Tell Me No Secrets

by Julie Corbin

  A weighty silence swells to fill the space around us and then Euan crouches down beside her. ‘Orla! Can you hear me?’ He tries to feel the pulse in her throat then gives up and lays his ear against her chest. He looks up at me. ‘She’s not breathing.’ He starts mouth to mouth, then finds the base of her sternum, moves his hands up her ribcage and pushes hard where her heart should be. Just like I did for Rose. Fifteen compressions and two breaths, over and over.

  Time slows right down. I watch Euan and I watch Orla. Blood is leaking on to the floor. I walk around her body to better see where it’s coming from. Her skull has been opened up by one of the cast-iron points at the edge of the fire surround. Blood and a spongy, grey mess is oozing from a deep cut in the base of her skull. I put my fist in my mouth. The air around me judders. Lights flash and I slide into a memory. Euan has me tied to the big tree and I’ve fallen asleep. I’m dreaming about us flying. We’re holding hands and we’re flying over the village. Me and him. I can see our back gardens and I shout, ‘Look, Euan! There!’ And we fly back down to earth, land with a bump.

  I’m on the floor. Someone is whimpering. Me. It’s a weak, insipid sound that says nothing about how desperate I feel. My eyes are smarting, my head pounds and I cough and then immediately wince. My throat feels as if it’s lined with cut glass. I crawl around Orla’s body and grab hold of Euan’s trousers. ‘Her head,’ I say, and then try to stand up but my legs tremble uncontrollably and I end up on all fours again.

  Euan leans over her body. He feels the back of her skull then says something under his breath and sits back on his haunches. There is blood all over his hands. The smell is metallic, iron-rich and cloying. It catches at the back of my throat and I retch. I crawl back towards my handbag and my mobile phone. I will call an ambulance. Of course I will. They might be able to save her. They can work wonders nowadays. They have all sorts of cutting-edge techniques that save lives and restore people back to full health. But hard as I try, I can’t press the numbers. My hands are shaking and my vision is blurring. I start to cry, hacking sobs that shake me inside out.

  I don’t know how much time passes – one minute or five, I can’t say – but finally I get up on to my feet again. Euan is standing now and is looking down at Orla’s body.

  ‘Is she dead?’

  He nods.

  I steel myself to look at her. People often say that the dead appear to be sleeping. But Orla doesn’t look like she’s asleep. Her face is bleached of colour. Her body is eerily still. Her dress has risen up at one side and I can see marks on the inside of her thigh.

  ‘Track marks,’ Euan says. ‘From where she’s been injecting heroin.’

  The pinkie finger of her left hand is bent backwards. I move it in line with the others. It won’t stay. It juts out at right angles to the one next to it.

  Euan sits down in the armchair and I sit on the floor close to his feet, pull my knees up to my chin. Part of me is disengaged like a chain separated from the cog that turns it. The other part of me is asking: What now? Orla is dead. It’s over. My stomach shrinks. It’s like she said in the graveyard: Euan was always good at doing what had to be done.

  I twist around to face him. ‘Did you mean to kill her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He looks hurt then says flatly, ‘I didn’t know the spike was there and even if I had, I could hardly have judged it so accurately.’

  I consider this and then say, ‘Why did you never tell me about Rose?’

  He raises his eyebrows. ‘Cowardice.’

  I shake my head. ‘You’re not a coward.’

  ‘Then you pick a reason.’ He stands up. ‘For now we have to deal with this.’ He points to Orla’s crumpled body, blood spreading across the floorboards in a meandering stream. I am resigned to calling the police and telling them the whole sorry tale, beginning with Rose and ending with Orla’s death but Euan says, ‘Grace? Look at me.’

  I look.

  ‘This is what you have to do. Go back to your car and wait there. If anybody comes down the path to her cottage call me. Can you manage that?’

  ‘What will you say to the police?’

  ‘We can’t call the police.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I could end up being prosecuted.’ He looks stern. ‘We both could.’

  ‘We can’t cover this up!’ I stand up beside him. ‘It was an accident! Self-defence. She was trying to strangle me and you stopped her.’

  ‘Maybe so but it doesn’t look good,’ Euan continues. ‘There will be an inquiry and the police will be bound to discover that we had reason to shut her up.’

  I almost agree with him and then I think about the years stretching ahead of me. Fearful. Looking over my shoulder. What if someone has seen my car and tells the police I was here? What if Orla told someone that she thought we were going to harm her? What if Euan, years down the road, decides to blackmail me? He’s not someone I can trust any more. He’s almost as much of a snake as she was. He deliberately withheld information that would have turned my life around.

  ‘Just go, Grace.’ He tries to touch my arm, thinks better of it when I glare at him. ‘Walk through the door and don’t look back.’

  I reach for my mobile. ‘Well, there’s the thing.’ I hold his eyes. ‘I would always be looking back.’

  ‘Stop! Think,’ he says, urgent now. ‘Think about the girls and Paul, Ed, going to Australia.’

  ‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘I’ve been down this road before. I can’t keep another secret. Not again.’ I call emergency services and ask for the police. I expect Euan to take the phone from me but he doesn’t. He walks into the kitchen and washes the blood off his hands. When he’s finished he comes back to join me by the window.

  ‘What are you going to tell them?’

  ‘I’m going to tell them the truth.’

  ‘All of it?’

  I don’t answer.

  ‘We have to tell the same story,’ he says. ‘Grace?’

  I turn away and when I see the lights of the police car arrive at the top of the footpath, I walk out into the rain to meet them.

  Once more a police station. Once more I am wet and have a blanket around me but this time Orla is not opposite me. Orla is dead. Euan sits opposite me instead. Neither of us speaks. We are taken to separate rooms and questioned. I tell the truth. It isn’t the whole truth: I don’t mention Rose and I don’t mention the fact that I thought about killing Orla, albeit only for moments. I always give them the same answers: she was obsessed with me and my family and with her teenage self. She had been hounding me for almost two weeks and I came to the cottage to try to reason with her. She attacked me. I have bruises from her fingers around my throat and her skin is under my fingernails. I confirm Euan’s story that all he did was pull her off me and that she fell awkwardly. No one could have predicted that.

  Paul and Ed return from Skye at once. Paul stays beside me, supporting me through the questioning and the whispered speculation that inevitably follows. For those first two weeks after Orla’s death, he is constantly with me. To all intents and purposes he is one hundred per cent on my side but when we are alone, I see and hear how he really feels.

  ‘I’m doing this for the girls,’ he tells me. ‘You. You, Grace.’ His eyes are shot through with betrayal and I keep my head low, too ashamed to look at him. ‘I will never understand, first, why you were having an affair with Euan and second, why you didn’t tell me about Orla’s obsession with you.’

  ‘I couldn’t—’

  ‘But you could tell Euan?’ he snaps back.

  I say nothing. The truth is – I have no defence. There is nothing I can say that will make it better. If I was completely truthful, I would only make matters worse. I search my conscience but I truly believe that there is nothing to be gained from telling Paul the exact sequence of events that led to Rose’s drowning. It’s too late to help Rose and it will reopen an old wound for Paul. I don’t feel like I’m
protecting Euan and I don’t feel like I’m protecting myself. I feel like I’m doing the only thing I can do by accepting that what happened all those years ago can never be made right and I have to live with that.

  Daisy and Ella are both visibly horrified when they find out about Orla’s obsession with me. Ella fluctuates between tears and being over-protective of me, making me cups of tea, filling the dishwasher, emptying the tumble drier. Daisy is confused. ‘I don’t understand how it happened,’ she keeps saying. ‘Why did she want to hurt you? She seemed nice.’

  I worry that Shugs will come forward to give the police another angle but he never does. I worry that fellow diners in the Edinburgh restaurant might read about the case, recognise Orla’s photograph and come forward to say that they heard me threaten her, but that doesn’t happen either.

  In the end, Orla seals her own fate, and two weeks after her death the police come to the house to inform me that neither Euan nor I will be prosecuted. There’s the bedroom – evidence that her obsession was a real and powerful one. Her history of poor mental health, her drug addiction and her conviction for the part she played in her husband’s murder. (I find out that while she didn’t actually wield the knife, she paid the man who did and then stood watching as her husband died.)

  When the police leave, my feeling of relief is heartfelt but tempered by the growing rift between Paul and myself. We are to move to Melbourne as originally planned but gone are the moments of shared decisions: where we will holiday, where we will live, what we will take with us and what we will leave behind. Paul makes the decisions himself. He is polite but cold. He doesn’t seek my company. He no longer includes me in his thoughts. We don’t make love any more.

  I throw myself into packing up, glad to have something else to focus on and one morning when I am at the front of the house emptying the garage, a car pulls up. My stomach turns over when I see Murray and Angeline climb out. I meet them halfway along the front path and see at once that Angeline has changed. She is immaculately dressed, as always, but her walk is less confident, her gaze less assured.

  ‘Grace.’ She stops a pace away from me. ‘It seems I misjudged you.’

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Angeline.’

  ‘Are you? Are you really?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’ I keep my voice steady. ‘I did not want any of this to happen. I absolutely didn’t.’

  ‘And yet it did.’ She leans towards me. ‘Look me in the eye and tell me that neither of you wanted my daughter dead.’ I look her in the eye but before I speak she says, ‘I thought as much.’ She starts to shake with rage. ‘I will not forget this. You may have fooled the police, both of you, with your plausible story but you have not fooled me.’

  ‘Angeline.’ Murray takes her left elbow and as he does so she lifts her right arm and slaps me so hard across the face that my teeth shift in my jaw. I lurch backward, my hand automatically raised to my cheek. Murray turns Angeline around and they go back to the car.

  I go inside, my vision blurred, my heart pounding, my face stinging with pain. I pull Murphy up on the sofa beside me and stay there for the rest of the afternoon, dry-eyed and empty inside. No one disturbs me. The girls are not coming home until late evening because they are rehearsing Romeo and Juliet – Ella is Juliet and Daisy has found her niche backstage. Ed isn’t due to come home either. He has been staying with my parents since Orla died. All three, in spite of their initial shock and subsequent anxiety as the details came to light, support me unreservedly. ‘Don’t you worry about us – we’re all rubbing along well together,’ my mum tells me, her voice high-pitched with optimism. ‘And we’re looking forward to Australia.’

  I’m pleased that my mum and dad are coming out with us. My dad’s stomach has settled since he started a course of treatment and they are planning ‘an adventure’, my mum says. ‘We won’t come for the whole year; just to see you settled. And then we might do a spot of travelling. I hear you can walk up and over the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I might even persuade your father into shorts.’

  Paul will be back for tea, I hope. He is tying up loose ends at the university and I can never be sure quite when he will be home. I have made his favourite chicken casserole. It’s in the slow cooker, ready, just in case.

  At just after six he comes through the front door and Murphy goes to greet him. I stand up, stretch out my stiff legs and touch him lightly on the arm. ‘The table is set,’ I say.

  He doesn’t look at me. ‘Give me fifteen minutes.’ He goes upstairs for a shower and I stand at the kitchen window, watch the waves break over the sand and try to think of nothing.

  When Paul comes to the table I sit opposite him and dish up. When I take the first forkful I realise that I can barely swallow, my face is numb, my teeth feel like they belong in someone else’s mouth.

  ‘Are you going to tell me how you got that mark on your face?’

  The sound of his voice makes me jump and I drop my fork. ‘Orla’s mother.’

  ‘She came here?’

  I nod.

  He leans across the table and tenderly touches my cheek. ‘My God, she really hit you.’ He comes around to my side, stands me up and turns my face up towards the light. ‘Why didn’t you call me?’

  ‘I thought you would think . . .’ My voice gives out. I try again. ‘I thought you would think that I deserved it.’

  His jaw tightens and then he gives me a small, sad smile. ‘No, I don’t think that.’

  He runs his hands across my hair and down my shoulders and my arms.

  At once I start to tremble and then to cry. Silent tears stream down my face. ‘Please, Paul,’ I whisper. ‘Just tell me that there’s a chance you’ll forgive me.’

  ‘Of course there’s a chance.’ He pulls me into his chest and holds me there. ‘Give me time, Grace.’

  It’s more than I could have hoped for and I can barely breathe for fear that he will change his mind and push me away. But he doesn’t. Food forgotten, he takes me upstairs. We lie on the bed together. He keeps his arms around me and we talk. I tell him how sorry I am, how much I love him, how much I want to make it right between us and how hard I will work to make our family happy again.

  The evening’s performance of Romeo and Juliet is just days before we leave for Melbourne. My face is still bruised but I do a good job of covering it with make-up. We collect my parents and Ed and go in to St Andrews to watch the play. Paul holds my hand as we walk up the steps. We sit in the second row, right in front of the stage. I am in the middle, Paul on one side, my mum on the other.

  Just before the performance starts, my dad realises he has left his glasses in the car. I take the keys from Paul, go back through the foyer and past the last few stragglers who are just arriving. I find Dad’s glasses and head straight back inside only to bump into Monica and Euan. I haven’t spoken to either of them since the day Orla died.

  There are an awkward few seconds while we each appraise one another. Monica looks remarkably well: her hair, her make-up, her smart trouser suit and crisp white blouse. She has hold of Euan’s arm in such a way that makes it look as if she is the one keeping him upright. Euan’s face is strained. Clearly, he hasn’t shaved in days and there is a tremor in his jaw. I don’t know what goes on in their private moments but, in public, Monica has behaved like Paul. She has stayed by Euan’s side, supporting him, warding off idle gossip and nosey neighbours. And I don’t know whether she knows about the affair, but if she does, she hides it well.

  ‘It hasn’t started, has it?’ she asks me.

  ‘Just about to, I think.’ I sidle past them both.

  ‘Grace?’ His voice sounds sore. I turn back and find that I can look him in the eye without hating him, without loving him, without, in fact, feeling anything at all. ‘I’m sorry.’

  I don’t answer. I walk back down the centre aisle, just as the curtain begins to open and slide into my seat next to Paul.

  ‘Did you get talking to someone out there?’ he says.

 
‘There’s nobody out there.’ I rest my head against his shoulder. ‘Nobody at all.’

  About the author

  Julie Corbin lives in Sussex with her husband and three children.

  Tell Me No Secrets is her debut novel.