Dead Secret (26 page)

I would love to tie this up neatly now. Present it in a
gift-wrapped
box. I would love to say that I tracked down that mystery man in the hotel. I would love to say that I confronted him, that he crumbled and confessed to killing my mother. But
life isn’t like that, is it? The mystery man is probably dead, for a start. But there is something important to remember. Just
because
you can’t prove something, doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Here’s my truth. My mother thought she was being daring when she met James Cory for lunch. Bet she dressed really nicely that day, took extra care with her makeup. Bet she was skittish with it all, the way she was going to manipulate him, get what she wanted, pressurise him to leave his wife. I keep thinking of Jackie Sandford saying she was laughing with nerves and
excitement
afterwards. She knew she’d pushed it. But the truth was, it didn’t matter what she’d said. Her fate had already been sealed the week before. She just didn’t know it yet. They talked over lunch. Cory got angry. He didn’t like someone else taking control. He didn’t like what she was saying about corruption and the council contracts and the Masons. But he tried to placate her. He agreed to leave his wife because he knew he’d never actually have to do it. Then he left her to her fate, knowing he would never see her again. What did he think about as he walked back to his office? What did he feel? Doubt? Guilt? Or just relief? Does a psychopath get normal emotions mixed in with the madness? Meanwhile, my mother phoned Jackie Sandford. Then she phoned my father, who fell apart and drove to the loch to end his life. But he couldn’t. And while he was doing that, the man in the bar, the nameless, faceless assassin, did the work he was paid to do.

I wish I knew exactly where… how… but those details are not mine to know. Life has unanswered mysteries. Her car was
abandoned
, so my guess is that she was bundled into another vehicle. Her life probably ended as my father drove to terminate his. But we stopped him, me and Sarah. I know we did. He thought of us.

Proof? I can’t prove it. I can’t produce a body, though I know
it’s in the foundations of an Inverness car park. I can’t produce DNA from the murderer, though I know the real murderer is Cory. But what I tell you, I believe to be true. I knew Da and you didn’t. You have to decide for yourself whether you believe what I tell you. Whether you believe in him. Sometimes in life, we are forced to take things on faith.

The church is cold when we arrive at 9.30, half an hour before the service. Father Riley says he has switched the heating on, and after a while the water begins to rumble through the old
radiators
. More noise than heat. They are barely warm, even when the rumbling stops and the heat is supposedly through.

Some wreaths have been delivered and left in the porch at the back of the church and we read the messages, murmuring amongst ourselves in low voices, though there is no one else here to hear. We bring them down to the front of the church and place them on the coffin. I want to hug that polished wooden box in the way I wasn’t able to hug Da in the funeral parlour. I think of Da as a little boy, lying across his mother’s coffin. I understand that need. But of course, I don’t do anything. I lay the flowers on the top and let my hand linger there when no one is watching.

Sarah and I have sent one with deep red roses and white lilies and sprays of fragile white gypsophila. Baby’s breath, the florist said it was called. Sarah and I liked that. I used the deposit for the holiday Da and I were supposed to be going on to pay my half. I wanted flowers everywhere.

You can smell the sweetness of them as soon as you walk through the door. Beautiful tall white lilies, with creamy heads and flashes of lime green in the elegant petals that blend
perfectly
with simple fern. Classy. It had to be something classy, I
had told Sarah. Da came from nowhere, from a peasant crop of rocky land, but he was the classiest man I ever knew.

I always think of Tariq when I see lilies. The slenderness of them, the beauty. When Tariq went, it was like losing the
possibility
that life could be special. The vibrancy of a favourite colour; the crispness of fresh cotton sheets; the heartbeat of
excitement
; the explosion of a favourite taste in the mouth. Losing Tariq was like losing the colour of a painting. But losing Da is like losing the outline, the bit that holds everything up. His
going
is incomprehensible. He has simply always been.

Khadim is first to arrive, twenty minutes early. From the church door, I see him walk across the grounds, rolling slightly as he walks and puffing with the exertion. Khadim is getting older too. I feel a surge of tenderness for him. It isn’t the coffin or the flowers or even the painful emotion of talking to Peggy that makes the first, hot tears of the day sting in my eyes. It is the sight of Khadim’s best suit and his big domed tummy encased in a waistcoat and a gold chain. It is the respect for Da that I see reflected in the inky
blackness
of his shiny shoes, so carefully polished.

He looks sad, as the elderly do when they attend funerals, when they begin to feel like they are among the last people of their generation alive. But he is anxious too.

He doesn’t know what to do in the church, he whispers to me. He doesn’t know what to do during the service. Just watch me, I tell him softly. Stand when I stand, and sit when I sit, and you’ll be fine. I squeeze his arm and say thank you for coming, Da would have been so pleased, and he gives me a little awkward hug and clears his throat noisily.

There is a steady trickle after that and then a little rush at five to ten and we acknowledge everyone at the back as they arrive.
There aren’t many words, just ‘I’m so sorry’, over and over again, and I feel sorry for them having to talk to us when there is
nothing
to be said. Shameena is among the last. I hug her when she arrives.

“Thank you,” I whisper, and she says nothing but leans her head against mine and holds me.

“I wore my salwar kameez,” she says as we hug, “instead of black. Your dad loved colour.”

“Perfect,” I say, looking at the rich, deep, electric blue, edged with gold. And it is.

I watch her walk down the church, hesitate at the pew where Khadim sits. He glances up and I hold my breath. His body moves, almost imperceptibly, making room for her, and I am glad.

Sarah and I sit together, with Peggy beside Sarah, and
Charlie
beside me. We rise and fall like puppets on strings, without thought, without meaning. We kneel. We pray. We sing. We stand. We sit. We listen.

“Joseph Connaghan was a fine Catholic man,” says Father Riley, “beloved father of Rebecca and Sarah. It is with Joseph’s family that our thoughts are today.” It means nothing. My eyes are drawn continually to the wooden box on the stand at my side. I keep thinking of the shell in there, the shell without the spirit. Where is his spirit? But even if the shell is all that remains, I refuse to believe that all of Da is destroyed. There is something of him in me, even in Sarah. Something that is nothing to do with blood.

Sarah and I don’t look at one another as we stand side by side. But I can feel her. I can feel the stiffness of her in the moments when she struggles to hold everything together. I can feel her
love for him. A tear falls from where she stands, dripping onto the hymn book in her hand, and I squash my arm up against hers and take a tissue from my pocket with a tiny movement and hand it to her, and with a tiny movement she takes it and I feel the pressure of her shoulder back.

I look at our wreath of roses on his coffin, Sarah’s and mine, and the closed circle of flowers. Sarah and me, a whole circle. Roses and lilies; different but complementary. It’s the moment when I know we are stripped: the thick varnish gone, the
underlying
layers removed. The thud of the bottom of the barrel. Peggy was right. He was her father. He was her father in
everything
but blood and cells and DNA. And what was that when it came to love? Cory had blood and cells and DNA to match Sarah’s. What he had was nothing to what Da had.

The offertory. A slow procession carrying bread and wine to the altar as the small parish choir sings.

“Love one another, I have loved you, and I have shown you how to be free.”

It could be Da talking, and perhaps it is. Things will never be the same again, but I know who I am, where I came from. I am free to be whoever I am going to be. But Sarah? How do I love her? How do I free her? By telling her the truth or by telling her nothing? Sarah is my sister but she isn’t me. I needed to know the truth. She didn’t. Da knew that. He loved us both in different ways and he wanted different things for us. Maybe he has been talking to me all along. Leading me to Lochglas, giving me answers. I just didn’t hear him because I didn’t know how to listen to the dead, how they talked. I was talking to him inside my head and maybe he was answering in there too.

“Heavenly Father,” Father Riley is saying, “give us, today, the strength…” The words become a distant drone, like the drone of bees on a summer’s day as you drift off to sleep on a garden chair.

The summer rain begins again, a faint pattering on the church roof. A shuffled queue for communion, silently filing past the coffin. I turn and see Khadim. He is wiping his eyes with a cloth handkerchief, and I turn my head back. The queue is gone, seats resumed. Father Riley takes his seat on the altar and waits, and I nod to Shameena. She walks to the front of the church in that glorious blue and gives a tiny bow, not to the altar, but to Pa’s coffin. A nod of respect.

In just a few minutes the flowers will be lifted from the wood. The pall bearers will raise Da to their shoulders and we will take him to the earth. The petals on the wreaths will drip with rain, the ink on the messages running to a blur. But I hope he is
listening
, wherever he is, that he will hear my message clearly, my song, for him. Shameena stands at the altar and nods to the
organist
and the first notes of Puccini fill the church. I know she will silence the nightingale. I wonder if she sings for Khadim as much as she sings for Da. Her voice soars halfway to heaven, up, up to the rafters. It is clear and sweet and true and it pierces my heart.

“
O mio babbino caro
,” she sings. “Oh My Beloved Father.”

With sincere thanks to Ben Yarde-Buller for good advice, good cheer, and great support over the years. It has all been so much appreciated.

Catherine Deveney is an award-winning features writer and reporter for the
Observer
and other newspapers. She lives in Rossshire, Scotland, with her family.

Dead Secret
is her third novel.

Ties that Bind

Kiss the Bullet