The Darkest Secret (26 page)

They are all crammed into the doorway of the annexe. The men are silent – silent, at last – and the women are babbling. He hears Jimmy's name called over and over, Linda and Imogen crying it with hysterical desperation. Oh, God, he thinks, has he finally taken it all too far? I thought he was pickled; embalmed by his own intake, a low-rent Keith Richards destined to outlive the whole world, like a cockroach. But what's he doing in the annexe? When we slunk off he was sound asleep on a sofa, snoring.

He jogs the last few paces. ‘What's going on? What's happened?'

They turn as one to look at him, Maria, Linda, Imogen, Charlie, and each of their faces has aged a million years. He sees four dead souls staring up at him from the pit of hell.

The earth stops. Jumps two feet to the left and almost tears his feet out from under him. ‘What is it?' he asks, and feels as if he's been struck deaf, so quiet and far away is his voice.

No one answers. Sean pushes his way between them and his world comes crashing to an end.

Jimmy and Robert, suddenly sober, are on their knees by the mattress where his daughters lie. Simone is circling the room, feeling each child's wrist for a pulse. Ruby lies on her side, oblivious, her hair slightly damp as though she's had a shower in the night. No one pays attention to her, for the men are crouching over Coco. Robert pumps with the heel of one hand on her breastbone; Jimmy holds her head back and periodically covers her mouth with his own and breathes, breathes, breathes.

Sean has to put a hand on the doorframe to steady himself, for the strength has rushed from his legs. Linda tries to put a hand on his shoulder, sobbing, but he is filled with a sudden revulsion and sweeps the hand away with his own.

‘What's happened?'

No one answers. They don't need to. They all know.

He stumbles forward, goes down on his knees beside his oldest friend.

‘Coco,' he hears himself say. ‘Coco?'

Her eyes are closed, as though she is still asleep. Her body bounces with each downward thrust of Robert's arm. One… two… three… four… five… breathe… and each time Jimmy breathes out he subconsciously inhales, willing the tiny chest to expand and slowly, slowly fall.

‘Jimmy, do something!' cries Linda.

Shut up, shut up, shut
up
. Her voice sounds harsh in his ears, stripped of its wit and nuance, like some mindless seabird swooping down in pursuit of carrion.

‘I
am
doing something, you silly bitch,' snaps Jimmy. ‘Go and get my bag. Go on. Go!'

Linda stumbles off, weeping, into the beautiful dawn. From the dim interior he sees that the sun is up, now, the sanguine flush on the high, light clouds giving way to azure haze, and his new-laid lawn is emerald-green where the light touches and burns away the dew. He looks down at his other daughter, takes her wrist between his fingers. Her breath is shallow and she no more responds to his presence than she has to that of the others, but her pulse is strong and even.

Coco is waxy white beneath the light suntan she's developed despite the fanatical slathering Claire has subjected them to over the summer. Her mouth is open, forced that way perhaps by Jimmy, and her pale pink tongue looks dry, like suede. He knows right down at a cellular level that she is gone. There's no one there now, he thinks. All the giggles, the tantrums, the cuddles, the broken sleep, the grazed knees, the tears and the smiles: what a waste. What a stupid, pointless waste. Abruptly he drops Ruby's hand back on to the mattress, disgusted by her survival. Coco was always the strong one. Why take the good one, and leave the faulty one behind?

Linda returns, Jimmy's briefcase horizontal between her outstretched hands like a butler's tray. Jimmy throws it open on the floor and Sean sees a cornucopia of pleasure drugs: little plastic bags, jumbled blister strips, a prescription pad, a zip-up canvas box with a white upright cross on the lid.
FIRST
AID
, reads the legend below. What the hell? he thinks, as Jimmy picks it up. We don't need plasters and bandages and zinc ointment now. She's dying. My little girl is dying.

Inside the box: syringes, phials of some clear liquid, needles the size of biro refills.

‘Oh, God,' says Imogen. ‘Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,' her tone and volume rising with each invocation.

‘Fucksake, someone shut her up,' snaps Jimmy, and Maria, still calm, as she always is, but lily-white, puts a hand on Imogen's arm, firmly but kindly. Imogen clamps her hands over her mouth. Simone, who's checked her brother last of all, straightens up and watches. So calm, he thinks, like her stepmother. Nothing fazes her, even at her fragile age.

Jimmy prepares a syringe. ‘You might want to look away,' he says. ‘I'm going to try to start her heart, but it's not pretty.'

Sean nods, but keeps his eyes on the doctor's hands. Imogen lets out a little moan from behind her fingers and Jimmy looks fiercely in her direction. ‘Seriously,' he says. ‘If she can't keep quiet, you're going to have to get her out of here.' He fills the syringe from a phial, takes his time flicking it with a finger to make the bubbles rise. C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, thinks Sean, though he knows that a started heart will stop for good if Jimmy doesn't do what he's doing. But it seems to take forever. The seconds tick off in his head. C'mon. He waits, barely breathes, while Jimmy forces the plunger up until adrenaline arcs from the end of the needle. Such a tiny amount, he thinks. A tiny amount for a tiny body. Oh, God.

Jimmy turns his daughter on to her back, raises a fist and plunges the needle through her breastbone. A collective holding of breath while they wait for the scene they've seen a thousand times on television: the corpse, reanimated, bolt upright and gasping, eyes bugging and mouth wide open.

Nothing.

Coco bounces again, with the force of the blow, and her eyes fly open. For a second his heart skips as he thinks it's worked. But nothing. She lies on her back and stares glassily at the ceiling tiles.

Jimmy slumps back. Closes the eyes again. ‘Shit,' he says. ‘Oh, shit, I'm sorry.'

Silence.

Sean doesn't know what he feels. I should be crying, he thinks, but instead I'm numb. It's all over. Everything is over. My life, her life, all of our lives. We will never recover from this, none of us. Everything – we'll lose everything. Custody, jobs, reputations, liberty.

Maria's calm voice, businesslike, as though she's in the office, planning a campaign. ‘We need to get the kids out of here,' she says, ‘before they wake up.'

‘I don't want to go back yet,' says Ruby.

It's not yet four, but the estuary is already deep in the final stages of dusk and lights are twinkling in Instow across the water.

‘No,' I agree.

‘I sort of don't want to go back
ever
.'

‘I know what you mean.'

‘It's weird, that house.'

‘Yeah. The atmosphere's not great, is it?'

Ruby's nose is red with cold. We went to the supermarket in Bideford after lunch and we've been tasting the delights of Appledore ever since: around the tiny streets, out up Irsha Street to the lifeboat station and back. Contrary to my expectations, Appledore turns out to be beautiful. A maze of alleyways and ancient buildings: a smuggler's heaven with a hundred little boats tied up on the mud-flats. But real, somehow. Not preserved in amber, like Padstow. If we'd thought before, we could have taken a boat out to Lundy Island, but it somehow didn't seem right to be planning pleasure cruises in the house of grief.

‘Nine point six per cent of the population has a personality disorder,' she says. ‘It's interesting how they gather in clusters, isn't it?'

‘Yeah.' So it's not just me, then.

‘D'you think Dad had one?'

‘Um. Yes, probably.'

‘Narcissistic?'

‘And antisocial,' I say. ‘He was a bit of a psychopath, wasn't he?'

‘Oh, thank God,' she says. ‘I used to think it was me. It's funny how you always assume it's you, isn't it?'

‘I think it's one of the ways you can tell you haven't got a personality disorder yourself, isn't it? But Sean's houses were always a bit weird. Like hotels. He didn't like a place to feel as though anyone lived there. But why did you think it was you?'

She snuffles. ‘I don't know. I mean, maybe it was just the stepmother thing. Step-parents. I mean, it's a weird thing, isn't it? That's why there are so many of them in fairy stories.'

I think of Barney. He's never been weird with us. Took a while to get to know him, but then, he never pushed it. ‘Dunno. My current stepfather's okay.'

‘Mummy says that's why she never got married again. She doesn't want to inflict that on me from both sides.'

Hmm, I think, your mummy's being a bit economical with the truth there. It took mine a good decade before she could face the dating pool, but at least she was honest about why. Or is that a good thing? I don't know. I heard a hell of a lot of things I'd rather not have about my dad in the meantime. Is that what people mean when they go on about children being poisoned against their parents? Poison can be drip-fed, after all, like arsenic. It's not all cyanide.

‘I don't know,' I say. ‘Maybe it just reflects Dad's taste in women?'

A sideways glance. ‘What was Mum like as a stepmother?'

This child is a bloody monster when it comes to questions. ‘Honestly?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, okay, then. Pretty crap, as it goes. She never exactly gave us the impression she was glad to have us around.'

‘Oh,' she says, and looks sad.

‘You did ask.'

So maybe it was Sean. Claire never gave any impression while I was at Downside of being the cold individual I knew when I was younger. Control issues, sure. Massive ones of those. But no coldness. None of the huffing in a corner I remember from her marriage to my dad. That's the thing with your psychopaths, isn't it? They're not always creeping around with knives in dark alleyways. Most of them kill you from the inside out.

‘Thing is,' she says, ‘I never really got the impression that he liked me much.' And her eyes fill with tears behind her glasses.

‘Oh, Ruby.'

I put out a hand and squeeze hers. I can't say he ever gave us much of the same impression, once he'd moved on. Some men are good at that. The past is the past,
je ne regrette rien
and all the other self-help mantras. But we were older, at least. At least we had had a few years in which he wanted us around.

‘I think,' she says, in a little voice, ‘he always blamed me for not being Coco.'

‘No,' I say. ‘No, darling, of course he didn't.' and even while I'm saying it I'm wondering if I'm adding to the family lie bank again. Because I never talked to Dad about Coco, not once. Not about what he felt, not about what he thought; not even about what his theories were. It was a
verboten
subject. He seemed, when he wasn't on parade for Maria's campaign, to want to avoid talking about it at all. Plunged himself into a condo development for British expats in the Emirates and didn't resurface until Claire and Ruby were safely gone. And then it was Linda falling foul of her own choice of staircase, and mourning Linda, and then it was Simone, and now it's too late. I don't know. Guilty conscience? Wouldn't he have a guilty conscience anyway? Even if what happened to Coco had panned out the way he claimed?

‘He never wanted to be alone in a room with me,' she says. ‘Not ever. It was like the wives were under orders to never let him be alone with me. They even came in the car when he picked me up from the station. And I know he only ever saw me because Mummy made him. Once
she
stopped bothering,
he
did too.'

‘When did she stop bothering?'

She thinks. ‘Around when Emma was born, I guess. I only met her the once before today. I took a teddy up to St Mary's, Paddington, when she was born.'

‘Oh, that's quite classic, isn't it?'

‘I guess.'

We reach a bench that looks out over the Torridge. ‘I could do with a cigarette,' I say, and sit down.

‘So could I.' She sits beside me.

‘Well, you're not having one.'

‘Worth a try, eh?' She flashes me a little grin.

‘Always worth a try. And when you're eighteen you might succeed.'

Gosh. Did I just say I'll still know you when you're eighteen? I think I did. Well, I never.

The bracelet is branding itself on to my skin under my jumper. Do I tell her? Or do I carry on with the same old half-truths and keep the peace?

She plunges her hands up her sleeves like a muff and stares out at the water. The tide is in, and laps at the bank beneath the quay. ‘It's nice here,' she says.

‘It is. I had no idea.'

‘I came down here a couple of times when I was staying. It's good around here, on a bike. I even went to Ilfracombe, one day.'

‘Shame he couldn't hold off till the summer,' I say. ‘Then we could've gone for a paddle.'

‘Uh-uh.' She sniffs again. There's a lot of moisture in the air, though the rain has held off well. ‘A lot of quicksand out there.'

‘Really? Quicksand? Like in the cowboy movies?'

‘Yep. Coastguard's always having to turn out to fish the tourists out, apparently.'

‘Blimey.'

‘I know.'

‘Oh, well. I guess that's why it's still a town, not a collection of holiday homes.'

‘Yeah,' she says. ‘That and the shipyard, of course. Not too many Londoners wanting to send little Johnny out to build sandcastles unsupervised, and they hate it when people are actually
making
stuff in the countryside.'

The joke kicks some thought off in her and she goes quiet again. I smoke my fag and wait, and after a minute or so she says, ‘Mila, what do
you
think happened?'

I don't need to ask what she's talking about. ‘I don't know, Rubes. I honestly don't know.'

Even less so now.
 

‘What you said before. About Mummy. All those conspiracy theorists on the internet. Why was everybody blaming her?'

‘Human nature, my love. The general misogyny of group-think.'

Ruby frowns. She doubts me. Oh, little girl, you're growing up far too fast this weekend.

‘If there's a cause, it has to
have
a cause. It's only logic, isn't it? And if there's a woman in the mix you can bet your backside she'll be the one to blame. Just think about the way they all danced in the streets when Thatcher died. When people get it into their heads that a woman is powerful her power becomes legendary, but never in a good way. Thatch ended up being some kind of all-powerful mistress of the dark arts rather than an ideologue with a talent for deafness.'

‘But… it's women doing it, most of the time. It's all “Stacey's Mum” and “Little Angel”.'

‘Oh, Ruby. Hate to tell you this, but women can be the worst misogynists of all.'

‘But
why
?' she wails.

‘I don't know. Stockholm syndrome? Fear of change? Self-loathing? Getting in there first so the men don't turn it on them?'

‘But she wasn't even
there
.' Her hands come out of her sleeves and she starts circling her thumbs. Glares down at them.

‘Facts,' I say grandly, ‘rarely get in the way of righteousness.'

I think about Claire. All alone facing the blame while her husband refused to even behave as though anything had happened. Dogshit through the letterbox and green-inked envelopes. I'm so ashamed of my own part in it all. It was so easy for me and India. A great big I-told-you-so that let us feel smugly that we'd been right all along. I remember her standing there at a press conference a few days after Coco had vanished, the rest of the Jackson Associates grouped together four feet away, literally distancing themselves as they realised who the company scapegoat was. Her face, prematurely lined and blank with fear and heartbreak. And the die-cunt-die types on the comments sections, the shouters in the street, the as-a-mother-myself columnists earning their silver coins with their think-pieces, all agreeing the following day that she wasn't upset enough. You can't win, of course. If she'd cried until she burst, they'd have said she was acting.

Ruby stirs. I wonder if I can get away with lighting another cigarette while we're still sitting. There's nothing like restrictions to make you want to cram as much in between times as you can. My nicotine levels are seesawing like a seagull in a hurricane. Ah, dammit, I think, and light another.

‘You know those boxes? In the hall?'

She's not talking about Blackheath. ‘Yes.'

‘They've been there ever since we moved in, you know. They were in storage before that, but when we moved in she brought them out and just left them there. And she never goes into them. Not ever.'

‘Do you know what's in them?'

‘Do you think I just power down when she goes out?'

Cheeky bint. ‘So what's in them?'

‘Everything,' she says. ‘Her whole life, from before. All of it. Designer clothes and shoes and bags and perfume and face cream that's gone to wax and photo albums from before us and jewellery, all just chucked in together the way Simone did with Dad's stuff. Everything.'

‘I don't suppose she has much use for them in your new life,' I venture.

She treats me to a snort of contempt. ‘Oh, please. Why not just get rid of them, then? Throw them away? Sell them? Seriously: we could probably buy a house with what's in those boxes. Why's she still keeping them, making a mess of our whole house so we can't walk up the hall without turning sideways?'

‘I guess she's just not there yet?'

‘Where? Not where?'

My house is full of the same. The brain rewires itself wrong all the time. We moved so often when we were young, and all our stuff would get ‘edited' when we did it, and it's left me constitutionally incapable of throwing anything away. In one of my many boxes is my teddy bear. I stopped using it when I was nine – I remember making a deliberate decision to stop – but throwing it away would feel like cutting out an internal organ. Someone else will do it, eventually, when my dead body is found eaten by cats. They'll pause with it in their hand, feel melancholy, then they'll stuff it into a black bag and my childhood will be gone at last.

‘It's a holding pattern,' I tell her. The past put away, but still there, always there, to sabotage you.

‘The photo albums are the worst,' she says. ‘She had loads of friends once. There's all this stuff from when she was at university, and she's looking so happy. Surrounded by people, you know, boys, girls, people her own age, and they're all having fun and hugging and laughing and dressing up for parties, and it's almost unbearable.'

I hadn't even realised that Claire had gone to university. God, we were so absorbed by our own hurt it never occurred to us to ask her questions about herself. Besides, I never thought of the Wives as anything other than addenda to Sean, as though they only came into being when he turned his holy gaze upon them. And it probably suited him that way.

‘And now she's sad all the time,' says Ruby, ‘and no one comes to see us.'

My father knew what happened to Coco.
 

‘Ruby,' I ask, ‘do you think it would make a difference? If she knew? What happened?'

‘Why?' She glances at me suspiciously. ‘Do you know something?'

I back off, sharpish. ‘No. No, nothing like that. Just a question. Just wondering.'

She turns away. She always turns away when she's going to say something that makes her uncomfortable. ‘I fucking hate Coco for what she did to us,' she says, and starts to cry.

‘Oh, Ruby,' I say. I think she takes it as a reproof, because she wraps her arms around herself as though she has a stomach ache. I put an arm round her shoulder, and she cries harder.

‘It doesn't fucking
matter
what happened, does it? The damage is done now. Who
cares
if she's away with the gypsies or buried in an unmarked grave? It doesn't matter! The whole world hates us and my mum won't let me out of her sight and it's all her fault. She's just a – a fact. I don't even remember her, not really. She's a bit of history, a conspiracy theory like Princess Diana. I don't
want
to know. I don't
care.
I just wish people would stop bringing it up, or bringing it up by avoiding the subject, or asking me how my mother is as if I'd ever say
anything
other than that she's fine. I just hate it. I hate her. I can't even go to
school
because of Coco.'