The Darkest Secret

by Alex Marwood

  Builders. Strange, noisy creatures. He thought when he was young that it was a British class thing, but every construction site he’s come across anywhere in the world – Dubai, Hong Kong, even the smiling Thais – has been filled with men who can communicate only at a roar. The Poles, it seems, are no different. Their fuck-offs and their oi-mates have more consonants and fewer vowels, but otherwise they might have come from some finishing school run by Barratt Homes.

  He picks his way past the crane and stamps up the steps that run up the side of the bank. The digger is on the crest, ladling sandy soil – more like soily sand, down here – into the back of a dump truck. Four men stand by the wheels in hard hats, shouting at each other over the grinding of gears. He’s impressed by how fit all these Poles are who’ve been flooding in since the gates were opened. Not a belly or a butt-crack between them beneath those hi-vis jackets. On his own build there was a forklift driver who had to literally lift his stomach up to get behind the wheel. Didn’t stop him commenting on every teenage girl to pass along the road, though. He was glad they’d gone by the time his daughters turned up. No guarantee that these good Catholic boys are any better, but somehow he feels less bothered when the ogling isn’t coming from someone who must be cultivating galloping fungal infections down his low-slung trousers.

  He marches up to them and shouts, ‘Excuse me!’

  They don’t hear him the first time. He adjusts the volume. ‘OI! EXCUSE ME!’

  Four pairs of eyes swivel to look. ‘Foreman!’ he shouts. ‘Which one of you’s the foreman?’

  The men stare at him blankly. Of course. None of them has bothered to learn the language before they set off across Europe to be here on the first of May, when Poland joined the Schengen system. ‘Boss!’ he yells. ‘I need to speak to the boss!’

  They look none the wiser. But one of them bangs on the door of the digger and shouts ‘Janusz! Że dupkiem z pokoju obok jest z powrotem!’ and the engine cuts out. I don’t know if I’m getting the boss, he thinks, but I guess they’re at least getting me the anglophone.

  The door opens and the man he spoke to yesterday emerges. ‘Hello, mister,’ he says, and climbs down. Shouts a few words to one of his team, who climbs up into the cab and picks up where he left off. Multi-skilled, thinks Sean. I must get me a few of those. Can’t stand watching men sitting around drinking tea while the plasterer’s in, on my dollar.

  ‘It’s six-thirty in the morning!’ he shouts, nonetheless. Sean has never had a problem holding two ideas in his head at one time.

  There are big patches of early-morning sweat beneath Janusz’s arms. Sean is sweating too. That last armagnac he had is seeping undigested from his pores and he has a raging, queasy thirst. I bet he can smell it, he thinks. But I don’t care. It doesn’t matter if I have a hangover or not; this is completely out of order.

  ‘Yes, sorry, mister,’ says Janusz. ‘We got a deadline here.’

  He’s trying it on, the way they all do. There’s not a builder on the planet who doesn’t know the local noise by-laws and ignores them anyway.

  ‘You know and I know you’re not allowed to start with heavy machinery until eight-thirty,’ he shouts. ‘Shut it down!’

  Janusz flips both hands out in the air. ‘We’re only doing our jobs, mister,’ he shouts.

  Sean invokes all the patrician gods who raised him up to his pedestal. Stares the man full in the eye with magisterial dignity and shouts, ‘Tough!’

  Janusz shouts something up at the man in the cab, and the engine stops.

  ‘Listen,’ says Janusz, ‘we’re running late.’

  ‘Not my problem.’

  ‘But it’s part your fault, mister. If your trucks hadn’t been blocking our trucks we would have got this pool in by now.’

  ‘Not my problem, again,’ he says. ‘You stop until you’re allowed to start or I’m calling the council. Want to see how delayed you’ll be then?’

  Janusz calls something to his men and they all take their hats off. Each one, as he does so, blows upwards from a pouting lower lip. Obviously some sort of commentary on the development, but Sean is immune to workman commentary. He’s been telling site staff what to do for well over two decades.

  ‘Right,’ he says. He’s starting to feel shaky now. This is going to be a long, long day.

  As he retreats down the bank he hears a burst of laughter behind him. He knows they’re talking about him, but he ignores it. Two more hours’ sleep, he’s bought them all, at least. Maybe if he gets an Alka-Seltzer and a couple of pints of water inside him the moment he gets back to the house, the worst of his suffering will have passed by the time the engines start again. He doubts it, though. This one feels as though it might be set in for the day. Thank God my birthday’s not until tomorrow, he thinks. Claire may have been pissed off at the prospect of the extra night, but the first night of the holidays is always a big one and nobody’s fit for anything the next day.

  Two skinny figures, legs like storks’, hurry along the road in the sunlight. Each one carries a pair of high-heeled shoes in her hands. Someone’s had an even bigger night out than I have, he thinks; if that’s not the walk of shame, I’ve lost my eye. And then he sees that the two figures are his daughters, and he stops dead.

  ‘Where have you two been?’ he asks. No one, he suddenly remembers, went to check whether they’d come home at any point during the night. Simone, no trouble at all as ever, simply stayed in the annexe with her book and her snacks. At least, he thinks, I suppose she did. None of us would know, in all honesty.

  The girls’ eyes flick towards each other and back again. ‘We got up and went for a walk,’ says India. ‘It’s such a lovely day.’

  I could do without this, he thinks, swaying in the sunlight. Is it too much to ask, that I just have a jolly weekend without other people lobbing spanners into the works? ‘You got dressed up in last night’s clothes and smeared make-up halfway down your cheeks to go for a walk down to the chain ferry?’

  ‘You’re always on at us about making more effort,’ says Milly. She’s so damn sassy that there are moments when he wants to slap her. ‘I’d’ve thought you’d be pleased.’

  ‘Don’t give me that,’ he says. ‘You’ve been out all night, haven’t you?’

  ‘What?’ asks Milly. ‘You think, or you know?’

  Being wrong-footed makes him angry. What sounds like a ribald comment tumbles down from the bank behind him and is followed by a couple of laughs. Oh, go back to your kielbasa, he thinks, irritably. It’s got nothing to do with you.

  ‘Right, well, you’re both grounded.’

  The girls’ heads turn and they look at each other. They burst out laughing. ‘You’re hilarious!’ says India. ‘That’s the best one ever!’

  Sean is dumbfounded. Feels his life slipping away between his fingertips. When did his daughters stop respecting him? And why has he only just noticed?

  ‘He’ll probably stop our pocket money next,’ says Milly, in her performance voice.

  ‘Oh, yes?’ India waves jazz hands of imitation terror. Then drops them to her side with abrupt contempt. ‘Mind you, I guess he’d have to give us some first…’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ says Milly. ‘I forgot about that.’

  ‘You’re old enough for Saturday jobs,’ he says.

  ‘Ooh!’ replies India. ‘Does that mean I have your permission to drop the court-ordered access visits and get a job instead?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Milly. ‘They do rather get in the way of regular employment, don’t they?’

  ‘Still,’ says India, ‘as long as you’re happy with your new family, that’s all that counts, eh?’

  ‘He’d better. He’d be terribly lonely otherwise,’ says Milly, ‘given how he doesn’t even remember we’re coming half the time.’

  Sean feels as if he’s been hit by a tornado. ‘Listen,’ he tries, ‘while you’re in my house, you live by my rules, okay?’

  ‘Great!’ says Milly, and marches past him towards the
house. ‘I’ll open the brandy, Indy. You fetch the dope.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  I should have asked. Goddammit, I should have asked. Or Claire should have warned me, at least, if she’s been keeping stuff back for so long. Let me in on the party line. Or maybe that’s it. Maybe she’s been waiting for someone else to have to do it, all these years.

  ‘What do you know?’ I ask, cautiously.

  ‘What I’ve been told. And I know it’s bullshit. If she’d died in a swimming pool accident there wouldn’t have been journalists swarming all over the place when Dad died. And it’s not the first time. They were here a couple of years ago, and they were here when I was eight, and I worked out ages ago that that must have been the fifth and tenth anniversaries. So yeah. I call bullshit. We’re not famous people. I know Dad’s rich, but that by itself isn’t enough to make them interested. Jammy people’s kids drown in swimming pools far more often than poor people’s, it’s a fact, because rich people have more swimming pools for them to drown in, but people don’t keep asking about it for years after they have.’

  Oh, boy. ‘Tell me what they told you,’ I say, playing for time. Stupid, stupid people. They didn’t really think they could keep this from her forever, did they? And now I’m stuck not only with telling her, but telling her by default that her parents are liars. I mean. She was going to work it out sometime this weekend. Surely Claire saw that one coming?

  She’s not daft. She knows what I’m doing, but she plays along. ‘I had a twin sister. Her name was Coco. She drowned in a swimming pool when we were little, when we were on holiday. That’s all I know. I don’t remember it. You’d have thought I’d remember some of it, wouldn’t you? I mean, if we were on holiday I must have been there too, right? I barely remember her. If it weren’t for that… shrine that Mum keeps in the living room I probably wouldn’t remember her at all, really.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘you don’t get any more thinking time. Just tell me.’

  Smart. She’s been saving this up to catch me on the hop because she thinks that if I have time to get my story straight I won’t tell her the truth. She’s probably right.

  ‘And you’ve never tried to find out? Looked it up on the internet? Watched items about it on TV?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘I always wondered why we didn’t have a TV. I mean, I know she home-schools me and that and home schoolers are notoriously nutso, but I just thought it was about protecting me from all the rubbish. And, you know, porn and that. The internet’s nothing but porn, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s got other stuff as well,’ I say, and then I bite my lip when I realise she’s been playing me. ‘Oh,’ I say again.

  ‘We’ve had smartphones since before I was born, Grandma,’ she says. ‘And she’s so dumb about it all that she never noticed what sort of upgrades I was getting on Dad’s business account.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say again. ‘So why did you pretend you didn’t know?’

  ‘I wanted to see if you’d toe the party line.’

  And I haven’t even had coffee yet.

  ‘I might well have done if I knew what it was,’ I say. ‘I’ve not exactly been besties with your mum, you know? We’ve not been having long confabs in the wee small hours.’

  ‘So what happened?’ she asks again. Persistent, like her father.

  ‘I wasn’t there, Ruby. I can’t tell you anything other than what I was told myself.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Short version? Same as the one you know. Same as the one in the papers you’ve been reading. She disappeared.’

  Ruby’s jaw snaps shut. Whatever answer she’s been expecting, it wasn’t that one. I think she’s been persuading herself these past few weeks that if she caught me on the hop she could force some admission out of me that the combined might of Fleet Street has failed to do. I know. I know how she feels. The whole thing stinks like old fish, but they’ve all stuck to the same story for the past twelve years and unless one of them cracks then I’m going to know no more than anybody else.

  We reach the village, drive up past the shop towards the main road. A woman is pruning an already neat box hedge with a pair of oversized shears. She turns to stare at us as we go by. Ruby clamps a cheery grin to her face and waves as we pass. Recognising her, the woman waves back and returns to her chore. They don’t miss a trick in this village. It’s more secure than Wandsworth Prison.

  As soon as we pass, her smile disappears and she turns to me again. ‘What do you mean, disappeared? What happened?’

  If we knew that, Ruby, we would have found her, wouldn’t we?

  ‘Look,’ I tell her, ‘I can only tell you what I know. I wasn’t there. I was there that weekend, and I know who else was there, but India and I had left ages before it happened. That afternoon on the beach you remember? With the jellyfish? That was that weekend. It must have been Thursday afternoon, because we were gone by Friday, and Coco didn’t even disappear till Sunday night, Monday morning. We weren’t getting on with Dad, and he’d forgotten we were even meant to be there, and we couldn’t stand those people. I never could. That bloody Charlie Clutterbuck makes me want to throw up. So we went home. And don’t think it’s not crossed my mind that if we’d stayed we might have stopped it happening. I’ve thought it over and over. You were nice little kids. I actually liked you both, whatever I thought about your mum and my dad and the bloody awful mess they’d created. You didn’t deserve that. Coco didn’t deserve that.’

  Ruby is quiet for a moment as she digests my words and then she says, ‘So what happened?’ again, very calmly, very firmly. I swear, the kid could get a job with the Stasi.

  I take a breath and slow down. Try to order my thoughts so I can tell her in some sort of rational order. If she’s been Googling the whole sorry mess, there’s very little I can add, apart from working out which of the conspiracy theories she’s soaked up with the facts.

  ‘It’s not like I don’t blame them,’ I say. ‘But not your mum. I’ve got plenty of reasons for feeling sour towards her, but not for that. She’d left too, because Dad was being so unreasonable. And I’m not, like, all Daily Mail about it, either. I don’t see why she shouldn’t have left her kids in the charge of their father. But they were all drinking like fish all weekend. I don’t suppose they’d have heard a bomb go off once they were asleep, let alone someone creeping around downstairs.’

  Ruby just sits there and stares silently.

  ‘I…’ I say, and dry up. We reach the main road and I get to concentrate on feeling my way out into the traffic for a moment.

  ‘Just tell me,’ she says, once we’re bowling along the outside lane.

  ‘I don’t know what you want me to tell you,’ I say. ‘There’s not some… back room where we’ve been keeping the whole story. She disappeared from the bedroom you were sharing in the middle of the night. No one ever found her, or any sign of her.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ says Ruby. ‘It clearly had a major impact on your life, then.’

  ‘No, I…’ She’s right, of course. It’s not fair to leave it like that. Ruby is probably the person most affected by it all, in the end, even more than her mother, and she knows nothing.

  ‘Okay,’ she says, ‘then tell me it in your own words and I’ll see.’

  See what? I take my eyes off the road to look at her for a moment. She is calm and dead, dead serious. Okay, I think. It’s not like I’m going to be able to change the subject. I sigh and start from the beginning.

  ‘Well, it was Dad’s fiftieth birthday. Have you heard of a place called Sandbanks? It’s in Poole Harbour.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ she says. She clearly wants me to get on to the good stuff, but I’m not going to, not just like that. If I’m going to tell everything I know, she needs to hear what she’s asked for: the story in my words.

  ‘Fair enough. It’s a bit of a tabloid favourite, because it suddenly became the most expensive per-square-foot property in the country some
time in the 1990s. There’s no obvious reason. It’s a suburban sandspit that cuts almost all the way across the harbour, with a chain ferry at the end, going over to Purbeck. It used to be the sort of place accountants retired to, and there was a run-down hotel with the sort of sandy beach they market for family holidays. Then suddenly all these IT millionaires started buying up there and the whole market went wild. So Dad started doing quick-turnover refurbs down there. He was making a quarter, half a million in profit off each one. He was wallowing in easy dough like a milk bath.’

  Ruby grunts. She clearly doesn’t think a history of the British property market is going to get her very far.

  ‘I’m telling you because it’s why we were there, Ruby. And there rather than, you know, the South of France. I don’t suppose the papers got on to that; they were too wrapped up in the whole Millionaires’ Row angle. He had just finished a refurb and it was going on the market the following week, and it was the most deluxe conversion he’d ever done, so he decided he might as well make use of the facilities he’d paid for and have his birthday weekend down there.’

  ‘Poole Harbour’s Bournemouth, isn’t it? It’s not exactly Dad, is it?’

  ‘No. Exactly. All honesty? I think he wanted to pretend he was a teenager again, and it’s so much easier to do that if you don’t have customs officials to get past.’

  She thinks about this for a moment. ‘So you’re saying they were taking drugs?’

  ‘You wanted to know, Ruby.’

  She looks disgusted, the way only a teenager can do at the thought of someone of mature years doing rock-star stuff. Gawd. The whole Simone thing must be even more gruesome for her than it is for me. Primal trauma is one thing, but the old goat with a woman who is a couple of years shy of being legally able to be his granddaughter? Especially when that woman is Simone. I was as sick as a dog for weeks when I found out.