A guilty secret, p.27
A Guilty Secret, page 27
I let out a shaky sigh. ‘How could you have known any different? I didn’t tell you.’
‘Maybe. But you know what, Finn?’ She looked at me with eyes full of regret and sorrow. ‘I should have learned, after everything that happened. Instead, I treated Kate in exactly the same way.’
I didn’t say anything. I just slipped an arm round her, pulling her into my chest. We sat like that, letting the train sway us.
As the train drew into our station I murmured my last words to her.
‘We’ve been on a long journey, Mhairi, and I’m glad of it. I’m glad we did this: went searching for answers about Kate. I’m glad of what we’ve finally been able to say to each other. We can move on now, if you want that. I forgive you and I’m sorry for everything I did.’
I half expected my new-found peace to disappear once I returned home, to my own empty house, with the same dull furniture and crockery and quiet.
But it didn’t.
It stayed with me. Finally, it felt as though something had truly shifted.
I pushed open the front door, stepping over the handful of letters on the mat, and dropped my overnight bag in the hall. I’d unpack and sort everything later. The house felt a little stale and musty, so in the kitchen I opened the window. I thought of Kate, remembering her, processing all we’d learned about what she had been through. The helper who hadn’t let anyone help her. Not me, not Mhairi, not even Sebastian. Instead, she had tried to make things right by fixing other people, lightening their burdens and shouldering their loads. The wise one who underneath had carried such guilt.
I made myself a cup of tea and waited quietly while it brewed, then sat down with it on my familiar sofa in the lounge. From habit, I pulled out my phone and checked it. There were a couple of texts from Mhairi, saying she was back home with Tom and that Kitty and Imrie were happy to see her. I tapped out a quick reply:
Me too, love to all of them and speak soon x
To read her messages so casually would have been unthinkable two weeks ago, but it had become so straightforward to talk with Mhairi since then, the air between us finally free and clear.
The tea tasted good: strong and comforting. I had picked up fresh milk on my way home from the station. It was a mixed day outside, crisp but sunny with a buffeting wind. Little ideas fluttered at the edges of my mind: opportunities, possibilities. Unfamiliar thoughts about the future.
Once I’d finished my tea, I picked up my phone again and called a familiar number. It went to voicemail: she was probably out shopping or at tai chi or the beach.
I left a message for her.
‘Hi, Mum, it’s me. I’m back home now, and not going anywhere else for a while. All is good here. Hope you’re good, too. Chat soon.’
I hung up and drained the last of my tea.
Then, knees aching a little, I stood up. There was one more task I had to do before dinner. Something small and easy, but immensely symbolic.
I pulled on a pair of old trainers by the back door and let myself out.
The garage door screeched as I levered it open and for a moment I felt a stabbing echo of fear through my chest. But I flicked the light on, took a breath, and it passed. The strip light flickered for a moment, then steadied. Not that I needed it: there was plenty of daylight shining in from outside.
Tomorrow, I would give the space a good sweep and a tidy-up. Sort through the junk: choose what to keep, what to bin, what to sell.
For now, I set my hands on the stepladder, climbing up rung by rung until I was just a few inches from the ceiling where a small spider scampered over my hand and away.
I reached out and tugged at the canvas strap I’d tied up there. It came undone surprisingly easily. Maybe even if Mhairi hadn’t called me right then, and I’d tried to go through with it, it wouldn’t have held me anyway. Clearly I hadn’t tied it very tight.
Either way, I didn’t need it there anymore.
I undid the knots, dismantling the noose.
DRAFT EMAIL [created: 16.08pm 08/01/2011]
From: katefallon@hotmail.com
To: mhairi_1981@gmail.com
Subject: Time Travel
Hey Mhairi,
You know you asked me the other day about my New Year’s resolution and I mentioned time travel? I wanted to explain what I meant and I’m not even sure how to tell you because I’ve never talked to anyone about it – ever, but I did this placement at a school called St Michael’s, when I was training. There was a group of girls aged thirteen and fourteen who were having these fainting fits. The school doctor thought it was anxiety so I was called in.
I just knew from the start that there was something wrong at this school. The whole place – the atmosphere. It reeked of old-fashioned sexism and misogyny. As an assistant psychologist I’d worked in an adult sexual assault clinic, and I thought two of the schoolgirls referred to me showed signs of abuse.
Withdrawal. Hypervigilance. Dissociation.
One of them had been bed wetting too.
There was an older girl as well, and I suspected others, but I was only there a few weeks.
My supervisor was off sick, I didn’t have her to talk to. I tried to speak to the clinical manager of my team, but he said it was a serious allegation I was making, when none of the girls had directly disclosed. He implied that my previous work made me biased, and warned me how dangerous it was for well-meaning therapists to go digging for abuse.
He was our clinical lead and so much more experienced than I was, and I hadn’t worked with boarding school teenagers before, so what did I know? So I pushed down my suspicions and did the anxiety management work the school had requested, like a good girl, and actually the girls all got better – except those two.
A month or so later, I heard about a teacher who had moved on from the school. No notice period, no real explanation, nothing. A sudden transfer. And that’s when I realized: maybe I’d been right all along.
But I still didn’t do anything. The referral had been closed, the girls discharged from our service, and I had moved on to a completely different training placement by then. What did I really know about that teacher’s situation? What did I really know about what was going on at that school?
So, I never did anything, Mhairi, and even if I tried to speak up now, who would listen? I don’t have any evidence except the memory of my feelings back then. My gut.
But I still lie awake at night, thinking about it.
About the girl who quit that school and the other one who ended up in a psychiatric hospital.
And I keep thinking, what if, Mhairi? What if?
[Last updated: 23.17pm 10/01/2011]
UNSENT
From: mhairi_1981@gmail.com
To: katefallon@hotmail.com
Sent: 15.05pm, 17/05/2019
Subject: The end
Kate,
I know you’ll never get this message but I had to write to you anyway. I need you to know that I understand everything now.
You’d lived for years with that guilt inside you. I remember once, I tried to ask you about it – but I didn’t push it. A horrible failure on my part. But maybe even if I had, you would still never have opened up.
It was Carrie who broke the walls down, wasn’t it? Accidentally – she wasn’t to know. You thought she was blaming you, with all her stories about the Fainting Girls. You thought she’d been abused by that same teacher too.
You blamed yourself, Kate. That was your error. You cared so much and thought that somehow, against everything you were up against, somehow you should have been able to fix the whole world.
You were such a good therapist, Kate. Such a good friend. I’ll never forget what you did for me and Finn, and how hard you fought for us and our marriage. In the end, you couldn’t put us back together either, but that was because of me and my failings, Kate – not you.
People do terrible things, Kate, and you tried to help fix them. But when you can’t, it doesn’t make it your fault.
Anyway, maybe you’re looking down on all of this from heaven (or wherever blameless souls go after death), in which case, you’ll know all of this already.
But I just wanted to write and tell you myself. I’m not angry anymore, Kate. Just sad and so sorry: I know now what happened, and why you did what you did.
Rest in peace, Kate.
Love, Mhairi
xxx
CHAPTER 49
Mae
2019
Currently, there’s only a trespassing charge against me. For now, I’ve been released on bail, pending further investigation – further investigation that’s already well underway. With Carrie’s near-miss and Serena’s death dive, the police wanted to speak to everyone on the scene. Including those two weirdos, Finn and Mhairi, and you betcha they told the police about that online video of us and Luke.
Within twenty-four hours, they’d found and dug up Luke’s body. Finally, his disappearance was solved.
But despite what Serena had feared, after sixteen years there was only a skeleton. No way of reliably determining the cause of death. So all the police will have to go on are our testimonies of what happened that night. I know detectives have already been speaking to Carrie in hospital.
So what is my testimony going to be?
These last few days, I’ve spent hours reading up on trauma and its symptoms. My kind of trauma, especially. It’s weird how accurate the descriptions are. The articles I read describe it all: my self-loathing, my ‘promiscuousness’, my self-destructiveness – it all fits. I can see now that I’ve spent my whole adult life reliving it. Over and over, through every guy I slept with that was decades older than me, or married, or wanted me to ‘meet his friends’, and who every time would screw me up more.
Serena, I know, will fight tooth and nail to deny everything – even what she did to poor Carrie. An accident! she’ll say. Carrie slipped, the sides must have crumbled! That’s Serena: self-protective to her core. (And yes, of course Serena survived her leap.)
With Carrie, though, I fear it’s so much more complicated. Because on the one hand, Carrie told us she couldn’t go on without confessing everything to the authorities. She said that to me, to Victor and to Serena.
On the other hand, what would telling the whole truth really mean for her? It would mean betraying all of us: her best, most loyal friends.
I fidget about in this crappy, cramped hotel room (I’m still in Perthshire, not allowed to leave the UK), waiting to see which devil wins out for my friend. I go back and forth and back and forth in my mind about what’s most likely: whether Carrie will come through for us and leave us out of it, like she offered Serena. Whether she’ll tell a lie to protect her faithful friends – after we kept her secret all these years. Whether she’ll find a way to unburden herself while still sticking to those perfect teenage promises we made.
Or not.
I sit here, waiting to see what my old friend will do. And all the while, after everything I’ve gone through these last couple of weeks, a new desire is sparking up in me, like a glowing candle flame, burning brighter all the time. I’m finally starting to see things clearly. Finally, I’m starting to understand myself.
Now that I’ve read up on it – now that I have a framework, the right words, some insight – I can see that for so long I’ve been living my life on the run, trying to outpace those memories, that shame. I’ve been clawing my way from one day, one city, one man to the next, telling myself I was enjoying it, loving it, that I was in control of everything I chose.
Well, that was bollocks.
Now I know that all I was doing was surviving (barely). Margaret (Mae) Forsythe: gorgeous, alluring and seriously fucked up.
Well, I don’t want that anymore, I’ve decided. I’ve wasted sixteen years in glitzy self-sabotage and I’m sickened now at the thought of falling back in. I want something different for myself going forwards: the chance to make something better of my life. I want to get some half-decent therapy and sort myself out. I want to turn over a new leaf – uproot the whole fucking tree.
I want to get on with the life I should have had, if Mr Witham hadn’t done what he did to me.
That’s what I want. And I think Carrie owes me that.
After all, I buried Luke for her.
But it’s in her hands now: my fate, and what she does with me. Little Carrie, the new girl at St Michael’s. It’s up to her now.
Who’d have thought.
CHAPTER 50
Carrie
2019
No comment, is all I say to them. No comment. Each time the detective – or his friendly female colleague – come to see me, I make sure I have my lawyer there, and I repeat:
No. Comment.
I spoke pretty freely to Finn and Mhairi, though – those friends of my therapist. I’d calculated it was safe to share some stuff with them at least. For all kinds of reasons, I felt like I owed them. If they hadn’t come looking for me, caring so much for their friend Dr Fallon, where would this have ended? Would I ever have found out the whole truth? And when I saw Mhairi that second time, perched so awkwardly on my hospital bed, I saw how much she was burdened by guilt.
I knew what that felt like. I’d blamed myself for decades.
Kate had too.
At least I could help Mhairi stop blaming herself.
Now they’ve gone, and lying here in hospital, I’ve had lots of time to think. I’ve been thinking quite calmly (I think the morphine helps).
In between police visits, I count the ceiling tiles and weigh up my options.
It was a terrible thing they did that second night: Serena, Mae and Alex. But they wouldn’t have been in that position if it hadn’t been for me.
I was the one who gave Luke three tablets, on top of however much vodka he’d drunk. My actions led to his overdose; my friends were only trying to clean up my mess.
In fact, it goes back way further than that, if you really think about it. If you weave all the little threads together, like in a friendship bracelet, you see the patterns that come from all those one-by-one knots.
Luke got to know us because of the drugs we bought. We bought those drugs because of what was going on at the school. The chaos with the Fainting Girls. With Bryony and Ava. Lying in hospital, I’ve been doing my own research and I’ve learned about flashbacks, dissociation, and vasovagal syncope – fainting caused by acute emotional distress. Even without Dr Kate Fallon, I can join up the dots. Bryony and Ava hadn’t been mucking around or faking. They were victims of abuse – just like Mae.
And who was ultimately to blame for all that?
He’s the knot in the thread that started this. And he got off scot-free.
He did die young, I guess – at only forty-one – but his obituary from three years ago said he’d been survived by a wife and two daughters, and was remembered fondly by hundreds of pupils and staff.
How is that fair? What’s right, then, anyway? How are you supposed to define justice and who’s to blame after that?
We never meant any to harm Luke. We didn’t. We were stupid, damaged teenagers, playing games to try to cope.
We weren’t the first movers: that was Mr Witham.
We were the victims. Not evil. Just reckless, at most.
I guess what I’m saying is, I forgive them. All of them – even Serena and what she did. I get why she tried to trap me in that trench. She couldn’t have me running to the police; she was terrified I was going to completely ruin her career – her whole life.
So, after all my thinking, I’ve decided what to tell them – that bullying detective, and his pretty, friendly teammate.
I lie on my back in the hospital bed and feel tears dribble from my eyes onto the pillow, my breaths through the oxygen mask coming in gulps.
It began as a throwaway remark to Serena, when I was panicking up there on the ridge, and throwing out all kinds of ideas. But now I realize it’s exactly the right plan.
I’m going to say that it was only me there that night. I’m going to say it was a secret meeting: just the two of us. I’ll say Luke overdosed and, all by myself, I buried him.
I’m going to say my friends had nothing to do with it. They didn’t even know about it, I’ll say.
The tears tickle in my hair. I’m remembering those first few days at St Michael’s, when Mae and Serena took me under their wing. I’m remembering the first night they let me come with them up the high bank, shared a joint with me, and took me with them every night after that.
In the starched hospital bed, I run my fingers round the macramé friendship bracelet on my wrist – the one I still wear after all these years. They didn’t make it for me, Mae and Serena, but it reminds me of them – it always did.
The tears come faster as I remember the night after Luke died, when Mae made us each hold our hands to the flame.
What’s that, if not loyalty? What’s that if not friendship – the only thing I ever wanted? They did that for me, all of them. And they kept their promises. Even Alex – mostly – by giving me a whole sixteen years to come clean.
Swear on the pain you’ll never say anything.
I close my eyes and press my thumb into the scar on my palm that still shows there.
I know what I’m going to do; I’m decided.
I made them a promise, and I’ll keep it. I’ll keep it tomorrow when I hand myself in, and I’ll keep it all the way to my grave.
A wave of relief sweeps through me as I make the decision. Maybe it’s nothing but another timed dose of morphine, but I really do think I feel that blackened curse lift.
EPILOGUE
Victor
2019
I laid out the whole truth to my lawyer, and it wasn’t really breaking that old pact, since attorney-client privilege is a thing.
To begin with, I planned to say I wasn’t there the night Luke died. Technically true – and also it would fit with what I knew Carrie was going to claim. I’d managed to talk to her two days after her ‘accident’ – even though she wasn’t meant to talk to anyone – and she had promised that was absolutely what she’d say. She was going give a statement that she met Luke alone that night, gave him the drugs alone, buried him by herself. She was going to keep our names completely out of it. She was going to keep her promise that way.
