The Secrets of Strangers

by Charity Norman

  ‘You must remember going to get the gun from your vehicle?’

  ‘Not really—well, yes, I remember grabbing it out of the case, and a handful of ammunition. Felt like a dream.’

  ‘How did it come to be loaded?’

  ‘I dunno. I must have done that, but the next thing I remember is running back into Tuckbox. I was holding it. Robert looked up and saw me and said, You again? Smiling. Still smiling! And I wanted to stop him smiling, and he’d thrown my mum into the river, and I shot him. Once. Twice. I’m surprised I hit him ’cos my whole body was shaking. Fuck, I wish I’d missed.’

  He’s looking over towards the far corner by the swinging door, where Robert’s body is somehow seeming less and less human. So much blood. What was he even thinking? Julia can’t come in here, there’s a dead body! And, anyway, what kind of a last memory of her dad would she have, filthy and crazy in a blood-spattered café? Much better if she remembers a happy half-hour snuggling up with bedtime stories.

  Emmanuel’s crayons are still scattered across the table in the booth. He chooses a dark blue one. Julia likes blue. It’s her favourite colour: blue slides in her hair, blue pyjamas, blue everything. Of course, in the future she might prefer red, or green, but he has to start somewhere.

  ‘Eliza,’ he says. ‘I just want to do something. Can you call back in five minutes?’

  She sounds worried, but she says she will. She’s really got no choice.

  He takes a seat at the table and unfolds a serviette, thinking about what he wants to say. If he had time to write a million words it wouldn’t be enough. He has no idea who Julia will be when—if—she reads this. He doesn’t know what worries she’ll have, or what dreams. The chances are, she’ll have been told nothing but horror stories about her father. She might have no memory of him at all, or of the farm, or the happy times they’ve spent together.

  He crumples up the first three attempts. His handwriting’s embarrassing, his spelling is worse. Autocorrect has been his saviour but a blue crayon doesn’t have that. Everything he writes looks lame, or childish, or just plain stupid. He imagines Nicola rolling her eyes and throwing his letter in the bin. Julia will probably never see it and, if she does, she’ll think her dad was an illiterate fool.

  He doesn’t even notice he’s crying, until the tears blur his vision.

  Eliza

  Sam’s words drag along behind him like a weighted chain.

  ‘I’ve written a letter to Julia,’ he says. ‘Just a short one. Wish I could spell. Will you see Nicola gets it? Ask her to give it to Julia when she’s old enough?’

  Eliza catches Paul’s eye. They both grimace.

  ‘Please?’ persists Sam.

  ‘You don’t need to write to Julia. You’ll see her yourself one day soon.’

  ‘Can I trust you to do this for me, Eliza? I can trust you, can’t I? Promise me.’

  ‘I promise to do my best. It might depend on the content of the letter. Julia’s only two.’

  ‘Three. She turned three in September. I bought a present for her: a really flash silver pedal car. It’s in the back of the Landy. I brought it with me in case I got to see her today. She’ll love it! Tell Nicola, will you? Make sure she gets her pedal car.’

  Eliza’s frantically thinking of reasons for him to live.

  ‘She’s very small, Sam.’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘She needs her dad.’

  He doesn’t reply. Something has changed, something has gone very wrong. His next words are a shout of fury but it’s not aimed at Eliza.

  ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me! That was Nicola, wasn’t it? Where is she?’

  Eliza’s stomach clenches. She can hear a cacophony of rage and fear—a shriek, protests from the hostages, bellowing from Sam.

  You’re imagining things, Sam. Too much bloody Ritalin! You’re hallucinating, mate.

  ‘Where the fuck is she? Where is she? Get out of my fucking way, Abi!’

  It’s happening, it’s happening—the worst-case scenario, the unthinkable. Ashwin’s clutching at his hair, mouthing shit, shit, he’s on his phone and alerting the boss to this disaster. This negotiation is hurtling out of the sky, the ground is rushing up to meet it, and there is definitely no parachute.

  Someone must have turned on the speakerphone at Sam’s end, because the voices are suddenly amplified into Eliza’s headset. She can hear every word. A woman seems to be trying to take control of the situation. Not Mutesi—this voice isn’t nearly so mellow. She’s crisply telling Sam to stop being an idiot and put that frigging gun down unless he wants the fucking SAS smashing in through the plate-glass windows and blowing his head off—which they will, she assures him.

  Ashwin’s still muttering into his phone. He listens, glances at Eliza.

  ‘The boss wants your urgent assessment: are we looking at immediate loss of life?’

  She takes a breath, forcing her mind to straighten out of its tailspin. She can’t afford the luxury of panic. If she gives the word, the negotiation will be over. Tuckbox will turn into a battleground within seconds.

  ‘We’re out of time,’ groans Ashwin, who is listening to the boss through one ear, the café through the other. He’s lost his cool. ‘For God’s sake, Eliza! He’s about to find her and when he does—’

  ‘Tell the boss to hold on,’ she says, interrupting him. ‘We’ve finally got a listening device. We can hear, we’re monitoring. Hold on. Tell him.’

  Ashwin looks aghast. ‘You sure?’

  Of course she isn’t sure.

  At that moment, the shouting stops abruptly. There’s nothing. No noise, no voices. Eliza listens with her whole being, pressing the headset to her ears. She may have just made a catastrophic blunder. Every nerve, every thought, every breath is focused on what’s happening in that café.

  The silence is menacing. It has undertow, like the swell of a breaking wave.

  She shuts her eyes. If the next sound she hears is the report of a shotgun, she’ll have to live with the guilt forever.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Sam

  If the others hadn’t been dead quiet at that precise moment. If the radio hadn’t been turned off. If a dodgy hinge hadn’t caused the swinging door into the storeroom to stick, leaving it just a little bit open.

  If, if. If any of those things hadn’t happened, he would probably never have known she was there. She sneezed three times in quick succession, each one louder than the last. He’s loved that girl. He lived with her for over three years. He knows her sneezes when he hears them.

  It all makes sense! Now he knows why Neil and Abi have been so keen to keep nipping out to the back kitchen. Now he knows why the police have spent all day insisting they can’t find her.

  Everyone’s been lying to him.

  They try to stop him. They’re all yelling. Neil flails out and even manages to grab his arm, but Neil’s no athlete. It’s easy to barge past him and into the back kitchen. The most obvious place to hide is the staff toilet—no, it’s empty. He emerges to find Abi blocking his way with a stubborn pout and her arms held out wide, as though heading off a raging bull. She’s demanding that he put his frigging gun down unless he wants the fucking SAS smashing in here and blowing his head off—which they certainly will, she declares triumphantly, because they’re listening to you, Sam! They’re listening to all this on speakerphone! See? She’s holding up the café phone to prove her point.

  Now Mutesi has joined her, while Neil and Buddy are limping into position on her other side. A cuddly grandmother, a tactless lawyer, an arthritic gambler and his dog. A stubborn wall of oddballs. Sam’s about to try and shoulder his way through them when he hears a familiar voice yelling his name. They all look round as Nicola half tumbles, half crawls out of the cupboard under the sink.

  ‘Stop, Sam!’ She sounds panicked. She’s on her hands and knees. ‘Stop. Stop.’

  The three of them gather around, helping her to her feet while shielding her from him.


  He’s silenced. He’s stunned. The love of his life has changed so much, but not as he expected. In his bitter moments he’s imagined her drinking champagne or shopping for designer clothes, prosperous and smug after months of secretly banging Robert. He couldn’t have been more wrong. She looks half-starved. He can see the bones of her elbows and hips, mauve shadows under her eyes. Her face is chalk-white, streaked with running mascara and smudged lipstick. A clown’s face. He’s built her up in his mind as the cold-hearted, unassailable bitch who stomped on his heart. The Nicola he knew was never frightened of anyone but she’s scared witless right now. Her whole body is trembling. She seems horrified by the sight of the gun in his hand. He’s ashamed.

  ‘Sorry.’ He turns away from her, laying it on a benchtop. It’s the first time he’s put it down since this whole thing began. ‘Sorry, Nicola. See? I’ll leave it here. I’ve put it down, okay?’

  She shifts her gaze to his face. She’s never looked at him so intently—at least not since those early days when she thought she was in love with him. Her voice is hoarse.

  ‘Where’s Robert?’ she asks.

  Nobody speaks. Mutesi lays a consoling hand on her arm.

  Nicola is still staring into Sam’s face. ‘Did you kill him? Is he dead?’

  When he nods, her eyes close for a second. She lets out a long breath.

  ‘Good,’ she says.

  Good?

  ‘I was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Robert was the devil.’

  Of all the conversations he’s imagined having with Nicola, this isn’t one of them.

  ‘See these?’ She’s twisting her left arm, holding it up to the light. When he looks more closely, he sees what she’s pointing out: dark blotches, spread all the way from her wrists to her shoulders. What are they—bruises? They look like purplish fruit, dropping from the leaves of her vine tattoo.

  ‘Robert,’ she declares furiously. ‘Bloody Robert Lacey. He turned out to be a piece of work! I said it was wrong—him and me—I told him it was immoral and we had to end it. I tried to kick him out of my flat. Well, he didn’t like that. He showed his true colours. Look. These—’ she lays her own fingers over the marks ‘—are where he grabbed me. See? Same on the other arm.’ She turns to show those ones too. ‘You know how easily I bruise, Sam. He said Julia and I owed him. Our home, our income, our security, everything was down to him. He lied to me right from the beginning. He lied about you, he lied about Harriet. By the time I worked out what he really was, it was too late. He owned me.’

  Up is down, day is night. Sam has no idea what to believe. It occurs to him that lying is a game for people like Robert and Nicola. To them the truth is just a football, to be kicked and passed around.

  Abi seems to have appointed herself chair of this strange meeting.

  ‘Okay,’ she says, holding up both hands. Sam’s sure she uses that booming voice in court. ‘Okay, okay. Sam—you’ve been demanding to talk to Nicola all day. Right? Right. Well, here she is! Your wish is granted. So get talking. What exactly d’you want to discuss?’

  ‘The truth,’ he says.

  ‘Truth.’ Abi narrows her eyes. ‘You’re going to have to be a bit more specific.’

  ‘I’ve lived through years of Robert World, followed by years of Nicola World, and I feel like I’ve gone crazy. I want to know what really happened between you and Robert. I want to understand why my life got destroyed. Then I’ll say goodbye and you can all walk out of here. Five minutes of truth, and after that you’ll never hear from me again.’

  ‘Is that a promise?’ asks Nicola.

  ‘Hope to die.’

  ‘No matter what I tell you?’

  ‘No matter what, as long as it’s real. No more twisting, no more spin.’

  She wraps her bruised arms around herself. She looks lonely.

  ‘Go on then,’ she says. ‘You ask, I’ll answer.’

  He can’t think. He doesn’t know where to begin. He didn’t expect it to happen like this. It’s so sudden—after all the months of silence, of meaningless solicitors’ letters and being blocked from phoning and lying awake hour after hour, imagining what he’d say to her if only he had the chance.

  ‘Start with Robert,’ he says in the end. ‘You and him were sleeping together?’

  She nods.

  ‘Even when my mother was dying?’

  She hesitates, glancing towards the shotgun before she nods again.

  ‘You visited her in the hospice, dutiful daughter-in-law, and all the time you were shagging her husband?’

  ‘I didn’t want to by then. Robert told me—way, way back, not long after I first met him—he made out their marriage had been pretty much a fiction for years. He told me Harriet had never got over the loss of her first husband, and Robert felt like a third party in someone else’s love affair. He was about to leave her when she got her diagnosis. Then he couldn’t. He couldn’t leave a dying woman. That’s what he told me, and I believed him. Now I’m not so sure.’

  ‘When did it begin, this thing with you and him?’

  ‘Sam, don’t do this.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Okay. Okay. He made a beeline for me the very first time we met. Remember we walked ahead across the farm that morning when they visited? We got on like a house on fire. Later he told me he’d never connected with anyone like he did with me. He said it was our star signs that were in alignment.’

  ‘Ugh, spare me,’ mutters Abi.

  ‘But nothing happened while you and me were together, Sam. I promise. Robert acted very loving, very generous—and, yes, there was a spark. He pressured me all the time to leave you, he said their door would be open to me, and in the end I did. That’s when … well, you know. He waited until your mum was out, we shared a bottle of wine and he came into my room and announced he was violently in love with me, that you have to seize what you want in life. He … one thing led to another. He was just so overwhelming. He made me feel amazing. It didn’t feel wrong. It—’

  ‘It was betraying my mother! An innocent woman who trusted you—and with the grandfather of your child, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Step-grandfather.’

  ‘It was totally fucked up.’

  ‘I know. I know.’ There are tears now. She wipes one eye, sniffing. Maybe she’s genuinely remorseful, but he doubts it. ‘I know it was fucked up. But he promised me their marriage had been over for a long time, he swore they’d be getting divorced. In the end I started to hate what he and I were doing. I started to hate him too.’

  So it’s true. He wasn’t paranoid to suspect them; it wasn’t all in his mind. His stepfather was sleeping with his girlfriend. It’s like having a reliable compass for the first time ever. Up is up. Down is down. Night and day are in their ordered places.

  ‘I kept trying to end it,’ she says. ‘He always persuaded me to stay. The day of the funeral I told him no more, it’s over. That’s when I got these.’ Her fingertips caress the bruises on her arms. ‘Shoved me against a door, tore my clothes. What Robert wanted, he got. And what choice did I have? I’ve got nobody else. He’s my boss, he pays my rent, he organises every little thing about my life. The flat belongs to a shady mate of his who would have thrown Julia and me onto the street at a single word from Robert. So I gave in, yet again. Does that make me a whore?’

  Sam laughs shortly. ‘If the cap fits.’

  ‘I felt like one. I kept coming to work every day, kept letting him into my bed and into my mind. I began to think I’d never be free of him.’

  ‘You could have come back to Tyndale.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘Yeah, Sam, you’d have made me so welcome. Not.’

  ‘I’d have been happy to see you. Happy to have Julia home.’

  ‘No! Don’t you dare minimise your part in all this. I left in the middle of the night because when you lose your temper you’re like a different person. You can’t control your anger, Sam. You tried to drag me out of my car. You thre
atened me, you bruised me, you terrified your baby daughter. These things happened. They happened. You can’t deny it. Robert was the devil but, in your own way, you were the deep blue sea.’

  She’s getting back some of her chutzpah. Her eyes have taken on their slate-grey gleam. She’s got her hands jammed into the back pockets of her jeans.

  ‘That’s it,’ she says, staring him down. ‘That’s the truth. The whole truth, and nothing but. And I’m sorry, Sam. I really am. I wish we could have the time over again. Robert was a big mistake. He seemed to be offering the earth, and I was taken in by him. I was dazzled. Despite everything, you’re the one I really loved.’

  She has no idea how empty and stupid those words sound now. He could laugh. He could cry. Perhaps she even believes her own lies.

  ‘How was Mum?’ he asks. ‘How was she in the end?’

  At last there’s something honest, a softening. Her shoulders drop. Her voice loses its defensive brassiness.

  ‘Peaceful,’ she says. ‘She wasn’t in pain, especially not in the last few days. I was there. She was asleep for a while, and then she was gone. They were wonderful in the hospice.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me she was dying?’

  ‘Robert said no. I asked him, and the nurse asked him. He was sure you’d cause a scene and upset her.’

  ‘Why did you throw her ashes away?’

  She blinks. Her gaze darts to a spot somewhere behind him, and then back to his face.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Her ashes.’

  ‘Why did I …’ She’s frowning. ‘What about her ashes?’

  ‘Robert told me what the pair of you did with her. He told me this morning. Why? Hadn’t you humiliated her enough?’