Our Little Secret (36 page)

This is unbelievable. Impossible! How can he be
lying
like this? Who has
paid
him to lie to my face?

‘But you must know. They are in the final house along this road,’ I protest one last time, but he shrugs and looks through his computer system.

‘I’m afraid you must have made a mistake. That house has been empty for a year. The owners are abroad.’

‘They’re not. They’re here,’ I yell at him, exasperated. ‘I live there.’

‘Hey, lady, I’m just doing my job.’

I know he is, and I know he’s lying and he knows I know he’s lying, so in the end I resort to bribery. For the princely sum of 300 dollars he tells me that the cab is allowed up for five minutes, and then he’s calling the police.

Fucking bastard.

87

I get to the gates of the house, but they’re locked and, when I press on the buzzer, nothing happens. I stare at the security camera above the gates. Are they watching me? Are they deliberately not letting me in?

I make the cab driver promise to wait and, ignoring the insects that buzz around the hedge, squeeze through the bushes at the side of the gate and then push through the undergrowth until I’m on the other side.

I run up the grass verge of the drive, desperate to get to the house. But when I get there, it is closed and shut up. They aren’t ignoring me. They just aren’t here.

No one is here.

I run up the front steps and try the front door, but it’s locked.

Desperately I run around to the back, but the house is locked.

Where is everyone? Where are the Parkers? Where are Gundred, Laura, the gardeners?

I race along the back terrace and cup my hand against the window of the sitting room and my heart suddenly thuds.

At first I can’t quite believe what I’m seeing.

The room is empty. The white shelves are there, but the books have gone and the drinks cabinet and record player, the sofas, table and sculptures. Even the rug has gone.

What’s happened? Where have they gone?

I’m shaking with frustration and fear. I have to get in there. I have to find out what’s going on.

I yank the handle of the French-window doors, but they’re locked. I stare through the glass again and see that the key is in the lock. Desperately I heave one of the stone pots of hydrangeas over and thrust it into one of the lower glass panels. The glass shatters and I reach in and turn the key. I snag my T-shirt on the sharp shard of glass and feel my skin puncture beneath, but I don’t care.

I run through the sitting room and into the corridor.

‘Edward? Edward?’ I call, but the house is eerily quiet. I run to the end of the corridor to the stairwell, and the glass door of the gallery doesn’t slide back. The walls beyond are empty. All the pictures have gone.

I feel a sob escape me as I race up the stairs, two at a time. My arm is hurting. Blood runs out from under the sleeve of my jacket, and drops run off my fingertips onto the black-and-white tiles.

I get to the first floor. My floor. All the furniture has gone. All the art. Even the bronze nudey man.

I race to my room. The door is open and the round waterbed has gone. The side table, lamp and dresser have gone.

There’s only one familiar thing. The pencil drawing that Edward did of me on the yacht is abandoned on the window-seat cushion.

88

When I get back to the cab I can see a police car arriving slowly over the brow of the hill.

‘Just get out of here,’ I yell at the cab driver, thumping myself into the back seat. I’m trembling violently. ‘Just take me into Manhattan.’

I’m going to find Marnie and demand an explanation.

‘Hey, you’re bleeding,’ he says. ‘Don’t bleed over my seat.’

The police car is getting closer. The driver can see we’re about to move off. I hear the siren sound briefly.

‘Oh, man,’ the cab driver says, ‘I knew you were trouble.’

The policeman doesn’t know that I’ve broken into the house, but he wants to know why my arm is bleeding. I make up a lie about knocking off a scab from an old wound, but the officer doesn’t believe me. He’s looking at me like I’m crazy. I’m bleeding badly, but I don’t care. I can’t feel it. I’m too shocked.

‘Can you call the owners of this house?’ I beg the policeman. ‘It’s very important that I speak to them. Please, Officer.’

He finally strolls to the police car and I see him picking up the radio. He seems bored and annoyed as he talks into it. We wait for an age, as I explain that I live at the house, but the owners have forgotten to give me a key. He clearly thinks I’m nuts.

The radio inside the car comes to life and the policeman walks to get the message. I see him nodding and then he comes back.

‘The owner of this house lives in Singapore. It’s managed by an agency.’

‘An agency? No, that’s not right. It’s owned by the Parkers. Edward and Marnie Parker.’

The policeman refuses to do any more research for me, and he’s keen for us to move on. Nobody has heard of the Parkers. The policeman checks with the guard at the gatehouse. The house has been empty for a year.

Am I going insane?

89

I stare out of the window, hardly seeing the blur, just seeing my own reflection as the cabbie takes me back to Manhattan, occasionally tutting to make sure I’ve registered his displeasure.

I look different. Even to me. I look serious and jaded, tainted by an overwhelming experience that I simply can’t get my head round.

They planned it all.
You fulfilled our fantasy
. I fully get it now. Their note makes complete sense. Without all the emotion of yesterday, I can finally understand. Our spontaneous threesome really was meticulously planned all along, and I was too naive even to suspect it. The Parkers are extraordinary people, all right. Extraordinarily rich people, who will do anything they can to get what they want. Even if it means faking having kids, or faking a whole life together, to ensnare someone they can both have fun seducing. Did they compare notes about me? Did they know everything all along, when they were telling me to keep secrets?

Of course they did.

Is
anything
they told me about themselves true? Was any of it real?

I will do anything to keep him happy,
Marnie’s voice bangs around my head.
Anything at all.

The audaciousness of her plan is breathtaking. They picked me and played me, knowing all along that it would end the way it did. They made it seem so plausible. They made it seem like it was my choice all along, but I was just doing exactly what they wanted.

They had already begun the process of moving out of Thousand Acres when I was with them at the condo. Maybe they hadn’t really moved into it at all. That’s why there were red rooms. Empty red rooms. Rooms they hadn’t moved into – which they never had any intention of moving into.

And now the Parkers don’t want me to find them, but I’m not going to let them do that to me.

I resolve to find out the whole truth. I’ll go to Marnie’s studio and challenge her. I’ll tell her that she mustn’t be scared. That I’ll never say anything, so long as she lets me stay.

I can’t leave now. I can’t. I have to see them one more time.

And then I remember.

Marnie’s studio.

I picture me in it with her, and suddenly my throat goes dry. Because I remember the photoshoot, and the toys and the handcuffs and all the pictures she has of me.

What if I try and track her down and those pictures are the ‘serious repercussions’ she mentioned in her letter? She has all the incriminating evidence that she needs to make sure I’d never be employed again.

90

I go back to the hotel, but I can’t stay in my room. I’m too jangled. Instead, I wander around SoHo, staring in shop windows and not seeing anything.

Eventually my feet get sore, and I find a table under an awning in a cupcake cafe on the sidewalk. The smell is delicious, but I’m too churned up to eat anything. Instead, I watch the queue of kids being swallowed inside, to gawp and gaze at the glass counters full of pastel frosting. I would have brought the Parker twins here, I think – if they’d ever existed.

I shake my head. I still can’t believe it.

I’m vaguely aware of a phone ringing, but it takes a grandma on the next table to point out that it’s coming from my bag.

I thank her and, embarrassed, take out my phone. I’m sure it’ll be Harry. At some point in the evening last night I gave him my phone number, I remember. He’ll be wanting that kiss-and-tell and, for the first time, I’m tempted to give it to him. Blow up the Parkers’ world. Tell the truth about the kind of people they are.

When the phone rings again, though, I bottle it. I don’t want to speak to Harry. I’m too confused. Too stunned. I’m not brave enough to confess what happened. I’m not ready to soil it, stamp on it and make it public. I know instinctively that it would crush whatever I have left of myself.

Besides, I’m frightened. Frightened of what Marnie might do with those photos. If she and Edward were prepared to go to the lengths they did for their own pleasure, then what might they be capable of if I incurred their wrath?

‘Are you gonna answer that?’ the waitress asks, pointedly.

I glower at her and pick up the phone and press the Answer button, steeling myself.

‘Miss Henshaw?’

It’s a woman’s voice. Not Harry. She sounds vaguely familiar.

‘This is Laura.’

I sit upright. ‘Laura?’ It doesn’t sound like mousy Laura, with her chainmail braces. How has she got my number? From the Parkers?

‘Could we meet?’ she asks.

91

I wait for her outside the Guggenheim Museum on the edge of Central Park. I’m exhausted and weepy as I sit in the sunshine. I stare around, waiting to see Laura and her terrible haircut emerge through the crowds of Japanese students.

I wonder why she called me, and why she wanted to meet me. I’m nervous about what she wants to tell me and, more specifically, what she knows. What small nugget of truth she’s picked up, whilst she’s been vacuuming around the Parkers’ locked doors. I think of how she refused to tell me anything about the house or the kids. Why has she changed her mind now?

Does she know about what happened between me and the Parkers? Does she know what the Parkers really employ their staff for? Oh my God – has she been duped by them, too? Has she had a threesome with them?

I doubt it, but I’m really hoping that, if she’s asked to meet me, she’ll be able to shed some light on why Thousand Acres is suddenly empty. And where Edward and Marnie Parker have gone.

‘Sophie,’ someone says in my ear, making me jump.

I look up and see a woman standing next to me, and I stare at her in shock. Laura is no longer Laura, as I knew her at Thousand Acres. Her hair is blonde and her figure has miraculously changed, but it’s still her. She’s wearing a green wrapover dress with sexy high heels. And she’s carrying a bag. A toffee-coloured designer handbag . . .

A distant memory chimes. I stare at her again. And then I realize who she is. She’s the woman who spilt coffee over me at FunPlex. The woman who gave me the copy of
The Lady
. . .

She cocks her head and smiles sympathetically, acknowledging my shock.

‘It’s a long story,’ she says. ‘Shall we?’

I stumble to my feet and walk with her. I see the limo on the pavement a little way up. The Parkers’ limo. Oh my God. Has she brought Edward?

Because, in spite of everything – everything he’s done – a part of me still yearns to see him. A part of me still wants not to have been discarded by him, but still to have him as mine. Hopes that, even if this all might have begun as a game to him, he really did fall for me. And when he held me like he did, looked at me like he did, that it was as real for him as it was for me.

Laura nods to Trewin, who stands next to the passenger door, like she’s in charge.

And then I realize . . . she
is
in charge.

He smiles at me for the first time.

‘Laura, I don’t understand,’ I gasp, as we’re sealed into the back, on the familiar fawn seat.

‘I know that the Parkers think you have left already, but I’m glad you haven’t,’ she tells me. She has an English accent. I stare at her, dumbfounded. She knows? She knows what happened?

‘You’re English?’ I blurt. My mind is going crazy.

‘I’m mainly based in London, yes. My agency is.’

‘Your nanny agency?’

Because the Parkers don’t have kids
, I want to blurt, but I don’t, because she shakes her head. She knows that already.

‘No. It’s a different kind of agency. You could call it bespoke.’

‘But I don’t understand?’

‘You sent your CV and a photo to a nanny agency in London, and we pay them a very healthy retainer to look through their books for the right sort of girl for us. And we found you,’ she says with a smile. ‘Then it was a question of tracking you down.’

‘But the advert in
The Lady
?’

‘It was step one of a long strategy we had planned. I was only really there, that day in FunPlex, to see you. But when I left you the magazine, and you fell for it straight away, it made our lives very easy.’

So the Parkers paid her to find me. To find someone innocent they could corrupt, and to play out their ultimate fantasy. I stare at her, dumbfounded. They didn’t just meet me and seduce me. There was a plan in place long before I ever set foot on a plane.

‘You have to know that the Parkers chose you very carefully. There were fifty or more candidates, Sophie, but there was no doubt in their mind that it had to be you. Only you. They absolutely guaranteed that they wouldn’t hurt you, and I hope that’s the case?’

I nod slowly, but I can’t speak. I stare out of the window at the queue of tourists near the museum, trying to absorb all of this. So they chose
me
, together. I’m kind of stunned and flattered at the same time.

I thought they loved me, a little bit, but it wasn’t that. It was something else. They
chose
me for their fantasy.

I sit back and try and take it all in. I almost want to laugh at the audaciousness of it all.