘Can we return to what happened in the forest yesterday?’ the woman says.

  But the older officer holds up his hand.

  ‘Go on. Tell it your way.’

  So I do, trying to stick to verifiable facts: Robert working at Copse View, meeting Jim; the photos; the incomplete police notes about being called to the home; the lack of action.

  I can’t see the police officers’ faces all that well, but I notice their body language change as they realise this is even bigger than the attempted murder they thought they were investigating.

  ‘Did you find a bag? My bag, in the scowle, where you found Robert?’

  The male detective nods.

  ‘The photos are in there. I believe Rosanna Chapman – the only one I could identify – is dead. That Robert killed her, when they were both teenagers. Buried her in those same woods. But there will be other girls who knew what happened there. Who might talk if they think you’re taking it seriously this time.’

  ‘Tell us how you got your injuries,’ the woman says.

  As I describe what happened, I experience the pain again, and the hopelessness, the certainty that it would all end there, in the woods.

  And then I tell them about the moment I decided I wanted to live. About the knife going in and coming out, and the struggle to climb for my life.

  I don’t tell them about Pip guiding me towards the road, or that, when I was finally faced with death, I understood it wasn’t what I wanted.

  Whatever they might charge me with, no one can take that clarity away.

  I am more than a survivor. I want to live.

  *

  On the second day, while I’m still in hospital, Robert wakes up. He claims not to know who he is, or what happened.

  But the police are starting to fill in the gaps.

  The female detective comes to see me on the morning of day three, to tell me what they know.

  Robert has had half a dozen identities since Jim left him bleeding in the forest all those years ago. He’s charmed himself into the homes of a series of women, leaving them with bones and spirits broken and bank accounts empty. None of them reported him to the police. It seems the women were simply relieved he had tired of torturing them.

  ‘We’ve spoken to a few of them now, following the trail of his previous addresses. They all say the same – to start with, they thought he was too ordinary to be a threat. They thought they were the ones in control.’

  ‘Do you think the women you haven’t found yet are . . .?’ I try to find the right words. ‘All right?’

  She says nothing. ‘We’re on it.’

  ‘And Rosanna?’

  ‘So far, we’ve found nothing on Rosanna since July 1979. It seems the staff at the home assumed she’d run away – she’d done that before – and as she was a few months from her sixteenth birthday, no one looked very hard.’

  I half-expect to see Pink when I look up, but instead there’s only me and the officer, and, across the ward, an elderly lady who came in yesterday after breaking her hip.

  ‘He suggeste
d he’d buried her at Little Pike.’

  The officer nods. ‘We are looking for disturbed ground.’

  I nod and wish I hadn’t. Everything is hurting now they’ve reduced my pain medication.

  ‘He’s a liar, isn’t he? But I think he was telling the truth then. It felt like he was boasting.’

  She sighs. ‘It’s a bit like untangling string. When we think we’ve found the end of one story, we realise it’s the start of someone else’s.’

  I know how that feels.

  *

  Oli comes back to Gloucestershire to drive me home.

  ‘You look bloody awful,’ he says.

  ‘One of the benefits of being half-blind is at least I can’t see that.’

  I need him to laugh. I can’t bear pity.

  He manages a half-hearted chuckle.

  ‘It explains a lot about why you shacked up with me.’

  Weak jokes and mild insults will get us through.

  He leads me out into the unexpected heat of the May afternoon, towards his new Dad-equipped 4x4, and moves the seat back so there’s room for the cast on my ankle.

  I turn to grasp the seatbelt. Charlie sits in the back. His presence startles me for a moment – I haven’t seen him since I woke up wounded in the forest with him at my side – then makes me smile.

  I’ve missed you.

  ‘Some supplies for the journey.’ Oli passes me a striped carrier bag. Inside, there’s chocolate, nuts, Coke, a small bottle of brandy. He nods at the latter. ‘For emergencies.’

  As he starts the engine, I open the Coke and take a tentative swig, in case the bubbles hurt my gum around the tooth they had to remove. Oli sets the satnav, and the screen shows we have over three hours of driving ahead.

  ‘OK, Georgie. You can sleep, or talk, or I can put the radio on—’

  ‘Talk,’ I say. ‘I want to talk. To explain.’

  ‘You already told me what happened in the forest.’

  ‘Not about that. About me.’

  As we travel out towards the motorway, I try to decide where to begin. I know telling the truth is the only way, but I’m scared he might hate me for it. For all the lies I’ve told.

  ‘You have to know that I’ve deceived everyone, Oli. But I’ve felt worst about lying to you.’

  ‘Like I said. I understand why you met Daniel.’

  ‘The secrets . . . They’re bigger.’

  He sighs. ‘Maybe they only feel big because you don’t share them. It’s not like I haven’t always known there were things you hadn’t told me.’

  I close my eyes. When I open them again, I am ready.

  ‘Oli, my name isn’t Georgia Sage. My name is Suzanne Ross. My father murdered my mother and brother when I was eleven years old. I’ve been lying ever since. I don’t want to lie anymore. I want you to know who I really am.’

  I hear a sharp intake of breath. Then he reaches over and places his hand over mine.

  As we drive, I tell him about the girl I was, the invention I became. And finally, I’m ready to tell someone exactly what happened that day in September when I told my brother he couldn’t come in, when my father locked my door, gave me the key and told me not to use it.

  Oli keeps his hand on mine as the car coasts along the motorway. He lets me chip away at the layers of lies at my own pace, like stripping paint, without knowing if what is underneath has rotted away completely.

  When I come to the part about being spared that day, he says, ‘Oh, Georgie,’ and then shakes his head. ‘Or do you want me to call you Suzanne?’

  ‘No. Maybe now I’m more Georgia than Suzanne. Because what matters is the people who know me now. You. Neena.’

  My story is done. The air in the car feels sour from it.

  ‘I’d love to know about you, then, if you want to tell me,’ Oli says eventually. ‘Your brother. Your mother. There is more to your childhood than that one day, isn’t there?’

  And now he’s given me permission, it comes out. The good, as well as the bad: memories of Pip, and Mum. Thousands of journeys up and down our front path with school bags and lunchboxes and swimming gear. Games of Swingball, Marmite leaping up, always the third contestant in our furious games.

  The screech of Pip’s recorder. The smell of my mother’s chocolate cake. The ordinariness of our lives, our quarrels, our home.

  I remember a day the colour of this one: picking honeysuckle and freesias to fill a jam jar, taking the bouquet to my room, capturing its delicacy in watercolours. Back then, when I thought I’d go on to paint the big wide world. The memories feel as vivid as my hallucinations.

  I want to feel, smell, see that very small world again.

  Before I can work out who I want to be next.

  ‘Could we go somewhere else on the way home? I don’t think it’d be a huge detour. I know the postcode.’

  He glances at me. ‘Of course.’

  For the first time in twenty years, I say where I am from, and where I want to go.

  78

  There is one last layer to be stripped away.

  ‘You sure you don’t want me to try to come in with you?’ Neena asks. ‘My press card could go a long way in an open prison.’

  I shake my head. ‘No. I need my getaway driver to be ready to take me to the pub immediately afterwards.’

  She nods, though I’m guessing the journalist in her is dying to see what happens next. When I told her about my past, she was the opposite to Oli: asking endless questions, not even trying to conceal her fascination.

  ‘Aren’t you the dark horse?’ she’d said.

  If she was hurt by my lies, the drama of my revelations cancelled it out.

  I open the car door and twist to get my ankle and cast out first, then the crutches. Two days out of hospital, and I am still not used to it.

  I could have delayed the prison visit, I guess. But I wanted to finish this. Going to my old house with Oli was something I did on a whim, but it has made me see I cannot move on without understanding that final day.

  Twenty years in denial is too long.

  The place where my father is serving his sentence – where, I suppose, he will die – is the opposite of the Victorian jail that held Daniel. It’s low-rise, surrounded by a wall that’s more decorative than deterrent.

  The furniture and the security processes are still rigorous – they even X-ray my crutches, and run a metal detector over my cast – but buttermilk-coloured light pours in through modern windows.

  ‘Miss Sage?’

  I turn to see a small, powerful woman in a prison uniform.

  ‘I’m Heather Penney. Thank you for coming.’

  She looks me up and down when we shake hands but says nothing about my injuries.

  I think she’s younger than me – her features aren’t quite clear – but she holds herself in an old-fashioned way, as though she’s been trained to walk correctly by pacing with an encyclopaedia on her head.

  As she closes the door behind me, and I hobble into the main building, I notice that an ‘open’ prison still has plenty of locks.

  She escorts me to a bland room with a table and three chairs, helps me to sit down, my ankle stretched out. A fluted plastic jug of water and two cardboard cups are already laid out.

  ‘Is there anything you’d like to ask before I bring him in?’

  I glance at the door. Right now, I really want to leave. But my fear has kept me locked in for twenty years. Yet again, the key to getting out is in my hand. I’ve waited too long to use it.

  ‘Is he . . . well?’

  ‘He is relatively pain-free. One of the reasons he wanted the meeting sooner rather than later, was so that his appearance would not be too shocking.’

  She thinks he wants to spare me. I bet it’s all about his own pride.

  ‘Would you like me to stay? We’re confident there’s no risk to you, and I have permission to wait outside, with the door ajar if you want privacy, but it’s your choice.’

  ‘I’d
rather you were here.’

  How does she know I’m no risk to him?

  She goes to fetch him and the door closes itself behind her. My throat tightens and my head pounds. I’d give anything to see Charlie now, my little partner in crime. But he’s contrary, will only show up when he feels like it.

  The door handle shifts. I stare at it. I was kidding myself. I’m not ready. I will never be ready—

  Heather comes in first. She steps out of the way and there is my father.

  Still tall, though stooped.

  My father’s hair is titanium now, grandfatherly. I’m not ready to look at his face, so I focus on his clothes: proper trousers, not the baggy sweatpants everyone wore at Daniel’s prison; a pale-blue shirt over bony upper arms, with sharp lines pressed into the short sleeves.

  He’s hovering beside the table, waiting. I don’t think either of us know what for. Surely not an embrace.

  ‘Shall we sit down?’ Heather asks. I nod.

  She moves out the chair, and ushers my father into it with a soft touch to his elbow. When I look at his face, he’s staring straight ahead.

  That’s when I understand.

  He can’t see properly.

  He has Best disease too.

  Now I know that, I can study him: rail-thin, except his face which is chubby – from steroids, maybe? – so his once sharp features are undefined. Loose skin hoods the top halves of his eyes, but the blur of his pupils is the same grey-blue as my own.

  He looks up and I don’t look away. How much of me can he see?

  ‘Suzanne.’

  There is a longing in his voice. My throat tightens.

  ‘Don’t call me that.’

  ‘I’m sorry. You sound the same.’

  I don’t know how I am meant to respond to that.

  ‘I’m dying,’ he says.

  ‘Heather told me.’

  ‘I don’t expect you to feel sorry for me.’

  But I think he does. Again, I have nothing to say.

  ‘I got in touch because once I’m gone, you might regret not having the chance to ask me questions about it.’

  It.

  ‘You mean the day you killed your wife and your son? Our family?’

  He inhales sharply. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you hoping for a deathbed reconciliation?’