Tell Me Your Secret Read online

And I wasn’t lying when I said I don’t like coincidences. I don’t. There is something brewing here that I am not seeing. Callie. She is the new player in this. So is Ned Wellst. Both of them have just popped up when the guy starts to hunt down his victims. What if Callie is a decoy? What if he let her go, hoping she would go to the police, which would draw out more victims that he could pick off?

  Ned Wellst turning up, finding himself a job as a photographer on a very important assignment when the paper have regular photographers, is a very clever way of inserting himself into the investigation.

  I sit in my car and stare at Pieta Rawlings’s flat. From here I can see the comforting glow of the light from her living room. On the windowsill is a collection of photoframes. I’d stared at them with a lump in my throat. Her and her son had looked so happy. There was only one of them together, the others were of him on his own and him with, I presume, his cousins and wider family. But the picture of him and her – her in a soft, powder-blue jumper looking at him, him with his arms hooked around her neck, grinning at her like she was his whole world and he was hers . . . that picture had got to me.

  It wasn’t jealousy, so don’t go there. It was knowing that after everything, she had the capacity to be happy again. To laugh in front of the camera, to care for her son.

  I was happy, I suppose, that she was happy.

  I don’t want anything to happen to her. I don’t want that photo, that smile, to end up tacked to my board while below it is another photo of her face-down in a park, her number on display. I don’t want to tell her son that his mother isn’t coming home because I didn’t push her when necessary.

  And Jovie could have had that. Jovie could have been happy again if I had given her the chance.

  So don’t hate me, ok? I lied about Ned Wellst and Jason Breechner knowing each other. I’d found one of his photos on a site that featured one of Jason Breechner’s warehouses. There were no other connections. No other links. No mutual friends on social media, no business conducted in the same area at the same time.

  Oh, don’t look like that. I said it because I needed Pieta to come clean and I needed her to do it quickly. It might be Ned. We have absolutely no idea. It might not, but you have to understand that everything I do, I do to protect her. And all the other women out there whose lives are now on the clock.

  And don’t worry, I’ll call her tomorrow and let her know I made a mistake. That Ned and Jason don’t know each other after all. I can’t do anything about the sleepless night she’s going to have tonight, but, you know, it might push her to come to me – come to the police – and tell me everything she knows. And if she does, the end will definitely justify the means.

  Pieta

  Sunday, 16 June

  ‘Why are we down here so early on a Sunday, Kobster?’

  My son, of course, side-eyes me, eviscerates me with his glare for daring to call him Kobster. Only Sazz is allowed to do that. ‘Sorry, I mean, Light of my Life, My Illustrious Firstborn, why are we down here so early?’

  ‘You know why,’ he replies.

  The sea is calm today, it sits out on the horizon like layers of blown glass. The sun has edged itself into the sky and the clouds are hanging low but aren’t yet threatening rain. We’re treated to interludes of bright yellow sunlight as we walk towards Brighton from the block opposite our road that leads down towards the sea.

  Only a couple of dog walkers and joggers are out this early. Everyone else is at home or in bed.

  ‘I do not know why,’ I state. Even though I absolutely do.

  ‘Mum, the seagulls are up to something. It’s my job to find out what.’

  ‘They’re not up to something,’ I say quietly.

  ‘They are! They are plotting to take over,’ he says. ‘The things they do, it’s not right. They’re up to something.’

  It’s a good thing Kobi doesn’t know about the movie The Birds – it would give credence to this theory.

  ‘What do you think they’re actually going to do?’

  ‘Take over the world, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  We pass a dark green bench, one that I regularly used to sit on when it was just me in that house, and it took coming to the seafront and experiencing that expanse to make me appreciate my flat wasn’t too big for one, after all.

  ‘Can I borrow your phone, please?’ Kobi asks. ‘I need to take some photos.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m not encouraging this nonsense, Kobi. Your good buddy Sazz might indulge it, but not me.’

  ‘Fine,’ he huffs, sounding exactly like me. ‘I’ll have to do it myself.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He marches over to the bench, sheds his rucksack and retrieves his A4 sketchpad and range of B pencils. Indignantly, he flicks a couple of sheets over and starts to sketch. I can see from here the shapes he’s making, the basic structure of a bird in flight. I’ve always been fascinated by how he can do that. Art seems to flow from his fingers – no effort, no worries, he simply renders what he sees onto paper.

  I can do that with writing – the words seem to flow from out there into my fingers onto the keyboard – but not with drawing, not with art. The closest I come to it is with my pottery. But that is not in the same league as Kobi’s drawing. He’s an amazing artist, an excellent mathematician, and has a natural talent for languages.

  My son is amazing. He has all these abilities, these gifts, and none of them come from me. Every time we have a moment like this, when he just effortlessly executes something that would anguish me to attempt, I’m sharply reminded who his father is. And if these talents are from him, what else could he have possibly inherited?

  ‘Kobi, you know I love you, right?’ I say to him.

  ‘Yes, Mum,’ he replies, shading in a seagull’s wing.

  ‘Good, because I have to follow that up by telling you there is no way on Earth that the seagulls are planning a takeover.’

  My son doesn’t dignify my words with a reply. He simply raises his forefinger, taps his nose and then returns to displaying a talent I know he didn’t inherit from anyone on my side of the family.

  Part 4

  Pieta

  Monday, 17 June

  Callie Beckman has moved from the hotel in Arundel to one of the smaller ones on the seafront in the centre of Brighton. It’s an opulent place, everything just-so and clean; the carefully maintained side of shiny.

  I’m not sure if this is a logistical thing or if they held the initial interviews out in the middle of nowhere to make it harder for her to get papped, but this one is definitely easier to get to. Ned sent me a message saying he’d meet me at the hotel as he was going to get there early to work out lighting.

  I’d been tempted to reply asking Ned if he knew my ex, Jason. Because even though DI Foster had called me Saturday morning and apologised unreservedly for getting it mixed up about Jason and Ned knowing each other, I hadn’t known what to think. She didn’t seem to be someone who got much wrong, but when I did searches myself, there had been nothing to connect Ned and Jason except they both knew me at different points in time. I’d left it and put it down to DI Foster trying it on for whatever reason.

  Today, I am dressed like me. I am wearing my denim skirt with a three-quarter-sleeved red top, fluorescent tie-dye print tights, my rainbow-striped armwarmers and white trainers that have a red heart stitched on the inside. Lillian had nearly flipped when she saw me this morning, I looked like all her unprofessional woman nightmares come true, but since I’d got her the story, she’d chosen to bite her tongue. Hard.

  My love of the restorative nature of colour came from when I painted a plate at the Mirin’s Pottery Palace with lots of rainbow colours. When it’d been glazed and fired, a sense of joy diffused through me as I held that plate, and I’d find myself regularly tracing my fingers over the lines of colours, trying to absorb that joy into me. Bright colours, multicolours, make me happy, keep me this sid
e of sane, keep me safe. I don’t care, really, if it makes me look ridiculous. It’s what I need to keep me grounded and what I need to get through today.

  Lillian’s last-minute pep talk basically boiled down to: ‘Don’t mess it up, Pieta.’

  Officer Perry from last week is waiting in the foyer when I arrive. He is out of uniform and sitting in one of the foyer’s bucket seats, but he looks like he’d be more comfortable in his uniform, standing guard outside the room. He manages to get me from the foyer to Callie’s room with three words: ‘Hello.’ And ‘This way.’ I, on the other hand, have managed to babble: ‘I’m Pieta Rawlings. Remember? From the other day? At the other hotel in Arundel? Not that I expect you to remember my name, just my face. Not that my face is unforgettable or something. But then, you’re a police officer, they’re expecting me, so I’d guess you’d know my name. And the White Tern wasn’t that long ago, so you’d probably remember my face. Or at least, think that you’d seen my face somewhere before. Shall I just go up? What room number do I need?’

  Callie is in the ominously named Room 101 on the first floor and DI Foster answers the door.

  We stare at each other for long seconds. Could we have been friends if we’d met at another time? We’re about the same age, we’re both Londoners, would we be hanging out right now if we didn’t meet under these circumstances? At the moment, it feels like we’re fighting over a man – someone we both think is the be-all and end-all, someone we’d willingly lose our best friends over, only to realise in a few years that winning him was the dud prize, and we should have just let our friend have him while keeping our friendship.

  Could we have been friends?

  I stare into her shiny, fawn-brown eyes, she stares directly back into my mahogany-brown ones.

  No.

  We wouldn’t have been friends. Possibly friends of friends who can get on within a group setting, but not one-to-one. There is a side to her that is too brutal and ruthless for me; there is a secret too deeply twisted around the core of my being to allow me to get close to anyone.

  I suppose that’s what hurts me most about what happened – it has shut me off from the comfort of other people. I can dress brightly, I can work at my job, I can share in-jokes with my pals at work, I can laugh with Sazz, I can cuddle my son, but I can’t get past that barrier with other people. I know, deep down, that I can’t trust anyone, and that means every relationship will stay surface, remain safe.

  ‘Pieta,’ DI Foster says, finding a smile. It actually seems quite genuine. ‘Come on in.’

  She leads me down a wide corridor, passing the white-tiled bathroom on our way, and into the main room. The room is an expanse that I wasn’t prepared for. The bed is the centrepiece, large and made up with a cream duvet cover adorned with cherry blossoms. Through an archway there is a sofa and the television as well as a coffee table.

  Callie is sitting on the sofa while Ned stands in front of her, large camera in hands taking photos. Her head is lowered, clearly uncomfortable with the attention from the lens, so she instead focuses on her hands. Every so often she looks up as he’s about to snap a shot and he must capture that vulnerability that was not on display the other day.

  ‘Hi, Ned,’ I say brightly. I need Callie to be comfortable, to think I am nice and easy to talk to, not someone harbouring a grudge against the man in the room.

  Ned glances away from Callie, blushes when he sees me, then returns to his subject. ‘Hi,’ he says stiffly. If anyone didn’t know better, they’d think we’d had an unsatisfactory one-night stand from his behaviour. ‘I’m, erm, I’m just getting some prelim shots of Callie. Lighting and the like.’ The pink continues to glow on his cheeks, while the shiftiness settles around his eyes.

  ‘Hi, Callie,’ I say, moving into the room.

  She’s raised her head and now has a smile that is frozen in the direction of the camera. Her eyes keep darting in my direction, unsure if she should look away or not now she’s managed to look at the camera. ‘Hi,’ she pushes out through her rictus smile. ‘Hi.’

  Ned shoots her a beatific grin when he realises what she’s doing. ‘You can move,’ he says gently. ‘I am going to be taking hundreds of shots of you while you talk, so the more you move, the better it will be for me to get the different light levels.’

  She dramatically lowers her shoulders and unhitches her smile from where it was hoisted around her ears. ‘Hi, Pieta,’ she says. She goes to stand up but then stops, turns to Ned. ‘Can I stand up?’

  ‘Yes, yes you can,’ he says. ‘You can do whatever you like. After a while, you won’t even notice I’m here.’

  She stops again and then stares right at him, as though startled by that idea. ‘I doubt that. Who could not notice you were here?’

  Ned blushes even harder and I have to stop myself rolling my eyes. Can this not happen, please? I think. Can Ned Wellst not have a ‘thing’ with a vulnerable woman, please?

  ‘Can we establish some ground rules,’ Detective Inspector Foster states. It’s not a question nor a firm request. It is a straight, unadorned order. ‘You can talk about the attack, you can talk about yourself, you can talk about your recovery, but nothing about the police investigation, what little you might know. Nothing to do with the most recent murders, nothing to do with a description of the attacker.’

  ‘But how will any of this help if I can’t talk about those things?’ Callie asks. Her eyebrows are drawn together, confusion in every crease. ‘I’m only doing this to help other women. If they don’t know women are being murdered, how will they know to come forward? And what if they come to you with a completely different description?’

  ‘You let me worry about that. I just need you to stick to the stuff about you. And you only.’ She grins at us, sitting on opposite ends of the sofa, my silver tape machine between us and my notebook and pen on my lap. It’s one of those loaded smiles that manages to be part-way genuine, part-way stern, and all-the-way terrifying. ‘Since this is all about to “go on the record”, the only thing I’ll be able to do if you break any of our conditions is end the interview and find a legal way to stop you talking to anyone else.’ Another ‘smile’. ‘I don’t want to do that . . . please, don’t make me do that.’

  If there was ever any doubt in our minds that DI Foster was in charge and in control of this whole thing, that has just been erased.

  ‘OK, go ahead. Don’t let me stop you from having the talk you need to have right now.’

  She retreats through the archway, retrieves a chair from in front of the desk/dressing table and places it just at the edge of the archway, facing the window and the substantial sea view. She picks up her phone and then sits on the floor, instead of the chair. Her back is resting against the bed. She seems to tune us out, but I know and Callie knows, she is listening to every word.

  I need to find a way to take DI Foster off Callie’s mind. I need her to focus properly, completely on me and telling me what happened.

  ‘All right, Callie, I’m going to record this, if you don’t mind. I will be taking notes as well, but try not to let that put you off. We’re essentially just having a chat.’

  As I’m about to hit the record button, she reaches out and covers my hand with hers. Automatically, instinctively, I snatch my hand away.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you jump,’ she says.

  ‘It’s fine, I just wasn’t expecting it, that’s all,’ I reply.

  ‘Before we start, I just want to say I’m sorry, about last time. How I was. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ I reply.

  ‘Well, it is, and I’m sorry. I’d been talking to people all day and they seemed, I don’t know, they all seemed to be doubting me in some way because I wasn’t how they expected a victim to be and I thought you were one of them. I thought you were doubting my story. Sorry.’

  ‘There’s no need to apologise.’ I click on the recorder, quickly, to not give her a chance to touch me again.

  I say the date and
time into the recorder, I ask her to say her name and the date into the recorder.

  ‘What star sign are you, Callie?’ I ask.

  ‘What?’ she replies, her shoulders unknotting at the unexpected question.

  ‘I’m a typical Libran – always on the search for justice and balance and fair play. What about you?’

  Her forehead creases, her eyes go up to the right as she considers the question. ‘You don’t believe in all that stuff, do you?’ she replies.

  ‘I’ll take that as “Capricorn”,’ I reply. ‘Every single person I know who is a Capricorn says that. Every one.’

  She laughs, relaxing her face for a moment, allowing us to see the strong lines, the quiet, understated beauty in the shape of her face, the set of her eyes. Ned has been taking photos the whole time, even when DI Foster was talking. Clicking away so the sound becomes part of the background noise and not something that will distract her from talking, or place her on edge for the pictures.

  ‘Tell me about yourself, Callie. Where were you born?’

  ‘Where was I born? Right here in Brighton. Up at the Royal Sussex. But we moved to the countryside when we were young. Over near Herstmonceaux.’

  ‘I love that word – Herstmonceaux.’

  ‘I do as well!’ she says. ‘Hurst. Mon. Zoo. It’s not at all spelt how you say it.’

  ‘I know. When you say “we”, who was it you moved with?’

  ‘My parents – Mum and Dad and my older brother.’

  ‘When did you move to London?’

  ‘That’s a bit complicated. My parents split up when I was thirteen. My dad moved to London so my brother and I had to go and visit him sometimes.’

  ‘You don’t sound like you enjoyed it much.’

  ‘It was the other side of London so we spent hours travelling up there. The last thing you want to do when you’re a kid.’

  ‘Do your family know what happened?’

  ‘No.’ She wilts. ‘No. I have to tell them.’