Little Black Lies (27 page)

‘She’ll know,’ she used to tell me. ‘If she sees us together, she’ll know immediately.’

‘Would that be such a bad thing?’ Unlike Catrin, I never wanted to keep our affair secret. I wanted everyone to know. I wanted to shout to the world that she was mine. Christ, I’d have tattooed ‘Property of Callum Murray’ on her forehead if I could.

‘It’s not fair to force a confidence on her.’ Catrin hadn’t even pretended to think about it. ‘She and Sander are friends with me and Ben. It would be putting her in a very difficult position.’

So the secret had stayed a secret and Catrin, who shared everything with her best mate, now had something in her life that she couldn’t share. Mind you, it’s beginning to look like Catrin had more secrets than either of us knew about.

Rachel shudders when she’s out of the wind, like a dog putting its fur to rights after a soaking. She’s generally considered to be one of the best-looking women on the islands, but I could never see it. Even before worry for her son stripped her face of any life, she was always too bland, too blonde, for my taste. There are dark roots peering through that blonde hair right now, and those famous blue eyes are bloodshot.

‘Catrin’s been arrested again.’ She isn’t dressed for the weather. She’s wearing riding jodhpurs and a thin, long-sleeved T-shirt. Both look too tight, strained over her flesh and bumpy in the wrong places. Knee-high boots. No coat. ‘The police found a diary on her computer. People are saying it’s tantamount to a confession, Callum. That she’s confessed to killing Peter.’

Christ, does confidentiality mean nothing to these people?

Rachel sees something on my face and takes a nervous step backwards. ‘You knew, didn’t you? How did you know?’

I don’t want this right now. I can’t deal with bereaved, hysterical mothers, I’m too close to hysterics myself.

‘Catrin was here when the police came for her. A couple of hours ago. Rachel, you should be with your family. Let me drive you home.’

I turn to the door, meaning to open it, to steer her out, and catch a whiff of horse. She must have ridden over.

She steps back again, holding out one hand as if to ward me off. ‘I need to read it for myself,’ she tells me. ‘I won’t believe it otherwise. Not Catrin. She wouldn’t.’

I think I’d give anything to have that certainty back. That belief in Catrin. Except, I’ve read the diary. And now this woman wants to as well. I can’t let her do that.

‘Rachel, there’ll be all sorts of rumours flying round the next few days. You should listen to none of them. If there is a diary, it’ll come up as part of her trial.’

‘That will be months away. I need to know now.’

I’m not budging from the door. Her face blanches, her eyes fill up. ‘I’m his mother, Callum. I have to know what’s happened to him. I can’t stand everyone at the police station knowing the details and me not.’

‘Rach.’ Without thinking, I use Catrin’s name for her. ‘I don’t know what you think I can do…’

‘You can find it.’ She steps forward, reaching out as if to touch me, not quite daring to. ‘Her computer’s at the police station. Her files will have been copied and you can access them. There is nothing you can’t do with computers.’

I start to shake my head.

‘I know more about you than you think. I knew about the two of you. I knew from the very beginning. She could never hide anything from me.’

‘Rachel, I’m not sure what you mean, but—’

‘It was obvious. She physically changed when your name was mentioned. She sat upright, stopped whatever she was doing, so she wouldn’t miss a word that was being said. I could practically see her ears flapping.’

‘I need to take you home.’ I look round for something to pick up, some signal I can make that her time here is up. The woman didn’t bring a coat, a bag, anything. Short of opening the door and bundling her out, there’s nothing I can do.

‘She mentioned you more than she talked about her husband. Any excuse to drop your name into the conversation. I saw her eyes when she looked at you. Catrin didn’t know how to keep a secret. She certainly didn’t know how to lie. I knew when she’d been with you, and I knew when you hadn’t called her for a couple of days.’

No, I can’t deal with this, not now. I feel bad for the woman, but my universe has been rocked too. ‘You’re upset. You need to be with your so— with Chris and Michael. They’ll be wondering where you are.’

‘I didn’t say anything.’ She seems to be trying to placate me now. ‘I would never have said anything. I was waiting for her to tell me.’

She didn’t say anything to Catrin, but she told Catrin’s husband? I need to close this down, get her out of here. ‘Rachel, there was nothing to tell. You’ve got this wrong.’

‘I know she never loved Ben the way she loved you. I’m not sure she ever really loved him at all, but once you appeared, it was all over for them.’

This woman is way smarter than Catrin. Or maybe just more manipulative. Catrin would never wheedle and flatter her way to what she wanted. She’d ask, straight up. If she didn’t get it, she’d argue the case, but it would be clean arguments. Catrin argued like a man. She would never dream of exploiting someone’s weakness the way Rachel is doing now. And Rachel is lying. Small lies, but lies all the same. If Catrin was telling me the truth – and I’ve never known her do otherwise – Rachel caught us in the act.

‘I’m phoning your parents.’ I stride round her and head for the phone at my desk. Big mistake. She follows me, of course, and Catrin’s diary is still open on my PC. All Rachel needs to do is move the mouse and the file will appear. I turn abruptly and put myself in between desk and visitor.

‘Rachel, you don’t know what you’re asking. Whatever Catrin might or might not have written in that diary, it’s not going to be stuff you want to read.’

She doesn’t back down. No way, I realize, is this woman going to back down. ‘Of course it’s not. I don’t want Bob Stopford to come to my house later today, sit me down and tell me he’s very sorry but they’ve found my son’s body. But I know he’s going to, because Catrin’s diary will have told him where Peter is. I don’t want to be avoiding the newspapers six months from now, because all the details of how she killed him will be in there. I don’t want to tell Chris and Michael that their baby brother is never coming home. I don’t want to meet my husband off the plane later today and tell him I let his baby get killed by a madwoman who used to be my friend, but I’m going to have to do all these things and if I can know for certain, if I can read it in her own words, then it might start to sink in and I can begin to deal with it.’

Oh crap, double crap, a whole fucking lorryload of crap.

‘Come and sit down.’

She lets me take her into the sitting room. Queenie, curled up on the rug, opens her eyes and appears to start. She gets up slowly, not taking her eyes off Rachel. I push Rachel into a chair by the fire and pour us both a drink. Then I sit down at her side and look her directly in the eyes. No easy way of doing this.

‘Rachel, I’m truly sorry, but I think Peter may be dead.’

She gives a cry, something in between a wail and a scream. Her hands come up towards her mouth and she seems to bite down on something directly in front of her face. I wish I’d never started this, but know I have to see it through.

‘I’m sure she didn’t hurt him. Or frighten him. She isn’t cruel. I’m sure it was all very quick, but it does look as though he’s dead. I’m so sorry.’

Rachel closes her eyes, starts rocking backwards and forwards. She’d told herself anything was better than not knowing and now she’s discovering that not knowing has a lot to recommend it. Then she looks back at me and shakes her head. ‘She wouldn’t. I just know it. She wouldn’t.’

She’s slipping out of focus. I take a deep breath and rub my eyes. Then she’s in my arms and I honestly can’t say which of us is sobbing. Or which of us is sobbing the hardest. When, minutes later, we’re calmer, we find that Queenie has crept into the gap between us.

‘You’ve read the diary already, haven’t you?’ Rachel whispers.

‘You shouldn’t read it,’ I say. ‘You should trust me when I tell you no good will come of you reading it.’

She’s pulling herself away from me. ‘And yet I have to. Is it on your computer?’

I don’t stop her this time. I pick up Queenie, trail after her and the three of us sit down at my desk.

*   *   *

The first two-thirds of it are hard enough to read. They are the private thoughts of a woman barely able to keep functioning, so great was the weight of her grief. Anyone would find them tough. For two people who loved her, both of whom, arguably, were directly responsible for her misery in the first place, they are close to unbearable. Rachel is clinging to my hand before she gets to the bottom of the first page. When she finishes the second, I prise myself free to get kitchen roll. I’m going to need it too.

When I come back, she seems diminished. Outwardly, pretty much the same as I left her, staring directly ahead at the computer screen with eyes that might have forgotten how to blink; inside, though, something essentially human has slipped away.

I sit down, put the kitchen roll between us, and we carry on.

As I read, for the second time, about the ghosts of the little boys Catrin sees around her house, of the voices she hears calling for her out at sea, I think any half-decent lawyer should be able to pull off an insanity plea. I read about how her husband faded in front of her eyes, how his colours became muted, his voice muffled, as he simply drifted out of her life. I reread her decision to stay on the islands rather than make a new life for herself elsewhere. Here on the Falklands, she tells herself, no one will ever ask her if she has children. No one will ever expect her to be normal.

There is no mention of me. I have ego enough to notice that. It’s as though I stopped existing for Catrin the day I didn’t save her children.

The passages Rachel needs to see, the words that, when read in any court, will convict her former friend, are towards the end. On 19 October this year, Catrin wrote:

People would tell me to forgive Rachel; that what happened was an accident, nobody’s fault, that she is suffering too. They’d say that only through forgiveness can I begin to heal. As though healing were even remotely possible. Or desirable. I cannot bear the thought of a life without my sons. In this half-life left to me, this existence in the shadows, they are still with me. I cannot let them go.

Rachel jumps when she sees her own name on the screen. In the words of the song, she ain’t seen nothing yet.

The truth is, I don’t hate Rachel, the woman I once knew, because she’s no longer that woman for me. She isn’t human in my eyes now, any more than I am. She’s become an event. A living disaster. A void sucking every last beam of light from around me. She’s the reason the world has lost all balance. While she’s around, the universe is tilted and those of us on the underside are on the brink of falling straight down into hell.

I’m not looking at the woman beside me any more. I can’t.

*   *   *

The piece that I have no doubt will eventually become known as Catrin’s confession begins on Tuesday, 1 November, the day after Archie West’s abduction.

A child has gone missing. I have no interest in who he is or how it happened. I don’t care whether he’s found tonight or in six months’ time when his bones have been picked clean by birds. I have no interest in any living child, but I can’t get the sight of his mother out of my head. She was disappearing before my eyes. Folding inwards. Her shock and helplessness were simply beyond her capacity to cope.

I thought she looked like me. All the way home, I was seeing my own face in place of hers. And then, just as I was parking up, I saw her as Rachel.

‘Enough?’ I ask, more than happy to leave it there.

Rachel shakes her head.

Which would be worse, I wonder – knowing your child is dead, that he died quickly and painlessly, or not knowing where he is, who has him, or how much he might be suffering? How many hours of not knowing, of imagining the very worst possible, can any woman deal with before she loses her grip on reality?

Before she suffers like I am suffering?

Rachel drops her head into her hands and starts to sob again. I give her time. I know better than to suggest again that we stop. ‘Three years with this inside her,’ she says, eventually. ‘Does it get any worse?’

‘I’m afraid it does.’

‘OK, carry on.’

‘Rach—’

‘Carry on.’

It was as though someone had switched the lights on, as though everything that had been in shadow was suddenly plain as day. Why couldn’t it have been Rachel standing there on the dock, falling apart? Rachel suffering as that poor bitch is doing. Why not Rachel dying inside, right now, instead of curling up on her son’s bed, rocking his warm body back to sleep? Why isn’t she staring at that bed, cold and empty, wondering where on God’s earth he is?

*   *   *

As we get closer to the end, there is a picture I can’t get out of my head. Catrin, standing pale as stone beside the body of a large pilot whale, his blood spattered across her face, the smoke still rising from the gun in her hand. I see her standing in the exact same way, over the body of a dead child, and know that, thanks to the article in the
Daily Mirror,
the whole world will soon be doing the same.

The last entry is Thursday, 3 November, the day after the whale beaching. Catrin must have written it within hours of handing over little Archie West to his parents. The reunion had had everyone witnessing it in tears. It had left Catrin unmoved.

I’ve been wondering if I have what it takes to kill. Whether I can look a living creature in the eye and take the one irreversible action that ends a life. Asked and answered, I suppose. I have no difficulty in killing. I’m actually rather good at it.

Today is the anniversary of the boys’ deaths. It is three years to the day since Rachel’s recklessness ended their lives and mine. Three years since I began plotting how I might redress the balance. For most of that time, I’ve been thinking about how and when I might kill Rachel. Now, I’m wondering whether that might not be enough. Whether I might actually go one step further.