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

side of the bed. None of that had happened, it couldn’t have.

‘I would like to call the defendant, Martin Jarvis, to the stand.’

All eyes turned as Martin stood up. Frankie had never seen him dressed like that: the ill-fitting suit, the tie, the collar of his shirt slightly awry. He walked with strange jerky movements to the witness box where he mounted the steps, his face totally devoid of any expression. His skin had a pallor to it, a ghostly translucence, as he was asked his particulars. He answered calmly and precisely as though this might be something that happened to him every day.

She listened to the muffled rise and fall of voices as though she was one side of a thick plate of glass. Mr Bain, the barrister, then began to press questions about Martin’s whereabouts that night. Martin was speaking, but her ears couldn’t bear to listen to him: hearing his voice was sheer agony – this was the voice that had whispered to her; those were the lips that had told her so many lies. Her heart was thudding so hard she couldn’t hear his answers. The sound of the questions came in and out of focus: Why had he been at that party? Who did he see there? Who had he spoken to? She was terrified that at any minute she was going to hear her name. She waited. She waited some more. It didn’t come.

‘So can you tell the court, Mr Jarvis, the sequence of events after you left that party? You say you invited Charlotte Vale back to your canal boat?’

‘Yes.’

His voice was barely audible.

The saliva in her mouth tasted bitter.

‘And in your opinion, she was going with you willingly? Happily, even?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you mind speaking up, Mr Jarvis?’

‘Yes.’

A knife-like pain stabbed through her gut.

‘And you maintain that she went with you willingly because she’d been to your boat on several occasions before, I understand?’

The judge peered down intently.

‘That’s correct.’

The knife drove in further, twisting, slicing her in two.

He told them how he’d left Charlotte sitting on the bed in the cabin. He said she’d been upset about something, but she wouldn’t say why. He said he’d offered to go and buy wine from an off-licence, but the local shop had been closed and he didn’t go any further afield. When he got back, Charlotte had gone. The cabin was just as he’d left it and he just thought she’d changed her mind and gone home.

The judge suddenly coughed.

‘Can I just clarify that we definitely have no CCTV footage from the streets to confirm or repudiate what the defendant is alleging here? Is that correct?’

Martin’s barrister, Mr Saunders, got to his feet. ‘That’s correct, Your Honour. The CCTV does not show my client or the victim, Charlotte Vale, again. There is nothing whatsoever connecting Ms Vale’s death with Mr Jarvis.’

The prosecution barrister got to his feet and Mr Saunders was forced to sit down.

‘Can I ask the witness a simple question? Were you, or were you not, in a sexual relationship with Charlotte Vale?’

Frankie closed her eyes. Her stomach came up to meet her throat but she held on.

‘Objection!’ Mr Saunders shot up. ‘That has no bearing on the case.’

‘Overruled.’ The judge harrumphed. ‘Please answer the question, Mr Jarvis.’

‘No, I was not.’

There was a murmuring hiss from somewhere over to her right that grew more menacing.

‘Yet there were marks on Charlotte’s body, scratches around her neck. I wondered if she had got them during or before intercourse took place?’

Her stomach rose again.

‘Object—’

But Mr Saunders didn’t get any further. The explosion was immediate.

‘Liar! You fucking liar, Jarvis!’

It took a second for Frankie to register the shock of someone screaming. The boy with the denim jacket was on his feet, his fists raised and then slamming down on the rail in front of him again and again as he leaned over to yell a stream of obscenities. Martin had shrunk down in the witness stand and was gripping the sides as if any moment the guy might launch himself through the air from the public gallery and tear him to shreds. Suddenly everyone in the courtroom began to speak at once above the blam-blam-blam of the judge’s gavel. Within moments, two guys in security uniforms appeared, grabbed the lad and hauled him bodily away, his shouts and yells echoing all the way out into the corridor. Frankie stared at the space he had left and, with a shock, realised where she’d seen him before.

That party.

The lad with the white-blonde hair who had come up to them. She stared blankly at the empty seat. The woman in the pink jacket had a tissue pressed to her mouth and her eyes were swollen. The sandy-haired man had an arm around her shoulder. He looked as though he was just about keeping it together.

‘No, no, no, no, no,’ the woman was whispering. ‘Not to Charlotte, not with him… Not with him… What did that monster do to you, my baby? What did he do?’

She remembered the bed of leaves, the heat of them, the whispering in the darkness.

‘This is more than love.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘No boundaries… No going back… That’s what we said, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s what we said.’

That was it. The vomit that had been threatening for so long came up in one terrific rush. Her palm came up to her mouth to stop it. She bolted for the exit, out into the corridor and straight to the Ladies’ where she hung like a rag doll over the toilet bowl, sobbing and coughing as her insides turned out. Everything left her: every shred of self-respect, every hope she’d ever had; her whole world was flushed away in an instant.

The moment she’d seen them together, she’d known. From that moment the magical world had turned grey; there was nothing special there; just old and dirty and monochrome. Why had he done those terrible things? Why did he have to come into her life bright and burning, and then turn out to be