Keep My Secrets by Elena Wilkes (large ebook reader .txt) 📗

She can see it’s against every instinct, but he reaches down and turns the ignition. The misted window makes it feel as though everything is closing in: there are shapes out there, piles of rubbish sacks casting weird shadows in the yellow streetlights. Alex opens both side windows; she daren’t look round.

‘We’ll have to wait a minute for the windscreen to clear.’ He peers out, blinking.

Out of the corner of her eye she thinks she sees a figure. She turns her head, seeing the bulk of shadows through the fog, hearing the growl and hiss of the truck behind them. The black plastic bags flap in the wind, but something else moves. The headlights of a stationary car on the other side of the street suddenly light up, and the figure crosses the road in front of them. She stares at the shape, willing it to pause and face her. The mist bundles in waves and then clears a little. It’s him, it has to be him. He’s always been out there hovering in the periphery of her sightline, that man, just she remembers him, that twenty-one-year-old, conjured up; a man she wants to hate. It’s been a long, long time. Fifteen years gone and now he’s found her, just as she always knew he would.

A patch on the windscreen clears a little. Alex puts the car into gear. They go to pull away just as the figure passes by her window. It turns its head and looks straight at her.

It’s not him.

Chapter Nine

Then

‘How do you plead?’

Frankie sat up in the public gallery, tucked away in a corner, her hands clasped between her knees, leaning anxiously forward. The whole room was designed to absorb the daylight: the dark Victorian benches, the arched, ornate ceiling, the scrolled, panelled walls closing everything in. The outside world didn’t exist. This had been life for the last few days. This was her only life.

‘Not guilty.’

She stared at the shape of Martin’s head, unable to drag her gaze away. She closed her eyes for a second, remembering how, just a few months ago, the sight of him from her bedroom window sent her stomach somersaulting. All those feelings were still there, as intense as they’d ever been. How she wished they weren’t. She opened her eyes. The clusters of dusty pendant lights gave everything a muted, jaundiced haze and the room felt dry and over-heated. Her eyes kept being drawn back to him over and over, as though an invisible thread connected them that nothing, not anger, or hurt, or time could ever break.

The judge was speaking; he was a jowly man, old and wrinkly, like the judge in a cartoon. He droned on, speaking a language she didn’t understand.

They’d taken him away that day, questioned him and eventually charged him, gathering their evidence and their paperwork, mapping out his movements that night, weaving and knitting until it all fitted together like a jigsaw. The next day he’d rung the care home from HMP Moreton Wood where he was being held.

‘No, I’m very sorry, that simply isn’t possible.’

She had been passing Jude’s office door when the call came through. She instantly knew it was Martin: Jude’s voice had that stiff, professional clip.

‘Please… Let me speak to him. Jude, please—’

But Jude only carried on talking, waving her away and shaking her head.

‘Let me speak to him,’ Frankie insisted. ‘I need to know what he’s told the police.’

Jude paused with her hand over the receiver and Frankie took the tack that she knew would work.

‘Look, you need to know what he’s told the police. I’m seventeen and I’m still in your care. It’s in all our interests. If he drops me in it, it’ll all come back on you. Think about it Jude.’

‘Precisely. This is for me to deal with.’

‘It’s my life too. I got Martin into this by going to that party, didn’t I?’ She held out her hand. ‘Come on… Please… Two minutes. Just let me speak to him.’

There was a moment’s hesitation and then reluctantly, very reluctantly, Jude handed over the phone, but made it clear she was going nowhere.

‘Hello?’

‘You don’t know what it’s like just to hear your voice,’ he breathed.

‘What’s happening?’

‘They’re saying I did it.’

‘I know.’

‘It doesn’t matter what they say, you know I didn’t. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

She closed her eyes. If she concentrated hard, she could shut out all the flashing images that came back to her: the darkness, the water, the boat, that queasy rise and fall sensation beneath her feet. By closing her mind, she could make it fade around the edges and start to go black until there was nothing there. Nothing. None of it.

‘So what did you tell the police about me?’ She was aware of Jude’s piercing eyes.

‘I didn’t tell them anything; there’s nothing for them to know. Look, all this will get sorted, but I need to ask you a qu—’

‘What’s he saying?’ Jude stood suddenly. ‘Give the phone back to me.’ Her fingers began to wrestle the receiver from Frankie’s hand.

‘Ow!’

‘Is there anything else I can help you with, Martin?’ She was breathing hard and her face was set and stony. ‘No? Good. Right then. Thanks so much for getting in touch. Goodbye.’ And the phone went down. She looked up.

‘Sit, please.’

Her tone said there was no choice.

‘I might as well be very straight with you, Frankie. You’re a bright girl and you have a chance of a proper future, but you know better than I do that someone with your sort of background is often never given a first chance, let alone a second. Are you listening to me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Stay away from all this chaos with Martin Jarvis.’

‘But—’

She held up a hand. ‘I know you feel responsible in some way because of going off to that party, but you’re not. There were clearly things going on with him that just need leaving alone. Let the court deal with him.’

She had a frightened tight feeling in her chest.

‘I should