Little Black Lies

by Sharon Bolton

  ‘Was it mine?’ I call after her as she strides ahead. I know she isn’t going to tell me. Not now anyway. Still, the ball has been played. It’s in her court.

  We walk on, we’re almost home.

  ‘Cal, I need to ask you something about computers.’

  ‘Should be within my grasp.’ I’m sulking a bit.

  ‘I need to delete some files. If I go into File Management and delete them, are they gone for good or are they still on the hard drive somewhere?’

  Ask me something hard. ‘Still there. I can delete them properly for you, if it’s that important.’

  ‘Can you tell me how to do it?’

  As I start to wonder where this is going, we reach the last ridge and are a stone’s throw from the house. ‘If it’s your home computer, though, you might have to wait. It wasn’t in your bedroom earlier. It must have been taken in as part of the investigation.’

  She stops walking. Just as I see that there are two police cars waiting outside my house. I stop too. When she turns around I don’t like what I see on her face. She slips off my coat and hands it to me. ‘Thank you,’ she tells me. ‘Not just for the coat.’

  We’ve been seen. Stopford is getting out of one car with Josh Savidge. Skye is in the other, with two more constables. They start walking towards us.

  ‘Better late than never, I suppose.’ I feel the need to act as though this is no big deal. That, of course, given what we left behind at Catrin’s house, the police are going to be waiting for us.

  ‘I was wrong,’ she says. ‘About Ben being the reliable one. You’re the one who’s been there for me, who never gave up. I’m sorry.’

  And there’s the smile. It’s only there for a second, but it’s real. Then it’s gone. ‘Callum, don’t do anything stupid. You can’t protect me any more. Don’t get yourself in trouble.’

  ‘Cat, this is bullshit. They’ve probably just come to make sure you’re OK.’

  ‘Look after Queenie, please. I think Ben will take her, but until he can get something sorted out. Promise me you’ll look after her.’

  ‘There’s nothing they can do. They don’t have any evidence.’

  ‘Oh, they have enough. More than enough.’

  She starts walking forward. I put out a hand to hold her back and she gently brushes it away.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Callum,’ she tells me. Then she walks ahead. As the night grows colder, I stay where I am. I watch her meet the police head on. I watch her hold out her hands for the cuffs, I see her listen without arguing as they arrest her again. Then I watch them take her away.

  * * *

  Queenie is seriously upset. Scratching at doors, whining, racing from one side of the house to another. Not sure whether I want to yell at her or join in, I start wandering the rooms myself.

  Catrin wanted me to delete something on her computer. No, she wanted me to tell her how to do it. The police have her computer. Whatever it is she didn’t want me to see, they’ve seen. Knowing they’d seen it, she went with them without arguing.

  Catrin’s computer is a stand-alone model. There’d been no lead that would have connected it to a modem. No modem either. She had no way of sending emails or accessing websites. She’d have used it for admin, for storing information. That means there’s no way I can access it directly. To transfer information she’d have needed to save it on to a disk and download to another computer. If that’s been done already I can pick it up at the police station.

  Within minutes I’m back in the police system but I find nothing. I get up, light a fire, force food down my throat, feed Queenie and try again. Nothing. I keep trying. Finally, an hour before dawn, I find it. Her files have all been downloaded and saved, but one in particular has been opened and read several times in the past few hours. I open it too and find a diary. I had no idea she kept a diary. Maybe when she and I were together she didn’t. The first entry is dated a little under three years ago.

  In different circumstances, I would not dream of violating Catrin’s privacy. But everyone connected with the islands’ police force will know the contents of the document in front of me by now. I start reading. I finish as the sun is starting to appear on the eastern horizon.

  DAY SIX

  Saturday, 5 November

  23

  There must be some mechanism in our heads that acts as a kind of filter when really bad things happen. Protecting us from the full force of the blow, it lets the bad news trickle through, drip-feeding, giving us just enough to deal with, before calling a halt and making us take a break. Certainly, in this first hour after reading Catrin’s diary I’m struggling to take it all in, to make sense of any of it. For this first hour, I’m numb.

  Catrin kept a diary, that much I know. It started out as a record of grief, an expression of wonder that someone could go on living with so much pain. I deal with that, as I wander from room to room, step outside to let the cold air hurt me. Catrin kept a diary, and in it recorded the clear progression from grief to burning rage, then a cold, pitiless determination to get revenge.

  In reading Catrin’s diary, I have discovered a woman I had no idea existed. A woman whose pain was so great, that she was prepared to become a monster rather than go on living as she was.

  I thought nothing, ever again, could shock me to the core. I’ve seen mates blown apart by grenades on nights when I’ve been so cold I’ve been tempted to put my hands on the guts spilling out of their stomachs just to stay warm. I’ve seen dark-skinned boys running around battlefields looking for their missing arms. I’ve seen men bigger than me sobbing for their mothers, as they die lonely, freezing deaths on the opposite side of the planet. I thought it was impossible to shock me. How wrong I’ve been.

  The knocking on the door takes me completely by surprise.

  She’s back. It was all a mistake. The diary was nonsense, a fake, some twisted work of fiction. I race to the door and pull it open. Not Catrin on my doorstep.

  Rachel.

  24

  She smells like a beer mat in the Globe a few hours after the final whistle in the annual soccer match. Mascara smudges under her eyes suggest she hasn’t washed or looked at herself in the mirror for days.

  ‘I need to talk to you.’ Her eyes don’t quite focus on mine.

  I step back to let her in, but I’m wary. I can’t imagine why Rachel would be here. She and I barely know each other. Catrin talked about her a lot but never wanted the two of us to spend any time together.

  ‘She’ll know,’ she used to tell me. ‘If she sees us together, she’ll know immediately.’

  ‘Would that be such a bad thing?’ Unlike Catrin, I never wanted to keep our affair secret. I wanted everyone to know. I wanted to shout to the world that she was mine. Christ, I’d have tattooed ‘Property of Callum Murray’ on her forehead if I could.

  ‘It’s not fair to force a confidence on her.’ Catrin hadn’t even pretended to think about it. ‘She and Sander are friends with me and Ben. It would be putting her in a very difficult position.’

  So the secret had stayed a secret and Catrin, who shared everything with her best mate, now had something in her life that she couldn’t share. Mind you, it’s beginning to look like Catrin had more secrets than either of us knew about.

  Rachel shudders when she’s out of the wind, like a dog putting its fur to rights after a soaking. She’s generally considered to be one of the best-looking women on the islands, but I could never see it. Even before worry for her son stripped her face of any life, she was always too bland, too blonde, for my taste. There are dark roots peering through that blonde hair right now, and those famous blue eyes are bloodshot.

  ‘Catrin’s been arrested again.’ She isn’t dressed for the weather. She’s wearing riding jodhpurs and a thin, long-sleeved T-shirt. Both look too tight, strained over her flesh and bumpy in the wrong places. Knee-high boots. No coat. ‘The police found a diary on her computer. People are saying it’s tantamount to a confession, Callum. That she’s confe
ssed to killing Peter.’

  Christ, does confidentiality mean nothing to these people?

  Rachel sees something on my face and takes a nervous step backwards. ‘You knew, didn’t you? How did you know?’

  I don’t want this right now. I can’t deal with bereaved, hysterical mothers, I’m too close to hysterics myself.

  ‘Catrin was here when the police came for her. A couple of hours ago. Rachel, you should be with your family. Let me drive you home.’

  I turn to the door, meaning to open it, to steer her out, and catch a whiff of horse. She must have ridden over.

  She steps back again, holding out one hand as if to ward me off. ‘I need to read it for myself,’ she tells me. ‘I won’t believe it otherwise. Not Catrin. She wouldn’t.’

  I think I’d give anything to have that certainty back. That belief in Catrin. Except, I’ve read the diary. And now this woman wants to as well. I can’t let her do that.

  ‘Rachel, there’ll be all sorts of rumours flying round the next few days. You should listen to none of them. If there is a diary, it’ll come up as part of her trial.’

  ‘That will be months away. I need to know now.’

  I’m not budging from the door. Her face blanches, her eyes fill up. ‘I’m his mother, Callum. I have to know what’s happened to him. I can’t stand everyone at the police station knowing the details and me not.’

  ‘Rach.’ Without thinking, I use Catrin’s name for her. ‘I don’t know what you think I can do…’

  ‘You can find it.’ She steps forward, reaching out as if to touch me, not quite daring to. ‘Her computer’s at the police station. Her files will have been copied and you can access them. There is nothing you can’t do with computers.’

  I start to shake my head.

  ‘I know more about you than you think. I knew about the two of you. I knew from the very beginning. She could never hide anything from me.’

  ‘Rachel, I’m not sure what you mean, but—’

  ‘It was obvious. She physically changed when your name was mentioned. She sat upright, stopped whatever she was doing, so she wouldn’t miss a word that was being said. I could practically see her ears flapping.’

  ‘I need to take you home.’ I look round for something to pick up, some signal I can make that her time here is up. The woman didn’t bring a coat, a bag, anything. Short of opening the door and bundling her out, there’s nothing I can do.

  ‘She mentioned you more than she talked about her husband. Any excuse to drop your name into the conversation. I saw her eyes when she looked at you. Catrin didn’t know how to keep a secret. She certainly didn’t know how to lie. I knew when she’d been with you, and I knew when you hadn’t called her for a couple of days.’

  No, I can’t deal with this, not now. I feel bad for the woman, but my universe has been rocked too. ‘You’re upset. You need to be with your so— with Chris and Michael. They’ll be wondering where you are.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything.’ She seems to be trying to placate me now. ‘I would never have said anything. I was waiting for her to tell me.’

  She didn’t say anything to Catrin, but she told Catrin’s husband? I need to close this down, get her out of here. ‘Rachel, there was nothing to tell. You’ve got this wrong.’

  ‘I know she never loved Ben the way she loved you. I’m not sure she ever really loved him at all, but once you appeared, it was all over for them.’

  This woman is way smarter than Catrin. Or maybe just more manipulative. Catrin would never wheedle and flatter her way to what she wanted. She’d ask, straight up. If she didn’t get it, she’d argue the case, but it would be clean arguments. Catrin argued like a man. She would never dream of exploiting someone’s weakness the way Rachel is doing now. And Rachel is lying. Small lies, but lies all the same. If Catrin was telling me the truth – and I’ve never known her do otherwise – Rachel caught us in the act.

  ‘I’m phoning your parents.’ I stride round her and head for the phone at my desk. Big mistake. She follows me, of course, and Catrin’s diary is still open on my PC. All Rachel needs to do is move the mouse and the file will appear. I turn abruptly and put myself in between desk and visitor.

  ‘Rachel, you don’t know what you’re asking. Whatever Catrin might or might not have written in that diary, it’s not going to be stuff you want to read.’

  She doesn’t back down. No way, I realize, is this woman going to back down. ‘Of course it’s not. I don’t want Bob Stopford to come to my house later today, sit me down and tell me he’s very sorry but they’ve found my son’s body. But I know he’s going to, because Catrin’s diary will have told him where Peter is. I don’t want to be avoiding the newspapers six months from now, because all the details of how she killed him will be in there. I don’t want to tell Chris and Michael that their baby brother is never coming home. I don’t want to meet my husband off the plane later today and tell him I let his baby get killed by a madwoman who used to be my friend, but I’m going to have to do all these things and if I can know for certain, if I can read it in her own words, then it might start to sink in and I can begin to deal with it.’

  Oh crap, double crap, a whole fucking lorryload of crap.

  ‘Come and sit down.’

  She lets me take her into the sitting room. Queenie, curled up on the rug, opens her eyes and appears to start. She gets up slowly, not taking her eyes off Rachel. I push Rachel into a chair by the fire and pour us both a drink. Then I sit down at her side and look her directly in the eyes. No easy way of doing this.

  ‘Rachel, I’m truly sorry, but I think Peter may be dead.’

  She gives a cry, something in between a wail and a scream. Her hands come up towards her mouth and she seems to bite down on something directly in front of her face. I wish I’d never started this, but know I have to see it through.

  ‘I’m sure she didn’t hurt him. Or frighten him. She isn’t cruel. I’m sure it was all very quick, but it does look as though he’s dead. I’m so sorry.’

  Rachel closes her eyes, starts rocking backwards and forwards. She’d told herself anything was better than not knowing and now she’s discovering that not knowing has a lot to recommend it. Then she looks back at me and shakes her head. ‘She wouldn’t. I just know it. She wouldn’t.’

  She’s slipping out of focus. I take a deep breath and rub my eyes. Then she’s in my arms and I honestly can’t say which of us is sobbing. Or which of us is sobbing the hardest. When, minutes later, we’re calmer, we find that Queenie has crept into the gap between us.

  ‘You’ve read the diary already, haven’t you?’ Rachel whispers.

  ‘You shouldn’t read it,’ I say. ‘You should trust me when I tell you no good will come of you reading it.’

  She’s pulling herself away from me. ‘And yet I have to. Is it on your computer?’

  I don’t stop her this time. I pick up Queenie, trail after her and the three of us sit down at my desk.

  * * *

  The first two-thirds of it are hard enough to read. They are the private thoughts of a woman barely able to keep functioning, so great was the weight of her grief. Anyone would find them tough. For two people who loved her, both of whom, arguably, were directly responsible for her misery in the first place, they are close to unbearable. Rachel is clinging to my hand before she gets to the bottom of the first page. When she finishes the second, I prise myself free to get kitchen roll. I’m going to need it too.

  When I come back, she seems diminished. Outwardly, pretty much the same as I left her, staring directly ahead at the computer screen with eyes that might have forgotten how to blink; inside, though, something essentially human has slipped away.

  I sit down, put the kitchen roll between us, and we carry on.

  As I read, for the second time, about the ghosts of the little boys Catrin sees around her house, of the voices she hears calling for her out at sea, I think any half-decent lawyer should be able to pull off an insanity plea. I r
ead about how her husband faded in front of her eyes, how his colours became muted, his voice muffled, as he simply drifted out of her life. I reread her decision to stay on the islands rather than make a new life for herself elsewhere. Here on the Falklands, she tells herself, no one will ever ask her if she has children. No one will ever expect her to be normal.

  There is no mention of me. I have ego enough to notice that. It’s as though I stopped existing for Catrin the day I didn’t save her children.

  The passages Rachel needs to see, the words that, when read in any court, will convict her former friend, are towards the end. On 19 October this year, Catrin wrote:

  People would tell me to forgive Rachel; that what happened was an accident, nobody’s fault, that she is suffering too. They’d say that only through forgiveness can I begin to heal. As though healing were even remotely possible. Or desirable. I cannot bear the thought of a life without my sons. In this half-life left to me, this existence in the shadows, they are still with me. I cannot let them go.

  Rachel jumps when she sees her own name on the screen. In the words of the song, she ain’t seen nothing yet.

  The truth is, I don’t hate Rachel, the woman I once knew, because she’s no longer that woman for me. She isn’t human in my eyes now, any more than I am. She’s become an event. A living disaster. A void sucking every last beam of light from around me. She’s the reason the world has lost all balance. While she’s around, the universe is tilted and those of us on the underside are on the brink of falling straight down into hell.

  I’m not looking at the woman beside me any more. I can’t.

  * * *

  The piece that I have no doubt will eventually become known as Catrin’s confession begins on Tuesday, 1 November, the day after Archie West’s abduction.

  A child has gone missing. I have no interest in who he is or how it happened. I don’t care whether he’s found tonight or in six months’ time when his bones have been picked clean by birds. I have no interest in any living child, but I can’t get the sight of his mother out of my head. She was disappearing before my eyes. Folding inwards. Her shock and helplessness were simply beyond her capacity to cope.