A Secret Life
Page 27
‘Look,’ he whispered, forcing her head round, and she felt his saliva speckle her cheek. The image was there, her hand splayed white against the railings, her wedding ring. Another man’s body thrust into hers, his flesh red in her mouth—
‘I’ve seen it,’ she said, finding her voice, out of nowhere. ‘I’ve seen it. You know how – you know—’
He didn’t let her finish. ‘I know what, exactly?’ he said. ‘That you go up to town on a night out, I give you my blessing, I give you money, I take care of our child—’ and he paused, so she would know what it had all been for and her insides went to liquid, Tabs in the car. ‘And you’re shagging a stranger? In the fucking street?’
He believed it: she could see in his eyes that he believed everything he was saying and for a second she wondered if she’d got it all wrong. No. Holly. He’d been having an affair with Holly, they were running away together. Holly had been the one had got out the bottle of brandy.
‘You’re mad,’ she said, the words escaping her before she could pull them back, but they were true. ‘You did it. You did it. You and Holly. She spiked my drink. I woke up the next morning and I – I—’
She couldn’t go on. The knowledge of what had been done to her was there at last, it was in every cell of her body. She felt heavy, like a doll stuffed with sand, she felt as if a tide was rising around her and she would drown.
‘Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy it,’ he said and then she felt it rush like fire through her, the rage, and she hung on to the feeling, she twisted, away from him and ran.
He was on her in a second, a hank of her hair still in his hand, and the back of her head struck the stone of the kitchen floor, hard, she felt her peripheral vision go and for a second – she didn’t know how long – she blacked out. When she opened her eyes he was on top of her, ripping at his trousers. She could hear a hiss, and shook her head to clear it, but the sound didn’t go away.
And then he stopped. His flies undone, his penis flaccid. Was that what this was all about? She remembered Dad’s worried face, when they’d talked about IVF, donor sperm, his eyes darting to Tim next time they saw each other.
‘I thought it was what I wanted,’ he said. He leaned back and his face was blank and dead as though this, the truth, this brief moment of calm and lucidity was strange and alien to him.
She felt herself hauled round, roughly: he was astride her on the floor looking down; he leaned low over her. A hand on either side of her neck but not around it, not yet. His fingers were in the hair behind her ears, stroking as if for a love scene. She felt her neck go stiff with the effort of looking up into his face, waiting.
‘When was the last time you gave me a blowjob?’ he said, nasty and in the silence that followed she knew what that hissing was, it was coming from the kitchen. The clanking she’d heard as she stood in the hall came back to her: the sound had been familiar and now she realised what it was. A smell, familiar and strange at the same time. She turned her head towards the kitchen and there was the shadow of something, in the corner of her eye something propped inside the kitchen door. Familiar and unfamiliar, in the wrong place, like the sound of a gas bottle being hauled over her kitchen floor, just like the smell of gas, in a kitchen that was all electric.
Flakes of red paint. He’d used the bottle to damage the car, it must have been heavy. He must have hit the car like he wanted to hit her.
Stay in the car, Tabs, stay, she heard in her head, if I die and he dies at least – there’s Dad but then—
‘Your mother’s not having her,’ she said. ‘Not your fucking mother,’ and he hit her so hard her head turned sideways on her neck and she saw what it was, standing inside the kitchen door.
The butt of a shotgun, and now she knew what that box had contained, the long locked box in the garage. And now it was out of the box and resting there, waiting for Tim to remember what he wanted to do next.
Before the first scream had left her mouth Georgie realised her mistake. Her terrible mistake. A tapping, a child’s insistent tapping, at the door.
A voice: a small voice. ‘Mummy, are you all right?’
And then Tim hit her, again, she could see his face, judicious, considering, glancing sideways at the gun then back at her. He reached for it.
Georgie could see it coming as if in slow motion and she didn’t feel the pain for a second, only blood in her mouth and in her eyes.
If she even gets in. If she even sees this.
Tabs.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The girl on the forecourt – in her high heels with the keys swinging in her hand as behind them the traffic honked and growled – had stared at Frank blocking her path. His shirt was untucked, he could feel a bruise beginning to throb on his cheek and there was a look in her eye he didn’t quite understand.
Not as if he was a lunatic, exactly, more as if she had known something really bad was going to happen and she was trying to work out if he was it. When she stood her ground, he had asked her her name.
Lydia. Funny old-fashioned sort of a name. As she said it he could see she had been crying. In the white glare of the security lights the tears looked black. ‘Listen,’ he began patiently, without much hope of any of this working out, not Eddie getting to the hospital, nor Lucy, nor him stopping what Eddie knew was coming to little Georgie Baxter. ‘This might sound funny, but I need to get to your boss.’
And she’d started to cry again. He’d put a hand on her shoulder and she’d looked up and said, ‘I’ll drive you.’
Crammed into the passenger seat of her little yellow car Frank could see straight off that she was scared of him, her employer. ‘You all right?’ he asked.
Lydia looked sideways at him and rubbed at her little upturned nose with her knuckle. ‘He’s—’ she hesitated, settled on, ‘he’s never shouted at me before. I was – he was really—’ Then she turned back to face the road, eyes big.
Then they were at the entrance to a small close, three, four houses, sloping drives, hedges, a good distance between all of them. Lydia pointed. ‘That’s where he lives,’ she said, pale.
A small car was on the drive, its door open. Inside the house all the lights seemed to be off but there was a gleam, around the big garage door. There was no sound.
‘Did he hurt someone?’ Lydia said hesitating but Frank didn’t get a chance to answer.
A small child was screaming. ‘Daddydaddydaddy.’
‘Call the police,’ said Frank. ‘Tell them he killed Holly Walker and he’s going to kill his wife and child.’ And he was out of the car and running.
She thought she would probably die, but she had to speak. Shout. The blood bubbled in her mouth, she could feel it running and she couldn’t see out of one eye.
‘Back,’ she said. It sounded like something else, bag.
Georgie knew he’d hit her, not shot her, hit her with the butt of the gun. Then she felt him begin to rise off her and – not dying yet not dead yet – from somewhere in the blood and hurting she found her voice.
‘Back, go back, Tabs, go back back in the car go back.’ A bubbling breath. ‘Now.’
Shrieking.
He was standing over her, swaying, and the smell of gas was in her nostrils with the taste of blood. She knew he would hit her again but she reached up and grabbed him by something, she didn’t know what, his trousers, and craned, twisted to see behind her and the front door.
Tabs stood there, upside down in her one eye but it was Tabs. Not coming in. Good girl.
And with swift careless violence with his polished leather-soled shoe Tim kicked Georgie in the head.
She heard it before she felt it, a crunch and crack – and far off, too far off, a siren heading somewhere else – and her vision blurring so she couldn’t be sure if what she had seen through his legs at the back door framed in the dark glass was Tabs or someone else, Dad come to save her, God or angels, before it was all gone.
Glass and Tim and Tabs, all gone black.
&
nbsp; The little girl was standing in the doorway.
If he ran, rugby-tackled, Frank knew he could get her out of the way. The child. The kid. That sound ‘daddydaddydaddy’ was an alarm that hurt his head. Frank never had a daddy, never wanted one.
But he stayed back. Since when had he been anything but a bull in a china shop, blundering in? Skirted the house, trying to see. The kid didn’t turn her head, she could see something happening inside and as long as she didn’t step over the threshold maybe he had time. Time for surprise. She was smart. He had seen that in her sleepy face outside Fanelli’s. Be smart. And soundlessly he ran, staying back.
There was some light inside the house after all, falling from inside somewhere and then he understood, the garage must access the house, the light that was on in there. He was at the big garage door: if the little girl turned her head she would see him, but she didn’t turn. He pushed tentatively at the top of the metal shuttering, to see if it would give: it didn’t. He moved on, round the side of the house and as he did he caught the whiff of something, a smell.
Gas. Shit. Quick. Quick now. Too late to go back to the front. A side door, sturdy wood, locked. He scaled it, feeling every pound, every extra ounce he was carrying as the wood dug into his belly and he was down, on a paved path with a loud crunch. Shit.
Grass, quiet on the grass and he skirted the house. A wide sitting room window, all dark – then a glazed door. That faint light falling through it on to the glass.
It would be locked, wouldn’t it? Of course it would be. Wrong, Frank, wrong, blundering again, and he paused, gasping, hands up on the glass in time to see him, the silhouette of a man straddling her on the floor, her head raised and then it fell back. She didn’t move.
Her husband. He wore a suit, his hair was thinning, and he was holding something, Frank had never actually seen one before except in the movies, a shotgun. He was bringing it up to his shoulder and beyond him in the doorway, the little girl.
And under Frank’s hand – too soon, too late – the door opened and he crashed inside stumbling and the man turning towards him with the gun in his hand.
He smelled the gas. A spark would do it, even the light switch would do it as Frank blundered on, hands outstretched.
And then her hand came up from the ground and pulled him off balance, and Frank had him on the ground and the gun, when it went off, was beneath him.
She knelt over him, unbuttoning his shirt, pulling out his tie. She could feel his eyes on her, she could see saliva bubble at the corner of his mouth. She pushed herself back off him and tied the tie around the top of his thigh, twisting it tight and tighter. She could feel him staring up at her but she didn’t look back. She turned instead to find Tabs. She could see nothing at first then the soft edge of her head, her hair, the other side of the doorway into the hall. Hiding behind the door.
He’d shot himself in the thigh. ‘You,’ she said, gesturing to Frank, not capable of more than that but he understood and reached to take the tourniquet. Twisted it to keep up the pressure.
She stood between Tabs and the kitchen and leaned to pull the door shut behind them. Time enough as it swung closed to see his head turn, to see the look in his eyes and then to see it change. Hatred and outrage becoming something vaguer, loosening, leaving.
Tabs’ head in Georgie’s soft belly, her mouth moving. Georgie held on to her, held on for dear life.
Chapter Thirty
There were police cars first, then there was an ambulance.
Georgie could see them from where she sat, in the car with Tabs’ head in her lap.
The police wouldn’t go in straight away. They talked to her through the glass, because she wouldn’t open the door or the window. She told them there was a gun and gas and they just stood there, in a huddle, until she opened the door and said she would show them.
Then Frank had been in the doorway swinging the gas bottle and all the doors and windows had been open in the house and Georgie had wanted to say, I don’t care. Throw a match. Let it all go up. But she had just stared, and held on to Tabs.
They had been trying to get her to go to the ambulance but she just sat there, holding on to Tabs until suddenly he was there in the car door. Frank was there, leaning down, his big hand on the top of the door, his strong square face looking at her.
‘Come on now,’ he said, and she could see he had a bruise on his face. ‘Let’s take care of you.’
Postscript
Tim didn’t get to hospital: he bled to death in the ambulance. Apparently it hadn’t been quite painless, or quick, he had had time to call the paramedic a bitch and threaten to sue. But Georgie didn’t tell Tabs any of that, of course. She was glad he’d known he was dying. She was glad he’d had time to understand what he’d done.
Georgie thought they’d move back into town permanently. Somewhere near Dad’s, that swooping row of South London terraces, where she’d been small herself. There would be time, and brains enough between her and Dad, to formulate an explanation for Tabs, a story, that would make sense to her. She wouldn’t have to know everything. Tim had not even, after all, been her biological father.
Frank’s mum, Lena, it turned out, lived two streets away from Dad, and when he came to visit – he was working at a Savoy-style bar on the Thames owned by a friend of a friend these days – he called in on them, sitting in the back garden under the overgrown roses drinking a beer with Dad. Georgie loved Frank, and so did Tabs. So did Dad.
Tim’s mother had engaged a solicitor to try and gain custody of Tabs, within hours of his death. Citing Georgie as an unfit mother with tales Tim had told her, more than one tale, of Georgie’s instability, her promiscuity.
Even without that as an incentive, Georgie would have gone to the police with a complaint of sexual assault against Mark Cutler, erstwhile employee of Eddie Starling of Starling Property, currently under investigation for tax fraud and living off immoral earnings. Showing them the photograph: holding it up, because no shame was involved, only anger. Only rage. Evidence of Tim’s attempts to blackmail her, his calling in favours to have her drink spiked on that night out, to have her abused sexually, so that he might have a better chance of gaining custody of Tabs. Not his biological daughter, as Georgie pointed out then and on subsequent occasions, which was perhaps why he felt he needed more weaponry, more leverage.
The police had not yet been able to trace Mark Cutler, but they were confident they would. They asked her repeatedly, if she was sure she would be prepared to go to court, and repeatedly Georgie had said, yes. Yes. Yes, she would.
And as she sat beside Tabs every night, holding her hand as she went to sleep in the bedroom where she herself had slept from infancy, that was the word in Georgie’s head, the word for the life that awaited them. Yes.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank, as always, my incomparable agent, Victoria Hobbs, my indefatigable editor Maddie West, the publicity and marketing team at Sphere, spearheaded by the unstoppable Kirsteen Astor, and Thalia Proctor for her patience and unvarying efficiency.
To Richard Beswick, my thanks and love for a couple of decades of friendship and literary encouragement, and last but not least, my wonderful, clever family for their love and forbearance.
Table of Contents
About the Author
Also by Christobel Kent
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Postscript
Acknowledgements