The Secrets Between Us

by Louise Douglas

  ‘What should I say?’

  ‘Ask him about Alexander.’

  ‘But he must hate Alex, after what he did. Why should he help me?’

  ‘You’re not asking for help, you’re asking for information.’

  ‘What should I do if he doesn’t want to talk to me?’

  Neil pulled a face. ‘Be charming. Flirt. I don’t know, you’ll think of something.’

  It took me several minutes to compose myself enough to dial the contact number. It wasn’t even half past eight and I thought it was unlikely there would be anyone there. I expected to be put through to an answerphone and was planning the message I’d leave when a gruff voice at the end of the line said: ‘Hello, Bryant’s Reclamation.’

  As it turned out, I had got straight through to the right person. Matt Bryant was not exactly unfriendly, but he was suspicious. He’d heard the news about Alexander and Genevieve and had already been contacted by several national publications wanting to sign him up for an exclusive story about how he knew the murderer when he was only a thief. They wouldn’t be able to publish any of this before the trial because it was sub judice, but they’d be able to run a bumper supplement when … if Alexander was found guilty.

  ‘Can’t stand the vultures,’ Matt said. ‘I had quite enough of them last time round, but they won’t bloody leave me alone. I told them to piss off, I’m not speaking to anyone.’

  ‘But I’m not a journalist,’ I said quickly.

  I told him who I was and explained my relationship with Alexander. I did my best to convince him that my intentions were honourable but he said he’d been ‘stitched up’ too often in the past and refused to speak to me over the phone.

  ‘If you want to talk, we’ll do it face to face,’ he said. ‘But I’m not promising anything.’

  He put the phone down. I sat for a moment, trying to work out what to do. I crossed to Neil’s desk.

  ‘What now?’ he asked.

  ‘He won’t talk to me on the phone.’

  ‘Well, go and see him then.’

  ‘He’s in Worcester.’

  ‘It’s not that far.’

  Neil put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a set of keys.

  ‘You know which car it is,’ he said. ‘Go on. Off you go.’

  I listened to Radio 4 as I drove back down the M5, and by lunchtime I was sitting in the café that faced the reclamation yard, eating a cheese and tomato toastie. Matt Bryant sat opposite tucking into a hot meat pie and chips. When I’d arrived, he had recognized me from a newspaper photograph taken the day I left Burrington Stoke. He’d put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed and said: ‘It is you. I had to be sure. Might have been somebody pretending to be you. It’s a terrible bloody business. Let’s get something to eat.’

  I liked him. He was a chatty, friendly man with a strong chin and an even stronger country accent. He was proud of his business, his family and his success. He wore an expensive watch and overalls. His boots had steel toecaps yet he smelled of Calvin Klein and his car had a personalized plate. I could imagine him being Alexander’s friend, but in a different world from the one in which I knew Alexander. The café was busy, hot and steamy, decorated with tinsel and battery-operated Santas who tinkled and chimed in competition with the end-of-year songs playing on the radio.

  Matt shook his head as I told him my version of the story.

  ‘I knew it would end in disaster,’ he said. ‘I bloody knew it.’

  ‘What would end in disaster?’ I asked.

  ‘Alex and Genevieve. We all warned him, but he wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly her fault how it ended,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Listen,’ Matt said, waving his fork at me. ‘She sucked Alex up and we knew she’d spit him out when she’d had enough.’

  ‘How did they meet?’ I asked.

  ‘She was a friend of my sister’s. They’d been at university together.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘We all used to hang around in a crowd. All the girls liked Alex but he only had eyes for Gen. He thought they were fated to be together. He was one of those people who was always trying to make things right. I expect you know what he’s like.’

  I felt a pang of missing Alexander. Up to that point, I hadn’t met anyone who knew him before Genevieve. If things had been different, I thought, if I had known him then, when we were younger, before any of these bad things happened … But he wouldn’t have been interested in me. He would still have chosen Genevieve, of course.

  Matt took a drink of tea and swallowed.

  ‘No matter what the mess was, he’d try to clean it up. It was the way he was, probably because of his useless bloody mother. And Genevieve, for all her fancy education and her horses and her looks, she was a mess.’

  I had never heard her described like that before. It contradicted everything I knew about her.

  ‘How was she a mess?’ I asked.

  Matt rolled his eyes.

  ‘She was involved with an older man. He was married but had promised to leave his wife – usual story – then the wife went and fell pregnant and so he had to stay with her for the sake of the kid, and that’s why Genevieve came to live with us for a while. She was in a right old state, crying all the time, threatening to do all sorts. One minute she was going to front it out with the wife, the next she was going to kill herself. She said she couldn’t bear to be at home trying to put a brave face on it with her mother asking questions all the time.’

  The man couldn’t have been Luke Innes, because Luke wasn’t older and he hadn’t been married. I felt a twinge of frustration. I could imagine Virginia interrogating Genevieve, trying to get to the bottom of her daughter’s unhappiness, and Genevieve being unable to tell her mother anything for fear of the repercussions. I could understand why she needed to get away.

  ‘Did she ever go on!’ Matt said. ‘She was a class-A victim, the world’s greatest drama queen. Any normal person would have thought “silly cow” for getting involved with a married man. But Alex took her side completely. He blamed the bloke, thought she’d been used and abused, and wanted to make her happy again.’

  I nodded encouragingly.

  ‘He loved the girl,’ Matt said. ‘He worshipped the ground she walked on. He would have done anything for her, anything.’

  He picked a piece of buttered bread and wiped his plate. I gazed out of the window for a moment while I composed myself. I was furiously jealous of Genevieve and furious with Alexander for being so good to her.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d be defending Alexander,’ I said. ‘Not after what he did to you.’

  Matt paused with the bread between his fingers. He looked right into my eyes. Then he looked away again and put the bread into his mouth. I waited while he chewed. He washed it down with a drink of tea, and took a long time swallowing. He replaced the cup in its saucer slowly.

  ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ he said.

  ‘I know he stole a lot of money and brought you to the brink of bankruptcy.’

  Matt nodded. ‘That’s what it said in the papers, yes.’

  ‘Isn’t it true?’

  ‘Alex confessed. He pleaded guilty. That much is true.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to say,’ I said.

  Matt leaned forward and spoke quietly.

  ‘You don’t know what happened after the trial, do you?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘As soon as Alex changed his plea to guilty, magically all the missing money reappeared in the company accounts.’

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘Every penny.’

  Matt sat back up straight again. He folded his arms across his chest. I put the crust of the toastie back on the plate and wiped my fingers on a paper napkin.

  ‘I don’t understand. Are you saying the money was never stolen?’

  ‘No, it was stolen all right. Only, once Alex took the rap, somebody gave it back with a note to our accountant that it
was an anonymous donation from a well-wisher.’

  ‘Why would anyone do that?’

  ‘I figured that somebody told Alex that, if he changed his plea, they’d bail the business out. So he put his neck on the line to save mine.’

  ‘My God.’

  ‘Of course he was also protecting whoever did take the money.’

  The breathless, excited feeling was creeping back under my skin. My mouth was dry. I took a sip of tea. I felt a surge of affection for Alexander. I held the next question in my mouth for a second or two before I asked, because the answer was so important to me.

  ‘You’re certain it wasn’t Alexander? He’s not the thief?’

  Matt snorted.

  ‘How long have you known him? He can’t do numbers, he can barely manage email. He counted as special needs in school, his dyslexia was so bad. No way he could have pulled off a stunt like that and covered his tracks.’

  ‘If it wasn’t him …?’

  ‘Oh, come on, it’s not rocket science! Who had a rich, besotted father willing to do anything to keep his baby out of trouble? The same person whom Alex wouldn’t have thought twice about going to gaol for? The poor sod probably thought she’d see it as proof of his devotion.’

  ‘Genevieve?’

  ‘Who else?’

  I had to look down in case Matt saw the jealousy in my eyes. I was ashamed of myself. Poor Genevieve was dead, she was lying ice-cold in a mortuary drawer somewhere, she would never see Alexander’s face or hold her son again, and still I was jealous. Still that nasty little worm of resentment burrowed away at me.

  ‘But her father’s rich as Croesus,’ I said to Matt. ‘Why would she need to steal money?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’d wager it was something to do with the married lover. Maybe he’d told her he couldn’t afford to leave his missus now they had a kid. Maybe she wanted to buy a love nest. She could hardly go asking Daddy for money for that.’

  I remembered the flat in Tenby.

  ‘So you don’t think it was over between Genevieve and this man even though he’d told her he wasn’t going to leave his wife?’

  Matt shrugged. ‘She didn’t get pregnant by herself, did she?’

  ‘No, no she didn’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry the girl’s dead,’ said Matt. ‘She didn’t deserve that, but there was never going to be a happy ending for those two. Genny was eight months pregnant when they let Alex out of prison, and still he believed her when she told him he was the one she’d wanted all along.’

  We chatted for a little longer. I asked Matt if Genevieve had stayed in touch with his sister, and he said he didn’t know. Charlene had married and gone to work for a bank in Hong Kong. She had a couple of kids and was settled there; he hadn’t seen her for several years. I came to the impression they weren’t close.

  When I stood to say goodbye, he stood too, and he shook my hand and clasped my shoulder.

  ‘I hope it’s all going to turn out all right for you and Alex,’ he said. ‘He’s a lucky man to have you fighting his corner for him.’

  I shook my head. ‘I lost the faith for a while.’

  ‘You’re all right, love,’ he said. ‘You’re doing fine. And when you see Alex, when you get him out of the clink, give him my regards. Tell him I could do with an extra pair of hands round here if he’s at a loose end.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I will.’

  Alexander is innocent, I thought, as I left Worcester and headed back towards the motorway. He was definitely innocent of the theft and he was probably innocent of murder. The things he’d told me about his relationship with Genevieve – that she had been in love with somebody else when they married, that he had tried to make her happy but couldn’t – had all been confirmed by what Matt had told me. Everything was complicated and hidden behind secrets and lies, put in place to protect darker secrets and lies. The story was the same, it just depended which way you told it.

  I told myself that I’d known Alexander was a good man in my heart all along but now I knew it in my head too. I wished there was some way I could wind back the clock to the day Alexander and Jamie went to fetch the Christmas tree. I wished that, instead of running away from Alexander, I’d gone to stand at his side and taken his hand and had the courage to tell the police officers that he was incapable of dishonesty or worse.

  But I hadn’t.

  I’d believed he was a thief. I’d suspected him of hiding Genevieve’s laptop in the well and deliberately making me doubt my own mind. When I’d looked at him, I’d remembered the words You next, and I’d wondered what he was going to do to me.

  Alexander had loved Genevieve unconditionally, until she made it impossible for him to love her any more. I began to understand why she had acted as she had, why she had stabbed him. His devotion must have frustrated her. She must have felt trapped by it. Perhaps she had wanted to make him understand that she would never reciprocate his feelings for her. She wanted to set him free.

  But she’d also wanted to keep her child.

  Alexander had done nothing but look after me and put his trust in me. He didn’t love me like he loved Genevieve, but maybe that sort of passion only comes once in a person’s life. I could hardly blame him for that.

  Alexander was innocent, but I was guilty of the worst disloyalty. I didn’t know if he’d ever be able to forgive me. I knew I would never forgive myself.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  IT WAS LATE by the time I arrived back in Manchester. The Christmas lights were still lit but the sales had started and there were leaflets and posters defacing the shop windows and the streets seemed to be full of sodden litter. Everywhere was quiet. It was the calm before the chaos of the New Year’s Eve celebrations. The eyes of a fox gleamed in the headlights and then the creature turned and trotted into the darkness. I watched the city pass me by and I wondered where Alexander was and what he was thinking; if he had any inkling that I was doing my best for him or if he had given up on me as he believed I had given up on him.

  When I got back to the flat, Neil opened the door to me, and we hugged enthusiastically.

  ‘Through here,’ May called. ‘I’ve made kebabs.’

  ‘I just need to wash my hands!’

  I went through to the bathroom and freshened up, then I went into the spare room – my room – and crossed to the window to draw the curtains. I gazed out. I couldn’t see much in the dark, only the lighted windows of the houses that backed on to May and Neil’s street. For a moment I felt the weight of a baby on my shoulder. I had imagined broken nights standing at a window like this, patting my baby’s back, singing him to sleep as he nuzzled his hot little head into my neck, and the little snuffling noises he would make. I had imagined that scenario so many times it was almost as if I was remembering something real. Almost.

  I pulled the curtain across.

  We sat in the living room. May had made a buffet supper and laid it out on the table. She and Neil sat on the settee, and I sat on the floor opposite. The room was cosy. I felt safe and hungry and normal, like my old self.

  ‘Look at you!’ said May, passing me a glass of wine. ‘All bright-eyed and bushy-tailed! You’re dying to tell us what you found out, aren’t you?’

  I shuffled about a bit.

  ‘Go on,’ said Neil, gesturing with his hand.

  ‘Well,’ I began, like a child about to recite a poem in front of the class, ‘the main thing is that Alexander didn’t steal a single penny from Matt Bryant’s business.’

  I beamed at May and Neil. They nodded at me encouragingly.

  ‘In fact it was quite the opposite. Matt thinks Alex made a deal to save it. He thinks Alex agreed to plead guilty because he knew, if he did, the missing money would be paid back to Matt.’

  Neil pulled a face.

  ‘That may be the case, but it doesn’t rule out Alexander from being the person who took it in the first place,’ he said.

  ‘Matt’s theory is if the trial had progressed Alex would
have been proved innocent and the identity of the true culprit would have been obvious. That’s why it was imperative he changed his plea when he did.’

  ‘Goodness!’ May raised her eyebrows. Her eyes were wide. We exchanged smiles.

  ‘Matt thinks Genevieve took the money,’ I said.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think he’s probably right.’

  ‘How did she do it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I think I might!’ said Neil.

  May and I gazed at him expectantly.

  ‘Hold on,’ said Neil. ‘Let me start from the beginning.’

  He told us he’d tracked down the last of Genevieve’s old schools easily enough through the internet and spoken to her long-suffering house mistress. Genevieve had been a ‘wilful’ girl, according to the woman, who didn’t go into details but implied that Genevieve, having successfully contrived to get herself expelled from two boarding schools, had spent most of her time at the third endeavouring to achieve a hat trick.

  ‘She told me that everyone was surprised when Genevieve announced that she wanted to go to university,’ said Neil, ‘because she wasn’t at all academic and had shown no inclination to study. All she wanted to do was ride. Everyone assumed that, if she bothered with further education at all, she’d go to the agricultural college in Cirencester, but one day she decided that university was what she wanted to do, and that’s what she did.’

  ‘She must’ve done OK at school to get in,’ said May.

  Neil shook his head. ‘She did terribly. The school suspects strings were pulled. The family must have had friends on the staff.’

  ‘It’s all right for some,’ May said. She wiped her fingers on a sheet of kitchen paper and then sat back into the settee.

  ‘Genevieve was at university with Matt Bryant’s sister,’ I said.