The Christmas Secret

by Karen Swan

  ‘I don’t even want to look at you. I can’t fucking believe—’ He began hammering his fist on the ancient oak door again. ‘Open this door, you fucking bastards!’

  But no one came and she sank down to the sofa, her knees simply refusing to lock any more, her body betraying her mind. After a minute or two of fist-drumming the door, he gave up as well and a silence mushroomed around them, filling the room. Still she didn’t dare look at him, but shortly afterwards, she heard his footsteps begin to pace on the parquet.

  Alex glanced at the locked door again, wondering how long this would go on for. How could she have escaped from him on a snowed-in island, only to find herself locked in the same room with him a few hours later? Were the others all standing behind the door, listening in? ‘How do they even know?’ she asked calmly.

  ‘How do you think?’ he snapped. ‘I rang to tell them that I wasn’t coming for Christmas and next thing, it’s like the bloody Spanish Inquisition.’

  ‘And yet here you are.’

  ‘Yes. Because they’re my friends. They wanted to help.’

  Alex nodded, indicating their predicament. This was helping?

  She sighed and for a second, she caught sight of herself: legs wrapped one around the other, her shoulders hunched, her head dropped – the classic low-power pose she never let her clients sink into. But to her surprise, she found she couldn’t pull herself out of it; it was easier to say than to do and her limbs felt leaden, her heart a slow drowsy throb. Because for once, she wasn’t ‘fine’ – she wasn’t on top of this, she wasn’t in control. She didn’t want to be here but she didn’t know where she did want to be either. She had no home, simply a base; she had no family, simply obligations; and unlike him, she had no friends, not any more; they had fallen by the wayside of her ambition as her focus steadily closed down to just colleagues and clients, the people who could help. She had scaled the summit of her career-long quest, but at what cost? She was alone, empty and exhausted.

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘Just the truth,’ he said coldly. ‘That you lied. Set me up.’

  The pain in his voice hurt her but she kept her eyes on his and nodded. ‘Yes.’ She glanced at her hands. ‘So why are they doing this then? After hearing all that, surely they think I’m a cold-hearted bitch? A monster?’

  He glared at her, wrong-footed by her own harshness at the condemnation upon her. ‘Yes, they probably do.’

  ‘So . . . ?’

  ‘I think they think you had a reason.’

  Alex went very still, forced a baffled frown. ‘Why would they think that?’

  ‘Emma saw something she thinks may explain it.’

  ‘Emma did?’ Alex scoffed. What on earth could—?

  ‘She saw a business card in your bag. Cereneo, or something?’ He watched her closely and she knew she wasn’t keeping the alarm off her face. ‘She’s a neuro nurse; said they’ve sent patients out to that clinic once or twice. It specializes in pioneering therapies for quadriplegics . . .’

  Alex felt the air leave her body, suctioned out by a level of shock that she couldn’t comprehend. No. There was no way.

  ‘Apparently you told her you were visiting your father in Switzerland on Boxing Day, but not skiing. It seemed a little odd.’ He looked straight at her. ‘She also said the treatment he’d require there would be very expensive.’ His tone was questioning, uncertain even, but his eyes were steady, assessing her, probing for the truth. ‘. . . Is it true?’ And when she didn’t reply – ‘You said right at the beginning you needed the money from this job to help someone in your family. I thought it was a joke, but it wasn’t, was it?’

  Alex tried to breathe in, to make her body work if not her brain. She stood up, moving away from him and hurrying towards the door. She banged on it with her fist. ‘Open this door!’ she demanded. ‘Do you hear me? Someone open this door right now or I’m calling the police!’

  She turned around to face him, to make sure he wasn’t following her, but the room was a blur; her eyes pooled with hot tears and she could only just make him out on the other side of the ottoman.

  ‘Alex.’

  ‘Stop. Just don’t,’ she said with as much authority as she could muster.

  ‘Why did you tell me he’d died?’

  ‘I didn’t. I never said that.’

  ‘You clearly implied it. It was what you wanted me to infer. You told me he was an alcoholic – past tense. But anyone who’s lived with an alcoholic knows there is no past tense. It dies only when you die. My father could have stopped drinking and not touched a drop for forty years and he would still have died as an alcoholic. You wanted me to think he was dead.’

  Alex willed herself to stay calm. ‘So?’

  ‘So?’ He gave a small snort. ‘So, there’s a big difference between need and greed, Alex. It changes everything.’ He took a step towards her, then stopped again as he saw her recoil. ‘If you tell me you did what you did because you needed the money for him, I could understand it. I could forgive it.’

  Every word was like a pickaxe to the rock wall around her. ‘I don’t need your forgiveness. I can live with what I did. I had my reasons.’

  There was a hesitation as he tried to see past her front. ‘So that million bought you – what? Surgery?’ he conjectured. ‘A state-of-the-art wheelchair? Care for the rest of his life?’

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘Tell me,’ he suddenly demanded, looking angry again. Beginning to walk, to pace. ‘Don’t you think I deserve to know why you destroyed my life? Was it to save his?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m not discussing this.’

  ‘Yes! You are. An explanation is the very least you owe me!’

  She shook her head, feeling the adrenaline pitch as he came towards her, black-eyed and red-cheeked.

  ‘Tell me!’

  ‘No.’

  He was in front of her now, his hand on her elbow, gripping hard. ‘Tell me!’

  ‘It bought me freedom, okay?!’ The words burst out of her before she could stop them, panic, fear, frustration, exhaustion bubbling together in a combustible mix. ‘He has no one else. Like you said yesterday – it’s all on me.’

  He watched her, trying to understand, to fill in the blanks. ‘What about your mother? Where’s she?’

  ‘Gone,’ she snapped, the word brittle. ‘She left us after the fire.’

  ‘Fire?’ His eyes narrowed at the word and she knew he was remembering her desperate shout the night of the distillery blaze and how it had been the only thing to travel through to him as he lay unconscious on the floor. It had been the voice of someone who had lived through those flames before.

  She exhaled, all out of fight. He knew most of it now, anyway – pieced together from a single business card and girls’ gossip. ‘He had been drinking.’ Her voice was quiet, her eyes on a spot on the floor past his shoulder. ‘And he fell asleep on the sofa and dropped the cigarette on the curtain. And by the time he woke up, the whole room was alight.’ She shook her head, feeling the long-repressed memories beginning to surface. ‘Somehow he got upstairs and managed to wake me and my mother.’ She swallowed, falling back into the terror of that night – the black smoke, his stumbling feet, her mother’s high-pitched screams of bewilderment. ‘We . . . we couldn’t get back down the stairs. The fire was moving so quickly that we had to throw our bed things out of the window and jump. Mum and I went first. Mum was okay but I landed badly and broke my ankle. I couldn’t move to get out of the way but Dad was panicking – he was still blind drunk – so he jumped from the other window, thirty feet onto the terrace below. He broke both legs, his pelvis and shattered his spine.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  Lochie looked horrified and she stared back at him with pity if he thought broken bones were the worst of it. ‘. . . It was only when he was being put in the ambulance that he remembered about Amy.’

  ‘Amy?’

  The tears began to fall now, hot and heavy globes of
anguish, and the words felt suddenly as unstoppable as the tears. ‘My sister. I was seventeen, she was nineteen. She was at Bristol Uni but she’d come back unexpectedly because she’d had a fight with her boyfriend. Mum and I were already in bed by the time she got in, so we didn’t know she was there. We had no idea. And by the time we did, by the time Dad remembered she’d popped her head in to say “hi” . . .’ She scrunched her eyes shut as she remembered her mother’s scream and how she’d tried to run back into the house as the flames engulfed the roof. Her head dropped into her hands, the sobs heaving her shoulders as a groan of pain escaped him, and Lochie wrapped his arms around her.

  ‘Oh, Alex,’ he breathed into her hair, rubbing her back gently with his hand as she wept. ‘And then our fire too . . . Why didn’t you say something?’

  She shook her head angrily. How? Where was she supposed to start – with which emotion? Grief for her sister who shouldn’t even have been there? Rage at her father whose fault this was? Despair at her mother who had turned and left – left them both – unable to forgive him and unable to look at her?

  She pulled back, infuriated by her own tears, and looked past him at the grey day beyond the window. ‘Mum finds it very hard, even now, to be with me. Amy and I looked so alike.’ She sniffed, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth and trying to steady her breathing again. ‘I understand it. She can’t help feeling that way. I know she loves me, she just can’t . . . be with us at the moment. It’s too hard.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No, there are no buts,’ Alex said, stopping him. ‘She lost her child. The way she sees it, her husband killed her child and that is a terrible truth to bear. I don’t blame her for any of it.’

  ‘What about your father? Do you blame him?’

  She kept her gaze steady on him, refusing to look away, to face up to the unpalatable, complicated truth. ‘Yes. And he pays the price for what he did a million times over every day.’ She thought of him, flat on his back and staring at the ceiling. At a stroke, his alcoholism had been cured but only because the urge for a drink was for ever denied by arms which now remained pinned to his sides, the cruel irony of devastating cramps shooting up and down his inert legs leaving him crying in pain. ‘He’s lost more than any of us – Amy, Mum – his ability to move.’ She swallowed, looking at him defiantly. ‘What was I supposed to do? Leave him too?’

  ‘No one would blame you.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry – I hate him, just like you hated yours. His weakness destroyed our family; of course I wanted to do what my mother did – turn my back on him, just leave him lying there and never go back! But he’s my father, the only one I’ll ever have. So this –’ she threw her arms out, indicating the room they were standing in, the two of them here, together – ‘working my backside off for the past fourteen years, working with you – it was the solution for me. I told myself that if I could get the money together for his care at that clinic, then that was the most I could be expected to do. I check in with his medical team every bloody day, I visit him every month. There’s nothing more that can be done beyond that, short of finding a cure; getting him to the best of the best was what I needed to do and then I’d be free of my duty to him. I could start living my life too.’

  He watched her. ‘Except – you met me.’

  The statement stopped her in her tracks. ‘Y-yes.’ She lifted her chin higher, trying to pull herself up, become bigger, stronger, more powerful than she felt. ‘And so I had to choose and I chose him. And I would do it again,’ she said determinedly, but with a tremor in her voice. ‘I would.’

  ‘As you should,’ he agreed. ‘I get it.’

  Forgiveness? She had never expected it, never dared to ask for it, but it blew her over like a wind anyway and she felt her shoulders drop down from her ears – she hadn’t even noticed they had hunched up. Her body softened.

  Understanding bloomed as their eyes met, that familiar zip of electricity charging the air around them. ‘Alex . . .’ She felt his hand reach for hers, but she pulled away before he could touch her and walked over to the sofa where she had left her bag. It wasn’t over yet.

  ‘I have something for you.’ He watched as she pulled a large brown A4 envelope from it and held it out for him to take. ‘I was intending to send it to you next week. But, well . . . I figure I’ll save the postage.’

  His eyes flicked up to hers, part amused, part wary. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Your insurance policy.’ And when she saw his frown, she added, ‘Figuratively, I mean. Not literally. It’s about your family. You only had half the story.’ She swallowed. ‘I only gave you half the story.’

  He opened it without a word, confusion clouding his face as he pulled out a wad of photocopies.

  ‘It’s proof that you have every right to sit as CEO of Kentallen Distillery Group. You are family in every definition of the word.’

  ‘What?’ he whispered, frowning deeply as he walked over to the partner’s desk, flicking through the sheets – there were photocopies of a handwritten letter, two black-and-white photographs, one colour photograph and a bright landscape painting. He set them all out on the surface and stared at them blankly. ‘I don’t understand what any of this means.’

  Alex walked over and pointed to the colour photograph that Skye had forwarded to her from her phone. ‘I take it you heard about this teddy bear they found in the hidden malt barrel on Monday?’

  ‘Vaguely – although with everything going on in Edinburgh, I haven’t given it any thought.’

  ‘Well, when Skye showed me this photo, it rang distinct alarm bells with me. Something about the teddy bear seemed familiar but I couldn’t think why. It kept bugging me. Then I remembered – I’d seen one in a couple of old photos at the Peggies’.’ She pointed to the pictures of the woman and child in the churchyard, and of the nurses and soldiers in the hospital.

  ‘Wait – why are you so intimately acquainted with the Peggies’ photo collection?’

  She gave a small snort. ‘I’m not. But they’ve got boxes of material that Mr P. inherited from his father who was the local police sergeant – letters, logbooks, photographs; they’ve been sorting through them with a view to donating it all to the museum. I just happened to come in when Mrs Peggie was going through them.’

  ‘And that was when you first found out my grandfather was adopted,’ he clarified, remembering their other conversation in the canteen.

  She nodded and pointed to the photograph of the nurse. ‘You probably don’t need me to tell you that that woman there is Clarissa Farquhar, your great-grandmother. It was she who inherited her brother Percy’s forty-per-cent stake in the company when he was killed in the war; which combined with her own thirteen per cent has ultimately given you your majority stake.’

  ‘Yes. I know who she is.’

  ‘But do you know who he is?’ She pointed to the photograph again.

  ‘The guy with the broken leg?’ he squinted. ‘No.’

  ‘He was an American called Edward Cobb – a soldier who was almost killed when the SS Tuscania was torpedoed in February 1918.’

  Lochie’s eyes flashed up to her at the mention of the troopship. He’d heard of it; it was written into the fabric of the island’s history.

  ‘Clarissa saved him. She saw him on the rocks and nursed him back to health. He had a broken leg and various other injuries but he also had Spanish flu. They thought he was going to die from it – most likely he’d had it before they left New York – but she nursed him back to health and he pulled through. He stayed on Islay for another four months whilst his leg healed.’

  ‘What happened to him after then?’

  Alex sighed. ‘He was sent to France as soon as his leg was mended. He was killed nine days later.’

  Lochie winced. ‘Christ.’

  ‘Clarissa became a recluse and eventually left the island. Her fiancé had been killed in 1916; her brother just after the Tuscania sank; and then Edward too . . . She said she had to get a
way and she went to live in the Peak District for a short time; her housekeeper went with her.’

  He shrugged, clearly baffled as to where she was leading with this. ‘Okay.’

  She grabbed the photo of the child in the churchyard. ‘Who’s this, do you think?’

  Lochie sighed and stared, easily recognizing the woman with him as Clarissa. ‘Well, I would imagine that’s my grandfather George. He’s the child she adopted – or rather, didn’t – after the war.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And see what he’s holding there?’ she said, pointing to the photo and then pulling forward the letter.

  ‘A bear.’

  ‘The same bear Edward Cobb’s mother sent over from America when news of the attack broke. See? She says there she was sending it so he wouldn’t feel so homesick.’

  She watched his eyes move from side to side, reading the letter quickly. ‘Okay,’ he said again. ‘So my grandfather ended up with Edward Cobb’s teddy bear. So what?’

  ‘It’s the same bear as was found in the hidden malt cask,’ she said, pointing again to Skye’s photograph of the bear wrapped in the baby blanket at the bottom of the opened cask. ‘The obvious question is why was it put there? Skye thought maybe the child had died and the mother had wanted to hide it from sight, but couldn’t bear to part with it altogether.’

  Lochie frowned. ‘It’s a stretch.’

  ‘In the absence of any other explanation, it was the most plausible reason anyone could think of.’

  He shot her a wry look. ‘But you have another explanation, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes. Look at this photograph with the soldiers again,’ she said, pointing to the tiny detail she had clocked but not processed on the first viewing. It was barely perceptible in the pale shades of grey, the fact that their hands were touching – only the edges of their little fingers each grazing the other’s, but it was enough to make their smiles widen and their eyes shine. Alex knew what love looked like now – it shone like a sunbeam; it was how she felt whenever Lochie looked at her. ‘See how they’re touching? And there’s a bench up on the cliffs by the farmhouse, with an inscription she wrote, about looking over to America. To him, from her. “In memory of EC,” it says, and it’s signed by “CF”. Edward Cobb and Clarissa Farquhar were lovers.’ His face roamed hers, the word like a gong, making their bodies vibrate. ‘And she had his baby.’