by Tess Stimson
Caz lied. I knew it then, and I know it now. My daughter didn’t kill her father, even in a desperate moment of madness. It’s not that I don’t believe her capable of such an act; I know better than most how thin is the line between normal and crazy. In extremis, we can all be driven to do something we’d never have thought was in our nature. But I also know Bella could never lie to me, not about something like this. Not for five months; not to me. I’d know.
Except she lied to me about where she was that dreadful morning, I think uneasily. She wasn’t swimming in the lagoon, like she said. I saw her leaving the Beach House, just moments before I got there.
Bella was traumatised, that’s all. She’s probably just blanked the horror from her mind. No point mentioning it to anyone. After all, Caz is the one who’s guilty.
Bella has always refused to discuss what happened that day with anyone, and on the advice of the counsellor we found to help her through her father’s brutal murder, I’ve never pressed it. I don’t know what she saw at the Beach House, but she certainly saw me, covered in her father’s blood, being taken away in a police car. Of course it scarred her, but she’s recovering. Her therapist is very skilled, very kind, and Bella is almost back to her old self again. Almost.
I take a gulp of wine. All these months later, the metallic smell of blood still lingers in my nostrils. I can still see the messianic fervour in Caz’s eyes when she concocted that ridiculous story to save her own skin, accusing Andrew of the most appalling wickedness. ‘There’s only one way to throw them off Bella’s scent,’ she said feverishly, in those last few moments before the groundsmen burst through the door. ‘We have to blame each other. They won’t be able to prove which of us did it, but they’ll be so busy trying, they won’t even look at Bella.’
In the street below, Christmas lights wink in the darkness. A young man in a Santa suit lets himself into an alley behind a department store, pulling off his long white beard and shoving it in his pocket so he can light a cigarette. I turn away from the window. No one is ever what they seem.
The familiar doubt gnaws at me as I pour myself a second glass of wine. I wish I hadn’t agreed to let the children spend the weekend at my parents’. Even now, I still don’t know why Caz would tell such an outrageous lie about Bella, unless lying is so much second nature to her, she no longer knows how to tell the truth. Why not just blame an intruder? Why tell me it was Bella?
I put my empty wineglass in the kitchen sink, and frenetically start to wipe down countertops that are already clean. Who knows why Caz lied, I think bitterly; maybe she’s so delusional she actually believes what she said is true. But she killed Andrew. She murdered him as surely as she poisoned my cat. I caught her, literally red-handed, covered in his blood! There’s no doubt in my mind she did it. No doubt. And thanks to me, she got away with it. I was the one who contaminated the crime scene; my fingerprints and DNA were everywhere. How could any jury decide which of us had struck the fatal blow? If it hadn’t been for our bitter history, the police might even have concluded we were in it together.
For a fleeting second, I wonder what I would have done if Bella had been guilty. My first instinct would be to protect my daughter, of course, but would covering up for her really be the best thing in the long run? I’d wreck her moral compass for life. Our actions, accidental or not, have consequences. Even if I’d believed Caz, I don’t think I could have gone along with her plan to blame each other to save Bella, though judging by the way things have played out with the CPS, the ploy would’ve worked. But it’s easy to be morally upright in theory. None of us ever truly know what we’d do until we’re put to the test.
My mother has no such qualms. ‘Of course you’d cover up for her,’ she said briskly, when I confided what Caz had told me. ‘You’re her mother. A mother would do anything to protect her child. Morality doesn’t come into it.’
She’s been an absolute rock, my mother. She grieves Andrew’s loss herself, I know that, but her only concern has been for Bella and Tolly. Thanks in no small part to her, the children are both doing better than I dared hope. I’m the one who can’t seem to get past Andrew’s death. I despise him for what he did with Taylor, but I would never have killed him and deprived my children of their father. No one deserves to die the way he did, drowning in his own blood.
Perhaps, if the police had been able to prove Caz did it, if I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Bella wasn’t involved—
I straighten up and throw the kitchen sponge into the sink in frustration. Every time I let myself go down this insane rabbit hole, I give Caz what she wants. She told me that ridiculous story to mess with my head, and I’m letting her.
Thank God I never have to see the woman again. She moved to New York with Kit as soon as the police returned her passport. She’s working at a very cutting-edge ad agency, Patrick tells me. No doubt she’ll go far. The further from me, the better.
I pick up Tolly’s toys from the sitting room floor and return them to his room, the maelstrom of doubt and fear quietly dissipating as it does whenever I think of Patrick these days. He and Tolly have become firm friends in the three months since Patrick and I started seeing each other again. If he’s done the maths around Tolly’s birthday and our affair, he hasn’t said anything, but things are going so well between us, I think I may tell him the truth soon. Tolly needs a father, and Patrick needs a son, even if he doesn’t know it yet.
Bella gets on well with him, too. I thought she’d be really hostile to the idea of me dating again, especially so soon after her father’s death, but to my surprise, she was encouraging. ‘It’s been four years since you split up, Mum,’ she said, when I tentatively broached the subject. ‘It’s about time you met someone else.’
I tuck Tolly’s Star Wars trainers neatly at the bottom of his wardrobe, and try to close it, but the door jams on something. Kneeling down, I wrestle the canvas strap of a small holdall from beneath the runner. Bella borrowed it from my mother when she came up to stay the other weekend. No doubt it’s filled with dirty washing. I must remember to make sure she takes the bag back to Mum next weekend.
Opening the laundry closet in the hall, I empty the contents of the bag onto the floor. Out tumble a pair of grubby jeans, the sweatshirt Bella lost two weeks ago and which caused a hurricane of hunting, and half a dozen dirty T-shirts and odd socks. Not a single item is black. That phase has finally passed, thank God, along with her friendship with Taylor. I think she’s met someone new, though she hasn’t actually said anything; she gets a lot of texts from a girl called Alice. It seems much less intense than her relationship with Taylor, much less dangerous. I’m hoping she’ll be ready to bring her home to meet us soon.
I throw everything into the washing machine, and shake out the holdall to make sure I’ve got every last sock. A crumpled pair of denim shorts falls onto the floor; they smell damp, as if they’ve been put away wet. I check the pockets, inhaling the briny tang of salt water, and toss them into the machine. They’ve probably been sitting in the holdall since the summer. None of us have been back to the beach since Andrew’s death. That’s a demon we’ll all need to face at some point, but not just yet.
My breath suddenly catches in my throat as I fold up the empty holdall. Caught in the zip is a long, tangled wisp of pale gold chiffon. It must have lain forgotten in the bottom of my mother’s canvas holdall, along with the shorts.
I ease the delicate fabric through my fingers. My mother’s chiffon scarf. She was wearing it that fateful morning at the hotel. I remember Bella teasing her at breakfast: Are you going to wear that gold scarf all weekend, Gree?
You only get one golden wedding anniversary, Mum said, laughing. Might as well make the most of it.
Splashed across the chiffon, faded but unmistakable, is the dull rust arterial spray of my husband’s blood.
Chapter 45
Celia
I think we can all agree: if ever a man deserved to be murdered, it was Andrew Page.
There was no shortage of women in his life with a motive. Louise, Caroline, Bella, Taylor, even Min; any one of them might have done it. Teenage girls can be very emotional, very passionate. They’re a maelstrom of hormones and feelings they don’t know what to do with. Louise knows that better than anyone. All that nonsense with Roger Lewison when she was nineteen; she stabbed herself that night at his house, but it could just as easily have been his wife. Or Roger himself.
She may tell herself now she’d never have killed the father of her children in cold blood, but I saw the look in her eyes the night before he died, on her way back from the beach. She can lie to herself, but not to me. I’m her mother. She went down to the Beach House that morning for a reason. It was just luck I got there first.
I didn’t kill Andrew to punish him, though he’d certainly earned it. I did it to save my daughter, and my granddaughter, from themselves. Any mother would have done the same. And I’ve had my life. It ended when Nicky died. I’m just marking time now, until the end.
Losing a child changes you in ways you’d never have believed possible. The person you thought you were is gone. There’s a shadow that covers the world, even as you are forced to still live in it. You cannot imagine the depth of pain to which you are taken unless you’ve gone through it yourself. It’s every parent’s worst fear, every parent’s nightmare. But your deepest fear of losing a child, is just that: a fear. Your fear is my story.
Everything looks different where I am; it even has a different smell. There isn’t a part of you that can possibly relate to this feeling. That’s a good thing, trust me. It’s not a feeling you want to have. You want nothing to do with this world. I’m like a prisoner in a cage; you can’t even come and visit me here.
I know what it’s like to bury my child. I know what it’s like to have to pick something out to wear to my child’s funeral. I know the feeling of having to force air into my lungs, just so I can breathe. The feeling of having to keep on living when there is nothing left to live for. I know what it’s like to put all my child’s belongings in a box. I know the feeling of bringing flowers to his grave. I can’t ever forget the smell of freshly dug dirt. I know what it’s like to have the whole world pity you, and in the same moment be glad they are not you.
Grief leaves you hollow and shattered, but when the pieces re-form into a misshapen, distorted approximation of the person you used to be, you find yourself stronger. Capable of doing anything to protect the ones you love.
I refuse to lose Louise, or Bella. They may mourn Andrew, but they will move on. Human beings are designed to absorb loss and heal. Except for the loss of a child. We are not meant to survive that.
Andrew was sleeping when I got to the Beach House that day. The knife was right there, on the table next to him; I didn’t have to use the one I’d brought. His death wasn’t quite instant: somehow, he staggered to his feet as I left, but I think he deserved a little pain, a moment of knowing, before he died. I hadn’t realised Caz was outside on the balcony until afterwards, I’d thought she was still at the lagoon, but she didn’t see me slip down the path to the beach. I must have missed Bella by just seconds as she came the other way. I’m so sorry I had to put her through that: walking in on her father in his last, bloody moments. But it could have been so much worse. Her friend, Taylor, had just told her that Andrew had been the father of her baby. Who knows what might have happened if Bella had been the one to find the knife.
I don’t know if she saw me leave the Beach House. She’s never mentioned it, but she’s also never told anyone she was there that day. I don’t know if she suspects me, or Caz, or even her mother, but if she does, she isn’t going to tell.
After all, the Roberts women are good at keeping secrets.
Acknowledgements
I am extraordinarily lucky to have two editors to thank for making this book so much better than I could have managed alone: Rachel Faulkner-Willcocks, who was working on the manuscript right up to the moment her beautiful daughter arrived a little earlier than expected, and Tilda McDonald, who seamlessly picked up the baton and carried the book across the finish line. I am truly blessed to have you both.
Thanks also to Rebecca Ritchie, who is, without question, the best agent in the world. Thank you for holding my hand, calming my terrors, and championing my writing with faith and passion.
Thank you to Sabah Khan, my brilliant and dogged publicist, and Helena Newton for copyediting. Your eagle eye prevented some excruciating howlers.
And thanks to all at Avon and HarperCollins for their tireless support behind the scenes, doing all the unglamorous heavy lifting that actually puts books into readers’ hands.
Thanks to Georgie Stewart, for reading the manuscript at lightning speed to check I’d got the details of the advertising world right; and to Wikipedia for some of the technical medical detail. Any errors are my own.
Thanks, too, to the NetGalley readers and the many bloggers and book lovers who review my novels and give them a headwind as they sail out into the world. It makes such a difference, it really does.
And across the globe, thanks to all the readers, to all the buyers and sellers and lenders of books who ensure that a good story, well told, will always find an audience. You set a high bar, which is as it should be.
Last, though never least, thanks to my family, Erik, Henry, Matt and Lily, for riding the rollercoaster that is life with an insecure, paranoid, narcissistic writer, for holding on hard and never letting go.
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‘More chilling than Gone Girl and twistier than The Girl on the Train’ Jane Green
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Published in the US as A Mother’s Secret
About the Author
Tess Stimson is the author of eleven novels, including top ten bestseller The Adultery Club, and two non-fiction books, which between them have been translated into dozens of languages.
A former journalist and reporter, Stimson was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Florida in 2002 and moved to the US. She now lives and works in Vermont with her husband Erik, their three children, and (at the last count) two cats, three fish, one gerbil and a large number of bats in the attic.
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