‘I think it was Mama’s…Mum’s.’
She corrects herself quickly but it feels like there’s something there. She is staring at a spot on the floor, lost in the horror.
‘What happened then?’
‘I listened. I didn’t know if I’d dreamt it. Like when you wake up and you’re not sure if it’s real.’
Charley stops for a breath. She angles herself closer to her sister, who puts an arm around her.
‘There was another scream,’ Charley adds. ‘I think it was Mama again.’ A breath and then: ‘Mum again.’
She hugs her knees tighter.
‘Go on,’ Martha whispers.
‘Father presented this security thing on telly,’ Charley adds. ‘He was a bit funny about safety after that. He said that if I ever heard anything like that, if I thought someone was breaking in, I had to go into the wardrobe and hide. There’s a hamper in there for dirty clothes. He said get behind it and stay still and quiet until he or Mama said it was safe.’
She’s speaking slowly enough that it’s easy to note down what she’s saying. I pause at the end of her sentence. ‘Mama’ is a new one on me. Never heard any kid call their mum that. Even ‘Father’ is a bit odd. Not ‘Dad’ or ‘Daddy’.
‘So that’s what you did?’ I ask.
Charley nods.
‘Did you hear anything while you were in the wardrobe?’
‘Someone coming up the stairs.’ She uncurls her legs and stretches them out. ‘I think that’s what I heard. I don’t know. There are these little slits across the front of the wardrobe doors, but I couldn’t hear everything properly. The bedroom door was shut.’
I wait, not wanting to ask the question. Even I hear the reluctance in my voice when the words appear: ‘Were there any other screams?’
She shakes her head slowly and the reply is clear enough: ‘No… I don’t know. I don’t think so.’
I’ve had witnesses go to pieces having seen far less than she has. There was a circuit judge who could barely tell me her name after a driver sped across a roundabout and embedded himself into a lamp post in front of her. A trained therapist simply stared at me after an armed robbery at a bank. It’s impossible to judge who’ll be a reliable witness and who’ll be a gibbering wreck.
Charley’s doing well. There are a few stutters, some hesitations, but she’s composed, especially for a thirteen-year-old. There’s a sense of a calm from the sister. It would usually be a non-starter to interview two witnesses together, but I don’t think I’d get much out of the younger sibling without Martha.
‘What happened then?’ I ask.
‘I waited.’
‘Did you hear any other noises?’
‘Not until my sister came in.’
‘Nobody entered the bedroom until then…?’
‘No.’
I turn to Martha, who hasn’t stopped watching me. A thick streak of eyeliner has smudged into the rest of her make-up from where she’s been rubbing her eyes.
‘What time did you get here?’ I ask.
‘About half-two,’ Martha replies. ‘Maybe a little later. I’d been out in the city. Got a taxi back.’
That’s good. There’ll be a record of that somewhere. It will make the time easier to verify.
‘Do you live here?’ I ask.
‘No, I’ve got a flat in Chalk Farm. You know that? Near Camden. I usually visit here on Saturdays.’
‘It’s a bit early.’
She shrugs. ‘Sometimes it’s not worth going home after a night out. I come here, get my head down for a few hours and then have lunch with the family.’
That explains the smeared make-up. She’s been out all night. She yawns as if to emphasise the point.
‘What happened when the taxi dropped you off?’ I ask.
‘I let myself in.’
‘And what did you see?’
Martha has removed her arm from Charley’s shoulders and they’re sitting by themselves. ‘I went into the kitchen to get a sandwich or something. Sometimes there’s chicken in the fridge. The door to the living room was open and then…’ She glances sideways momentarily to her sister. ‘I’d rather not say… not here. Perhaps we can do this again later?’
With a nod, I let her know that’s fine. It’s not the older sister’s statement I’m worried about.
I turn back to Charley: ‘What happened when you heard your sister’s voice?’
There’s a brief pause in which Charley turns to her older sister and then gulps. ‘Martha came upstairs calling my name. I heard her open the door and then I said I was in the wardrobe. She told me we were going to go out the front of the house and that the police were on the way. She told me not to go in the living room.’
Charley holds up her palms and I see it for the first time. The sun is starting to rise, sending a gloomy orange seeping through the clouds. Perhaps it’s the light, but I don’t think so. Despite my sixteen years in the job, I can’t stop myself shivering. I don’t think Charley notices, but Martha does. For a moment I wonder if she’s going to press forward and put a hand on my knee. It was too uncomfortable to kneel and too intimidating to stand. I’m sitting on the lawn with the girls. In the end, Martha rocks back and offers an apologetic, humourless smile. It’s like she’s comforting me.
‘I tried to stop her,’ Martha says.
Charley’s hands are stained a dark, crusty crimson.
‘It won’t come off,’ she says and I shiver again. ‘I tried washing them. I didn’t mean to touch anything. I just… It was Mama.’
She tails off but she’s said plenty.
Behind the girls, a pair of uniformed officers emerge from the house and they each take deep breaths. The younger one is a new recruit, only been in the job a couple of months and I can’t believe she’s seen anything like this. She stares off into nothingness as my friend Johnny pats her on the shoulder.
‘I think someone’s sorting you out with a place to stay,’ I tell Martha while looking around for a person who might know what they’re doing. ‘We can figure out a lift.’
She nods and pushes herself up from the ground, offering a hand to her sister. ‘Do you want a Maccy D’s, or something?’ she asks.
Charley shakes her head and clings onto Martha’s arm, leaving a sticky red smudge. ‘I just want to go.’
Four
Now
Seth
It takes two knocks before Emily opens the door to her hotel room. She yawns her way through a ‘morning’ and the now-usual follow-up about whether Charley has reappeared.
I ask her how Mum is, but my sister’s sigh says plenty, as does: ‘We should have kept her off the sherry.’
There’s no humour there – but this is how we talk about our mother. It’s the only way to deal with it all.
Em edges into the hallway, pulling the door almost closed behind her. Her voice is a husky whisper: ‘She forgot where she was when she woke up and started screaming about being kidnapped. She didn’t recognise me.’
I squeeze the bridge of my nose, trying to make everything go away. I don’t want to deal with this today. Em makes me feel even worse by folding her arms as if to emphasise that she’s my mother, too.
‘I called the police,’ I say.
It might be the tiredness, but Em’s eyes widen. ‘What did they say?’
‘Someone’s coming over to the house this afternoon.’
‘I can’t believe nobody saw her leave. How can someone disappear in a wedding dress?’
‘Mum said she saw Charley near the doors that lead into the back courtyard.’
A tilt of the head. Really? Em doesn’t say the word, but I know what she’s thinking. Mum says a lot of things.
‘When I picked her up yesterday, she thought it was for a silver jubilee party,’ Emily replies. ‘She called me Evelyn. She thought I was her old best friend.’
‘I know – but she was really clear for once. She mentioned the lilies at the back of the hotel. She wasn’t making t
hem up – they’re actually there.’
Em peers off to the side. Neither of us want to argue. We’ve been here before. ‘I spent a couple of hours going through your photos,’ she says. ‘I wondered if there might be something in them. Some stranger that no one knows…’
‘And?’
A shrug. ‘You both look very happy.’
Emily is not a professional photographer as such. She does IT at the local technology college, which means she’s really good at turning things off and on again.
She does not like that joke.
Because she was a bit bored, Em took a photography class a year and a bit ago and set up her own blog. She got a booking from the local council to take pictures of their renovated wildlife reserve and has been trying to build on that ever since.
Better than turning things off and on for a living, I guess.
Charley is one of her biggest supporters. It was her idea to ask Emily to photograph our wedding in the first place. Em said she’d do it for free, but Charley insisted on paying the going rate.
‘Do you want to come in and look at a few pics on my laptop?’ she asks.
This is Emily’s way of asking if I want a few minutes with Mum, to at least understand what she’s dealt with all night.
We head into the darkness of her room. The curtains are pulled, with the only light coming from a tall dim lamp in the corner. Lights in hotel rooms are always a lottery. Wall switches bear little or no relation to what’s being powered. Sometimes there are lights on the ceiling, other times it is a scattering of lamps that can’t be switched off from the comfort of the bed. Don’t even get me started on those ones that are plugged in next to the bed, taking up the only socket that could be used to charge a phone.
Mum is sitting in a chair close to the lamp, with a newspaper on the desk in front of her. She squints at Emily and me through the dim light and then turns back to the paper.
‘Do you know a nine-letter word for a tipping point?’ she asks. ‘Blank-blank-r-blank-s-blank-blank-blank-blank.’
One of the doctors a few years ago suggested that doing a daily puzzle or two might help Mum with her concentration levels. It’s odd how some things stick with her and others don’t. She does a crossword every day, as well as an arrowword or two. She’s good with language and can remember bits and pieces of pop culture from even the most recent of years. Band names and hit singles, she knows. Oscar winners are embedded; she remembers authors and books, Wimbledon champions and Premier League-winning managers.
But her own children?
Sometimes she looks at Emily and me as if she’s never laid eyes on us before.
Not this morning. For now, she seems relatively aware.
‘I’m not sure, Mum,’ I reply.
She nods acceptingly and pulls at the curtain, allowing sunlight to flood into the room.
‘It was a lovely ceremony,’ she says. ‘What a beautiful venue. The gardens, the flowers, the fountain. Emily was showing me some of the photos. At least one of my offspring is getting ready to give me some grandchildren…’
There’s a smirk, not the viciousness from yesterday. This is teasing and Emily lets it go.
‘How is Charley?’ Mum asks.
I exchange a quick glance with Em, who has a don’t-ask-me expression.
‘She’s having a rest,’ I reply.
‘I’m not surprised. It was a long day yesterday. Weddings always are. Getting ready in the morning, then the arrival and ceremony. Speeches, food, the dance. You just have to enjoy as much as you can. When your father and I got married, it was a register-office job. We didn’t have the money. He looked lovely in that chocolate brown suit of his. All wide cuffs and collars. I’m sure I’ve told you about it…’
She has, and we’ve seen the faded photos, but it’s surprising to hear her speaking with clarity.
Mum turns to me and, for that moment, I wonder if she’s going to revert to thinking it’s her wedding day again. ‘I think there’s a D on the end,’ she says. ‘A tipping point: Blank-blank-r-blank-s-blank-blank-blank-d.’
‘Threshold?’ Emily suggests.
Mum turns back to the paper and laughs. ‘Threshold! That’s it. Clever girl.’
She scratches the letters onto the page and then starts to tap the pen.
‘Mum… do you remember seeing Charley yesterday?’ I ask. ‘You said she was in the hall…’
‘By those French windows. I always wanted a set like that at the back of the house. but your father wasn’t a fan. He said it would be too hot in the afternoons because of where the sun rose.’
She peers up, gazing through the window towards the gardens at the front of the hotel. The sun is higher now, the lush green lawn drenched with warmth. The fountain has been turned on and jets of water are spurting high into the air. Em and I exchange another look, asking silently if this is it.
‘Do you remember what she was doing, Mum?’
‘Who?’
‘Charley. When you saw her in the hallway.’
There’s a lengthy pause and then Mum turns back to the pair of us. She squints between Emily and me and takes a breath. It is already hard to picture her in any way other than how she is now. The wrinkles on her face are starting to crease into each other and I swear she’s shorter than she used to be. There’s a stutter when she speaks, a constant distantness.
It’s horrible.
Of all the illnesses to afflict us, there can be little worse than dementia. A person’s own mind betraying them has such a knock-on effect on everyone else. It’s devastating when your own mother looks at you and asks who you are.
I will her to stay with us, if only for a couple more minutes.
‘She looked lovely,’ Mum says.
‘I know. In her dress… her white dress.’
‘Not too fancy. Not like some of the ones you see with frilly bits everywhere and trains that need half a dozen people to hold. Hers was perfect.’
There’s a lump in my throat. From nowhere, I think I might cry. Charley looked every bit as wonderful as Mum has described.
‘Where exactly was she, Mum?’
‘By the French windows, I told you.’
‘But was she walking past them, or going outside?’
Mum stops, thinks. I can almost see her mind ticking over. ‘I’m not sure. She was just standing there.’
‘Did she say anything?’
A grin: ‘She said to tell you that she loves you.’
I blink, surprised. ‘Those were her exact words?’
‘Right. “Tell your son I love him”.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘What?’
‘What happened after that? Did she say that like it was a goodbye? Or was she simply being nice?’
Mum turns back to her crossword and frowns. ‘Streamlined,’ she says. ‘Five letters, ends in K.’
‘Mum…?’
She doesn’t look up. ‘What?’
‘Do you remember what happened after that?’
‘After what?’
‘After you saw Charley in the corridor.’
She turns to the window, then me. She’s biting her lip, drumming her pen absent-mindedly. ‘Sleek,’ she says. ‘That means two down must be bedding.’
Five
Checkout is a morbid affair. Everyone from the other wedding party is traipsing past me with curious sideways stares. Word is obviously out that the other bride had second thoughts immediately after the ceremony. Some of them look on in sympathy, most with bemusement. A few are wearing that sideways smirk. I’ll be all over their Facebook accounts within hours, if I’m not already. There’s nothing comparable to another person’s misery to get a load of likes.
The only upside is that the hotel is nice enough to have comfy sofas in the reception area. I guess that’s the sign of a classy place. Comfy sofas means it’s a potential wedding venue; a two-for-one sticky-floored restaurant on the side means it’s probably one to miss.
I’ve got Raj
on one side, Rafi on the other, with our bags at our feet. I should probably have left already, but seeing as I dragged friends and family out here for the ceremony, I figured it’s only fair to say goodbye.
‘You should’ve got some food in you,’ Raj says with a hint of a slur.
‘I’ve never seen a buffet like it,’ Rafi adds. ‘Raj was taking pictures.’
Raj has his phone in his hand. ‘Well, I think I was,’ he says. ‘New phone. I don’t know what I’m doing half the time. I took nearly ninety photos of my own shoes last Saturday. I only got the phone to take wedding pics.’ He returns the device to his pocket and I sense him making eye contact with his brother behind my back. ‘Sorry, man. I should’ve helped you look and all that.’
It’s hard to know what to say. I don’t blame him, so offer a shrug.
As we sit in silence, the other happy couple stride into reception to a string of claps and whoops from their guests. The bride is bleary-eyed and looks like she might have spent a good portion of her wedding night emptying her stomach. Her hair is a straggly mess, far from the pristine pictures of the day before. The groom is in long shorts, flip-flops and a football top.
‘Marbs, baby!’ he shouts, breaking into a frog-like jig where he bounces from leg to leg. ‘We’re going to Marbella, a la-la-la; a la-la-la.’
Some of the other blokes join in until the bride whacks her new husband in the chest. ‘Will you keep it down? My head’s bloody banging.’
‘I told you not to down those Jäger shots.’
‘I’m not the one who was weeing in the bath at four a.m.’
‘I’m surprised you noticed with your head down the bog.’
There are a series of awkward looks between the assembled guests as the newly married couple bicker their way into the car park. A couple of the bridesmaids trail behind, dragging a set of suitcases.
It would be funny, but then I realise their wedding is still more of a success than mine. At least the happy couple know where each other is.
Rafi is fidgeting and I sense another glance between the brothers.
‘We kinda have to get off…’ Raj says.
The Wife’s Secret: A gripping psychological thriller with a heart-stopping twist Page 3