The Secrets

by Jane Adams

  Maria smiled. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘We know all about the car.’

  Mike closed his eyes. ‘How long have I been here?’

  ‘Since last night. It’s almost midday.’

  He absorbed that slowly. Last night. The car, hitting him. That flash of pain, then nothing.

  ‘Concussion?’ he asked.

  Eyes still closed, he felt Maria nod. ‘That and three broken ribs — they’ll be the next to start hurting — a broken wrist and leg — simple fracture, five inches below the knee — and bruises like you wouldn’t believe.’ She sounded cheerful about it. He opened his eyes and regarded her suspiciously. Saw she was smiling at him, her eyes glinting with mischief.

  ‘You’re enjoying this,’ he accused.

  She shook her head and laughed. Leaned closer and kissed him full on the mouth.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m just so bloody relieved. When your Sergeant Price called last night I didn’t know what to expect. Anything’s better than the things my mind made happen on the way down here.’

  He grinned weakly. ‘Glad you’re here,’ he whispered, realizing with a shock just how glad he really was. Then, ‘Marry me?’

  ‘No.’ She bent forward and kissed him again. It was amazing, Mike thought, just how much of the headache a kiss could take away. ‘Maybe later,’ she said. ‘Now, go back to sleep.’

  Mike had his eyes closed again and barely even heard her words.

  The next time he awoke it was to the sound of voices. Children, adults’ voices that he didn’t recognize. He opened his eyes slowly.

  Visitors. The man in the bed opposite seemed to have his entire family in to see him.

  Mike watched them, an older woman sitting herself down at the bedside, a younger woman trying to keep control of a toddler and a slightly older child, on their hands and knees and chasing each other around under the high bed. A teenage boy, looking awkward and out of place, staring around the ward, clearly at a loss as to what to do or say.

  Slowly, it registered that there were other voices, ones he did recognize, approaching down the length of the ward. Sergeant Price and Superintendent Jaques appeared around the partition that divided the ward into bays, filling the small area with their presence and their noise.

  As if these new visitors had brought the awareness with them, Mike suddenly realized that his ribs were hurting him, that his wrist ached and his entire body felt sore and tender. Worse than all of that, his bladder was very full and shrieking urgently for relief. It didn’t look as if he was going to get it in any hurry.

  Jaques, looking solemn and official, seated himself beside the bed. Price leaned against the partition.

  ‘How are you feeling now?’ Jaques asked him. ‘I was here before, but you were well out of it.’ He shook his head. ‘Well out of it,’ he repeated. He paused and regarded Mike with an interested, appraising air.

  ‘You’re looking better,’ he said. ‘Damned lucky, of course. They tell me you were hit at an oblique angle.’ He gestured with his hands, angling one against the other as though to demonstrate. ‘Lucky,’ he repeated. ‘That bloody car had hit you straight on’ — he paused again to demonstrate, this time driving the fist of one hand into the palm of the other — ‘well, we’d have been visiting the morgue, not the hospital.’

  Mike glanced across at Price. The sergeant was grinning at him. ‘We found the car,’ he said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Abandoned in the middle of Norwich about an hour later. Been reported stolen about six o’clock. Joy riders, we reckon, with too much booze inside them.’

  Mike nodded. ‘Any ID?’ he asked.

  ‘Not a thing, yet,’ Jaques told him. ‘It’s being dusted for prints but it might be a while before we get a match. If we get a match.’

  Mike sighed. He tried hard to get his thoughts into some kind of order. ‘The well?’ he asked. ‘Did they find anything in the well?’

  ‘As yet, bugger all that’s any use to us,’ Jaques told him. ‘Remains of a dead cat and an old shoe. An adult’s shoe, about size eight, they reckon,’ he added at Mike’s half-hopeful look.

  ‘I see.’ Mike said, deflated. He’d been certain they were on to something.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jaques went on, ‘that’s not your concern now. You’ll be on the sick for a good few weeks with those ribs.’

  He got to his feet, official visit clearly over.

  ‘Don’t worry about a thing, Mike,’ he said. ‘We’ll get the buggers. You just get yourself fixed up.’ He nodded, as though to affirm his words, and straightened his jacket, making himself ready to leave.

  He nodded briefly to Price, then left with the most perfunctory of goodbyes. Price pushed himself off from the partition, preparing to follow.

  ‘Beautiful bedside manner,’ he commented.

  Mike did his best to laugh.

  ‘You take care of yourself,’ Price told him. ‘I’ll be in later’. He smiled briefly and departed.

  Maria took Price’s place beside the partition.

  ‘Thought I’d keep out of the official way,’ she said. Then, a slightly anxious look crossing her face, ‘Are you all right? Want some painkillers or something?’

  Mike nodded. ‘That would be good,’ he said. ‘And a nurse with one of those bottle things or a bedpan would be even better.’

  * * *

  ‘He’s looking a great deal better,’ Maria told John, the satisfaction evident in her voice.

  John smiled into the receiver. When she had called him the night before, with some vague story about Mike being badly hurt, John had been devastated.

  ‘I’m so glad, my dear. I’m taking Andrews along to see him. It is open visiting on that ward, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, John, till ten, I believe, but don’t make it too late, he’s still pretty groggy.’

  ‘Don’t worry, my dear, we won’t keep him up. You’re driving back to Oaklands tonight?’

  ‘Yes, Chandra’s taking care of my patient list today, but I’ve a full diary for tomorrow and I’ve got to arrange for everything to be re-scheduled when they let him out.’

  ‘You’ll bring him here, of course. His room’s all ready.’

  ‘Thanks, John.’ He could hear the relief in her voice. ‘That would be a great help. And I’ve a few days’ holiday still due to me . . .’

  ‘Then I’ll expect you as well,’ he said, his mind busy already with planning meals and wondering who had a camp bed he could borrow.

  ‘Do we know when they’ll let him out?’

  ‘Hmm, they’ll keep him over the weekend, I should think. It was bad concussion. On the other hand, they need the bed and I’m well qualified to look after him. I’d make a guess at Monday.’

  ‘Monday,’ John repeated. ‘Right, I’ll sort everything out. Don’t you worry about anything.’

  He said goodbye to Maria shortly after that and stood beside the telephone a few minutes more, thinking.

  Tom Andrews had described the entire incident to him when he’d seen him earlier. The car, Andrews had said, had come out of nowhere. Mike had stepped back to get out of the way, but the Sierra had seemed to follow him up on to the verge before pulling back across the road and powering away.

  ‘They meant to get him, John. I’m convinced of that,’ Andrews had told him. ‘Even if the police are listing it as a simple non-stop RTA.’

  John had thought long and hard about Andrews’ assertion. The man could be mistaken, of course. His view from the mullioned pub window would have been narrow and awkward. Maybe he thought he had seen things happen in a certain way, when in fact the car might have swerved across the road, skidded, maybe, rather than been driven at its victim.

  But John couldn’t convince himself. Andrews had spent a lifetime observing, gathering facts and assimilating them into sense-making patterns.

  But if he wasn’t mistaken?

  Was this ‘accident’ in some way connected with what Mike had been working on?

  Andrews
had asked the same question. Neither he nor John had come up with an answer.

  * * *

  It was, despite John’s promises to Maria, very late by the time he made it to the hospital, and when he did it was without Andrews.

  There was no mistaking, though, that late as it was Mike was glad to see him, feeling better enough to be bored, having slept enough to be sleepless and in bed long enough to be sick of it.

  ‘I thought Tom Andrews was coming with you,’ he asked when their greetings were over.

  ‘He was,’ John confirmed. ‘I got a call from him about an hour ago. Seems someone broke into his office at the Chronicle, set fire to the place.’

  ‘What! They’re certain it’s arson?’

  ‘Sure as they can be yet. I don’t know any more than that. Tom was on his way to me when he found out. They got hold of him on his mobile and he was heading back to the office when he phoned me.’

  Mike was silent for a moment. ‘So you don’t know if anything was stolen?’

  John shook his head.

  At the other end of the ward the staff nurse was dimming the lights, gently hustling the late visitors out.

  ‘Looks like I’m going to have to leave you,’ he said. ‘Sorry Mike, I should have come earlier, but first Tom was delayed, and then that happened.’

  The staff nurse had reached the end of Mike’s bed now. She stood, checking his records and politely waiting for John to take his leave.

  ‘It is very late,’ she said gently.

  John nodded and got to his feet. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ he promised. ‘And I’ll bring Tom in with me.’

  "Bye, John,’ Mike said. He watched his friend walk down the ward, his mind already clouded with thoughts.

  What was going on?

  He sank back into the pillows and tried to get to sleep. Trying to avoid the blue Sierra that kept speeding through his dreams.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Saturday morning

  ‘You’ve made the papers.’ The staff nurse told him. ‘Here, let me help you back into bed and I’ll leave the paper on the locker for you.’

  Mike was grateful for the help. They’d allowed him to get up and go to the toilet, even have a wash, provided he didn’t lock the door, but the whole process had exhausted him more than he thought possible. He allowed the nurse to ease him between the sheets and rearrange his pillows for him, then lay back against them, trying to convince himself that he was doing well really. That there would be a time, not so far off, when he wouldn’t have a head that kept opening and closing like a repeatedly slamming door and ribs that wouldn’t clamp up on him, like sharp claws digging deep into his side, at the slightest overstretch.

  Still, he thought, look on the bright side. They’d said he could probably manage a bath later. Mike found himself looking forward to the possibility with almost childlike anticipation.

  With difficulty he reached out for the paper that the nurse had left on his locker.

  He grimaced, not certain he welcomed this fifteen minutes of fame.

  The report itself was an eyewitness account of events outside the Fox Inn, written by Tom Andrews himself and describing in vivid detail the shock and horror as he and others watched the car slew across the road and hit Detective Inspector Croft. Of their feelings of outrage when they realized that the driver didn’t even plan to stop.

  What, Andrews questioned, would have happened if the incident had occurred at a more remote location? If help had not arrived on the scene when it did?

  ‘You’re quite famous,’ the staff nurse told him, coming back with his painkillers. ‘We’ve had no end of calls, people wanting to know how you are and the like.’ She smiled brightly at him, then left him once more, bustling off to attend to the man in the opposite bed.

  Mike looked ruefully back at the paper. He couldn’t blame Andrews for the report, of course. An eyewitness account of an accident involving a policeman in a hit and run was far too good to miss out on. All the same, he felt, he really could have done without it.

  The article finished with a resume of Mike’s career, mentioning especially the child murder case he had been involved with the year before. Mike found himself described as an ‘imaginative and conscientious officer, of which the force could be proud’.

  He folded the paper up, article to the inside, embarrassed by the fuss, and glanced around, feeling both awkward and amused, wondering who else had seen it.

  Mike’s thoughts were broken by a woman’s voice speaking his name.

  ‘Mr Croft?’

  He looked up. ‘Mrs Masouk?’ Ellie was the last person he would have expected to see.

  ‘Um, I, I mean, I hope you don’t mind me coming, Mr Croft. Inspector.’

  ‘Mike,’ he said.

  She smiled, shyly. ‘Can I sit down?’

  ‘Oh, please.’ She wasn’t alone, he noted. A woman stood behind her, regarding Mike with a kind of anxious curiosity. He smiled encouragingly at her, watching as she drew up a chair and sat down, a little apart from Ellie, as though to give her privacy but still to make her presence felt.

  Ellie had seen him looking. ‘This is Fatima,’ she said. ‘Rezah’s sister.’

  Mike nodded remembering having seen her on Portland Close.

  ‘It’s ante-natal day,’ Ellie was explaining. ‘’Tima comes with me, or Rezah’s mother. I don’t like coming on my own.’ She paused, obviously uncertain, now she was here, that she’d done the right thing.

  ‘I saw, in the paper; about your accident. I thought, well, I thought. . . How are you feeling?’

  She bit her lip and looked anxiously into his face.

  ‘Feeling well enough to be bored,’ he assured her. ‘And it’s very kind of you to come, Mrs Masouk.’

  She smiled then. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘please call me Ellie. Everybody does.’

  Fatima moved restlessly. ‘Your appointment’s in half an hour, Ellie,’ she said.

  Ellie nodded. Then turned back to Mike.

  She looked pale, Mike thought, and there were dark shadows under her eyes as though she’d not been sleeping. She bit her lip. Then, folding her hands together in front of her, like a child about to recite from memory, she began.

  ‘I was only eight years old when it started,’ she said, ‘when my mum went out and I was left on my own with my dad.’ She had lowered her head, but now she glanced up at Mike as though assessing his reaction. Mike tilted his head slightly, keeping his expression neutral, professionally concerned.

  ‘He used to come into my room,’ she said. ‘First of all it was just games, he’d tickle me, just play games just like all my friend’s dads did with them. Then it started to be different.’ She hesitated, clasped her hands more closely, the knuckles white with the pressure. ‘Then he started touching me. Kissing me like I’d seen him kiss my mum. Making me touch him. He’d tell me that he loved me, that I was special to him, and,’ she glanced up swiftly once again, her eyes pleading, ‘he was my dad, Mr Croft, I wanted to be special to him, but . . .’ She looked away again. ‘I didn’t like the rest of it. He scared me and he hurt me and it got so I’d do anything not to be on my own with him. I’d kick up a right fuss when my mum went out to work in the evenings and my dad would tell her that I was spoilt. But I just got so scared, being on my own with him, knowing what he’d make me do and what he’d do to me.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell your mum?’ Mike asked gently.

  Ellie lifted her head and he saw that her eyes were wet.

  ‘I did,’ she said softly, ‘and my dad went mad. Telling my mum that I was just attention seeking, just trying to make trouble. And he kept demanding, in front of my mum, to know who’d told me about things like that. About sex. About all the things he’d made me do. Shouting at me, saying that he wanted to know how I knew about them. And my mum believed him.’ She shook her head sadly, then said, ‘She loved him, you see. They’d been happy before I came along. I don’t think they ever really wanted kids. I came between them
.’

  ‘That’s no excuse for what he did,’ Mike said. ‘How long did this go on for, Ellie?’

  She looked at him properly this time.

  ‘I was fifteen,’ she said. ‘He’d kept on doing it to me all that time, started having proper sex with me from when I was about eleven and I’d given up on trying to tell anyone.’ She hesitated for a moment, as though unable to explain why she hadn’t tried to get help.

  ‘I was scared of him,’ she said softly. ‘Scared of what he might do. He’d threaten things and then do some of them. He broke my arm once because I said I was going to talk to my teacher about him. Broke my arm and then took me to the hospital, said I’d fallen off the swing in the park. Acted so concerned I knew they’d never believe anything I said against him, and he said he’d do worse.’ She looked away from him once more. ‘I believed him,’ she said simply, ‘and in the end I couldn’t fight him any more.’

  Mike was silent for a moment. He glanced across at Fatima but the young woman was impassive, her expression impossible to read. ‘And when you were fifteen?’ Mike asked quietly.

  ‘I got a boyfriend,’ Ellie said, ‘and my dad caught us kissing. He went mad. Dragged me off home and up to my room. Started hitting me and yelling at me, then he told me to get undressed. I told him no. It was the first time I’d said no.’ She paused again, her voice now awed and softened. ‘I thought he’d kill me,’ she whispered, ‘he was just so angry. He started tearing at my clothes, saying that if I liked it so much then he’d give me more. He was shouting so loud he didn’t hear my mum come home from work. When she got upstairs he’d got me pinned to the bed with my clothes half off. She saw it all.’

  ‘What did she do, Ellie?’

  Ellie shook her head. ‘Sent me to stay with my aunt. Then she came after me and we both stayed there for a few days then found this grotty little flat.’

  ‘She didn’t go to the police?’

  Ellie laughed bitterly. ‘She loved him. She didn’t believe it was his fault. Said it was mine. That I’d strung him along.’

  She shook her head, the tears standing in her eyes again. ‘She even went back to him for a while and I stayed with friends, relatives, anyone who would have me.’