The Secrets Between Us (26 page)

I sighed and looked up at the ceiling so that the tears would run into my throat and not down my cheeks.

‘I didn’t take you for the sort of girl who’d give up at the first hurdle.’

‘Genevieve is a very big hurdle,’ I said. ‘Please don’t look at me like that. It’s not that I don’t want to be with Alex, only he won’t let me …’

‘What?’

‘Get close to him.’

The inspector passed me a paper napkin. I took it and dabbed at my eyes. There were mascara smears on the paper and probably also on my lower eyelids and cheeks.

‘Maybe he’s trying to protect you, Sarah.’

‘From what?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, but I knew what he meant to say was: ‘The truth.’ I heard the words so clearly in my mind that I did not doubt them.

‘He shuts me out all the time, from everything,’ I said. ‘I don’t think he trusts me.’

The inspector smiled at me kindly. ‘One thing I know for sure is that Alexander Westwood has made some fuck-awful decisions in his life. Something tells me you’re not one of them.’

I was flattered and reassured by the compliment. I screwed up the napkin and tucked it under the rim of my plate. ‘So
have you found out anything else about Genevieve?’ I asked. ‘Anything at all?’

He shook his head. ‘We’ve increased our efforts in trying to track her down, poured in a load of resources. We’ve interviewed dozens of people, we’ve liaised with our colleagues nationally and internationally, we’ve put our computers to work and we haven’t found a trace of her. Nothing. Nada, nix, zilch.’

‘Oh.’

I picked up the empty crisp packet and folded it very small. There was a banging sound in my ears. The detective turned his glass round in his hand.

‘The world’s a big place,’ I said. ‘It must be hard to find someone, especially if they don’t want to be found. I mean, look at Luke Innes.’

‘Let’s just say a few things are giving us cause for concern.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked in a small voice.

He shuffled in his chair and pulled at his tie.

‘In Genevieve’s letter to her parents, she said she was going abroad, but there’s no record of her leaving the country. If she went, she didn’t go by plane or via any port. She didn’t use her passport.’

‘Aren’t there other ways?’

‘There are, but why complicate things?’

The barman came over to put another log on the fire. He poked at it and a rush of hot air scorched my ankles. The headache had started to throb again.

‘And,’ the detective continued, ‘none of her various credit cards, nor her mobile phone, has been used since the day she left.’

‘She could’ve bought a new phone. And maybe her lover, if there is one, is paying for everything. He might be wealthy. They might be using different names. That’s why there’s no trail.’

DI Twyford swirled the pint slowly in his hands. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.

I knew then that he believed Genevieve was dead. I realized that the lunch, the whole thing, had been a set-up. He must have known Alexander wasn’t at Avalon. He must have known he’d catch me there alone. And there must have been a reason for him wanting to talk to me.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

DI TWYFORD DROVE
me back to Burrington Stoke. I asked him to drop me at the crossroads. I felt like I needed the walk back to Avalon to clear my mind. A mizzle had settled in the cold air and the dull afternoon suited my mood. The lunch and the city and the alcohol had picked me up temporarily, but now the anxiety about Genevieve was back again, several times worse than before. She was a missing person. I was certain the police believed some kind of crime had been committed, and although none, so far, had been specified, crimes against missing people were always terrible, weren’t they?

Was Alexander a suspect? Was I?

I kicked at leaves on the pavement, swung my bag and turned these thoughts over in my mind, and as I did so a car pulled up beside me. I looked up. It was the Land Rover. Alexander leaned across and opened the door. He didn’t say anything, so I climbed in.

He drove past Avalon and out through country lanes until we reached a narrow road with a cattle grid at the end that wound up through a steep gorge. White goats stood precariously on the sides of the grey cliffs as if they were paper cut-outs that had been pinned there.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘For a walk,’ he said.

‘My shoes …’

‘Your boots are in the back.’

‘What about Jamie?’

‘Claudia’s giving him tea.’

He parked close to the top of the hill and I changed into my walking boots. He passed me one of his old waxed jackets.

‘Thanks,’ I said, as he helped me into it and its weight settled on my shoulders.

I followed him over the road, up a stony path that led to the side of a huge hill, moorland really, fashioned into a beautiful big curve like the hip of a sleeping woman. The hillside was covered in purple-brown, dead bracken, and the ground underfoot was damp.

‘This way,’ he said.

We walked for several miles, heading around the side of the hill, and we didn’t say anything. I followed his back, and every now and then we stopped to look at the view. He paused to help me cross a galloping stream. He held my eye for a second and then turned and set off again.

It was a steep tramp up a wet, rocky path between flanks of heather and scrubby little wind-blown trees. Several times I had to stop to catch my breath, but Alexander ploughed on. He took off his jacket and tied it by the sleeves around his waist. There were sweat patches under each arm, in the centre of his back and at the neck of his shirt. I saw a deer leaping through the bracken and we startled some noisy hen-pheasants. I wanted to tell Alexander to slow down, but I couldn’t. I didn’t. I pushed myself to keep up with him.

At the top of the hill, he made me turn.

‘Look,’ he said.

I looked.

Beyond the black, pointed treetops of a managed evergreen woodland was the Severn Estuary, spread out
breathtakingly wide and reflecting the silver sun, with the distant hills of North Devon and South Wales stretching indistinguishably beneath an immense white sky made of sunlight.

‘It’s beautiful,’ I said.

Alexander reached out and took my hand and led me a little further, to a benchmark monument.

‘This is Beacon Batch. It’s the highest point of the Mendips,’ he said. ‘It’s the best place to watch the sun go down.’

‘Alexander, I …’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t say anything.’

He cleared his throat and he said very softly: ‘I went back to Avalon and you weren’t there. I thought you’d gone.’

We sat down side by side on the mound with our backs against the monument.

He picked up my hand and turned it over so it rested, palm upwards, in his larger one, cradled.

‘Don’t go,’ he said.

I glanced at his face. Alexander gently bent each of my fingers forward and examined each fingernail carefully as if it were something precious.

‘I mean,’ he said, ‘I can’t be without you.’

I leaned my head back against the monument and gazed out. I could see for miles, hundreds of miles probably. The sun sank behind a low cloud and, as it dropped behind the Welsh mountains, the temperature fell with it. Sunlight slipped away from the hills like sand through a timer.

‘I found the statue of Genevieve in the back garden,’ I said.

‘I know.’

‘You should have been a sculptor.’

He shook his head. ‘No chance.’

‘What happened to Pete?’ I asked.

He behaved as if he had not heard. I took my hand away from his.

‘You have to tell me, Alexander. You can’t keep not telling me. Your secrets are what’s driving us apart. They’re poisoning everything.’

‘It’s better you don’t know.’

‘If you trusted me, you’d tell me.’

‘But you won’t like it.’

Alexander looked out across the countryside. The sun was gone now – only its reflection remained, and its glorious colours were fading inevitably on the underside of the clouds.

He said: ‘Genevieve and I had a fight.’

‘Because she was leaving?’

‘No, no. I knew she was going. I had resigned myself to that. It was because she was going to take Jamie with her.’

‘Oh.’

‘I told her … I said she could do what she liked with her life but if she tried to take him from me, I would … oh Christ, Sarah, I said that I would kill her.’

I was less shocked by this than I might have been, because Virginia had already told me about the argument.

Alex’s hand was inside his shirt, under his rib, scratching at the place where the scar was, and his face was a picture of pain and something else, something ugly. It was anger.

‘But you didn’t mean it,’ I said.

‘I did at the time. I told her I would kill her. I was shouting … We were in the kitchen and the knife was on the counter …’

‘She stabbed you?’

‘She didn’t mean to. She was frightened; she thought I was going to hurt her and she grabbed it, it just happened, but I was bleeding, doubled over, and she was screaming at me and …’

I wanted him to stop. I wanted to put my hands over my ears. He had been right, it was better I didn’t know, but now Alexander was telling me the cruel truth it became part of me, in my mind for ever.

He shook his head and his voice changed. ‘Pete was the gentlest dog. He caught rabbits and rats but he’d never hurt a person,’ he said. ‘But he was my dog, and his instinct was to protect me. He went for Genevieve.’

I held my breath. The cadence of his voice was falling now; anger was replaced by sadness and resignation.

‘I had to pull him off her. After that Pete wasn’t the same. He’d been badly treated before I had him and all his old aggression came back. I couldn’t trust him round people.’

‘Genevieve, you mean?’

‘And Jamie. Jamie was so little, and he was rough with Pete … The dog never hurt him, he growled and tried to back off, but Jamie was too young to read the warning signs. He kept jumping at him and I knew that sooner or later …’

I rested my head back against the monument.

‘So Pete couldn’t stay with you?’

‘No.’

I waited, but Alexander didn’t say any more. A couple of cheerful, loud Australian men, spattered from head to toe in mud, came by on their mountain bikes and stopped for a few moments. In their dirty Lycra shorts they made the world seem more normal again.

‘Where did Pete go?’ I asked.

‘To a colleague of Bill’s in Bristol. He’d just lost his dog and wanted a replacement.’

‘Oh, good.’

Alexander swallowed. ‘But Pete wouldn’t settle. He kept running away, escaping out of the garden …’

I could tell by Alexander’s voice that this story was not going to have a happy ending.

‘Don’t tell me any more,’ I said. I covered my face with my hands.

‘I’m sorry,’ Alexander said quietly. ‘This is what I was afraid of.’

I leaned over and I kissed him. I kissed him insistently,
persistently, until he responded and kissed me back. I pulled away a little then, and licked my lips. It was a promise, a pledge.

‘You won’t go back to Manchester?’ he asked. Or perhaps it wasn’t a question.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I won’t go anywhere.’

‘It’s going to get worse,’ he said. ‘I mean, about Genevieve.’

‘I know,’ I said, feeling like I didn’t care. Only back then I had no idea how bad it would become.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

FOR A SHORT
while after that Alexander was exquisitely tender with me. He was gentle and careful in his words and actions and, together, in this newfound atmosphere of calm and trust, he and I communicated our feelings for one another through our mutual affection for Jamie. We were proud of every small achievement; we delighted in his chatter, his energy and his humour. Even his naughtiness – playful now rather than angry and foul-mouthed – charmed us, because we took it to mean he was recovering. If ever there was a time when we ran out of conversation, we talked about Jamie. Jamie was the light in our lives. In the middle of the police activity, and the family pressures, and the increasing burden of not knowing where Genevieve was, Jamie was something pure and innocent and untainted.

The search for Genevieve had been ramped up a gear, and being in the village was intolerable to me now. Outside the school gate, I stood alone, isolated from the other women. Only Betsy talked to me, but her loyalty was making things more difficult for her, so if she was already with another group when I arrived I didn’t do anything to attract her attention.

At Avalon, I sat with Jamie for hours making Lego models
or drawing while we waited for Alexander to come home, which was the time when we could lock the doors and draw the curtains and be safe, together. The three of us – Alexander, Jamie and I – encased ourselves in a private bubble where we could simply be; untouched by the outside world.

But the status quo couldn’t last. There were almost daily appeals for information about what had happened to Genevieve, and rumours were flying about with so many different theories. On the rare occasions I went down to the village, I would see a police car parked outside a particular house, or one would be pulling out of the lane that led past the quarry up to Eleonora House. Journalists from the local weekly papers were hanging around asking questions and collecting photographs. Genevieve’s disappearance was exciting to them. They didn’t care how Jamie felt when ‘friends who asked not to be named’ were quoted on the pages of their publication, speaking about frictions between Genevieve and her husband or how she used to turn up at the school gates looking as if she’d been crying and complaining about his moodiness. I had no idea how much of what they reported was true. I didn’t know if the unnamed friends were exaggerating or elaborating because they enjoyed the attention, or if these things really had taken place.

Sometimes I dreamed of how it would be if Genevieve returned. I imagined her walking through the village like the heroine in the last scene in a film – ideally with Luke Innes walking beside her, holding her hand. Alexander and I would be exonerated, and the villagers would be sorry for all their unkind speculation and snide comments.