Tell Me Your Secret Page 32

  And then he left. I thought my mother would stop it. I thought she might change, that she would do everything in her power to keep him. You know, dress up for him, cook his dinner better, have more sex with him. Anything. Anything that would mean he would stay. But no, she couldn’t do that, could she? She couldn’t put up a proper fight for the man I loved. If she couldn’t do it for her, why not do it for me?

  He left on a Friday night. He packed his bags right in front of us, in front of me. I was his little girl, his princess, he called me, and he just put his stuff into expensive, matching suitcases, got in his car and drove away. No, that’s not right. Before he left he told my mother she was useless, he told my brother he was worthless and he told me I wasn’t enough to keep him. He loved me, I was the best of them, but I wasn’t enough for him to live this life any more.

  My mother. She cried. She cried those awful tears that make a woman ugly, show her to be weak.

  Despite that, I wanted my mother to hold me, to hug me and tell me it was all right. We’d never been that close, she was always trying to control what I wore, where I went; she was always telling me that girls are difficult, girls can be so bitchy, girls cause so much trouble. But I needed her. I needed her to hug me and tell me it was going to be all right.

  And do you know what my mother did? She took a bottle of wine from the wine cellar and then she went to bed. It was Friday evening. My father had left, my brother was kicking a ball against the garden shed and my mother took to her bed.

  I went after her, begging her to love me, to hug me, to acknowledge I existed. My father had just proved I didn’t exist, so I wanted her to do it instead. She pulled back the covers and then got in and closed her eyes just before she pulled her silk sleep mask down into place.

  And she didn’t open her eyes again until Monday morning.

  She didn’t drink the wine, she didn’t get up to go to the toilet, she didn’t do anything but lie in bed with her eyes closed.

  She messed herself, but she didn’t care.

  I begged with her to talk to me and she didn’t listen.

  I cried for her to hold me and her arms stayed where they were.

  I even got Brett – her favourite – to talk to her and she wouldn’t budge. She just lay there, a woman displaced.

  I needed my mother, the first time I had ever really needed her and she wasn’t there for me.

  That’s when I started to hate her.

  Really hate her.

  She tried to make up for it afterwards, of course. Couldn’t be more sorry, crept around me begging for forgiveness, trying to buy my affection, but it was too late. TOO LATE.

  I NEVER forgive.

  But, you know, my mother was weak. Her crying told me that. Her inability to keep my father told me that.

  Do you know who I couldn’t forgive? Who I wouldn’t forgive? The woman who stole my father.

  People always say that he was an adult, a human, that you can’t steal someone who isn’t willing. But I knew, even then, it was the other woman’s fault.

  And she was going to pay.

  She was going to go through all that I went through. She was going to know what it was to put on a blindfold and hide.

  I couldn’t get her, of course, she never left my father’s side. But I would get stand-ins. They were two-a-penny. And every time it would be like the day my father left.

  Except this time, the other woman was going to spend forty-eight hours like my mother did, while I watched.

  Pieta

  Saturday, 13 July

  ‘I can’t believe that’s the reason you did all this. You killed people, you tortured people and then you compound it all by publicly lying about being raped.’

  ‘I didn’t lie!’ she screeches. ‘Who do you think my brother started on first? He was always this weird kid that only one person in the whole school liked. He followed her around like a lapdog but she wasn’t interested. She just wanted to be friends. And when his “friend” rejected him, who do you think he forced himself on? Me. That’s right, me.’ She is wild-eyed, furious. ‘If my father had been home like he should have been, he would have stopped him. He would have beaten him to within an inch of his life, kept him in line like he used to. But no, he was off playing happy families with her. And my mother . . . how about this for female solidarity? I told my mother what he was doing to me, and she told me to stop tempting him. Her little boy couldn’t ever do anything wrong, he was far too perfect. It had to be my fault, somehow, it always had to be my fault.

  ‘And before you start to dismiss it as a bad childhood habit – he still did it to me. When we were adults, between hunts, he would . . .’ She bares her teeth in anger, in possible agony.

  ‘You know how awful it is, so how could you do that to someone else? Let alone all those someone elses.’

  ‘Have you ever sat beside a woman who won’t communicate with you for forty-eight hours? Who just climbs into bed on the worst day of your life and doesn’t want anything to do with you again? I sat there beside her, talking to her, crying for her, begging her to let me know she was coming back to me. But no, she wouldn’t. She “couldn’t”. And all because one of your lot decided she wanted a status upgrade.’

  ‘One of my lot?’

  ‘One of your lot.’

  It’s becoming clearer, everything is joining up. ‘You mean your father left your mother for a black woman so in your mind all black women need to suffer? Is that what you’re saying?’

  She realises, despite wallowing in the depths of her righteous indignation, when I put it like that, it sounds a ridiculous reason to do it. She says nothing.

  I start to laugh, mirthlessly, at her. ‘Really? Really? There was I thinking you were a proper, real-life psychopath, with real, deep-seated reasons to do this, and really, really you’re just a run-of-the-mill racist misogynist.’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘Yes, you are. You hate women, you particularly hate black women. I bet you’ve always felt superior to black girls, and when your father chose someone you thought was inferior to you over you, it was the pathetic excuse you needed to get back at them. And that makes you a racist misogynist.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Of course I do. Your father, who I bet was Mr Respectability to the outside world, was an abusive arsehole behind closed doors but treated you like a little princess. You think that was a good thing, but actually it means he taught you from an early age that you should do everything you can to appease men, use your looks and a sweet nature to be more appealing. And to always see other girls as rivals. So you’re always looking for a way to give yourself an advantage over other girls.

  ‘I bet you idolised your father for the attention he gave you, never realising he was actually abusing you and controlling you to become his perverted idea of what a girl should be. But, boo, your perfect father also turns out to be a dirty skank who cheated on your mother. And then chose another woman over you – not your mother, you, his little princess, and that made you so mad. It must have been hell, going up to spend time with his other family, knowing he preferred them.’

  ‘You know nothing of my life,’ she snarls dangerously.

  ‘Don’t I? What you’ve been doing clearly shows me what your life was like and who you are. I mean, OK, like a lot of people, you feel wronged, so you seek revenge. But let’s look at your payback, shall we? Do you decide to get revenge on men like your dad, you know, the person who caused the actual damage in the first place? No. Do you decide to hurt and humiliate women like your mother, who actually inflicted the emotional pain of shutting you out for forty-eight hours when you needed her most? No. Or, do you go after people who look like someone right on the periphery of your story? You know, the black woman who happened to shack up with your worthless father? Yes.

  ‘Let’s examine for a minute why that might be . . . Could it possibly be because, to you, women like her – like me – are not human, not women lik
e you so the insult of being left for her was too great to ignore? That’s how you can get your brother to do that to them, to me, it doesn’t count in your mind because black girls don’t count.’

  Callie listens to me with the kind of look that broadcasts how desperately she would like to kill me. I have exposed her for the basic, simplistic person that she is. She isn’t complex and clever, she is just an everyday person who expresses her prejudices in a deadly way. And for showing how unremarkable she really is – she would love to kill me right now. She even raises the gun more decisively as she points it at my head. I remember during the interview she said that she had grown up around horses, around hunts, and she had learnt to use a gun. She won’t miss from this distance, I won’t be walking away with just a flesh wound.

  My mind flashes back to The Blindfolder’s knife, the patterns it traced on my skin, the nicks and cuts I sustained when he liked to play that ‘game’, and with that flash comes the wave of terror from knowing one move could finish me.

  ‘I would love to kill you right now,’ she says. ‘But I haven’t finished with you yet. You haven’t suffered enough. You took everything from me and I need you to pay for that.’

  You took everything from me! EVERYTHING! I want to scream, but I control myself to spit instead, ‘I haven’t taken anything from you.’

  ‘You took everything from me! EVERYTHING!’ she roars, mirroring what I was thinking. ‘After you, he wouldn’t do it again. The one thing that gave me satisfaction, that made me feel alive, and you robbed me of that. It was so simple. You had forty-eight hours to keep your eyes closed and you lived, or you opened your eyes and you didn’t live. Simple. All so simple. And it worked for years before you. We did it all over the country, and no one could touch us. No one could even begin to identify us. And then you. You!

  ‘Because you couldn’t play your part and be happy with it; you had to get ideas and talk to him, pretend to care about him. And after that, he didn’t want to do it any more. He wanted you back or he wanted to find someone who cared for him.

  ‘Can you believe that? He wanted someone who cared for him. Like I didn’t take care of his every need. Even after everything he did to me, I fed him, I gave him a place to live, got him jobs working with animals, I found him an outlet for his sick fantasises and he tells me that he wants someone who cares for him “like Pieta”, “like Pieta”, “like Pieta.” If I had to hear that one more time, I was going to kill someone. Else. I was going to kill someone else.’

  She shoves the gun even closer to me, giving me a chance to look into the abyss of the barrel. ‘You ruined everything. He felt so close to you, he didn’t use condoms. Years and years of our good work and he just decides to go off-plan.

  ‘Do you know how painstakingly I used to go over everything? How much time I would spend cleaning them, washing their clothes, clipping nails, combing hair, wiping and cleansing to make sure not one trace was left on them and he goes and does that? I could have killed him!’ Her rage pulses through every word, every syllable.

  ‘But that was all fine. You didn’t go to the police, you didn’t give them Brett’s DNA and then here he comes, out of prison a reformed soul who wants to go to the police and confess. Confess!

  ‘Thankfully my brother has always been spineless, he couldn’t do that without checking with me first. So, what was I to do? I had to promise him the one thing I knew he wanted more than anything – you.

  ‘I explained to him at length it had to be carefully orchestrated, carefully planned. I had to find you, then find those other women, kill them, to get you to realise you were in danger, to draw you out. I had it all planned. If I did it slowly, it would hopefully give him a taste for it again without ever having to worry about you. But no, Pieta, Pieta, Pieta. That was all he wanted. That was all he would do it for.’

  She shrugs. ‘Fine, I thought, I will actually get you. I will properly search for you and then kill you. Simple. I will end you and then he’ll have no choice but to start hunting again. But then, not so simple. You have a child. You have his child.

  ‘And when he found that out . . .’ She stamps her foot like a tantruming child, like a thwarted murderer. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have told him. But I thought he’d just want to steal the child. I thought that would be enough leverage over him so he’d do what I wanted again. But no, he wants to see you, talk to you, be with you. Be with you! He was even going to offer to turn himself in so he could have cosy little prison visits with his son. CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?

  ‘What about me? Hmmm? In all of that, WHAT ABOUT ME?’

  She gathers herself together, stops herself shaking with anger. The gun is so near, her finger so close to the trigger, it’s likely that any more raging and she is going to take my head off without meaning to.

  ‘The only thing I could do was put an end to his nonsense – permanently.’

  Sazz gasps and DI Foster, who has been on the periphery of my vision, freezes. Callie must have done it here, if they both know about him. He must be in this house and he must be dead. ‘He’s dead?’ I say through numb lips.

  He’s dead? The man who did this to me is really dead? He’s not out there in the world any more, he’s gone? I don’t have to worry about looking a stranger in the eye and maybe seeing my son’s features. I don’t have to worry about Kobi meeting him. I don’t have to worry about every little thing in case he comes back for me. He’s gone. This is too much. I can’t process that. Not right now. When there is so much to focus on, I can’t take the time to process this information. I have to put this out of my head. Focus on the here and now. On surviving this. On making sure all of us survive this.

  ‘Yes, he’s dead. He’s in the bathroom. Went up there to smarten himself up for your arrival. Have you ever heard anything like it? I came up behind him, stuck a needle in his neck.’

  ‘You killed your own brother?’ I say.

  ‘No, Pieta, you killed my brother. You made me do it. You took him away from me, again.’ Callie pauses for a moment to run her hand through her hair, to flatten her blonde strands. ‘That’s why I’m going to do my best to avoid killing you. I’m going to really, really hurt you instead.’

  She leaves my side and moves to stand in front of Sazz and Ned. ‘Which brings me to you two.’ She puts her head to one side, staring at them both.

  Apart from the gasp when she found out The Blindfolder was dead, Sazz hasn’t moved, hasn’t whimpered, hasn’t even acknowledged that she is aware of anything that is happening. Ned is staring at Callie and he doesn’t look scared, or concerned . . . fascinated is the best way to describe it.

  ‘If you’d done what I asked and brought your brat, things would be far simpler. It’d be a no-brainer who to kill.’ She shrugs. ‘So, I’m obviously going to have to track him down after this. And obviously I’m going to shoot her,’ she says about DI Foster. ‘But, before that, you’re going to choose which one of these two dies.’

  ‘Not going to happen,’ I reply.

  ‘Awww, are you having trouble choosing between the nanny and the school bully?’

  My head snaps to look at Ned. Why would he tell her that?

  ‘Oh, look at you, heartbroken because your buddy couldn’t keep his mouth shut. What do you think we did that night? I tried everything I knew to get him to fuck me, and he wouldn’t. What did he do instead? Talk about you.

  ‘Although, your face was hilarious when you saw he was there that morning. Priceless. Almost as priceless as when I showed you the branding. I thought you were going to have a heart attack.’

  I say nothing, just stare at her.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that, Pieta. All of this could be over in an instant if you choose. Nanny or bully? Bully or nanny?’

  I know what she’ll do, if I give even the slightest hint of engaging – she’ll kill them both. Or kill the other person if I do choose. She’s intent on making them suffer to make me suffer.

  ‘You’re spectacular,’ Ned suddenly declares. ‘I th
ink you’re spectacular.’

  ‘Oh, here we go, he’s going to beg for his life by telling you how much he loves you.’

  ‘Not her,’ Ned says, his gaze never leaving Callie, ‘you. You’re spectacular.’

  Callie double-takes then smirks. ‘Oh yeah, of course I am.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘You honestly think I’m going to fall for that?’

  ‘It’s true,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t sleep with you that night because you were vulnerable, you were a victim. I had no idea who the real you is. The real you . . . this you . . . you’re spectacular. I’ve never met a woman like you.’

  She falters, her eyes narrowing – she’s not sure what to make of what he has said. I’m not sure, either. Because the way he is looking at her, the awe in his voice . . . No, no, he’s faking it. He has to be. He can’t mean that, not about her. Not when he knows what she’s done.

  ‘Callie,’ he breathes. ‘You are . . . I can’t use any other word than spectacular. You’ve killed people. You’ve evaded the police for years. People only know now because you told them. Every part of you is special, and superior, and . . . you’re spectacular. I’ve never met anyone like you.’ As he speaks, his face softens, changes, alters. He looks at her like he looked at me when we were in bed together. He’s looking at her like he’s already, in his mind, making love to her.

  This can’t be real.

  She is wary, unsure, as she listens to him. ‘You know, I almost believed that, almost. But I’m not easily wooed like some.’

  ‘I don’t care what you do to me,’ Ned says, sitting back. ‘I know now that I could have been with you. You’re something unique and I could have been with you because you chose me.’

  I don’t believe him and neither does Callie. ‘OK, Nanny, your turn. You get to bid for your life, too.’