The secret keeper, p.24
The Secret Keeper, page 24
‘I guess that depends on how well they write it, but one thing’s for certain, we really ought to have some clothes on by the time we let them in.’
Chapter Twenty
ANA. Welcome to my new dwelling. It’s larger than any place I’ve lived before, but it has none of the elegance or comforts, and no access at all to the front door. The grounds are fenced – I’m used to that, my parents were always big on fences or walls, but theirs were swagged in foliage, flowering hedgerows and with gates that opened and closed at the touch of a button. My clothes are drab and ill-fitting; I have no phone of my own, and access to the shared device in the public area is limited and never private.
I take showers with other women, if you can call them that. For the most part they are a species of humanity that feels quite separate from the one I inhabit. Sagging, tattooed flesh that even goosebumps seem to shrink from. Greasy, sparse hair that clings to scabby scalps like seaweed to porous rocks; coarse voices that swear and cajole, threaten and screech in diabolical tirades of anger and grief. The smells are so sour, so utterly putrid and gut-wrenching that I can feel them staining my lungs like a disease. I remain as aloof as my privately paid warders and my centred mind will allow. I am not a part of this sad and repulsive community. I keep myself apart both mentally and spiritually, physically too as much as I can. I speak only when I have to and eat almost nothing. I will not serve my full sentence. This has already been decided by powers beyond those that run this godforsaken bedlam. A token punishment for a crime that was … What was it? How shall I describe it to you when I really don’t believe it to be anyone’s business but mine?
Everyone wants to know what happened the day Richmond died, what single thing was said, or what action was taken to make me reach for the knife. It was the knife I’d taken from Olivia’s kitchen. You see how I think of it as Olivia’s, both the knife and the kitchen. Not Richmond’s. It all belonged to her.
I understood almost from the start that he’d never find the backbone to leave her and his children in spite of what he said, and what it would cost him to stay. Not that we discussed it at the beginning; disappearing and starting a new life was a subject that didn’t arise until much later. By then he’d come to realise just how … committed? beholden? indebted? he was to me – and others – for introducing him to a select network of private capitalists with a stream of funds to invest. They could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams, and though we could see that he was nervous, he was excited, even electrified by the prospect.
You assume the object of the exercise was to legitimise the financial proceeds of crimes undisclosed, committed by individuals unnamed. You are welcome to your assumptions. I have no more to say about them.
Returning to the day Richmond died: you assume, still, that it was me who stabbed him. I find that amusing, and I want to leave you with that assumption, riddled as it is in doubt, because you will always wonder, was it me, or was someone else there that day?
He didn’t have to tell me he’d changed his mind about going with me, as I’ve already intimated I was expecting it, and had even prepared for it. I knew exactly where to find Olivia’s knife that day in the flat – did I tell you that I considered using one of her knives to kill her husband to be a rather ironic touch? I believe it even cast her under suspicion for a while. That was satisfying.
It was a great surprise to Richmond to realise that he wasn’t going to leave the apartment alive that day, and I keep wondering why. He knew very well that he could assist in investigations far beyond those happening at Penn Financial; that if he disclosed details of events leading to the incrimination of much bigger fish he would earn himself a much lighter sentence. He gave fervent assurances that he never would, but no one was going to run the risk of him changing his mind. So this is why I say I don’t understand why he was surprised when he realised he was going to be stopped. But putting that aside, he knew very well that I’d never let Olivia win. I might no longer have wanted him for myself, but I wasn’t going to let her have him either.
There really was only one way out for him.
My arrest at Charles de Gaulle airport wouldn’t have happened if someone hadn’t alerted the authorities to the time of my flight and the name I was travelling under. I understood straight away that I had become the victim of a twist in the game that had grown even bigger and deadlier than I had realised. Overnight our friends had turned into enemies, and just as quickly our enemies were friends.
Our world isn’t like yours. We don’t think like you, we don’t react like you and we certainly don’t live like you. Don’t try to understand us; we’re on a different level, so you’ll never succeed.
My only regret is that I haven’t persuaded Olivia to visit me. I want to look into her eyes when I tell her about Richmond, how willingly he betrayed her, and how he died. She deserves the details. She should be clear about what kind of man he was, and I want her to know …
Jennifer Hadley stopped the tape and looked across the desk at her partner, Tom Walker. As journalists and now biographers, they’d already determined not to be used in the mind games Ana Petrov was trying to inflict on Olivia Benting. This was far enough. The rest of the interview with Ana Petrov, showing her to be as vindictive as she was vengeful and sad, would be destroyed. No one, least of all Olivia, needed to read the lies and perversions of truths that Ana had concocted to try and bond herself to a woman she clearly hated as much as she envied and admired. The time had come for Ana to realise she had no more power. The game was up; she had not won. She was a loser in so many more ways than one.
Chapter Twenty-One
Olivia sighed in a gentle, yet slightly turbulent way as she looked up from the book she was reading and let her head fall against the sofa back. Memories were swirling around her like a breeze drifting in from a far-off world, a breeze that sometimes gusted, and at other times strengthened, wrenching at all it touched as though to punish, or distort, or uproot it.
Reliving that time of her life hadn’t been easy, or welcome. She wanted nothing more than to put it all behind her now, even to pretend that most of it hadn’t happened, and yet she was aware that without it she wouldn’t be where she was today. The stepping stones, obstacles, tragedies and triumphs of life came in so many different guises and presented so many unexpected challenges to the heart and to the character of a person that it was often impossible to know at the time what good, or ill, would come from them.
She thought of Richmond and Sean, her parents and her children, her friends and the single most powerful enemy she’d ever made without even trying. She knew this was how Ana Petrov continued to consider her, that the need to punish and to control, poison, the life of a woman she barely knew was what kept Ana Petrov going.
This was why Olivia had resolved never to engage with her. It was true she’d felt tempted at times – meeting Ana Petrov’s eyes from the visitor’s side of a prison meeting-room table was an experience she might enjoy. It could offer some small satisfaction to gloat at Ana’s miscalculation, to take her down with a few well-chosen words, but she knew that Ana would view the very fact that she’d come as a victory.
Staying away was Olivia’s victory. She wasn’t going to afford Ana the chance to plant her lies and distortions; she’d give her no opportunity to turn Richmond into a man whose failings were as deliberately dark and destructive as Ana’s own. Ana Petrov wasn’t going to have the chance to create a single shred of doubt where there needed to be none. She could no longer even send letters; a court-issued restraining order meant that anything addressed to Olivia was destroyed before it even left the prison.
So Ana Petrov was left to her frustrations and impotence, to whatever raging delusions and bizarre senses of entitlement that controlled her, for it still didn’t seem enough for her to know that she’d succeeded in ending Richmond’s marriage.
In that respect, she had won.
Olivia knew that Ana would probably see this book and think she’d won again, until she read it.
Feeling herself becoming submerged by the past, Olivia looked down at the closing words, knowing that in them she would find her way back to the present …
The authors of this book, Jennifer Hadley and Tom Walker, would like to thank everyone involved for speaking to us so freely and frankly about the events that in some cases so tragically affected their lives. When we were first approached by Sean Kenyon to put the family’s side of the story across we imagined it would achieve at least one centre spread, and maybe a few more associated articles as further events unfolded. Although we were right about that, we knew early on that there was so much more to tell, and that is why we returned to Kesterly to discuss putting everything into a book.
For the most part we have used the extensive interviews we conducted to inform the content and structure of events as they unfolded, occasionally calling upon dramatic licence to give voice to those who were unable or unwilling to speak to us. This device is employed, in particular, in the scenes where Richmond Benting is at his office receiving the news from Cooper Jarrett that Mace had turned down their appeal for a rescue package. It’s followed by Ana Petrov’s arrival when he hands over the key to his house. Much later at his lawyer’s office we imagine what is in his mind during the moments before he signs his statement of guilt.
You will see that we have also, in places, used extracts from the interviews we were able to carry out to allow friends and family to speak for Richmond as well as for themselves.
We want to stress that, before going to print, everything was approved by Olivia Benting and her lawyers.
We had hoped that Ana Petrov could be persuaded to add to the two interviews we conducted with her, the first taking place before her sentence, some of which is to be found early in the book. The second was at the prison where she is serving her life sentence, but since then she’s refused to see us again. The conclusions we draw from that are probably the same as the reader’s – she was strongly advised to stop speaking about her involvement in certain events touched upon in these pages.
In spite of her suggestion that someone else was at the flat the day Richmond Benting was murdered, it is our firm belief that she killed him. All the evidence confirms this, and we’re certain that her attempt to cast doubt on it was another attempt to engage with Olivia Benting. We are assured by the authorities that there is no arrangement for her to be released at any time prior to a parole board recommendation. This hearing is not set to take place until she has served ten years of her sentence, and at the time of going to press she remains incarcerated at HMP Drake Hall.
We invited Imogen Benting to tell us about her son, and to give us her version of events, but she repeatedly declined. Olivia’s parents, Rena and David Penn, also chose not to be interviewed, but they were tireless in their assistance with the articles and the book, as were Andee Lawrence and Graeme Ogilvy.
Many lives have been changed since Richmond Benting was persuaded to embark upon the marina expansion project, either through lost jobs and investments, or because, like Olivia Benting and her family, they were caught up in a world they knew nothing about until it was too late. To some it might seem a small story, but we would say that many stories seem small unless they’re involving you. We didn’t feel that Olivia and her children deserved to become a mere footnote to a much larger NCA investigation that continues to this day.
As Olivia closed the book she was aware of the past finally rolling back over a far horizon to settle in its rightful place, out of sight, if never entirely out of mind. She’d known before she started that the read would be difficult, for this was the second time she’d braved it, and though the memories it had stirred up of Ana were as unwelcome as they were unsettling, it was the ones of Richmond that were the hardest to bear, and the last to let go. The dramatic licence the authors had used to give him a voice had affected her deeply both times, but she hadn’t taken issue with it in the first place and nor would she now.
Of course, no one would ever be able to say for certain what Richmond had thought about, or how he’d really felt during that terrible period of his life, but the way they’d portrayed him as conflicted, riddled with guilt and fear, and with a conscience that was absent as often as it was present, had rung as true to her as if they’d somehow managed to speak to him. They’d allowed the world at large to believe that though he was a man of many flaws who’d compounded his mistakes by making more, at heart he was someone who’d loved his family, and who, in his convoluted and yes, arrogant, way, had believed he could protect them from the kinds of influences that were too corrupt and far-reaching for any normal man to defeat.
Putting the book down, Olivia inhaled deeply as she felt the comfort of the present continuing to claim her. In spite of all that had happened during these past two years, how much her and the children’s lives had changed, there were still times when she found it hard to accept that Richmond was really gone. It was as though he was somewhere else in the world living out another existence, just as he’d planned. It could be that he’d come back unexpectedly one day eager to see them, and ready to explain away his absence with some fantastical story that wouldn’t make any sense. Of course she knew he wouldn’t. She still missed him, and she was glad of it, because if she didn’t it would feel as though he hadn’t mattered, and for her and the children that would never be true.
Getting to her feet she walked across the apartment and went to stand on the balcony, gazing first at the crowded moorings below and then on out to sea, where small wisps of cloud were floating lazily across the horizon. For some reason, after reading the book, it seemed like a different Kesterly this evening, one that was distant in spite of being right there. She turned her head to take in the long crescent of the bay sweeping over to the opposite headland; the muddied stretch of sand, the jumble of Victorian hotels and guest houses. It was the same coastal town that she’d grown up in, where her parents had built their businesses, where she’d first met Sean and where she and Richmond had settled to begin a new phase of their lives.
As fragmented and lengthy as it might be, theirs was just one small story in amongst the thousands of others that had played out in every part of the town over the years. It was as impossible to guess at the number of those stories as it was to know all their details. The hundreds of windows she could see winking pale pink reflections in the early evening sunset had witnessed as much joy as sadness, had stood firm in the might of storms and basked benignly in summer suns. The rooms, the alleyways, inner courtyards and garden squares were as much a part of the place as the dramas they’d seen unfold. The whole town, as her father had once put it, was the keeper of more secrets than the waves that rolled on to the shore.
For a fleeting moment she found herself thinking of Gil and Gina, the owner of The Salon, and the mystery of why two people who loved each other had parted. She thought of Andee’s younger sister, who’d disappeared at the age of fourteen and had never been found. And then she thought of Richmond’s secrets, and what it had cost him to keep them.
A flurry of seagulls swooped away from the nearby cliffs like scraps of paper scattering in the wind, and as they resettled on the yacht masts and moorings below, she found her mind turning back to the book.
What she’d liked most about it, she decided, apart from her children’s courage in speaking out so honestly, was the writers’ insistence that she and her family should not become mere addenda to Ana’s story. Instead they’d achieved the opposite, for which she’d always feel grateful, since she recognised how tempting it must have been to set the rich and spoiled, some would say sociopathic, daughter of a billionaire businessman with connections to organised crime at the centre of events.
She could say that it was time now for them all to move on, but Luke and Sasha had done that a while ago. Having completed his first year at Melbourne Law School in a headrush of glory – quite literally, for he’d taken part in the Americas Cup halfway through – Luke was now fully submerged in his second year of studies. Sasha had texted earlier that week from somewhere in Argentina, where she was currently enjoying her gap year with friends before taking up a place at Auckland University next February to study biomedical science. Olivia really hadn’t seen that one coming, but if she’d learned anything these past few years it was never to assume she could see anything coming.
As for her parents, they were now in New Zealand, having sold their beloved house here in Kesterly and taken the architect’s plans with them to recreate the very same homestead in Hawkes Bay. Their acre of hilltop with a view out to sea was adjacent to a much larger plot that Sean had bought a few years ago, with a vague intention of developing in some way. This mini estate comprised a small complex of neglected stables, a vineyard gone mostly to weed, and a sorry-looking mansion just waiting for Olivia to transform back to its turn-of-the-century magnificence. When she’d asked why he’d bought it in the first place, he’d said that although he might not know much about horses or wine apart from being able to ride the former and drink the latter, he’d just got a feeling for the place, and maybe now he understood why. ‘And look at it this way,’ he’d added with one of his irresistible twinkles, ‘having a second home on the North Island of NZ is a damned sight easier than having one in Kesterly-on-Sea.’
Hearing the door of the apartment open and close, Olivia stayed where she was, waiting for him to come and join her. When he did she felt his arms go round her, and it was as though the entirety of everything that mattered most in her life now was enveloping her. His lips brushed her neck and she leaned back against him, inhaling the scent of sea air, and the musky maleness that was uniquely him. In some ways it was as though they were young again, picking up where they’d left off, starting the life they might have had if fate hadn’t had other plans.
