The Darkest Secret (28 page)

He's propping up the bar and talking at the top of his reedy voice and he's surrounded by people he shouldn't be talking to. The men who were taking pictures outside the gate are there, and a hard-looking woman with a gammy eye and a tape recorder, and several other people who could be fascinated locals or could be more of the same. The pub is half empty. Or half full, depending how you look at it. Drinking time proper hasn't started yet, and there are pitiful few tourists in Devon at this time of year. No one is talking but Jimmy, and Jimmy is talking a lot.

‘… they won't want coming out…' he is saying as we come in. ‘Oh, I could tell you a few stories. You're coming to the funeral, right? I would if I were you. I might have a few stories to tell, right there.'

‘Why don't you tell them now, James?' asks a member of his audience.

Jimmy lifts a shaky finger and taps the side of his nose. ‘I know I look like it,' he says from dry, flaky lips, ‘but I wasn't born yesterday.'

I make a start at backing out, but Ruby is right behind me, and hasn't really taken in what's going on, and our feet get caught in each other's. And the confusion attracts his eye.

‘Well, talk of the devil!' cries Jimmy. The whole pub turns to see who's there. This is probably the most exciting thing to happen in Appledore in January since the last hurricane. ‘Come in, ladies, come in!'

We hover indecisively, but then I see recognition dawn on the faces of the press and realise that we've got a choice between brazening it out and being chased through the streets to the car park. I unwind my scarf and step into the saloon bar.

‘Shut the door, love,' says the barman, and Ruby reluctantly obeys, looking like a rabbit in a snare but not screaming as loudly.

‘How are you doing, Jimmy?' I ask in my most confident voice. ‘You missed lunch.'

Jimmy cackles. ‘I was in the mood for a liquid lunch, thanks. Gents, have you met Camilla and Ruby Jackson, aka
the daughters
?'

‘Two of them,' I say, and the ‘gentlemen' all regard us as though we're a pair of stray lapdancers.

‘Can I get you a drink?' asks the man who shouted in my ear as I stood outside the gate on Thursday.

‘No, thanks,' I say, and don't look at him as I say it. I'm longing for that whisky, down in one, but I guess it will have to wait, now. ‘How are you, Jimmy? We've been looking for you for hours.'

‘Getting there,' he says, meaningfully, and raises his pint glass to his face. ‘Tell you what, gents. If you want a quote I'd start with them two.'

‘We're all very upset,' I say smoothly, ‘as is appropriate when we've just lost our father. Is this where you're staying, Jimmy?'

‘Oh, that's a point. Got any rooms, John?'

The barman polishes a glass with ill-concealed disdain and doesn't respond.

‘Got any rooms, John?'

‘Oh. Sorry. Were you talking to me? Only my name's Terry. And no. We're all booked up.'

Jimmy tuts. ‘Generic, innit?'

‘Yeah,' says Terry, ‘we don't actually do generic round these parts. People tend to think it's disrespectful.'

‘Woooo!' cries Jimmy, and laughs. If it weren't for the sort of spending you get when the press are in a pub I suspect he'd have been out on his ear some time ago.

The woman with the gammy eye lights on Ruby. ‘Are you the twin?' she asks. The twin. Nice. I can see how it must be, to have no legitimacy in your own right.

‘Not any more,' says Ruby. She's quite composed for someone who's barely left the farm.

‘Crikey,' says someone, ‘they're going to have to redo the photofit.' And a couple of people laugh. She stiffens.

‘Okay,' I say, ‘we're out of here. Just wanted to check you were okay. Night, all!'

I usher my sister out of the door. ‘Fuck,' I say, ‘that was a close one.'

‘My mum says it's rude to comment on people's physical appearance,' she says.

‘Yes. That's why. Wanker.'

‘I suppose he has a point,' she says. ‘I'm not the moppet I once was.'

‘No. You're lovely. I wouldn't like you half as much if you were some simpering bubblehead. Come on.'

We hurry along the quay to put some distance between us and the pub.

‘What's he up to?' she asks. ‘I thought he said he didn't have any money.'

‘Oh, lord. People have different ideas of what “no money” means. As long as he's making other people buy him drinks, I should think he's fairly content right now.'

‘But where will he sleep? That barman was lying about the room, wasn't he?'

‘Wouldn't you?'

‘Fair point.'

‘He'll probably sleep in his car,' I say. ‘I'd be surprised if he hasn't been doing that a fair bit lately, wouldn't you?'

‘Ugh,' she says. ‘No wonder he smells. Did he even have a bath, while he was at the house? He smells like dry rot. What was he going on about? About the funeral?'

‘I don't know,' I say. ‘He's full of shit, Ruby, I wouldn't let it worry you.'

So easy to say that, but I'm worried. They're all so damn shifty, shutting each other up and whispering in corners, hustling the Clutterbucks off to their hotel when they'd barely landed. Every one of them knows what happened, I think. Even Simone, and she's pretty much hollowed out inside. He wasn't a charitable man, my dad. He only ever did things that benefited other people if there was a banquet and an auction involved. Why would he have been keeping Jimmy all these years out of the goodness of his heart?

 

It takes five presses of the Blackheath buzzer before anyone answers. Then Joe's voice rattles out into the night air. ‘Oh,' he says. ‘Have you been there long?'

‘A while.'

‘Sorry,' he says, and buzzes us in.

The house is dark. Not even the light over the front door that greeted us when we first got here. Joe switches it on as we get the shopping out of the boot and stands at the top of the steps, waiting for us. ‘Sorry about that,' he says.

‘That's okay. Not your fault,' I say. ‘Where is everybody?'

‘Simone's in bed. The nanny's come and taken Emma up to the playroom. Everybody else is in the drawing room. Mr Clutterbuck's back.'

I'm a bit surprised to hear that. The buzzer is right by the front door and they must have heard it. But then, I think about the Clutterbucks and it doesn't surprise me any more.

Like a crab on a beach. Drawn by the scent of carrion. ‘We've got some stuff,' I tell him. ‘Bread and potatoes and milk and vegetables and that. And some cheese and charcuterie. I didn't get any meat, because I didn't know what to get. I can always go back tomorrow.'

‘No, you're all right,' he says. ‘The freezer's so full of meat you can barely shut it. All organic, of course, or shot by Sean.'

He remembers he's talking to the bereaved, gulps the words back and looks uncomfortable.

‘He did love killing things,' I say. ‘I guess it's how he exercised his inner psychopath.'

He smiles, relieved, and takes Ruby's bags. ‘Thanks for these. I was trying to make a fish pie, and I was running low on spuds
and
milk.'

‘Oh, great,' I say, ‘a useful man.'

He grins. ‘Anything to stop Simone from coming down and starting another production number. There's an entire suckling pig in that freezer. She needs to rest. She's exhausted. I don't think I'm very good at this sort of thing, though. I've had three goes at making béchamel and it just comes out as a series of lumps.'

The drawing-room door is closed. I can't hear voices from behind it. Perhaps they just really didn't hear the buzzer. I'll have to go in and tell them about Jimmy. It's the last thing I want to do. I want to go upstairs and fling myself on my bed and think. Or not think. Not thinking would be a great luxury.

‘I'll show you,' says Ruby. ‘Can't have lumpy béchamel.'

‘Great,' he says, and leads the way back to the kitchen. I hear them laugh as they turn the corner by the stairs. He's a cool drink of water, that boy. I wish I had my time over again. Maybe I wouldn't have turned out so cynical.

I take a breath and push the door open. A murmur of voices, cut short as the door opens.

‘Hello, Milly!' says Maria in that false-bright tone that tells you you're interrupting. They're scattered across the sofas – period-appropriate sofas, Knowleses and chesterfields, covered in brocade as shiny as the day it was put on. If Simone sells up, the Elite Group could take it all wholesale, install a reception desk in the front hall and run it as a business from day one.

‘Did you have a good time?' asks Robert.

‘Yes, it was nice,' I say. ‘Appledore is totally ceramic-cottage. We got some more vodka, and some tonic.' I hold up my shopping bag to show them.

‘Oh, well done,' says Maria.

‘Not much use for that now,' says Charlie. He's drinking armagnac, I notice; the Janneau bottle on a coaster on the side table, within arm's reach. Must have got through the VSOP, I guess.

‘Oh, talking of which, we found Jimmy. He's propping up the bar at the Smuggler's Arms.'

‘How predictable,' says Charlie.

‘He's holding forth,' I say, ‘and those hacks who were outside the front gate seem to have tracked him down.'

A frisson runs round the room. Yes, I think, you all know. Know something, at least, that you don't want the rest of the world to be sharing.

‘Oh,' says Maria.

Robert makes a weary grunt and starts pulling himself to his feet. ‘The Smuggler's Arms, you say? Where's that?'

‘On the quay in Appledore.'

‘Of course it is,' says Maria. ‘He's always liked a seafront boozer.'

‘Seafront, town centre, suburbs. Frankly he's fine with all of them,' says Robert.

‘So much for no money,' says Charlie.

‘I don't think he's buying his own drinks.'

‘When did he ever?'

‘Okay,' says Robert. ‘Well, I'll see what I can do. Charlie, come with?'

Charlie starts to haul himself from his seat. ‘I don't know how much success you're going to have,' I say. ‘He looks pretty dug in.'

He pulls the vodka bottle from the supermarket bag, cradles it against his hip. ‘I'm sure this will help. And if there's one thing I do know, it's never too long before he pops out for a smoke. They haven't got a garden, have they?'

‘Tables overlooking the water.'

‘Okay,' he says, and they leave.

The list is written. The women are scurrying about the house, putting children and their accoutrements back in bedrooms before they wake up, clearing the house of all signs that anything other than the most sedate of family weekends has been going on here. Empty bottles have been removed, one by one to mask the noise, from the recycling bins into cardboard boxes to take up to the big bins at the superstore along with Coco's mattress and pillow. The tops and tables will be scrubbed and polished until they look newly installed, the floors swept and washed, corners scoured for stray evidence. And meanwhile the men are going to dispose of the biggest evidence of all.

They don't speak. Not just because voices carry at six in the morning, but because they are all of them robbed of speech. They can't meet each other's eyes. Sean Jackson and Charlie Clutterbuck and Robert Gavila, walking silently together down the drive with their lifelong burden. Jimmy is asleep. Probably a good thing.

Sean is already rewriting his narrative in his head. Self-blame is not an emotion that lingers long in his psyche. It's not my fault, he thinks as he carries the body of his daughter in an old rubble bag that they have found stuffed against one of the walls of the floor-to-ceiling kitchen cupboards. If Claire had any self-control, if she weren't forever falling out with people, we would have had staff this weekend and none of this would have happened. What was I meant to do? I'd been planning for it for months, spent thousands of pounds. She was sabotaging my birthday and I was just trying to salvage the situation.

Coco weighs far more than she seemed to when she was wriggling and alive in his arms. He understands what they mean now by ‘dead weight'. She moves and flops inside the bag like a marionette made of wood.

Sean's heart wrenches. Claire thinks I have no emotions, he thinks, but I do. I remember her puppy warmth, the clambering, the feel of her breath in my ear, the thud-thud-thud of her heartbeat. If anyone knew what I was doing now they would think I was as cold as ice, but I'm not. What would be gained by ruining fourteen lives more than they are already, just because of some notion that ‘justice' makes things better? It's all spoiled already. Nothing will bring her back now.

Robert goes ahead as they reach the danger point where the drive joins the entrance to Harbour View and meets the road. There's still over half an hour before the ferry opens for its first trip of the day, but there could still be a queue building up. The people from the opposite end of life's spectrum, the people with whom he has nothing in common: the early-morning hikers, the dive-school runners with their Land Rovers filled with oxygen tanks, the Studland nudists ready for another day fiddling with themselves in the sand dunes behind the beach. All the people who think of the dawn as something you see when you get up, rather than the thing that prompts you to go to bed.

The road is empty. The whole of Poole must be sleeping off their bank holiday hangovers, making the most of the last weekend before retail starts the run-up to Christmas. Robert beckons with one hand and Sean and Charlie shuffle as fast as they can with their shared burden until they are under the cover of the locked digger. A single car drifts past in the local traffic lane, and they hold their breaths until it rounds the corner. The driver is drinking coffee; doesn't even glance in their direction as he passes by. Just a few more seconds of potential exposure and they will be inside Seawings' sheltering boundary.

They break for it, Coco bumping against their shins. He doesn't want to think about it. It's not his Coco any more. Now it's a practical problem that requires a practical solution. And practical solutions are what he's good at.

The garden of Seawings is in a state. Sandy mud churned up by tyres and boots, and those mysterious heaps of stones and painted wood and concrete that builders scatter about them wherever they go like cats marking their territory. The fibreglass shell that will become the swimming pool lies at the top of the bank beside six shoulder-high stacks of the paving stones that will border it once it's installed. Hard to believe that by tonight the whole place will be ready for the landscapers to come in and render it all green again, but he knows that the builders are booked on a late-night ferry from Portsmouth, and if there's one thing he's observed about this recent influx from the east it's that these Polish labourers are far more conscientious than their British counterparts. That man Janusz will magic an army of casuals out of the ether of the Polish support system to turn their hands to the final push if he's even slightly concerned that they won't make it, and his cash bribe will help make sure that he can manage it. Come noon, the grounds will be swarming with summer-tanned, ill-shaven men who will ignore every detail unrelated to the job in hand.

They hug the fence between Seawings and Harbour View as they make their way up the bank. That prune-mouthed old closet case at Seagulls will most likely be sleeping behind his firmly shuttered windows, but it's best to allow for the possibility that he might be lurking in there, keeping watch. They reach the top and glance around them. The only windows that overlook what will be the pool are the master-bedroom windows of Harbour View. There has been a lot of infill building on Sandbanks as its land value rose, but in this little enclave the suburban garden dreams of the original architects remain intact. They cross the mud to the ladder that sticks up above the hole's lip.

The hole is deep, and wet. The excavations have taken it below sea level. Water has seeped from the sandy soil and stands, brackish and uninviting, seven feet down.

‘How deep do you think it is?' asks Charlie, his voice suppressed for the first time in his adult life.

‘I guess we'll have to find out,' says Sean, and starts down the ladder.

They wait as he steps off the bottom rung and splashes in, knee-deep. The bag lies between their ankles, pitifully small for something so heavy. He paddles a few feet to survey the terrain. As foundations go, it is basic – really just a hole in the earth, the sand sucking wetly at his feet, little effort made even to demarcate between deep and shallow ends. He knows, having installed several of these in his time, that the shell will be lowered in with its drainage and pumps pretty much in place, ready to hook up to the filtration system that's already plumbed in under a manhole at the deep end. It doesn't need to be a carefully shaped hole. As long as it's deep enough for the pool to fit, that's all it needs to be. Rubble will fill it up and make a stable base. And weigh the body down.

We'll put her at the shallow end, he thinks. Away from the business end where the filters are. That way, even if something does go wrong and some nosy plumber has to burrow down into the pipework, he'll never reach far enough in to find anything. He wades back to the ladder. ‘Okay,' he says, in a low voice. ‘Pass her down.'

He's caught, for a moment, by the feminine pronoun. Stop, he thinks, just stop. You can't afford to think about it. It's not Coco, not your little girl; it's a package that needs disposing of. They'll probably be chucking half the rubble into here, and calling it hardcore.

‘How deep is it?' asks Robert.

‘A foot, eighteen inches?'

‘Christ.'

Don't wig out on me now, Robert.

He can feel himself sinking into the sandy bottom. Shifts his feet and feels a suck. We need to be careful down here, he thinks. Need to keep moving, or we'll get stuck.

‘Do we need ballast?' asks Robert.

He thinks. They'll need to take the bag away with them, give it to Imogen to put with the mattress and the pillow when she takes them up to the recycling bins at the big Asda in Bournemouth. Nothing that has been in touch with death can remain at Harbour View. If the police get suspicious, those sniffer dogs can scent a corpse at a thousand paces. It's a bog-standard carrier, as far as he knows, bought from a wholesaler along with a hundred others, but one can't be too careful. ‘Probably,' he says, and reaches up for the bag. ‘Maybe a couple of those paving stones? They should probably do it. See if you can find any broken ones.'

The two men take a handle each and start to lower the bag over the edge. Charlie groans with the effort, and Sean just has time to feel a tweak of contempt before he takes its full weight with stretched arms and finds himself staggering backwards. His feet go out from under him and he splashes backwards into the water, the bag on top of him, weighing him down.

Coco's hand slips out of the open mouth of the bag and slaps on to the surface of the water. He stares at it, breathless. She's wearing her bracelet. The sight of that, and the smallness of the fingers, the pale palm turned up towards the azure sky, makes tears fill his throat and hurt his eyes.

‘Are you okay?' asks Robert.

It's a struggle to speak. Oh, my darling. My little darling. Best of all my children, I'm so sorry. ‘Yes,' he replies. ‘Go and get some spades, and a couple of those slabs. I'll be fine.'

He sits and looks at the hand while he's alone. Sean has never seen a dead body unprepared before today. He missed the deaths of both his parents – his father because it was a sudden, tidy heart attack, when he was up in Sheffield at university, his mother because he left the trip to Devon too late, just stayed those extra couple of hours to sign off on a deal to convert some warehouses in Shoreditch, and by the time he reached the hospital she was already laid out, clean and nice and peaceful on the side-ward bed, awaiting the grieving relatives. There's dirt under her fingernails. How did that get there? he wonders, one of those stupid thoughts that wander through your mind when things are too much to bear. Did we not bath them last night?

The bracelet looks horribly out of place down here in the gloom: too bright, too clean. He recalls putting it on her, the day they christened the twins at the smart church on Ludgate Hill, some favour Robert managed to pull in via a colleague in one of the Temples. He takes the little hand in his own and holds it. It's cold, unresponsive; still floppy because the air is warm and rigor has yet to set in. He strokes the palm with a thumb; traces the lifeline. It doesn't look particularly short. It runs all the way across to the outer pad. Suddenly there are tears pouring down his face. ‘Oh, Coco,' he murmurs. ‘Oh, my Coco.'

I can't bear it, he thinks. Nothing of her, no place to visit, no object to love. He touches the bracelet, lets it slide up the wrist. It's loose, and there's still give in the sliding catch. Can I take it? He thinks. It's something of her. If I keep it near me I can look, from time to time, remind myself that she was here, once.

It's a stupid thing to do, he knows it is. But Sean is overtaken by an unaccustomed flood of sentiment and the bracelet, at least in this moment, feels horribly important, as though it contains a part of his daughter's soul. He glances up at the sky above his head. If they look over the edge now, he thinks, I won't do it. But he can hear them some distance away, the rasp of stone on stone, and he carries on. Pulls the clasp to its full extent and slides the bracelet over the hand. It's small and surprisingly heavy in his own. Pure gold, he thinks. Nothing but the best from the Gavilas. He slips it into the breast pocket of his polo shirt and does up the button.