The Secret Keeper Page 6

  The room was silent but for the racing pen. Laurel saw it all so clearly in her mind: the man, the awful man with his dark face and great big hands, grabbing at Ma, trying to hurt her, planning to harm the baby next—

  And did the man fall down straight away?

  The pen had stopped its scratching. The young policeman by the window was looking at her over the top of his notebook.

  Did the man fall immediately to the ground?

  Laurel nodded haltingly. I think so.

  You think so?

  don’t remember anything else. That’s when I fainted, I suppose. I woke up in the tree house.

  When was that?

  Just now. And then I came in here.

  The older policeman drew a slow breath, not quite silently, and then he let it out. Is there anything else you can think of that we ought to know? Anything you saw or heard? He scratched his bald pate. His eyes were a very light blue, almost grey. Take your time, the smallest thing could be important.

  Was there something she’d forgotten? Had she seen or heard anything else? Laurel thought carefully before answering. She didn’t think so. No, she was sure that was everything.

  Nothing at all?

  She said, no. Daddy’s hands were in his pockets and he glared from beneath his brows.

  The two policemen exchanged a glance, the older one dipped his head slightly and the younger flicked his notebook shut. The interview was over.

  Afterwards, Laurel sat on the window ledge in her bedroom, chewing her thumbnail and watching the three men outside by the gate. They didn’t talk much, but occasionally the older policeman said something and Daddy answered, pointing at various objects on the darkening horizon. The conversation might have been about farming methods, or the warmth of the sea-son, or the historical uses of Suffolk land, but Laurel doubted it was any of those topics they were discussing.

  A van lumbered up the driveway and the younger policeman met it at the top, striding across the long grass and gesturing back towards the house. Laurel watched as a man emerged from the driver’s seat, as a stretcher was pulled from the rear, as the sheet (not so white, she could see that now; stained with red that was almost black) fluttered on its way back through the garden. They loaded the stretcher and then the van drove away. The policemen left and Daddy came inside. The front door closed, she heard it through the floor. Boots were kicked off— one, two—and then a soft socked path was paced to her mother in the sitting room.

  Laurel drew the curtains and turned her back on the window. The policemen were gone. She had told the truth; she’d described exactly what was in her mind, everything that happened. Why then did she feel this way? Strange and uncertain.

  She lay down on her bed, curled up tightly with her hands, prayerlike, between her knees. She closed her eyes but opened them again so she’d stop seeing the silver flash, the white sheet, her mother’s face when the man said her name—

  Laurel stiffened. The man had said Ma’s name.

  She hadn’t told the policeman that. He’d asked if there was anything she’d forgotten, anything else at all she’d seen or heard, and she’d said no, there was nothing. But there was, there had been—

  The door opened and Laurel sat up quickly, half expecting the older officer back to take her to task. It was her father though, come to tell her he was off to fetch the others from next door. The baby had been put to bed and her mother was resting. He hesitated at the door, tapping his hand against the jamb. When he finally spoke again his voice was hoarse.

  That was a shock this afternoon, a terrible shock.

  Laurel bit her lip. Deep inside her, a sob she hadn’t acknowledged threatened to break.

  Your mother’s a brave woman.

  Laurel nodded.

  She’s a survivor, and so are you. You did well with those policemen.

  She mumbled, fresh tears stinging, Thank you, Daddy.

  The police say it’s probably that man from the papers, the one that’s been causing trouble by the stream. The description matches, and there’s no one else who’d come bothering your mother.

  It was as she’d thought. When she’d first seen the man, hadn’t she wondered if it might not be the menace from the papers? Laurel felt suddenly lighter.

  Now listen, Lol. Her father drove his hands into his pockets, jiggling them about a moment before continuing. Your mother and I, we’ve had a word and we reckon it’s a good idea not to tell the younger ones all that went on. There’s no need, and it’s far too much for them to understand. Give me the choice, I’d rather you’d been a hundred miles away yourself, but you weren’t and that’s as it is.

  I’m sorry.

  Nothing to be sorry for. Not your fault. You’ve helped out the police, your mother too, and it’s over. A bad man came to the house but everything’s all right now. Everything’s going to be all right.

  It wasn’t a question, not exactly, but it sounded like it and so Laurel answered, Yes, Daddy. Everything’s going to be all right.

  He smiled a one-sided smile. You’re a good girl, Laurel. I’m going to fetch your sisters now. We’ll keep what happened to ourselves, eh? There’s my girl.

  And they had. It became the great unspoken event in their family’s history. The sisters weren’t to be told and Gerry was certainly too young to remember, though they’d been wrong about that as things turned out.

  The others realised, of course, that something unusual had oc- curred—they’d been bundled unceremoniously from the birthday party and deposited in front of their neighbour’s brand-new Decca television set; their parents were oddly sombre for weeks; and a pair of policemen started paying regular visits that involved closed doors and low serious voices—but everything made sense when Daddy told them about the poor homeless man who’d died in the meadow on Gerry’s birthday. It was sad but, as he said, these things happened sometimes.

  Laurel, meanwhile, took to nail-biting in earnest. The police investigation was concluded in a matter of weeks: the man’s age and appearance matched descriptions of the picnic stalker, the police said it wasn’t unusual in these cases for violence to escalate over time, and Laurel’s eyewitness report made it clear her mother had acted in selfdefence. A burglary gone wrong; a lucky escape; nothing to be gained from splashing the details across the newspapers. Happily it was a time when discretion was the norm and a gentleman’s agreement could shift a head-line to page three. The curtain dropped, the story ended.

  And yet. While her family’s lives had returned to regular programming, Laurel’s remained in a fuzz of static. The sense that she was separate from the others deepened and she became unaccountably restless. The event itself played over in her mind, and the role she’d taken in the police investigation, the things she’d told them—worse, the thing she hadn’t—made the panic so bad sometimes, she could hardly breathe. No matter where she went at Greenacres—inside the house, or out in the garden—she felt trapped by what she’d seen and done. The memories were everywhere; they were inescapable; made worse for the event that caused them being utterly inexplicable.

  When she auditioned for the Central School and won a place, Laurel ignored her parents’ pleas to stay at home, to put it off a year and finish her A levels, to think of her sisters, the baby brother who loved her most of all. She packed instead, as little as she could, and she left them all behind. Her life’s direction changed, just as surely as a weather vane spun circles in an unexpected storm.

  Laurel drained the last of her wine and watched a pair of rooks fly low over Daddy’s meadow. Someone had turned the giant dimmer switch and the world was casting towards darkness. All actresses have favourite words, and ‘gloaming’ was one of Laurel’s. It was a pleasure to articulate, the sense of falling gloom and helpless encompassment inherent within the word’s sound, and yet it was so close to ‘glowing’ that some of the latter’s shine rubbed off on it.

  It was the time of day she associated especially with child-hood, with her life before she left for London
: her father’s return to the house after a day spent working on the farm, her mother towelling Gerry by the stove, her sisters laughing upstairs as Iris cycled through her repertoire of impersonations (an irony, really, that Iris had grown up to become that most imitable of all childhood’s figures, the headmistress); the transition point when the lights came on inside, and the house smelled of soap, and the big oak table was laid for dinner. Even now, Laurel sensed, quite unconsciously, the natural turn of the day. It was the closest she ever came to feeling homesick in her own place.

  Something moved in the meadow out there, the path that Daddy used to walk each day, and Laurel tensed; but it was just a car, a white car—she could see it more clearly now—winding up the driveway. She stood, shaking out the last drips from her glass. It had turned cool and Laurel wrapped her arms around herself, walking slowly to the gate. The driver flickered the headlights with an energy that could only belong to Daphne and Laurel raised a hand to wave.

  Six

  LAUREL SPENT a large part of dinner observing her youngest sister’s face. Something had been done to it, and done well, and the result was fascinating. ‘A fabulous new moisturiser,’ Daphne would say if asked, which, because Laurel didn’t fancy being lied to, she refrained from doing. Instead, she nodded along as Daphne tossed her blonde curls and enthralled them all with tales from the LA Breakfast Show set, where she read the weather and flirted with a newsreader named Chip each morning. Breaks in the garrulous monologue were rare and when occasion finally presented, Rose and Laurel leapt at once.

  ‘You first,’ said Laurel, tilting her wine glass—empty again, she no- ticed—towards her sister.

  ‘I was just going to say, perhaps we ought to talk a little about Mummy’s party.’

  ‘I should say so,’ said Iris.

  ‘I’ve some thoughts,’ said Daphne.

  ‘Certainly—’

  ‘Obviously—’

  ‘We—’

  ‘I—’

  ‘What were you thinking, Rosie?’ said Laurel.

  ‘Well—’ Rose, who’d always struggled in the sibling press, started with a cough—‘it will have to be in hospital, more’s the pity, but I thought we could try to come up with ways to make it special for her. You know how she feels about birthdays.’

  ‘Just what I was going to say,’ said Daphne, catching a small hiccup behind baby-pink fingernails. ‘And after all this will be her last.’

  Silence stretched between them, with the rude exception of the Swiss clock, until Iris broke it with a sniff: ‘You’re very … brash, now, aren’t you?’ she said, patting the blunt ends of her steel-grey bob. ‘Since you moved stateside.’

  ‘I was just saying—’

  ‘I think we all know what you were just saying.’

  ‘But it’s true.’

  ‘Precisely, some might argue, why you needn’t have said it at all.’ Laurel regarded her tablemates. Iris glowering, Daphne blinking with blue-eyed chagrin, Rose twisting her plait with an angst that threatened to sever it. Squint a little and they could have been their childhood selves. She sighed into her glass. ‘Perhaps we could take in some of Ma’s favourite things,’ she said, ‘play some of the records from Daddy’s collection. Is that the sort of thing you meant, Rosie?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rose, with unnerving gratitude, ‘yes, that’s perfect. I thought we might even retell some of the stories she used to invent for us.’

  ‘Like the one about the gate at the bottom of the garden that led to fairyland—’

  ‘And the dragon eggs she found in the woods—’

  ‘And the time she ran away to join the circus.’

  ‘Do you remember,’ said Iris suddenly, ‘the circus we had here?’

  ‘My circus,’ said Daphne, beaming from behind her wine-glass. ‘Well, yes,’ Iris interjected, ‘but only because—’

  ‘Because I’d had the horrid measles and missed the real circus when it came to town.’ Daphne laughed with pleasure at the memory ‘She got Daddy to build a tent at the bottom of the meadow, remember, and organised all of you to be clowns. Laurel was a lion, and Mummy walked the tightrope.’

  ‘She was rather good at that,’ said Iris. ‘Barely fell off the rope. She must’ve practised for weeks.’

  ‘Or else her story was true and she really did spend time in the circus,’ said Rose. ‘I can almost believe it of Mummy.’

  Daphne gave a contented sigh. ‘We were lucky to have a mother like ours, weren’t we? So playful, almost as if she hadn’t fully grown up; not at all like other people’s boring old mothers. I used to feel rather smug when I had friends home from school.’

  ‘You? Smug?’ Iris pretended surprise. ‘Now that just doesn’t seem— ‘With regards to Mummy’s party, ’ Rose flapped a hand, desperate to avoid a new dip into argument, ‘I thought I might bake a cake, Victoria sponge, her fav—’

  ‘Do you remember,’ said Daphne with sudden brightness, ‘that knife, the one with the ribbon—’

  ‘The red ribbon,’ said Iris.

  ‘—and the bone handle. She used to insist on it, every birth-day.’ ‘She said it was magical, that it could grant wishes.’

  ‘You know, I believed that for such a long time.’ Daphne rested her chin on the back of her hand with a pretty sigh. ‘I wonder whatever happened to that funny old knife.’

  ‘It disappeared,’ said Iris; ‘I remember that now. One year it just wasn’t there, and when I asked her she said it had been lost.’

  ‘No doubt it took up with the thousand pens and kirby grips that went AWOL from this house,’ said Laurel quickly. She cleared her throat. ‘I’m parched. More wine anyone?’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be something if we could find it …’ she heard as she crossed the hall.

  ‘What a splendid idea! We could take it in for her cake …’

  Laurel reached the kitchen and was therefore spared excited preparations for the search party. (‘How far could it have gone?’ Daphne was enthusing.)

  She flicked the switch and the room shuffled to life like a trusty old retainer who’d stuck around long past his use-by date. Empty of other people and with the fluorescent tube settling at a weak half-light, the kitchen looked sadder than Laurel remembered; the tile grouting was grey and the canister lids were dull with a film of greasy dust. She had the uncomfortable feeling that what she was seeing was the evidence of her mother’s failing eyesight. She should have organised a cleaner. Why hadn’t she thought to do that? And while she was self-castigating—why stop there?—she ought to have come to visit more often, cleaned the place herself.

  The fridge, at least, was a new one; Laurel had seen to that. When the old Kelvinator finally gave up the ghost, she’d ordered a replacement over the phone from London: energy-efficient and with a fancy ice-maker that her mother never used.

  Laurel found the bottle of wine and swung the door closed. A little too hard, perhaps, for a magnet fell and a piece of paper swept to the floor. It disappeared beneath the fridge and she cursed. She got down on all-fours to pat about amongst the dust bunnies. The newspaper clipping was from the Sudbury Chronicle and featured a photograph of Iris looking very head-mistressy in brown tweed and black tights at the front of her school. It was none the worse for its adventure and Laurel sought a gap to reposition it in. The task was easier said than done. The Nicolson fridge had always been a busy place, even before someone, somewhere, got the idea of selling magnets for the express purpose of clutter creation: anything deemed worthy of attention had been Sellotaped to the big white door for family notice. Photographs, accolades, cards, and certainly any mention in the media.

  From nowhere the memory came, a summer’s morning in June 1961—a month before Gerry’s birthday party: the seven of them sitting around the breakfast table spooning strawberry jam onto buttery toast as Daddy cut the article from the local newspaper; the photograph of Dorothy, smiling as she held aloft her prize-winning runner bean; Daddy taping it to the fridge afterwards as the rest of them clea
ned up.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Laurel spun around to see Rose standing in the door frame.

  ‘Fine. Why?’

  ‘You’ve been gone a while.’ She wrinkled her nose, regarding Laurel carefully. ‘And, I must say, you’re looking a little peaky.’

  ‘That’s just the light in here,’ said Laurel. ‘It gives one the most charming consumptive glow.’ She busied herself with the corkscrew, turning her back so Rose couldn’t read her expression. ‘I trust plans for the Great Knife Hunt are coming along?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Really when the two of them get together …’

  ‘If we could only harness the power and use it for good.’

  ‘Quite.’

  There was a gust of steam as Rose opened the oven to check on the raspberry cobbler, their mother’s trademark pudding. The sugary smell of warming fruit filled the air and Laurel closed her eyes.

  It had taken her months to summon the courage to ask about the incident. Such was her parents’ fierce determination to look onwards and upwards, to deny the whole event, that she might never have done so had she not begun dreaming of the man. But she had, each night the same. The man at the side of the house, calling her mother’s name— ‘Looks good,’ said Rose, sliding out the oven rack. ‘Not as good as hers perhaps, but we mustn’t expect miracles.’

  Laurel had found her mother in the kitchen, on this very spot, a few days before she left for London. She’d asked her straight. ‘How did that man know your name, Ma?’ Her stomach had churned as the words left her lips, her head had lightened, and a part of her, she realised as she waited, prayed that her mother would say she was mistaken. That she’d misheard and the man had said no such thing.

  Dorothy hadn’t answered right away. She’d gone to the fridge instead, opened the door and started riffling about inside. Laurel had watched her back for what seemed like forever, and she’d almost given up hope when her mother finally began to speak. ‘The newspaper,’ she said. ‘The police say he must’ve read the article in the paper. There was a copy in his briefcase. That’s how he knew where to come.’