Three Secrets

by Clare Boyd

  Three Secrets

  An utterly gripping psychological suspense thriller

  Clare Boyd

  Also by Clare Boyd

  Little Liar

  Three Secrets

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Epilogue

  Little Liar

  Clare’s Email Sign Up

  Also by Clare Boyd

  A Letter From Clare

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  2016

  ‘John’s coming over,’ Robert said, as I was laying the table for two.

  I added a third place.

  How I wish I had not laid that table at all.

  I sat between Robert and John, facing the tiny window. We were squashed around the three sides of the galley-kitchen table, under the tin-shade low lighting, which threw shadows down Robert’s face. Gravestone shapes, the horror to come.

  ‘I’m not ready to show you episode three,’ John said.

  ‘Just send it.’

  ‘But it’s crap.’

  ‘You always say that, John,’ I said.

  ‘And mostly Robert agrees.’ John laughed, always insecure, always handsome, with those golden flecks in his grey eyes.

  Robert’s foot was twitching, up and down, up and down. He was watching his handsome younger brother more than listening to him, unable to feign patience.

  I should have worried more about that.

  Robert suddenly pushed back his chair and slapped his hands on his knees. ‘I’ll find a shit-hot young writer to take your place if you’re struggling.’

  As the owner of Aspect Films, he could do this. I had felt uncomfortable about the power-play between them. They were brothers and they expected loyalty from one another, but sometimes I wondered if they liked each other.

  Then Robert said, ‘Don’t look at me like that! I’m kidding! Write from the heart, John. You can’t go wrong.’ But the delivery had been irritable.

  ‘What happened to inciting incidents and story arcs and Billy’s character flaws?’ John shot back.

  ‘You get annoyed with me when I script-edit you.’

  ‘True.’ John sat in his thinking pose: elbow on the table, chin propped up by his thumb, fingers wrapped in a crescent moon over his mouth; smothering his words, apologetic about his worries.

  ‘Forget Billy. That series is low-rent. Maybe there’s only so much of that crap you can write. Write the love story.’

  ‘You hated that script.’

  Robert tapped his fingers in an edgy rhythm. ‘You’re a brilliant screenwriter. I love everything you write.’

  John’s lips were parted, his eyes fixed on his brother. The air between them was charged. My heartbeat had begun to speed up. I wished the window was bigger to let in some more air.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re telling me this now. I was desperate to write that script but you said it would bankrupt Aspect.’

  My thighs had clenched. I had never seen John hit Robert, but I feared that he might.

  ‘I think we’re all tired,’ I said, feeling the strangeness of the evening come down on me. I brought Robert another cup of coffee, as he had let the first go cold.

  ‘If you don’t do what you want to do in life because you think it’ll fail or because of the bloody mortgage, you’re wasting your life. You’re wasting the precious time we have alive,’ Robert insisted, impassioned, adding, ‘There are always options. Always. Stop thinking about the comforts. That’s why we’re all trapped. Don’t be trapped, like me,’ he said, stabbing his temple. ‘Promise me?’

  ‘Do you feel trapped?’ John asked. I imagine John plays that question back in his nightmares.

  Ignoring his question, Robert continued, ‘Forget me and everyone else! You deserve better.’

  He grabbed John’s forearm and then at the same time kissed me roughly on my cheek, joining us together as an unwitting trio, swiping a tear from his nose. ‘I love you guys. And Alice. You’re the only three I do really love.’

  I thought about Alice sleeping in her bed upstairs under pink fairy lights. I thought about Robert’s parents, and how devastated they would be to hear this.

  ‘We love you, too,’ John said, cautiously, catching my eye.

  ‘Where does Dilys think you are tonight?’ Robert asked John.

  John mumbled his reply. ‘Research meeting with a nuclear physicist.’

  Robert and I both raised our eyebrows at him.

  John grinned sheepishly. ‘It’s plausible, isn’t it? Billy needs to use an X-ray gun in episode four.’

  ‘I’ve never understood why you can’t just tell her you’re here,’ Robert said.

  ‘She’d want to come,’ John said simply, as though this explained everything.

  ‘You know you have to leave her, don’t you?’

  ‘What?’ John reeled.

  ‘Robert?’ I quizzed him with a frown, a wifely shot of disapproval. ‘John, don’t listen to him.’

  ‘I want a fag.’ Robert stood, patting his pockets. ‘Where’s my wallet?’

  ‘Patel’s will be closed now,’ I reminded him.

  ‘San will let me in.’

  He kissed me goodbye.

  ‘Your wallet’s in your jacket. Don’t be long, will you?’ I said.

  ‘No, no!’ The front door slammed.

  ‘He might not come back,’ I had said to John.

  It had been a joke.

  Our eye contact had lingered for a couple of seconds too long. We had both known that Robert would stay for a smoke with Sanjeev, that he might get stoned, drink more whisky and wine, stumble back across the road sometime in the early hours. He had done this many times before.

  But Robert had not made it back home that night.

  He had left Sanjeev’s, walked up Whitehall Park and turned left at the top of the hill towards Hornsey Lane bridge, where he had climbed up and over the metal spikes and jumped onto the A1 to his death.

  Chapter One

  Francesca

  I prepared to move from the sofa, to turn off the television, to unpeel Alice from her spot under my arm, to seek out matching socks and untangle the four-day-old bird’s nest in her hair. Robert’s mother, Camilla, would expect her grandchil
d to be well turned out for Easter lunch. Appearances were everything to my mother-in-law. She confessed, once, to wearing red lipstick on the days she felt sad, to cheer herself up.

  Today was a red lipstick kind of day. I wondered if it might help me to get through lunch. Last week, I had said I could make it, knowing it was good for Alice to see her grandparents and cousins, knowing she would enjoy the Easter egg hunt on the sprawling lawns of their West Sussex pile.

  The whole Tennant clan would be there. Camilla and Patrick, and John and his wife, Dilys, and their three children. Even Uncle Ralph, who was Patrick’s eccentric younger brother, would be there. All of them lived within five miles of the same village. They would be full of love; they were claustrophobic.

  The remote control was in my hand, poised to turn off the cartoons. It seemed an impossible task. I kissed the top of Alice’s head, swamped with love for her, and looked out at the views from the skylight: the empty, pale, shifting hues of sky and the colourless metal geometrics of rooftops. This place on this sofa in this flat was the antidote to that landscape.

  The flat had once been a rich colour bomb, high above the city, small but sumptuous and sensual. Every little detail – a bone-china dish for teabags or a patchwork tea-cosy – was like a twig to a nest, carefully chosen, part of building a life with Robert, my husband, who had promised me the world, who had been so full of life. This flat was meant to be the beginning for our little family, not the end. But it seemed I had missed signs, missed secrets, missed something; and he had taken his own life. An unfathomable act, flooring me, leaving me no real understanding of why. His motive preyed on my mind, continually, allowing little else to flourish. I seemed to be searching for a murderer in his head. Some days I guessed at his rationale, blaming myself, flooded with guilt. On other days, I debunked those theories, unsatisfied, back to where I had started.

  Trapped in this wretched cycle, I ducked and shuffled through this small space: a dusty relic of my previous life. Tragedy layered the palette of colours that had once represented my joy for life. The flat was stuffy and busy with sadness, as though it knew its own history, as though it hated itself as much as I hated myself. For that very reason, I needed it. This flat and I were co-dependent. The memories and the secrets that it held were a tinder box. If I moved an ornament out of place, I worried the whole building would come crashing down on my head.

  I began to type a text:

  Hi Camilla – So sorry, I’m not feeling so well

  I deleted it. Retyping:

  Hi Camilla – So sorry, Alice has come down with a sick bug

  Letter by letter, I deleted it, going backwards, retreating.

  I brushed Alice’s hair while Scooby-Doo continued to entertain her. A knot was stubborn. I knew it was hopeless. It would have to be cut. Without Alice noticing, I found the kitchen scissors and snipped it out. The remaining tuft was obvious, and a little comical. Camilla would sniff at it. She would know I had cut a knot out; she would know I had not been brushing Alice’s hair; she would think I was a bad mother, but she would not say a word.

  This is why I hoped I would be safe today. The Tennants were good at keeping distasteful truths to themselves. If the worst wasn’t said out loud, it didn’t need to exist at all. This was how I had learnt to operate with them. Especially when it came to Robert’s death. Nobody talked about it. Nobody was to blame. Nobody was accusing anybody. This was one of the few Tennant family traditions that suited me perfectly.

  Chapter Two

  John

  John could hear Dilys shouting his name. He closed the bathroom door, and turned his razor on.

  A few minutes into his shave, the door burst open.

  ‘Why the hell didn’t you answer me?’

  John turned off the razor. ‘I didn’t hear you,’ he said, innocently, waggling his razor at her.

  ‘I know you did, John.’

  Everything about Dilys’ face was neat and symmetrical: her straight nose and even nostrils, the balance of her almond-shaped blue eyes, her top lip that mirrored her bottom lip, her centrally parted blonde hair. But when she was angry, the pool under her eyes turned purple and uneven, her lips puckered and her under-jaw pushed out at him.

  ‘Honestly, I didn’t hear,’ he insisted. He wiped his face on the towel to hide his lie. Dilys’ scrutiny was penetrating.

  ‘Don’t give me that crap. I was only next door.’

  ‘What did you need me for?’

  ‘I can’t find the bracelet your mum gave me!’ she cried.

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘If I lost it she’d never talk to me again!’

  ‘Mum won’t notice.’

  ‘She always notices everything.’

  ‘Have you looked in your jewellery box?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, I never thought of that,’ Dilys retorted sarcastically, throwing her arms in the air and charging out.

  As he dressed, into a smart shirt – his mother always noticed everything – and jeans, he could hear Dilys storming around, yelling at the children, throwing accusations, throwing actual things, slamming doors and shouting hysterically about the bracelet.

  John had a feeling that he was lying in wait in a bunker, hoping the hurricane outside would pass, but also knowing that the door to the bedroom wasn’t strong enough to keep it out.

  He chose his socks and sat on the bed to put them on.

  The door flew open. ‘Thanks for all your help, John,’ Dilys shrieked, although there were now tears in her increasingly high-pitched rage, and he felt bad, but he didn’t know how to help her when she was like this. His brain went into shutdown mode.

  ‘I don’t know where it is.’

  ‘I left it on my dressing table last night. Can you please think about whether or not you’ve moved it?’

  ‘Why would I touch it, Dilys?’ John bent down to put on his sock. ‘It doesn’t work with any of my outfits.’

  His joke went down badly.

  ‘CHRIST! I’m going to go mad! Can’t you see this is important to me?’ Her voice strained, desperate.

  He knew it was important, but he didn’t know what to suggest. He didn’t have any space in his head left. A lost bracelet was the least of his problems. If he spoke, he might blow up. He bent down to put the other sock on. Then he felt a slap to the back of his head.

  ‘Thanks for nothing, you idiot!’ she screamed, and stormed out.

  He rubbed his head, where her hand had hit, where other scars lay, where his shame burned.

  From deep within him, he called on his strength, battling away his fear, knowing only too well how her mood could escalate. He decided to engage with her plight for the bracelet, as he probably should have done originally. She couldn’t help her anger. It wasn’t her fault. Not really.

  Clocking through the various scenarios when he had seen her take it off, he thought of places it might be.

  He pulled out her gym bag from the bottom of the wardrobe, where he had tided it away, and looked in the side pocket, immediately locating it. He took a second to admire the tiny sapphire in the delicate silver. His mother had given it to Dilys on her fortieth birthday.

  He found Dilys in the kitchen. The contents of the recycling bin were strewn around her feet as she picked each discarded item out.

  ‘Here you go.’ John handed her the bracelet.

  She dropped the cereal box back into the bin and took the bracelet. It hung limply in her fingers, as though the reality of it disappointed her.

  ‘Where was it?’

  ‘In your gym bag.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well, I don’t mean to be funny, but if you’d tidied the cupboards better, I would’ve been able to find it myself.’

  She looked up at him with her blue eyes, as blue as the stone in the bracelet. They had a depthless quality to them; their colour was a pretty watercolour wash rather than windows to her soul.

  ‘I’m always tidying it,’ he insisted, reminding himself of the many times he had been
on his knees pairing her expensive shoes to make room for his battered old trainers.

  She smiled at him. ‘Really?’

  He clamped his jaws together, galled. Was it worth arguing with her about who tidied the most? Would it be petty to keep a logbook, charting the number of times he tidied bedrooms and cleared out the cupboards in their house? Was it worth it? He was sure he had better things to do; certain he had more important issues to worry about today. Could he rise above it, be the bigger person, drop it?

  For an easier life, yes. To stay safe, yes. To shelter the children, absolutely.

  ‘I’ll have a clear out, maybe,’ he said, begrudgingly accepting that they had accumulated a lot of junk they could probably do without.

  ‘Your mum’s going to go mental when you tell them the news today,’ she said, re-positioning the sapphire centrally on her wrist, moving on, satisfied with his reply.

  ‘We’d better get going or we’re going to be late. And then she really will go mental.’

  John was aware that Dilys had silenced him, but he could not waste energy winning a trivial argument about messy wardrobes today. His bigger worries wiped out their domestic gripes: his parents’ reaction to the news about Aspect Films, for one. Francesca’s desolation about the same news, another. It was going to rock the very foundations of her fragile survival mechanisms.