The Secrets Between Us (47 page)

Mr William Lefarge.

Mr
William
Lefarge.

Wil
liam
.

Liam
.

Lee
.

It was Bill! Of course it was Bill! Someone Genevieve met at university – probably the person who pulled the strings to admit her in the first place. A married man who was close. A family man whose wife had been pregnant a few years before Genevieve was. Someone with everything to lose and only Genevieve to gain. A man whose identity nobody must know. Someone who knew about the quarry. Someone who loved Genevieve but loved his wife and family even more. The man who had said to me only ten minutes earlier that he would do
anything
to protect Claudia.

I thought my knees would give way beneath me, that I would simply faint and fall and the next thing I would feel would be the smack of the hall floor against my skull, and maybe that would be a good thing because then Bill wouldn’t be able to see that I knew.

Genevieve had warned me.

You next
, she had said.

I turned my head away from Bill and stepped into the hall
so my back was to him. I hoped he hadn’t seen the recognition dawning on my face but, even if he hadn’t, there was a smell about me, a smell I recognized from years back, from school, and the smell was coming from my skin, from my glands, my neck, my armpits, the hot place between my breasts. It was the hormonal, primeval smell of fear. As I saw the dull sunlight falling through the windows, I knew that Bill must smell it too.

‘Come on,’ he said with a little sigh. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

I MOVED VERY
slowly towards the front door. I patted my pockets, looking for my phone, and then I remembered it was in my coat pocket and my coat was hanging up in the hallway.

I tried to rationalize and reason, but thoughts were chasing through my head so chaotically that I could not sort them. I was safe: Neil knew the truth. No, he didn’t, he didn’t know that Bill was Lee; he might work it out at some point, but he didn’t know now. He might never work it out.

Maybe Bill wasn’t going to kill me. Perhaps I was being paranoid. Probably he was just going to do what he said and drive me to the station. I couldn’t bear to be with him that long. I’d ask him to drop me at the nearest bus stop, that’s what I’d do. Everything would be fine.

Bill took hold of my arm and squeezed.

‘Come on,’ he said again.

He pushed me in front of him out of the house. One hand was in the small of my back, the other held my elbow. He wasn’t exactly being rough, but I knew I did not have a choice. He grabbed my coat from the hook in the hall as we went past and, as he did so, the mobile phone clattered out of the pocket and slid across the floor.

Bill passed me the coat, and put the phone in his pocket.

‘I’ll look after it for you,’ he said.

He wasn’t looking at me. It was as if his thoughts were miles away.

I glanced around, but there was no obvious escape route. The gates were still slightly open. That didn’t make any difference; there had never been anywhere to run. The lane to the left led directly up to Eleonora House, but it was a good half-mile away and mostly up a steep hill. I was wearing boots with heels that weren’t designed for running. The lane to the right led back down to the main road, and to the gated junction to the quarry, but that sheered sharply downhill and was much further and there were patches of black ice amongst the mud and rainwater. Ahead was farmland, but it was hedged, a thick, dense hedge that was impenetrable; even the nimble little deer could not find a way through. Behind was the old quarry.

If I ran, Bill would catch me. If I screamed, nobody would hear me. Bill had my phone and the phone was switched off so it would not be transmitting a signal. The taxi driver had dropped me off at the Spar. That would be the last anyone knew of me.

If I disappeared, nobody would ever know I had been here.

I gave a little involuntary cry of distress.

‘Don’t,’ said Bill. ‘Please don’t do that. I have such a headache.’

‘You don’t have to take me anywhere,’ I said. ‘I’ll walk down to the bus stop. I’ll go on my own.’

‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘No, Sarah, I can’t let you do that. I need to be certain that you’re gone.’

‘Please …’ I begged, holding back.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but you brought this on yourself. Nobody made you come to Burrington Stoke. Nobody made you get involved. Now you have to face up to what you’ve done.’

He opened the passenger door of his black four-wheel drive and hefted me up. The seat was cold and hard beneath my buttocks.

‘Is that what you said to Genevieve?’

‘What?’

Why did I say that? Why did those words come out of my mouth? I was trying to survive, I wanted to save myself, not rile Bill, not turn him against me.

He slammed the door shut. I leaned my head back against the headrest, trying to quell the dizziness that was overwhelming me. My fingers were trembling. I grasped my hands together in my lap. I knew it was important not to show how afraid I was. I had to pretend I was calm.

Bill got into the car beside me.

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing.’

Bill sat and stared at me for a moment or two.

‘Don’t put your seatbelt on,’ he said, although I had made no move to do so.

‘You know, don’t you?’ he said.

It wasn’t a question. I looked at my hands on my lap.

‘Was it you all the time?’ I asked. ‘Did Genevieve steal the money for you? Did she have the baby for you?’

Bill shook his head.

‘I told her not to give Damian a penny,’ he said. ‘Nobody believed a word he said. And she fell pregnant on purpose, to pressure me into leaving Claudia and the twins. I told her. I told her from the very beginning that nothing would make me break up my family. She wouldn’t listen.’

The dogs were clamouring to get into the car, their paws scratching against the side. I watched them through the window glass. Blue’s big paws scrabbled at the pane, leaving streaks of mud and claw marks. Bonnie paced behind him.

Bill sounded terribly tired. ‘Please would you sit forward.’

I did as he asked. I think I was in shock. My brain
couldn’t come to terms with the possibility that this gentle, softly spoken American was a threat. He bound my wrists together with his scarf, and then fastened it to the car’s armrest. It was tied so tightly I could feel the blood pooling behind it, and my hands immediately ached. There was no doubt in my mind then. I knew what he planned to do – but still I couldn’t believe it.

He put the car into gear, turning it slowly towards the fancy wrought-iron gates. He picked up a small black remote control from the dashboard and aimed it at the gatepost. The gates swung open. The wheels squeaked on the pink fishbone paving as Bill lined up the car to go through.

‘Why did you have to kill her?’ I asked. He inclined his head towards me. He did not notice the small lavender pot, although the wheel of the car knocked it slightly as we passed. It rocked on its base, but did not tip over.

‘To make her quiet,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t stop screaming. I asked her, I warned her, but she wouldn’t stop.’

My heart slowed a fraction.

We were through the gates, the nose of the car pointing out on to the lane. Bill turned right, downhill, towards the old quarry. In the wing mirror I saw the gates slide to behind us. The left one stuck on the pot. I saw the dogs watching from the other side.

‘Were you in the old quarry when she died?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘It was our place,’ he said. ‘Where we used to go. It was convenient. Private.’

Bill swallowed as he spoke and I noticed that the whites of his eyes were red and glassy. He drove the car carefully downhill.

‘She couldn’t be happy with what she had. She always had to have it all, everything. And even if she had had everything, if she had everything in the world, she still wouldn’t have been happy.’

‘Bill …’

‘Please don’t talk,’ he said.

We drove, slowly, down the lane. In the wing mirror I saw the dogs watching. They had come through the gap in the gates and were hesitating. They knew they weren’t supposed to go out of the garden on their own.

‘That morning,’ he said, ‘she turned up all bright and breezy, but she was in one of her moods. She said she’d left a letter for Alexander, and one to her parents, so there was no going back. She asked what Claudia had said when I told her I was leaving …’

He wiped his cheek with the back of his hand.

‘And I said I couldn’t do it to Claudia, I couldn’t destroy her like that. So Genevieve said she would tell her herself. She meant it. It wasn’t a threat. She said she’d been trying to tell her for weeks.’

Bill shook his head. Tears fell on to the legs of his trousers, stained the light-grey fabric a darker colour. He sniffed. The car was in too high a gear. The engine complained. He pulled a sour face, as if he still couldn’t believe what had happened that morning. From the corner of my eye, I saw Blue bounding down the lane after the car. He must have thought this was some kind of game.

‘She sat in the kitchen, on a stool. She was drinking coffee and she was serious,’ he said. ‘Claudia had taken the girls to school. She was due back any minute, so I suggested we went for a walk. I had to get her out of there. I never thought she’d agree to go with me, but she did. She said we’d walk down to the old quarry together and then I could wait for her there while she talked to Claudia. She knew I wouldn’t let her do that! What was she thinking?’

‘She was exhausted,’ I said. ‘Her nerves were shot. She believed you were going to Sicily. She’d been carrying the dream inside her for months.’

‘Yes, yes, but that’s exactly it – it was a
dream!
It was never real. It was all in her mind.’

‘You played along, Bill.’

‘She knew the rules.’

He slowed down as the wheels lost traction on a patch of mud. I felt closed in by the steep hedges on either side of the lane.

When Bill spoke next there was frustration in his voice. ‘Gen thought she could make me do anything she wanted if she pushed hard enough …’ He shook his head and then suddenly, abruptly, swung the car right, between a small gap in the hedgerow, so small I’d never noticed it before. Twigs scraped and scratched at the car and we were plunged into darkness as we drove through brambles. The vehicle lurched from side to side as we bumped over ruts and pits. I banged my head on the window and Bill turned and asked: ‘Are you all right?’ I almost laughed.

‘People have forgotten this track,’ Bill said. ‘The quarrymen built it as a cut-through to cart stone up to the top of the hill when they were building Eleonora House.’

Even then the history teacher in him came to the surface.

The car swerved and rocked. The track between the trees and the undergrowth was so narrow that there was no room to open a door and the world had turned very dark.

‘Nearly there,’ he said, as if I were a child who had whinged.

‘Bill, please,’ I said, trying to hold on to my breath. ‘If you push me off the cliff, they’ll know. It can’t have been Alexander and …’

‘Maybe you won’t be found,’ he said. ‘I thought somebody would find Genevieve straight away. It wasn’t as if I did anything to hide her. People are supposed to keep out of here, but occasionally they come in – walking their dogs, picking mushrooms, having sex, swimming even. I saw them. I’ve watched them. They’ve been coming all year, and nobody found Genevieve.’

‘But if they do find me …’

‘Then they do. Alexander is going to be locked up for life. People will say you were bound to be upset. Everyone knows you’ve been obsessed with Genevieve – wanting to be Genevieve, wanting her house, her husband, her child. Your family knows. The doctor knows. The police know. Our solicitor knows. And now those things have all been taken away from you, and you’ll never get them back. Especially Jamie. You wanted him more than anything, didn’t you? You wanted him so badly you were prepared to abduct him, but now you know he’s out of reach and that we’ll all be telling him stories about you. About how you tried to take him away from his family.’

‘No!’ I cried.

‘Nobody will be surprised you jumped. People will see the symmetry in your actions, the poetry, the fatal emulation of the woman you could never be. Do you know what people will say, Sarah? They’ll say they saw it coming. They’ll say it was a way for you to get your picture in the papers right next to Genevieve’s.’

He turned to me and smiled. His tears were gone. He may have wept when he killed Genevieve, but I meant nothing to him.

‘I’ll be on the CCTV,’ I said. ‘There’ll be evidence of me coming to the Barn this morning, and of us leaving together. If you hurt me, everyone will know it was you.’

‘No, they won’t,’ said Bill. ‘I turned the camera off before you came. I didn’t want Claudia to know you’d been back.’

I caught my breath and tried to stay calm.

Ahead, I could see the cut-through opening up. I could see the green of holly bushes amongst the winter trees, their finger-pointing branches. We must be at the top of the quarry. I had seen aerial photographs in the newspapers and on the internet. I knew how land overgrown with brambles and shrubs suddenly gave out to a sheer stone cliff, and that sixty feet below was the flooded pool, edged with abandoned
and fallen rocks, the rocks that had caught Genevieve’s body, and broken it so thoroughly as she fell to the water; the same rocks that had hidden her from view for so many months.

Bill stopped the car. The passenger window was parallel with the cliff edge. It was only a couple of feet away. The drop made my stomach turn.

I tried to move my wrists, but I couldn’t. My hands were pressed too far back, my fingers couldn’t reach the fabric of the scarf.

Bill didn’t look at me.

‘You should have stayed away,’ he said.

‘Please don’t do it,’ I said. ‘Please, Bill. Let me go.’

He shook his head.

‘I have to look after Claudia,’ he said. ‘That’s what I must do. That’s my job.’