Dead Secret

by Deveney Catherine

  I told Kirstin that I couldn’t ever tell Sarah the truth. Telling Sarah would not be like telling Father Peter, a conversation without consequences. Sarah loved Da. Ironic that he is the only parent we have shared, and the only one we do not have in common. But she doesn’t know that. How could I take him from her, tell her that the man she loved wasn’t really her father? That her real father was some rich bastard who brought her mother champagne then dumped her in the foundations of a car park?

  There is something else. I know it is not my information to give. I know if she were to be told, it should have been Da who told her. But he is not here. In his absence, there is a little part of me that won’t be stilled, that thinks she has the right to know. To tell her would be like telling her that the life she lived never really existed. It was just a fantasy. But not to tell her is to allow her to go on living a lie. More secrets. More shadows.

  You see the dilemma. It masquerades as something else, another problem altogether. For the dilemma is not just whether to tell, or not to tell. The dilemma is how to untangle the knotted threads of my own motivation. I can pick either course of action and hug it closely to my chest, warm myself with the embers of my own rectitude. I was right for this reason, for that reason. But there will also be another possibility, another reason for doing what I do.

  If I stay silent, will it be because I want power that she doesn’t have; the power of secret knowledge? The power of truth? Da will be all mine and she will never even know. If I tell her, will it be because somewhere deep inside I am fuelled by malice? Perfect Sarah, with her pretty blonde hair and blue eyes. If only we had peeled all those layers of love and hate back, I would know. But we are not quite there yet. The strings of puppet Sarah are in my hand. I am in control; I can cut them with a single snip.

  Am I jealous of Sarah? I don’t know any more. Perhaps a little. Of her perfection, her simplicity. The way she always chose order where I opted for chaos. I despised her order. But how often do you despise what you cannot have? I know that now I feel a sense of loss. It would be different had I always known; the trauma comes from unexpected revelation. I want her, my little sister, now that she no longer is my sister. I want her back.

  But don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to be Sarah. Don’t want her life, her job. Don’t want Des. Definitely don’t want Des. Da always said he thought Des had a good enough heart. Da didn’t know about the washing-machine night. I never forgave Des for that.

  Sarah and I were doing the crossword in the sitting room when he came in.

  “Your father,” he said as he closed the door, and he shook his head with a silly, rueful little smile.

  “What’s he up to now?” asked Sarah.

  “I went into the kitchen and he’s sitting there on top of the washing machine, not doing anything, just looking at the floor,” said Des, wide eyed. “On top of the bloody washing machine! I said, ‘All right Joe?’ And he said, ‘Fine thanks Des.’”

  Des rolled his eyes. “Do you think his mind’s going? That’s the way my mother went when the dementia started.”

  Des’s mum died last year, and the fact that he looked after her is the reason he says he isn’t married yet. I think there’s a rather more fundamental reason. With apologies to Sarah, no woman in her right mind would have him. I was mad with him for suggesting Da was losing his mind. Typical, snotty Des. Da could be off-beat, even eccentric, at times but that’s because he had an interesting mind. Des is so stolid he couldn’t see Da was smarter than him. “I’d find Mum wandering in the garden at midnight or walking to the shops in her slippers,” continued Des.

  I could have wrapped his diamond-patterned tie round his thick, stupid neck. And I probably would have if Da hadn’t come in just then and gone into his tool box for something. Probably something to fix the machine. I expect he was just having thinking time, sitting there on top of it. Sarah hurriedly picked up the paper.

  “Here’s a clue, everyone,” she said self-consciously, her face flushed. “Win the argument and say Amen to that. Four words… four, three, four and four.

  “Any letters?” asked Des.

  “First word starts with H.

  “Now,” said Des. “If we just think about…”

  “Have the last word,” Da said absently, and wandered out again.

  He was good at working out clues, Da. Better than me. I have all these pieces assembling in front of me that I don’t know how to make sense of. There are two pictures on the jigsaw box and I don’t know which one I have the pieces for. There we all are, in fragments in front of me: Da, Mother, Cory, Peggy and Charlie, sister Sarah, and me. But how do we all fit together?

  The next piece is easy. I have kept this one till last because I know it fits in the picture somewhere. I head into town, ask directions to his offices. He has come a long way since my mother’s time. The offices are two storeys high with an exterior of gleaming glass and polished chrome. A national company. He has an office in Glasgow, another in Yorkshire. I stand across the road at a bus stop and watch. I can see the reception through the swing doors. Fresh flowers. Exotic green pot plants in corners. Women who look like they are auditioning for an American soap with gleaming hair and tight skirts and kitten heels. I can see their mouths move in conversation. They talk, smile, walk, sit, oblivious to the fact that someone stands outside and watches them.

  But it is not them I am waiting for. I keep moving into the shadows, away from the direct sunlight, watching. I wait for over an hour just to catch a glimpse of him. I know it is him as soon as he appears. I stiffen when he comes into view; watch him. Even all these years after those newspaper photographs were taken, he is still recognisable. But I have the feeling that in some instinctive place I would know him anyway.

  He walks right up to the desk at the window of the first floor. You can tell he is important just by the way he walks. The cut of the suit. The proprietorial way he puts his arm round the secretary’s shoulder when she stands up. She fetches him some papers. He smiles. He sits on her desk. I watch every last movement. The way his hand goes to his hair every so often and smooths it back; the way he tilts his head when he listens. Yes, I know him.

  After five minutes he goes back to his office. I have seen him, really seen him. I feel high with it, pumped up, ferocious. I half walk, half run back towards town to pick up my car. My cheeks are red with the heat and the exertion, my heart pumping just enough that I am aware of its rhythm in my chest. The gears crunch as I move the car. My legs shake on the pedals and I let the clutch up too quickly, the car jerking to a stalled halt. I turn the key again impatiently, rev the engine, kangaroo hop forward. Back to Cory Construction, round the back to the car park and wait in a side street across the road opposite the entrance. He leaves early, at quarter past five, and I watch him get into a flash convertible. A young man’s car that only an old man could afford.

  Nothing in the mirror. The car indicator ticks as I signal left, follow him out through the town. He goes through the traffic lights and it turns to amber as I approach. I put my foot down on the accelerator, sail through as it turns red. It is me who is in charge, in control. I am watching him; he is not watching me. I am the pursuer; he the pursued. It gives me such a feeling of power, like he is an animal and I am tracking him. Sniffing him out. Left. Right. Right again. Round the town centre, out into the open road.

  A few miles out of town he slows, turns left, drives up a hill lined with pink rhododendron bushes. There is a small, exclusive development of maybe four or five houses at the top, with spectacular views out across the hills. It is a cul de sac. He turns into his driveway and I see him glance at my old battered car as I drive past and on to the end of the road to turn.

  The driveway has two stone lion gate heads at the entranceway. I slow going past, see the extensive front lawn with a sprinkling fountain, catch just a glimpse through the trees of a detached house. An extensive, red-roofed house with a sun deck at one end and a conservatory at the other. I can hardly bear t
he thought of it. Twenty-five years of luxury while my mother turned to dust under a ton of earth and concrete. We have things to talk about, James Cory and I. But not yet. Not quite yet.

  CHAPTER THREE

  This whole thing has become like a scab that I can’t stop picking. There are times, like in Terry Simons’ house, when it gets too sore to continue and I vow to leave the wound alone, let it heal. But as soon as the immediate pain dies down, the compulsion creeps back and I can’t keep my fingers away. I know that when I lift the crust of the scab, chances are I am going to remove more than dead skin. I’m going to pull new, fragile skin with it and draw blood. But even then, I just can’t seem to stop. I can’t stop pick, pick, picking.

  Terry Simons is bothering me. The ring. On the square. On the square. The phrase goes round and round inside my head and I don’t know why. It leads me back to the library, a half hunch, but what am I looking for? Masons. Masons. An Inside Story: The Secret World of Freemasonry, it says in the library catalogue. The book is there on the shelves when I look, a dark red cover with bold black writing on the spine. Inside, there’s a whole section on the police, a separate one on the judiciary. I flip over the pages, my eyes lighting on an extract from a newspaper cutting about the controversial memoirs of a senior policeman. 1969. David Thomas, Head of Monmouthshire CID. “The insidious effect of Freemasonry among the police has to be experienced to be believed.”

  A serving police officer’s testimony. “We all knew it happened. If two men were up for promotion and one belonged to the lodge, well all other things being equal… The boss said it was the same with any kind of club. If you knew a man through the golf club, it was going to make you closer. You were going to get to know them better over a round of golf. It wasn’t corruption, it was human nature, he said. In the end I decided to join. It was just a club, and a club that you were better in than out of.”

  Scandals. The collapse of Scotland Yard, 1877. And then a hundred years later, history repeating itself.

  The major impetus for challenging corruption in the Metropolitan Police came with the appointment of Sir Robert Mark in 1972. The notorious ‘Porn Squad Trials’ of the 1970’s involved wholesale corruption in an entire section of the capital’s CID police force. Officers in the Porn Squad were found to have turned a blind eye to the activities of Soho pornography dealers in return for substantial payments. It was subsequently discovered that some of the dealers and officers belonged to the same Masonic lodges.

  A senior officer of the Porn Squad, Detective Chief Inspector Bill Moody, was jailed for twelve years in 1977. It was, however, difficult to obtain evidence even from Masonic officers who were not involved in the corruption. Those who were ‘on the level’ or ‘on the square’, in other words members of the Lodge, saw it as their duty to protect their Masonic brothers…..

  That was London. What was happening 600 miles away in Inverness? I close the book. It’s a strong word, corruption. A tiger of a word. But sometimes corruption is quieter than a tiger. Sometimes it’s a worm. It’s slow burrowing, goes so deep you scarcely know it’s there any more. Is Terry Simons corrupt or merely misguided in defending Cory? I push down the alternative – that Cory really is innocent. I can’t know about Simons until I know what influences him.

  And sometimes you don’t even know what influences yourself.

  A quote from my mother’s letter that I found in the bureau comes back to me. ‘The Masonic mafia’ she had written flippantly. It was clear from what she wrote that David Carruthers had been a Mason. Was Cory? Probably. But did that mean Terry Simons automatically felt a duty to him, either consciously or subconsciously? Because corruption… well, it seems to me it isn’t always deliberate, straightforward, black and white. You know what it is? It’s see you in the club… why don’t you join us… one of us. Papes. Prods. Muslims. Jews. Little boxes, little boxes. Masons. Opus Dei. The Tribe of Angels. Black boxes, white boxes. Boxes like Tariq and I would have ended up in.

  Maybe it does matter if Cory was a Mason and maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s simpler than Masons and non-Masons. Maybe it’s just about insiders and outsiders. Some of us are always going to be outsiders. It’s what we know and what we expect. Da was an outsider. But James Cory? He was an insider. I know you, James Cory. One of us. Not guilty.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Back in the B & B room, an opened packet of supermarket sandwiches lies on the table by the window, a bite out of one sandwich. They irritate me too much to eat them. At twenty-eight, I still live like a broke nineteen-year-old student. I would have stretched to something better than a sandwich but I wanted to buy a bottle of wine. So they sit there, the egg and cress and the half-drunk bottle of cheapo red, like a silent reproof. A symbol of my failure to amount to anything. I want to tell them to fuck off but I can’t. I might need them. Bloody life all over.

  A phone rings in the distance, somewhere down the hall, then a tap comes at my door. Nobody has the B & B number except Mrs Carruthers. But when I answer, it’s a man’s voice.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Rebecca Connaghan?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is David Carruthers.”

  My heart quickens, then slows to a thumping, staccato beat.

  “David Carruthers? I thought… I’m sorry I didn’t… I was told David Carruthers was dead.”

  “I’m his son. My father died just over a year ago.”

  “I’m sorry…”

  “I’m told you were looking for my mother,” he continues over me. I get the feeling he is uninterested in social niceties. His voice is clipped, formal.

  “Yes, I thought, well, I hope… that she might be able to help me.”

  “I doubt it.”

  The dry tone stiffens my hackles.

  “I’m Kathleen Connaghan’s daughter.”

  “Yes, your message said.”

  “I’m up from Glasgow. I’m trying… trying to find out what happened to her.”

  “Well there’s nothing my mother can tell you. I must ask you to leave her in peace.”

  “What happened to Kathleen Connaghan had nothing to do with my mother or anyone else in my family. As you can imagine, she is still coming to terms with losing my father. She’s not well and I really don’t want her upset at the moment.”

  “I’m sorry to hear she’s not well. I really don’t want to upset her. I could just speak to her briefly, I won’t…”

  “I’m sorry, she can’t help you.”

  “But I…”

  “You’re not listening to what I am saying. My mother can’t help you. She is already upset by your call and she just doesn’t want any of this stuff resurfacing again. It had absolutely nothing to do with her or my dad.”

  “Perhaps I could meet with you first and explain everything and then you could…”

  But he interrupts again. “What on earth could I tell you? I was so young when all this happened.”

  “Just ten minutes…”

  “You really don’t seem to understand.” He sounds impatient now, his words little explosions of irritation. But I refuse to do the polite thing. I surf his anger, use the momentum of it to keep me upright.

  “I’ll meet any time that’s convenient for you.”

  “Look,” he says. “I’m really busy and I don’t see…”

  “I’ve just lost my dad.”

  The words catch in my throat, trembling there before emerging from my mouth, taking even me by surprise. On the wall where the phone hangs there is a pin board with cards stuck at every angle. Taxi numbers, cinema listings, a pizza delivery number. My fingers pick at a green drawing pin stuck tightly in the cork, working it loose.

  “I’m sorry,” he says finally.

  “Thanks.”

  “I know how hard that is.” His voice is softened, but has not been robbed of its purpose. “But… sorry… I can’t help you.”

  I don’t speak because I can’t. My finger works at the pin, the skin red and temporarily ind
ented, until the pin suddenly skites uncontrollably from the board. A taxi card flutters down, landing propped against the skirting board.

  He says nothing but the silence is disconcerting him. I can sense uncertainty ravelling round him like a cord, choking his certainty.

  “Are you on your own?”

  “Yes.”

  He is weakening. Even in my distress I can detach myself, recognise the main chance. A picture flashes into my mind. Father Dangerous, in the hotel room, lying beside me. I hear his voice. So many ghosts these days, but none the one I am looking for. “God, you’re hard, Rebecca,” says the ghost.

  “Please meet me,” I say quietly, resting my head against the pinboard.

  David Carruthers hesitates.

  “Please.”

  “Ten minutes is all I can manage.”

  “When?”

  “Now. Let’s get this done.”

  We meet in a town-centre bar with purple, marbled-effect wallpaper and dim, conical lights that hang low over wooden tables. Tea lights flicker in purple glass jars in the centre of the table. I know David Carruthers when he enters because of the way he hesitates, his eyes flicking round the room, searching. I try to catch his eye but he doesn’t see me, tucked as I am in the corner by the window. I like corners. They hold you in tight, like a womb.

  He’s dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, a soft, expensive-looking, black leather jacket on top. I can tell he’s vain. It’s far too hot for a jacket. He smells of money.

  It’s not just in his clothes but in his confidence, in the way he stands sure-footed in the centre of that room. I see it in the hotels I work in. Rich people walk differently.

  They talk like someone ought to listen. They hold themselves differently. The way David Carruthers holds himself now.