Dead Secret (12 page)

I grab hold of the bag, fight to keep my voice steady.

“Murdered? Who…?”

Marion frowns at me, suddenly registering the level of my
response
. She has no emotional investment in this story; there is nothing secret about it for her. Just a story she has occasionally told interested visitors. I can tell she is unnerved by my intensity.

“They never got anyone for it. Some folk thought it was Mrs Connaghan’s lover – he’s some kind of a big-shot businessman in Inverness. But others were convinced her husband must have done it in a jealous rage.” She stops. “The man I mentioned who owns the house,” she explains, mistaking my frozen expression for lack of comprehension. “Joseph Connaghan.”

My finger shakes as I try to dial the number. I need to talk; I cannot carry this alone. I can’t call Sarah. Shameena. I start to punch in her number. It can only be Shameena. Three. Six. My
finger hesitates, trembling, out of control. But what can I say? My finger hovers over the buttons. Shameena, remember you wanted to know how my mother died? Well, I think she was murdered. Maybe by my father, because why else would he have kept everything secret all these years?

Shameena will know what to do. My stomach begins to heave. I think I am going to be sick in this box. Two. Four. But what will she think, says the voice in my head. But what will she
think
? There is no one in the world I trust more than Shameena. But to tell her, to tell anyone, would be the greatest imaginable betrayal of Da. It’s not who I tell; it’s saying it out loud. It’s doubting. I want Shameena to reassure me that Da could not have killed my mother. But I would be relying on someone else to tell me what I should tell myself.

I rest the phone back on the cradle, the last digits undialled. It would be like Da dying all over again. I leave the box, feeling more alone than I have ever felt in my life. I go into a shop and buy ten cigarettes because I don’t have the money for twenty. I don’t even smoke.

My mind races all through the night, the new information
going
round and round relentlessly in my mind until it became a whirling blur that makes no sense at all. But however complex the detail might be, the bottom line is inescapable. My mother was murdered and my father was at least somewhere within the frame. I was alone and the only person who could answer the endless questions was Da. I constantly asked questions of him inside my own head in those early days after his death. But no answer ever seemed to come.

Did you kill her? Did you? Did you squeeze the life from her with your bare hands? I have to ask. There is only you left to talk to now, isn’t there? Only you, a dead man. So let’s talk, dead man. Love and murder, that’s what we need to discuss. Come to an
understanding
. I want to understand. I really do. If I don’t, who will?

I’ve heard it said that if you squeeze a person’s neck hard enough, their eyes begin to bleed. Did mother’s eyes bleed? Her neck would have been bruised if you did it that way, her eyes bloodshot and bulging. But maybe she wasn’t strangled.

Maybe she was shot. Or poisoned. Would that be cleaner? Would that be your murder of choice?

And then there’s the disposal of the body. The police never found
it. Even if you had enough anger to kill her, is it possible the man I knew had enough composure, enough
sang-froid
to dispose of her? I cannot imagine it. Rowing out in the middle of the loch in the night, throwing her weighted body in a sack over the edge. Or driving into the woods and digging and digging, deep into the earth, your spade clanking when it hit stone. How you would sweat, digging a grave. Did you sweat, Da?

I’m sweating. I’m sweating just thinking about it. I’ve been
digging
too, digging down into layers I don’t understand. This strange journey I set out on, it was to try and find you. To find the man you were, the woman she was. And now I’m terrified of what I have found. If you didn’t answer me at home I don’t suppose you’ll answer me here, in this quaint little B & B room with its frills and chintz. Except that this is the Highlands, where you were with her, and maybe you’ve come back here. Maybe your spirit is made to come back here. Maybe that’s what hell is, being confronted by the past.

What is your past? If you killed her, it would make sense of the years of silence. Except they weren’t just years of silence, were they? That is too passive a description. They were years of secrets. But then, what father would want to tell his children their mother was murdered even if he hadn’t done it? What father would want to tell his children their mother was murdered by her lover?

I am trying to imagine if you could have had that much hate inside you. Or maybe that much love. Sometimes I think love makes you even crazier than hate. I know about love, Da, though you may think I don’t. That kind of love. I think you guessed about Tariq, about the way I felt. Probably you dismissed it. We were only teenagers. Nothing happened. Maybe that’s why it was so powerful. It was unfulfilled. It didn’t have time to corrupt.
Maybe that first love, before you get cynical, is the strongest of all.

I don’t care what anyone says. I know about love making you crazy. When I allow myself to think about him, even all these years later, Tariq can make me crazy still. What I am trying to say, Da, is that I understand. About the depth of love, about the things it can make you do.

The heat. The memories. The
memory
. The one I kept pushing down. I knew, I knew so well how crazy love makes you. And knowing that, the idea that my father could have done
something
crazy did not seem so inconceivable. When it stopped being inconceivable, it started being frightening.

You know already, of course. About Tariq. That it did not end well. The day after his operation, Da came home from work and went straight into the sitting room. He sat on the easy chair with his head in his hands. I saw him when I passed upstairs. He just sat there without the television on.

“Okay, Da?” I called, stopping halfway up the stairs. He asked me to come down then, and he moved over and sat beside me on the sofa. I think I knew immediately. I can still remember his words, still hear them clearly, as if it were yesterday. The strange, strangled quality to his voice as he struggled to contain his
emotions
.

“Rebecca,” he said. “It’s Tariq.”

I don’t think at any point he said Tariq was dead because he didn’t need to say. I could feel a draining inside me, like
someone
had pulled a plug under me and my blood was pouring down from my head and out through my feet.

“When?”

“Two hours ago.”

It had happened suddenly. Tariq seemed to have come through the operation well the day before. Khadim was back at work in good spirits and was going to the hospital on his way home. But he got the call before he left. There was no time for Khadim to reach him.

Two hours. What had I been doing for the last two hours? I had put a load in the washing machine. I had cleaned the sink in the bathroom. And I had written a Get Well Soon card for a boy who was already dead.

I didn’t cry right away. It was days before I cried properly. I went and lay on my bed and listened to the sound of Da and Sarah moving around, to the phone ringing and the muffled conversations that followed, and the sound of the television news floating up the stairwell from downstairs. I listened to it all as if it was in a different world, somewhere far removed from me. Sarah came up around ten o’clock to go to bed. She was only twelve and her eyes were red but I knew she hurt more for me than for herself. She didn’t say anything at all but when the light went out I heard her creep round my bed and her arms came round me in the dark. She lay there for a minute and neither of us said a word but I stroked her hair. Sometimes, when I’m
really
, really mad with Sarah, I think of that night and I can’t stay angry.

Tariq was right all along. He knew he was going to die. I
wonder
, does the body tell the mind about death, or the mind tell the body? Is it a warning, a preparation, or a self-fulfilling
prophecy
? Did Da know the morning he died? Even the night before? Shameena said later that Tariq had tidied everything in his room before he left for hospital. His drawers, under his bed. He laid
out his wallet and his prayer book neatly beside the bed, like he was emptying his pockets before he left.

It is Muslim tradition to bury the body within twenty-four hours. There would be no coffin. Tariq would be wrapped in a shroud, and placed directly into the earth. I could hardly bear to think of things crawling over him. Beautiful Tariq. Shameena said he was lovely, even dead. She said her mother kept stroking him, and kissing him and combing his hair, that she scarcely left him alone for a moment. She even sang to him. Shameena broke her heart telling me how she watched Nazima put her hand on his forehead and stroke him and hum an old lullaby she had sung to them as children. Like Tariq was her baby again and she was soothing him to sleep. A sleep he would never wake up from.

I knew I wouldn’t be allowed to see his body again. But I gave Shameena the friendship bracelet and she promised that she would try to slip it on his wrist, or put it in his pocket, so that he would be buried with it. It hurt to give it away. It was all I had of him. But it hurt more to think of him going into the earth
without
something we shared going with him.

It was a few days later that we went to pay our respects at Khadim’s house. We went round to Pollokshields, past the
halal
butcher and the late-night grocer and Ayesha’s Asian fabric shop, which even when it was closed had a spotlight on the
displays
of rich satins and silks that flowed like jewelled rivers in the window. My heart always lifted when we reached it because I knew that I was about to see Tariq. But not that night. It was passing Ayesha’s that made me really understand that Tariq wasn’t coming back.

Strange how many things go wrong when you are in the middle of grief. Like one thing topples and everything else begins falling towards it. Feelings go wrong, and relationships go wrong, and inside you want things to be different but you can’t make them different. Every time you try to rebuild just one little part,
something
else goes crashing down round you, until you give up and simply sit amongst the rubble.

That’s the way it was after Tariq. I went a bit crazy inside. Got in a lot of trouble, both in school and out. I didn’t know how to handle my feelings, and I certainly couldn’t talk about them because I wasn’t supposed to be feeling that way, anyway. He was a good Muslim boy who was one day going to marry his good Muslim cousin, and I was a rubbish Catholic girl who lied about going to church and swore and drank.

I never meant to give Da the fright I did over the booze. It was all on the sly until one night he was on late shift and I asked some friends from school round. We clubbed together to buy some drink, but before they even arrived, I’d downed the best part of the bottle of vodka Da kept in the cupboard. Afterwards, I filled it up with water. He kept it for Peggy, really. Peggy liked a Bloody Mary now and then. I never saw Da drink, other than the occasional glass of wine and, very rarely, a whisky. He was always very controlled that way. I understand now. He couldn’t afford to let go, could he? Could never risk saying something he shouldn’t.

I had more when my school pals came. I meant to have them all out by the time Da came back. I’d be in bed. He’d never know until Peggy next had a Bloody Mary, and maybe I could have replaced the vodka by then. But I got so drunk I didn’t care any more. Once I started drinking, I just couldn’t think of anything
I cared enough about to make me stop. Certainly not myself. I didn’t care if I got in trouble. Didn’t care about the consequences.

Sarah was frantic; I remember that before I lost it. She’d
wanted
nothing to do with it all from the start. She hated the people I was mixing with. Later, she told me I was gabbling and crying uncontrollably and then I started being sick. She was trying to get me to be sick into the living-room waste basket but I was too drunk to have much of an aim. Then I passed out completely and she thought I was going to die because my skin became blue and my breathing slowed so dramatically she thought it had stopped altogether. When she started screaming that I needed an ambulance, everyone disappeared, terrified of being caught up in the stink.

What a sight I must have been by the time Da got home. Not that I remember much. The first I remember is waking up in hospital and finding Da, pale and grim, at my bedside. My head thumped. I had never felt so ill in my life. He took my hand but I closed my eyes tight shut again, too ashamed to look at him. I tried to turn away from him but couldn’t. I didn’t have the strength. I felt his hand on my arm.

“Okay, Becca,” he murmured, “okay.”