Can you keep a secret, p.1
Can You Keep A Secret?, page 1
Karen Perry
* * *
CAN YOU KEEP A SECRET?
Contents
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Two
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
PENGUIN BOOKS
CAN YOU KEEP A SECRET?
Karen Perry lives in Ireland. Can You Keep A Secret? follows Girl Unknown, Only We Know and The Boy That Never Was, which was selected for the Simon Mayo Radio 2 book club. All three were Sunday Times bestsellers.
Prologue
Night has entered the house. Crept in like an intruder.
Outside, crows gather in the trees. Sharp beaks jab at unseen feathers.
Beyond the window, the black outline of the avenue beckons. You feel your way in the dark. The floorboards creak. The surfaces of the room are blindly unfamiliar. The house around you feels vast, empty. Where are the others?
Your hands reach out and find the door, fumbling for the handle. You realize that you are trembling. That’s when you hear it again – a sharp crack echoing through the silence, a shot fired in the rooms below. This time you are sure. Your breathing snags in your chest. Blood pounds in your ears. You try to be still, struggling to listen.
The dark pushes up against you, thick and oppressive. The crows in the trees cease their flutter and call.
Someone is on the stairs.
Panic grips you by the throat. You take a step backwards. On the floor about your feet, the pictures lie scattered. The footfall is drawing closer.
You stare hard at the door as it opens, straining for a chink of light, but there is no familiar silhouette. Night has crept into the hallway.
You say a name, but there is no answer.
You hear the shallow breathing approach and the knowledge plunges through you like a dead weight. You know – you are sure of it: you should not have come back to this house. A reckless decision. Ill conceived, ill-judged, and – you are certain of it now – fatal.
Part One
* * *
1
2017
Three months before the killings I returned to Thornbury. Chance took me back, a set of unpremeditated circumstances, although in many ways it felt inevitable. It had been over twenty years since I had last set foot in the place, but in all that time, the house and the grounds around it had occupied a singular space in my memory, a bright pocket filled with summer grass and lofty ceilings, laughter, music and self-discovery. Despite all that happened there, I still retained the sense that I owed something of myself, of the person that I had become, to that house, and those who lived there.
We had been called down to cover a scene in a farmhouse outside Borris – a quaint village near the Carlow‒Kilkenny border. It appeared to be a murder-suicide attempt, and the poor bastard had made a hash of it. By the time the team got there, he and his wife were already in Waterford Regional Hospital, fighting for their lives or whatever was left of them. The local sergeant, a Roman-nosed depressive who looked as much like a farmer as he did a representative of the law, was a man named Savage, and he stood to one side, watching, while I and the others tiptoed over the scene in the small hours of the morning, fingerprinting, taking samples, documenting the whole sorry mess. One of my colleagues recorded what he saw with a drawling monotone into a Dictaphone, while I struggled with the light and remounted one flash after another in my search for the right exposure and a maximum depth of field.
Both victims had been at the kitchen table when the gun was fired. The blood had mostly seeped into the woodwork by the time we arrived, but there was still a slow drip on to the floor beneath. Sheets of newspaper were inexplicably covering the ground and it was the pat-pat of blood meeting paper – not the suicide attempt – which made me think of Thornbury and what had happened that summer all those years ago. I remembered we had gone hunting and two of us – Rachel and Marcus – had killed rabbits. They had hung the rabbits from a hook in the scullery. There was paper on the counter beneath, and that same pat-pat of blood dripping down came to me now as it did when I was fifteen years old.
‘We’re not far from Thornbury, are we?’ I asked Savage as we were packing up our things. It was still early, not yet nine, but the sun had broken clear of the clouds and it felt warm for a morning in April.
Savage’s mouth puckered with consideration. ‘Thornbury,’ he said, glancing down at the scuffed surface of his old brogues, enunciating the estate’s name as if it were one he had not heard in some time. ‘You know it, do you?’
‘I used to know people who lived there.’
‘The Bagenals?’ he said, his interest piqued now.
‘I went to school with Rachel and Patrick,’ I said, before asking breezily: ‘Do you know if anyone’s still living there?’
‘The son is still running the place, so I believe. Don’t know about the sister. Mrs Bagenal died some years back. Nice woman. Brain tumour, God love her.’
‘Yes, I had heard that.’
‘And then the father … Well.’ He looked at me then, an up-and-down assessment, so that I couldn’t help but feel that he was judging me, fitting me into whatever it was he knew of the Bagenals’ troubled history. ‘He died a long time ago.’
Neither of us spoke for a minute, Savage leaning down to rub a crumb of muck from his shoe with a stick he had picked up off the ground.
‘You could drop in on your way back to Dublin,’ he remarked. ‘It wouldn’t be much of a detour,’ and proceeded with a detailed itinerary of the minor roads that led to the estate. I didn’t comment, and if he saw the sudden change in my demeanour – nerves rushing to the surface – he didn’t comment.
His farewell to me was delivered in a deadpan tone:
‘Mind yourself,’ he said.
I did not intend going back. To this day, I’m not sure why I did. A seed of curiosity planted by Savage’s suggestion, perhaps, but that alone could not have been enough to drive me back to a place I had once sworn off for ever. The challenge of it rose in my mind as I drove alone through roads flanked with cow parsley and gorse, one eye on the satnav, nervy at the knowledge that the house was close by; niggled by the sense that I should test myself by just taking a quick look, to see if it still held the same power over me that I remembered as a girl. It had been so long. Rachel and I had lost touch years ago. I’d heard she was living in London. It wasn’t difficult for me to picture her married to a stockbroker – a rich divorcé – living in Kensington or Primrose Hill, childless from what I had heard. Patrick, I knew, had taken over the running of the estate while the rest of his peers were at university, and even though our paths hadn’t crossed since leaving school, I was still curious about him and Rachel, about the house.
The estate, though large, was well off the beaten track, and by the time I found the old granite pillars that marked the entrance it was getting on in the day, and I needed to get back to HQ. Still, I had come too close not to take a quick look. The memory of the warm yellow stone crawling with ancient wisteria and roses, those gracious rooms beyond, lured me nervously through the gateless pillars against my better judgement, along the curving road, tussocky grass growing in a furrow along the centre.
My first clue all was not well was the sight of a car that appeared to have been driven off the avenue and into a shallow ditch. It was an old VW Golf whose registration plates and wheels had been removed. The bonnet was buckled and twisted where it met with the wide solid trunk of an old beech tree. Weeds grew within the car’s interior, visible through the passenger door, which was slightly ajar. The windows remained intact but were smudged with moss and sap and the littered seed from overhanging branches. I slowed to survey the scene, before continuing past the overgrown rhododendrons to where the avenue rounded on to the front garden leading up to the house.
What I remembered of the front lawn was a clipped expanse of grass rolling down to the driveway, and a striped marquee pinned to the ground in front of the house for Patrick’s party. What a shock it was now to turn the corner and find the grass grown coarse and long, balding in places. An ugly fence had been erected around the perimeter as if at one stage livestock had been grazing here. But worse than that was the state of the house beyond. The sash windows with their bevelled-glass panes twinkling in the sun were sagging and cracked, paint peeling off their frames. In some cases, the glass had been removed and the gaps patched up with plywood. Ivy had grown thick and wild across one side of the house, hanging low over the windows or shorn back sharply over others, as if someone had made an effort to clip it back but then lost interest and given up. There was still beauty in the tangled rose that was just coming into bloom over the south-west corner of the house, and the contours of the building retaine
d something of their former majesty and grandeur. And yet it felt, as I pulled the car up in front of the main entrance, that the house was slowly surrendering to decay. I had a flash of Mrs Bagenal – Rachel and Patrick’s mother – her elegant hands and neatly set hair, standing proudly at the door to welcome her guests, and wondered how she might have felt had she lived to see its fallen state.
For a moment I sat there, prevaricating, a voice in the back of my mind instructing me to turn the car around and drive out of there. But instead I got out, an ache of tiredness in my legs and across my back, squinted up at the house, and thought I saw movement at one of the upper windows. For one loopy moment, I was sure the window was leaning precariously down from the frame, poised to drop and smash on the gravel below. But then my vision cleared, and the house righted itself as I blinked up at it. I told myself not to worry, that it was the result of too little sleep, and too much work, the drive down in the early hours conspiring to summon up strange images.
The front door opened, and a dog came bounding towards me – a red setter, ears flying back – a voice shouting after to heel. I leaned down to stroke the dog’s head, and it flopped back on to the ground, displaying its tummy.
‘Don’t mind Jinny,’ Patrick said, stepping over the threshold. ‘She’s a dreadful slut.’ He was coming towards me now. I could tell he had not recognized me yet, and it wasn’t until I held out my hand for him to shake that his face cleared in recognition.
‘Lindsey?’ he asked, taking my hand, and half smiling. ‘Is that really you?’
‘Hello, Patrick,’ I replied, nerves prickling all over my body, regretting my decision to come this far.
Patrick shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe it. ‘My God,’ he said, and there it was again, the rush of the familiar as he stepped back and took me in, asking with a kind of muted but polite astonishment, ‘What brings you back here?’
‘I was in the area, on a job. I had some time to kill, so …’
He blinked and stood back: ‘It’s been years since you’ve been here, an absolute age.’
‘More than twenty years.’
‘Yes, it would be that long, wouldn’t it? I’m looking down the barrel of fifty now.’
This was hardly true – he couldn’t be much past forty. I myself had let that significant birthday pass uncelebrated just a few weeks before. Patrick kept his gaze on me as he spoke, the same lively grey eyes that I remembered, although the face had changed somewhat. Lines around the eyes and a sprinkling of grey in the growth of stubble. His hair, too, although still thick and curly and, for the most part, the same coppery red, was threaded with silver, and he was wearing it a little longer than I remembered. With his faded jeans and a navy fleece that had seen better days, he added to the careworn impression I had of the house.
‘Well, well. Lindsey Morgan on my very doorstep. Who would have believed it?’
For a moment, I’m not sure either of us knew what to say. In an effort, I’m sure, to dispel the awkwardness between us, Patrick invited me inside.
‘You’ll have breakfast?’ he asked.
I declined at first, tried to make my excuses, but he waved away my protestations and ushered me inside.
After the brightness of the morning, the hall, once the door was closed, seemed gloomy and cold.
‘You said you were on a job?’ he asked over his shoulder, as he led me past the staircase with its ancient tiger skin pinned to the wall – a hunting trophy shot by an ancestor in the days of the Raj.
‘Yes. I was called to a crime scene in the area.’
‘You’re with the guards?’ he said with unveiled surprise.
‘Forensics.’
‘Really. So what’s the case? Or can’t you say?’
‘An attempted murder-suicide.’
At first, he said nothing. I wondered if I should have lied, or said something more sensitive. It seemed as though, with those words, I had summoned up the ghosts of both his parents. Neither of us commented on it. The dog’s claws clicked over the floorboards as we followed her down the chilly corridor.
‘There seems to be so much of that about nowadays,’ he said finally as we reached the back of the house, where the rooms were smaller, and the ceilings low. ‘The suicide part, at any rate. You can’t turn on the news nowadays without hearing about it …’
The radio was playing in the background in the kitchen, Patrick’s half-finished breakfast on the table, and I wondered whether he was thinking of his own father as he spoke those words. I felt a stab of regret and wondered why I had come at all. Hardly in the door, and I had put my foot in it. But Patrick welcomed me, nonetheless.
‘Sit, sit,’ he commanded, clearing away some newspapers and files that cluttered the table. ‘Let me cook you up some eggs,’ he said convivially, as if I were a chum he had not seen in a few weeks, and not an old school friend of his sister’s.
‘No, really, Patrick. A cup of tea is fine.’
But he wouldn’t hear of it.
‘By now, I’m a dab hand at whipping up a breakfast fry,’ he said, clattering about with pans on the old Aga. ‘Did you know I ran this place as a guest house for a while?’
‘Really?’
With the smell of frying butter filling the room, he chattered above the spit and crackle of the eggs in the pan, explaining how he had given the hospitality thing a go for a year or so before chucking it in.
‘Too many complaints,’ he explained. ‘The bed’s too hard. The room’s too cold. The house too spooky.’
‘Too spooky?’ I asked cheerfully.
‘It’s a house with a lot of history, as you know,’ Patrick said, sliding the eggs on to a plate and setting them before me with a flourish. ‘Not to mention what they thought of the food.’
‘Looks good to me,’ I answered, suddenly famished, and while I ate, he poured tea and filled me in on the other money-making ventures he had tried: farming, leasing the land to a local farmer, advertising the property as a location for film and television projects, airbnb.
‘The trouble is,’ he explained, ‘there’s barely enough money to be earned from those ventures to keep me going, let alone the house. As you can see, it needs a serious injection of capital.’
I looked around the room – the scuffed wooden countertops, the Victorian tiled floor, the Aga filling the room with heat. There was a fireplace with a little wood-burning stove inset, and a chaise longue had been drawn up next to it. The dog had settled herself on a folded blanket on the floor. The chaise longue I recognized as one that had stood in front of the drawing-room window all those years ago. I had slept on it the night of Peter Bagenal’s death. It had grown shabby with the years, the upholstery worn to the weave. A pillow and blanket were slung in one corner along with a paperback novel, and I wondered did Patrick sleep down here? My mind wandered back to the abandoned car driven into a tree, and I couldn’t help but question the way he was living. The whole expanse of this grand house and how enthralled I had been with the Bagenal family, all of it reduced to a fortyish bachelor son eking out an existence within the confines of a kitchen. It seemed wrong, somehow.
‘Why don’t you sell it?’ I asked, and he shot me a look of amusement.
‘What? Sell the family home? Don’t you understand anything of my tribe?’
This was an old joke from school. I remember the day Rachel gleefully whispered to me that she ‘kicked with the other foot’. I had stared at her, clueless. Our school was predominantly Catholic with only a handful of Church of Ireland pupils. The domain of rich landowners’ children, the sons and daughters of lawyers and bankers, I was the only one in the school to claim a publican as my father.
‘What does Rachel think?’
‘Rachel!’ he spluttered, but his amusement was thin. ‘I’m sure she couldn’t give a hoot what I do with the place. I could put the old pile up on Done Deal and she wouldn’t bat an eyelid. So long as her life in London can carry on uninterrupted.’
I suggested he might parcel off some of the land that surrounded the house and try to sell that. It was in the commuter belt, within driving distance of Dublin. Surely he could find a developer who might be interested.
