Silent Waters, page 25
He’s at home, alone. She has no phone, no nothing. She runs as fast as she can, panic in her chest. And that humming in her ears.
FORTY-EIGHT
Bill sits in a room that is heavy with heat and his own anxiety. The chair is plastic, uncomfortable, and his back is sweating against it.
It’s morning – he’s spent the night in a cell – and for the last hour, the two officers in front of him have taken it in turns asking questions, but his brain is turning too slowly to answer them – the cogs are sticking, and he can’t formulate words. He can’t formulate a defence. His lawyer – he can’t remember her name – asked for a break and got him a cup of tea in a plastic cup. It’s too milky, but he’s in no position to complain about it, or indeed anything.
There’s a part of him that is laughing at the absurdity of this, the other part is howling with the pain of it. Because why would Claudia do this after all he’s done to help her, after all they’ve been through? Is it to buy time so she can get away, is it because Mark has forced her hand? Or is it because this was always her plan? Perhaps she’s always harboured hatred against him for what happened to Henry.
He swallows. His mouth is dry and he wants some water but doesn’t dare ask for any. He wants his sister too but definitely can’t ask for her. He’s ruined everything that she has worked towards – has utterly failed her. All those years ago, he fucked up her Olympic diving dream and now he’s fucking up her diving career. He’s done so many wrong things.
His hands clench; he wants to bite his nails, wants to grab at his phone – though the police have that – and disappear into the murk of his gambling addiction but he’s impotent to do anything to make himself feel better. He doesn’t deserve the temporary relief of it anyway.
‘Mr Harper?’
Bill refocuses his eyes.
‘You’ve given us your version of events as to what has been happening the last few weeks.’
‘Yes.’
‘And now I’m going to tell you what we’re looking at here, direct from Miss Franklin, and you can see where we’re having some issues.’
Bill swallows. ‘OK.’
‘When Mark Mason and Claudia Franklin returned to the UK, you and Ms Franklin had struck up a friendship again, yes? You had offered to help her with selling her home, as she’d expressed an interest.’
‘Yes?’
‘You also offered to help her with managing real estate in Canada. In fact, you emailed some, am I right?’
‘Yes—’
‘You also corresponded directly with Victoria Franklin.’
‘Claudia asked me to—’
‘Bill,’ the lawyer says. ‘You don’t need to say anything.’
‘On the twentieth of June, you and Claudia met up at The Corner House Cafe, I gather, to finalise some of these plans.’
‘I gave her a new ID that day,’ Bill says. ‘Because then Mark wouldn’t track her. She wanted to start again.’
‘We have never found an alternative ID in our searches of Oak House.’
‘Ask her! Ask Claudia! Ask Mark.’
‘Ms Franklin has told us that during this meeting at The Corner House Cafe, you told her that you were in considerable debt. She felt sorry for you. You asked her to lend you some money when the house sale went through. She felt bad, but she said no.’
‘That’s not true—’
‘Bill, you don’t need to counter this.’
Bill looks to the lawyer. ‘This isn’t what happened.’
‘Claudia told us that you were angry – that you had helped her with getting things going with the sale and felt you were owed. You demanded money for the sale of Oak House to pay off your substantial gambling debts which we have since looked into. You owe a lot of money, Mr Harper.’
‘You don’t have to comment, Bill.’
‘Yes,’ Bill says at the same time.
‘Forty-five thousand pounds. More than twenty thousand of which you owe to Andy Bowman’s company, who you currently work for on a site as foreman.’
Bill closes his eyes. ‘Yes.’
‘On the twenty-ninth of June, in the afternoon, you broke into Oak House via one of the fence panels. You used to come through there as a teenager, Claudia tells us. Ms Franklin was in the garden on her laptop – the same laptop that we have since found in your flat. Claudia has said your argument got heated and you hit her on her head with the laptop.’
‘That’s not true. I’ve told you—’
‘Bill, I advise you not to comment,’ the lawyer says.
‘Then you dragged Ms Franklin back through the fence with you in case her husband returned.’
‘That’s not what happened,’ Bill says and sees his lawyer’s shoulders heave with a sigh.
‘You took her to your building site, held her against her will at the only finished house – number ten – until she agreed to give you the money.’
‘No.’
‘You then left the site and drove to the Lake District with Claudia.’
‘Yes. I mean, it wasn’t against her will. That’s where we decided to go to be as far away as possible—’
‘Bill,’ the lawyer tries, but Bill keeps talking.
‘I told you, we went there because the investigation had taken a turn we didn’t see coming and we needed to get away and figure things out.’
‘Or you just wanted to cover your tracks. You stayed there a couple of days until you were called by your site manager because something had been discovered in the pool of number ten, hadn’t it? Claudia had managed to write a message on the bottom of the pool, a message that you later tampered with. We have a photograph given to us by the site worker that originally found the note. Jonny Kilby. He’d taken a picture with his phone before you were back on site.’
Bill is silent.
‘When the police officer you met with came and took pictures, the message looked different. Your site manager told us you had gone down there alone and when he came to join you, you were in the pool, and told him that the liner had come away. He also confirmed the original message because he had seen it.’
‘I told you that I was worried . . . I was worried that, police would think I was perverting the—’
‘Bill,’ his lawyer growls.
‘You were perverting the course of justice, Mr Harper.’ The officer looks at his notes. ‘You then drove to town, where you are seen on CCTV going into Tea For Two. There you saw your good friend Kerry-Lou Westbrook there.’
He feels sick.
‘Her manager, Mr Ricky Prior, told us that you tend always to sit on the same table. Both you and your sister, Jen Harper, sit there because apparently it’s tradition. Apparently, as teenagers on the dive team, your sister and Claudia Franklin used to sit together at that table. There’s a very long history between the three of you.’
Bill swallows. Has Claudia told the police about Henry? How deep has her betrayal run?
‘Mr Prior showed us the table. And what did he tell us? That there used to be a message on it, but it was changed recently, but that he remembers the original and it’s the same as the one in the pool.’
‘I was worried.’
‘You were right to be worried, Mr Harper. Because now we come on to Victoria Franklin’s death. The tie that you said you borrowed from your sister for an interview was found in the river. You know this already, of course, because your sister told you about it, and you in turn told Claudia and gave her cause for concern. This, as you’ll understand, is another huge violation and won’t look any good for Jen Harper.’
Bill shakes his head. ‘I don’t know why it was there. I don’t know what to say.’
‘Say nothing,’ the lawyer says. ‘Christ.’
‘Ms Franklin told us that you made her go back to Oak House on the evening of the twenty-ninth of June, to get any money she had in cash and her jewellery. Mark Mason wasn’t there by that point, but you waited up the road while she tried to get in. However, by chance, Mark Mason had changed the locks and clearly had forgotten to tell her the new code. This was something neither of you had foreseen, so you panicked and decided to think of a new plan. You got Claudia back into your truck and you drove down the lane again.’
‘That did happen, but not how you’re describing,’ he says. ‘Why would she come back to my truck if she’d wanted to get away from me?’
‘Claudia tells us that it was when you were driving down the lane again that you saw headlights.’
‘What?’
‘You pulled into a dark lay-by, under the treeline, and switched off your engine. You both saw a taxi pass and saw Victoria inside. You had been communicating with her directly from Claudia’s laptop for quite some time, haven’t you, Mr Harper?’
‘Because Claudia asked me to. So that Mark Mason wouldn’t suspect anything—’
‘We have accessed her emails and she wasn’t happy about the sale. You could have manipulated Claudia, but not Victoria as well and now here she was, back in the UK for the first time in eighteen years.’
‘No—’ Bill says.
‘I admit that this is where it gets a little blurry for us,’ the officer says. ‘We’re not quite sure if you waited until the taxi had dropped Victoria off and then went back to talk to her about the sale, or if you drove away and she just happened to fall into the river. There are marks on her wrists, and they’ll be matched against the fingerprints you’ve given us. But, aside from that, the tie you were wearing for the interview was picked up from the river. Victoria Franklin’s jacket was in your sister’s flat. Her handbag and suitcase aren’t anywhere to be found. And when you discovered that Claudia had managed to escape your flat where you had taken her whilst on site with Andy Bowman – you then wrote an email from her laptop to the media, to divert attention from yourself onto Mark Mason.’
‘What happened to Bella Mitchell is true and you wouldn’t be doing your jobs if you didn’t look into it—’
‘I think my client could do with a rest,’ the lawyer interjects. ‘And we should have a chance to speak privately, Mr Harper, yes?’
Bill is about to say no, about to argue further, but stops when he sees the look in the woman’s eyes. Disdain, hopelessness.
‘OK,’ he says quietly.
‘Interview terminated at ten-thirty a.m.’
FORTY-NINE
In the light from the huge hallway window, Claudia sits on the bottom step of the grand staircase and listens to the grandfather clock which counts down time, and counts up all her lies.
She has ten minutes until the press conference at midday and she has all her make-up on, her hair is washed and curled, and her clothes pressed. She looks the part, as she always has done, but she feels like a husk and the house seems to echo it. The dusky pink tulle of her long pleated skirt is edged with grey dust and so she stands hurriedly. The cleaner clearly hasn’t been coming over the weeks Claudia has been away; soil, gravel from the drive, ancient plaster dust from the ceiling and strands of hair, all whisper across the stone tiles.
She tells herself that she’s detached emotionally from Bill, but he’s all she can think about. She could see herself reflected in his trusting eyes that evening when he met her at the barn and took one look at her bleeding head; he held her so tightly, she felt she couldn’t breathe. She could see love in his face when he delivered and set up a little fridge-freezer for her at number ten. And now she has framed him for murder. What a bitter thing it is to discover about yourself – that when the chips are down, you’re someone who will betray others in order not to face your own demons. Mark knows she’s a murderer. She knows he’s having an illegal relationship with Marie. The only way of keeping this truce, for them to both escape, is to place blame elsewhere. She cannot have the world know that she killed her stepfather, a man she had come to love, in cold blood.
‘I’ve let Emily in through the gate.’
She looks up, sees Mark coming down the stairs dressed in smart navy trousers and a crisp white shirt.
‘OK.’
Claudia doesn’t want to let Emily in. She knows that a family liaison officer isn’t merely a friendly face for a family in the middle of a shitstorm situation, but an investigator, a recorder of all the things that they say inside the house, and all the things they don’t.
‘Finn is already outside prepping the reporters.’
Finn is Finn O’Reilly, Mark’s lawyer.
‘We stick with our statements.’
‘Yes.’
He goes down past her and the stench of his cologne makes her insides curl.
‘And we limit the damage.’
She is silent.
He leans to the side of the door, glances out of the window, and then opens the door. She can hear the clicking of cameras from where she sits, like a swarm of crickets, and the sound alarms her.
‘Hello, Emily,’ Mark says.
‘Are you ready?’ she asks.
He looks back at Claudia, and she gets up, smooths her skirt, and walks towards them. He holds out his hand to her and she takes it, locks in the promise they’ve made each other. So different to their vows of love. Now they have vows of secrecy.
‘We’re ready,’ he says.
They stand side by side on the gravel outside Oak House. A few choice reporters have been allowed access inside the gates – others are beyond the railings. All are calling out to them, clamouring for their attention, snapping their cameras for photographs before they speak.
Mark squeezes her hand. He’s already holding it too tightly and Claudia can barely feel her fingers. She wonders if anyone can see it and if they can, if they’ll mistake it for support.
The media on the front drive are quiet as Mark reads out their statement.
‘Three weeks ago, on the twenty-ninth of June, my wife experienced something no person should have to. She was physically attacked, forced from her home, and then hidden away in a building site by a man she used to know, and used to trust. And, during this horrific trial, she found out that her mother, Victoria Franklin, had been found, dead, less than a mile from our house.’
He sticks to their script, and to the facts that are already in circulation and approved of by the police. He’s doing most of the talking because he always has done; he’s used to interviews and is good at them, but everyone knows that it’s Claudia that the nation wants to hear from. They want to know the terror she incurred, the violence she might have been subjected to, the horror and upset that her mother has been found dead in the river. People love bad news, love to absorb all the gritty details. Only Claudia knows the absolute truth of it all, save what really happened to her mother.
Claudia doesn’t know what she believes happened to Victoria – she can only think that she came, drunk, to the gates of Oak House, and on finding them locked and the taxi having disappeared down the lane, that she decided to cut through to town the quickest way, following the river through the water-meadows. To think that Claudia must have missed her mother by minutes, after living years of her life without her, is too much for Claudia to bear. She was going to go to Canada to start again, had hopes of rebuilding their relationship. She was going to try to be a good daughter. Impossible now to be a good person.
‘We are helping the police with their ongoing investigation into Victoria Franklin’s death,’ Mark finishes, ‘but this news was obviously extremely distressing on top of what was a hideous ordeal to go through. We appreciate empathy and respect towards my wife and I at this difficult time. Thank you.’
Immediately there are flashes of cameras.
‘Can we hear from you, Claudia?’ someone yells. Claudia sees that it’s a woman dressed in a powder-blue suit, her lanyard close enough for her to read it. The Sun. ‘Why did the man arrested take you away? What was your connection?’
Finn O’Reilly steps towards the microphones. ‘Mark has told you all he can at this present time.’
‘Are you going to comment about the article printed by the Mail last night, Mark?’ a man asks.
‘That email was sent by the man arrested, from Claudia Franklin’s laptop,’ Finn says.
‘Which he stole when he physically abused my wife in our own private garden and dragged her through the woods,’ Mark chips in. ‘Those allegations are unfounded.’
Claudia stands still, listens to the lies trip off his tongue. The way he says them, with such conviction, makes her wonder if he’s come to believe their story himself.
‘But you don’t deny that Bella Mitchell was a diving pupil under your care in Boston—’
Claudia knows without looking at him that the muscles in Mark’s jaw will be working hard to contain his angst.
‘Mark Mason will not be answering questions about Bella Mitchell,’ Finn says firmly.
‘When is the arrested man going to be named?’
‘What relationship did you have with him, Claudia?’
‘Is it the man from the cafe on the news?’
‘That is all, thank you,’ Finn says.
‘One more question! Claudia!’
Mark turns them and Claudia is forced to face the woman from the Sun.
‘Do you believe the man who abducted you could have killed your mother?’
She waits for Finn to jump in, but he doesn’t. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Mark appraise her. They all appraise her. There is only one answer here.
‘Yes,’ she says quietly. ‘I do.’
FIFTY
Jen lets out a scream at the TV. She wants to launch herself at it, wants to go through it, and scratch out Claudia’s eyes, pull out every strand of that golden blonde hair and stuff it into her mouth so she chokes on her lies. How can she have betrayed Bill so viciously? With every moment that passes, Jen is more convinced that Mark and Claudia planned this together all along. She doesn’t know for what reason they might have killed Victoria – perhaps it was an accident – but, either way, they needed someone to frame. And who better than Bill, who thought he owed Claudia everything.
