Tell Me No Secrets (38 page)

‘I say – fuck you.' I lean towards her. ‘I say you're a manipulative, twisted bitch who needs psychiatric help.'

She flinches at this but it's through her in a moment and she's back on track. ‘I expect you agreed to let him deal with me.'

‘We're not killers.'

‘Correct me if I'm wrong but I saw you thinking about it.' Her eyes are piercing and I turn away from them. ‘The knife block in your house. You imagined sticking a knife in me, didn't you?'

‘I did.'

‘So why didn't you?'

‘I've told you.' I look back at her, raising my voice. ‘Unlike you, I'm not a killer.'

She throws back her head and laughs at this. It's a mirthless sound that echoes the mania in her eyes. ‘I'll destroy you, Grace.' She tilts her head and purses her lips regretfully. ‘You have to strike first. Really, you do.'

‘I don't have to do anything. You're not my problem. He's not my problem. In fact' – I shrug my shoulders – ‘I can walk out of here with a clear conscience.'

‘But you've spent twenty-four years thinking you killed Paul's daughter.'

‘Well, now I can say with conviction that I didn't.'

She is circling me, breathing heavily. ‘I'll tell Paul you've been having an affair.' She is using the best piece of leverage she has left. ‘I'll tell him you've been at it for years.'

‘You're too late.'

That stops her short.

‘Paul already knows.'

‘Should we tell Daisy and Ella too then? Or is truth-telling selective?'

I'm tired of this. I'm not blameless; I know that. But Orla is an arch-manipulator and I've had enough of her games. ‘You have no control over me.' I start moving towards the door and she follows me.

‘You are not going to walk away from me!'

‘Oh yes, I am.' I'm inches from her face. ‘I'm going to find Paul and I'm going to grovel and beg and hope that he has enough compassion to forgive me.'

‘I'll keep watching you.' Her mouth is crippled with an ugly smile. ‘I'll come after your girls.'

‘Why?' I shake my head. ‘Why pursue me?'

‘Because I'm not done with you yet.' Her tone is adamant. ‘You can't just throw me off like this. I won't let you.' She flashes a glance across at Euan. ‘I spent a lot of time in prison thinking about you both and then when I came back to Scotland and found out that you were playing happy families, I made up my mind not to let you away with it. You think you deserve to have perfect lives when I have nothing?'

Her eyes are bright with enmity. Her hand is around my throat. Her forearm stretches the length of my sternum and she pushes me back against the wall. She is surprisingly strong, strong enough to stop me breathing and no matter how much I try, I can't get any air into my lungs. Panic overwhelms me. I struggle against her, digging my nails into her hand and kicking out with my feet. My lungs are fit to burst and I want to scream but I can't. Pressure builds at the back of my eyes but just before I close them I see Euan pull her away from me, hard. She falls back, almost in slow motion, her arms windmilling, her eyes wide with surprise. Her head strikes the cast-iron fireplace. The sound is like nothing I've ever heard before: a cross between the thud of a football against a wall and the cracking of a very large nut. I don't move and neither does Euan. Her eyelids flutter once and then stay closed.

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.'