The Secrets Between Us (27 page)

And sometimes, as I watched Jamie beside me on the settee, curled up with his thumb in his mouth, stroking his nose with a finger, I prayed that if my dream came true, Genevieve would carry on walking out of our lives again, leaving her boy with his father, and with me.

I could not talk about my fears with Alexander but at last I understood his reluctance to discuss the past. I didn’t want to talk about it either.

CHAPTER FORTY

ONE OF THE
knock-on effects of the media interest in Genevieve’s disappearance was that everyone in the village wanted to be involved in some way. There was never any shortage of people volunteering to talk to journalists; everyone had an opinion and a theory and, as speculation mounted, so did suspicion. I was used to conversations stopping when people saw me coming but it was becoming worse.

It took me a while to realize that some of the village women were jealous of my relationship with Alexander. I was an outsider and he belonged to the village. If he were to take up with anyone, it should have been a local girl.

By this time a small but increasingly outspoken group was complaining about the disruption caused by the media intrusion. They said it cast Burrington Stoke in a bad light. They were afraid it would become one of those places that is synonymous with tragedy or scandal. They didn’t blame the police or Virginia, of course; they blamed Alexander and me.

I was grateful that Christopher’s mother, Karen, who was a teacher, had been resolute in her support for our little family. It was she, I knew, who protected Jamie from the worst of the gossip and made sure he was not picked on in the playground. One afternoon she called me at home to
warn me there was a gaggle of reporters waiting outside the school. She suspected the police had issued some kind of news release concerning Genevieve, and suggested she take Jamie back to her house that night to save me having to face the barrage of cameras and journalists. I thought I ought to get Alexander’s permission first, but his phone was switched off. I couldn’t bear the thought of facing the journalists so I called the school back, thanked Karen and said I’d be grateful if she would look after Jamie. Then I switched on the television and waited for the news. It turned out that a man in his thirties had gone to an unnamed police station to answer questions about events leading up to the disappearance of Genevieve Churchill-Westwood. He had not been arrested and had attended the station voluntarily. Unconfirmed reports were that the man was Alexander Westwood, Mrs Churchill-Westwood’s husband. There was a lovely picture of Genevieve in her show-jumping gear, looking her most glamorous and laughing as if she didn’t have a care in the world, followed by a snatch-shot of Alexander going into the police station; he was frowning, unshaven, unkempt, his shoulders hunched, his hands in his pockets, gaunt and haunted.

I turned off the television.

The phone rang. It rang until it rang out, and then it started ringing again. It had to be journalists. What if it was the police? What if it was Alexander? What if it was the silence? What if it was Karen and something was wrong with Jamie? I picked the receiver up and held it to my ear.

‘Hello!’ said an excited female voice at the other end. ‘Is that Sarah?’

I knew it was a journalist. Neil said they always tried to sound really open and friendly when they were cold-calling for quotes. I replaced the receiver and immediately it rang again. I didn’t know what to do. If I pulled the plug out of the socket, Alexander would have no sure way of contacting
me. Something distracted me. Through the window, I thought I saw somebody in the garden. The photographers and journalists weren’t allowed on private land; they shouldn’t be in the garden. Neil said that didn’t always stop them though. If the stakes were high enough they’d do anything for the money shot. I ran round the house, breathless with panic, drawing the curtains. The phone kept ringing. It was driving me mad. I begged it to shut up and put my hands over my ears, but it rang again and again and again. In the end I unplugged it, and then the silence was almost worse than the bell. I turned on the television, the volume up loud, and watched some
Coronation Street
. May and I used to be addicted to soap operas, but I hadn’t watched much TV since I’d come to live at Avalon and I didn’t recognize half the characters. I tried to concentrate, but it was useless. It was just noise and it didn’t shut out the noise in my head.

A cramp seized hold of the toes of my left foot. It was painful, the big toe splaying stiff at an awkward angle to its neighbour. I pulled the toes back towards my ankle, as Laurie had taught me, but it didn’t help. Nervy and cramped, I hobbled into the kitchen, filled a glass with ice and poured over a double helping of Southern Comfort. I took a good drink and felt the alcohol warm and anaesthetize me. I licked the sweetness from my lips. Then I opened the oven door to check the chicken I’d put in to roast. There was no rush of hot air, no warmth around my knees. The chicken, beneath its foil, was lukewarm, uncooked, its poor naked skin still flaccid, but ever so slightly yellowed.

‘Fuck,’ I said. Even the Rayburn was against me.

My toes were still cramped.

I slid open the hatch that gave access to the wicks and furnace of the Rayburn and, although there was a strong smell of kerosene, that was cool too. It didn’t make sense. How could the flame have gone out while the door was shut? I felt uneasy. I went over to the door that opened into the
rosette room and checked, but it was closed. I locked the door. I should have locked it before. Why had I not thought to do that? What if someone had come in while I’d had the TV turned up loud? What if someone was hiding in the house?

‘Don’t be an arsehole,’ I said to myself. It was a phrase that Jamie had recently picked up and, although I told him off every time he said it, he knew it made me laugh. ‘Don’t be an arsehole, Sarah!’ I said out loud. ‘Don’t be such a pathetic little arsehole.’

I needed the spills to relight the wicks in the oven heater but I didn’t know where Alexander kept them.

I rummaged through the cupboard under the sink to no avail, and emptied the kitchen drawers, but they weren’t there either. Then I remembered the little oil heater in Alexander’s office. He must use the spills to light that. I hardly ever went into that room, partly because I was afraid of disturbing the paperwork that was spread about the desk and floor in a system that only Alexander could possibly understand, but mainly because Alexander had expressly asked me not to go into the room when he wasn’t there. Jamie was also forbidden from going into the office, because it was where everything dangerous was kept, including Alexander’s gun, in a secure, steel cabinet. The door to the office, which was at the far end of the house, at the back, was always locked, but I knew Alexander kept the key on top of the frame. I stood on tiptoe and patted my fingers through the dust until I felt the cold metal. I slipped the key down, unlocked the door and pushed it open carefully. I did not switch on the light until I had drawn the curtains.

The office was horribly cold and it smelled of the damp that was seeping through the ancient walls. The room was chaotic. Files were stacked upon files, papers spilled out of envelopes and plastic bags, and the computer printer was balanced precariously on twin piles of CDs. The locked
cabinet was behind the desk, at the far end of the room. I could see the spill-box on top of it.

I stepped carefully across the paperwork on the floor but, as I did so, my foot slipped. I reached out to steady myself and knocked over a sheaf of papers heaped on the table. I went down on my hands and knees to pick them up. They were pictures printed from the computer. I sat back on my heels and turned one over.

It was a picture of Genevieve, just her head and shoulders and a hand holding the hair out of her eyes. Alexander must have zoomed in from a bigger picture, because the image was grainy. Even in black and white, even in poor resolution, Genevieve looked so alive.

I turned another sheet of paper. It was the same image but zoomed in even further so that Genevieve’s face covered the paper. Her eyes were distorted so far as to be almost abstract, but they stared out, dark and clear, with the window of light in the pupil magnified until it was almost large enough to see into her soul.

I looked at the next image. And the next. And the next. I spread the images around me until the floor was carpeted in them. It became a kind of compulsion to look at Genevieve and examine her in such close detail. She had the kind of face and eyes that held your attention. She was so lovely. But the images, so many pictures, were deeply unsettling. I knew Alexander’s heart and mind were still full of Genevieve, but he must have spent hours looking at her face on the screen, zooming into her eyes, looking at her, making new images from existing ones, printing them out, all those scores of pictures.

I thought I knew why he’d done it. It was because he wanted to see her face again, like he used to see it. She wasn’t there, but he needed to see her in detail, as he did when she lay beside him in bed, as she was in the mornings, in the evenings, when she was at Avalon, when he was hers and she
was his wife. Yes, I understood what had driven Alexander: still the images struck me as sinister. They made me angry; they scared me.

And I was jealous. Alex would never want to look at me in close-up. He had never taken a picture of me, not even on his mobile phone. If I were to go out of his life, there would be nothing at all to prove I’d ever been in it.

Furiously, I put the photographs back, face down in a pile, left the spills where they were so Alexander wouldn’t know that I’d been there, retreated out of the room, and locked the door.

By the time Alexander came in my fingertips were burned and there was a pile of matches, charred and curled like the lashes of some mythical creature, on the lino on the floor. The chicken was inedible, the potatoes, carrots and parsnips uncooked and greasy.

I had been almost sobbing with frustration but when he stood in the kitchen I composed myself. He looked terrible. I had never seen him so drained. He was crumpled, messed up, and the fronts of his jeans were soaked and mud-spattered.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked. ‘What happened? What did the police say?’

‘Just more of the same,’ he said. ‘Is there anything to eat?’

I looked towards the Rayburn.

‘The pilot light went out,’ I said.

Alexander shrugged.

‘Where’s Jamie?’

‘At Christopher’s. I thought he’d be safer there. Are there photographers outside?’

He nodded. ‘I left the Land Rover at the bottom of the lane and came in on foot through the orchard.’

He went to the fridge and took out a beer.

‘I’m going up for a shower.’

‘Do you want a sandwich or something?’

‘Not now.’

He went upstairs, and I heard footsteps on the landing and the creaking of the boards in the bathroom. I rubbed my elbows with the opposite hands and waited. From upstairs, he called me, as I had known he would.

He stood in my bedroom. His clothes were heaped in a pile by the door and I could smell the sweat and heat of him.

My room was lit by candles. Not in a romantic, cosy way but darkly, so the flickering light seemed threatening. I looked at Alexander naked and it was obvious that he wanted sex, but I wasn’t sure if he wanted me or just the comfort of another person.

Despite the pictures I’d found in his office, despite everything, even then, I was drawn to him irresistibly like the tide to the shore. I stepped forward and touched him and there it was again, that heat between us, a compulsion that seemed to be growing in intensity, something that frightened and obsessed me and that could not be denied, not then; not ever.

Afterwards we lay side by side amongst bed linen twisted and churned, and the cooling room smelled of candle smoke. Alexander held me very close. I was exhausted; I had been shameless – a harlot, a hussy, a whore – and I didn’t care. I would do anything to please him, to ease him, to make him forget.

He stroked my head.

‘Oh, Sarah,’ he said. It was all he said.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

AFTER ALEXANDER’S VISIT
to the police station, media activity in Burrington Stoke increased incrementally. Betsy reported that there was a kind of war mentality gripping the village. Everyone, even the journalist-haters, was excited and unified by the drama and the shared desire to find Genevieve and ‘bring her home’. That’s what they all said. They were committed to bringing their girl home. I think most people knew, in their hearts, by then that the odds of her being brought home alive were diminishing, but the phrase was rousing and ambiguous enough to cover any eventuality. There were rumours that the police were going to start searching the surrounding countryside.

The newspapers were having a field day. The
Daily Mail
paid Dale Vowles a five-figure sum to give them an exclusive on the tragedy of Robbie Innes. Betsy told me somebody had told her that he’d been offered the same again to talk about the day he fought Alexander Westwood and won, should it transpire that Alexander had had anything to do with Genevieve’s disappearance. As well as the story, Dale gave them a photograph taken at a Young Farmers’ fund-raising event the autumn before Robbie died. I stared at the face in the newspaper. Robbie was an attractive, fair-haired, ruddy-faced young man, not at all like Alexander. There was an
accompanying image of Genevieve, aged seventeen, sitting on a gate, holding tight to the top bar with her hands. She had long hair and was wearing jeans and wellingtons, and she was laughing. I’d hardly seen a photograph of Genevieve where she wasn’t laughing.

Somebody had seen a woman who looked a lot like Genevieve Churchill-Westwood in a travel agency in Axbridge a couple of weeks before she disappeared. ‘Confirmed’ sightings were reported from the South Welsh seaside resort of Tenby, where Genevieve had, apparently, bought a ‘love nest’ or a ‘bolt hole’, depending on which paper you read, under the name of Juliet Bravo, ‘her favourite horse’. The words ‘Missing’, ‘Beauty’ and ‘Heiress’ featured predominantly in the headlines and those in the accompanying write-ups were full of poignancy and implied that whoever was responsible for her disappearance may have had some financial motivation. A national television news crew did a piece to camera from outside the entrance to Eleonora House. I didn’t see it, but Betsy told me the presenter banged on about how wealthy the family was. Alexander told me that when he was at the station, the police had asked him about Genevieve’s life insurance. He did not tell me what his answers had been.