I Know Your Secret - Ruth Heald Page 0,83

should have let me know she was being released. But I’ve moved house so often since then. I never thought to give the probation service an updated address. I’d thought it would be years before she was out.

‘And now she’s living with you?’ I say, my voice wavering. I feel sick with fear. All this time she’s been so close by.

‘She was until recently.’

My whole body stiffens. On the stand Virginia had said the fire was my fault, that it would never have happened if I hadn’t been sleeping with her husband. She blamed me.

But she hadn’t understood. Hadn’t understood how much in love we were. Nick and I were meant to be together.

‘I’m sorry for everything you went through back then,’ I say, trying to ease the tension that fills the room. ‘It must have been so tough.’

‘I really wanted to move in with you,’ she says. ‘Why did you say no?’

‘I was in a difficult place in my personal life.’ I can’t tell her more, can’t explain that I had been living in the flat that was burnt down when her father died, that I was the woman who was sleeping with her father. That I couldn’t take her in without him.

‘In what way?’ Danielle asks.

‘It… it was just… I’m tired. I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Because your lover had died?’ she asks. ‘My father.’ And then I see the rage burning in her, the rage that’s been there all along.

‘You knew?’

‘I’ve known for a long time.’

Fifty-Eight

Danielle

At first I hadn’t wanted to go to my mother’s trial. I didn’t want to watch her in the dock, shrunken by the position she found herself in, accused of murder. And I didn’t want to remember the fire. I didn’t want to think of Dad, dead and buried in the ground. Didn’t want to think how things might have been different.

But one day, instead of going to school, I went to the courtroom. I was surprised when I had to queue for a seat in the public gallery, when I found myself squeezed in between two strangers. The court was full of journalists and law students with notebooks, sitting alongside voyeurs, drawn in by someone else’s trauma. Who were all these people who suddenly had the right to know all the details of our lives? It made me feel sick, our lives laid bare for everyone to pore over, for everyone to have an opinion on.

My mother looked small but stoic in the dock. She stood perfectly still as the police officer who’d been first on the scene gave evidence. When he described my father’s body, I couldn’t stop the tears from cascading down my face. I wiped them away with the back of my hand and sniffed. The courtroom was silent, collectively holding its breath as it listened to the witness testimony.

My mother didn’t react. She was dosed up on antidepressants, drowning out all her emotions. Eyes staring expressionless as if she was just listening to the news. Even I could see that she looked guilty, that her lack of emotion wasn’t going to play out well in the court. What kind of woman wasn’t sad when her husband died? Of all the people in that room, only she and I knew who’d really started the fire. I wished so hard that I hadn’t gone to the flat that day, that none of it had happened. All I wanted was to be back with her, shouting at me to tidy my room and unload the dishwasher.

I looked at the jury, some of them shaking their heads, moved by what the police officer was saying. I wanted to catch my mother’s eye, to communicate to her that she needed to look sadder, play the part of the grieving widow. Otherwise she was going to prison. I’d be left on my own. But she never looked up, never saw I was there.

And then the next witness was called to the stand. I didn’t catch the name. I was so caught up in what the forensics expert said. It was inconclusive. My mother might not be found guilty. My heart was racing with hope. My mother might come home to me.

But then I saw her take the stand. Beth.

She took the oath as I stared at her in shock. She was introduced and then the lawyers hit her with the first question.

‘How long had you and Nicholas Loughton been in a relationship?’

Fifty-Nine

Beth

‘You know about the relationship I had with your father?’ I