The Secrets Page 3

  It was filled with the sense of rage and deep injustice Eric had felt then. Still felt. At being abandoned by those he had called his family and his friends.

  He picked it up, smoothed out more of the creases with his fingertips and began to read again.

  My dear Frank,

  They have placed us in what they term emergency accommodation. One room in which to live and sleep and try to keep some sense of belonging. One room for a man, his wife and five little children. The two eldest and myself, we sleep on mattresses on the floor in sleeping bags and Johanna shares a single bed with little Paulie.

  There is so much noise here, Frank. Day and night, people coming and going, every room in this place crammed to breaking point with women and children and their menfolk. Shouting and banging and making noise.

  The children have nowhere to play. There’s just a tiny garden behind and a main road only a step outside the front door.

  We don’t deserve this, Frank. My wife, my children, none of us deserve this. A sin has been committed too great for me to comprehend as yet.

  I would give or do or say anything just to come back to you all. To turn back the clock and undo what has been done.

  We have been placed on a list and have to wait our turn for a suitable house but that may be many weeks away and in the meantime we have to live in this place. Muddle through as best we can.

  Eighteen weeks they had waited, Eric remembered. Eighteen weeks and three days of fighting their way through a system already clogged by too much need.

  Eighteen weeks and three days that had taken them from the overheated summer, in a room whose inadequate windows opened only onto the smoke of traffic and city dust, into the damp and chill of a despairing winter. Tempers had grown short, nerves set on edge by the slightest irritation. Even Johanna’s seemingly infinite patience had been unable to hold out against the miasma of doubt and desolation that had settled in with the winter cold.

  Then Danny had been born and they had been rehoused. Given the most basic of furnishings from the common store and been grateful out of all proportion for the charity. A grant had seen the new place carpeted, and a small stock of tokens provided the paint and mops and buckets to clean and decorate.

  Compared with the home they had once had, the new place was as nothing. Small and cramped and barely adequate. But compared with the single room in the overcrowded hostel, it seemed like heaven.

  Heaven, he remembered, had lasted for fifteen weeks and five days. Then, one day, Eric had come home and known that it was over.

  It was the way his neighbours stared at him as he walked down the street. The way a mother hustled her children aside when he passed them on the pavement.

  And then he’d known. Someone had recognized him. Someone had remembered. Someone knew who he was and what he’d been accused of. And once someone knew, it was only a matter of time before they all knew and the time of peace ended.

  ‘Five times in three years, Frank,’ Eric said softly, speaking to a brother he knew he might never see again. ‘Five times in three years they’ve moved us on, like some damned itinerants with no rights.’

  Abruptly he got to his feet and paced the length of the kitchen as though the room trapped him.

  Five times the rumours had followed, then the suspicion, then the trouble. He’d learnt to look for it early since that first time.

  At the first house, even the second, they had tried to fit in, tried to make a new life in a new community. But, of course, it hadn’t worked. Eric could see now that it would never work. He and his kind, his family, they were outsiders. Always would be.

  Eventually he had ceased even to try to belong. Had built walls about himself and his family. Shut them inside what little shelter he could still provide in such a hostile world and learnt to anticipate the trouble even before it showed signs of beginning.

  He sighed heavily as he crumpled the letter in his hand once more and thrust it deep into his trouser pocket.

  It would never end, Eric knew that now. Never end until he had been publicly vindicated. Until he had stood up in a court of law and shown the world that there were men, guilty men, far more worthy of hatred than Eric Pearson.

  Chapter Five

  Monday morning

  Morning routine. Same as ever Mike checked the day book, accepted coffee, exchanged a joke with Symonds, duty sergeant for the first shift and still getting himself sorted with his electric razor in one hand and an unidentifiable hot sandwich in the other.

  Mike listened to the morning briefing wishing the day had assigned him a more active role. He went to his desk carrying his bag of files and dumped it on the stained green carpet next to the waste bin as though hoping that was where the entire thing could end up.

  Irritably, he rifled through his in-tray, grabbed a loose handful of report sheets and set to work, trying to rough out some sort of assessment of the Fletcher mess.

  * * *

  Eric stood in position by the living room window, sipping his second cup of tea of the day.

  Johanna had persuaded him downstairs for breakfast. He’d eaten with a distracted air, listening vaguely to his children’s chatter, to Johanna’s replies, to the familiar sounds of the meal being prepared and eaten and argued over.

  He had returned upstairs then, taking his tea and his camera, leaving Johanna and the children to clear away the remnants of breakfast and begin their morning lessons. Another duty he had once been so very conscientious of now left to Johanna. In his less self-indulgent moments Eric acknowledged that he left too much to Johanna these days. That he should do more to aid the running of their household and the daily welfare of his family.

  But these moments passed quickly and came less and less frequently. Eric’s was a mind under siege. A life imprisoned within a tall house, whose windows gazed out upon a world that he could no longer share.

  Intensely, as though every nuance of movement mattered, Eric watched and photographed the local children leave their homes and set off for school, shepherded by their mothers and older sisters and brothers. Watched the postman following the curve of the close and delivering nothing to the Pearson house. Stared with rapt attention as Ellie Masouk, now back from her shopping, opened the door to take a package too large to fit through her letterbox. Listened with devotion as the milk float rattled its way down to the end of the close and delivered its daily crate load to his door.

  He would have to go out soon, Eric knew. Get some money, do some shopping, leave the house eyeless and unguarded for at least an hour or so.

  Eric Pearson sighed irritably and placed his empty mug on the windowsill, glancing briefly about the room as he did so.

  Such a dreary room, the sun seeming to miss both windows, apart from the earliest shafts in the morning and the half-dead rays of late evening. Untidy, too, with the clutter of toys and books and papers not cleared away from one day’s end to the next.

  He frowned suddenly. He really ought to give Johanna more help. For all of two minutes Eric walked around the room picking toys from the floor and books from the chairs. Clearing the whole stack of unread papers from the table standing beside the back window.

  Then, as though his purpose failed him, he let the entire bundle fall to the floor, leaving the mess so much worse than it had been. He stood still, his arms dropping to his sides and his eyes fixing once again upon the now empty street.

  * * *

  ‘Got a minute, Mike?’ DI Miles stuck his round head round the door and followed it rapidly with his equally rotund body.

  Mike looked up from his paper-strewn desk and grinned warily. ‘Depends what you’ve got in mind.’

  Miles came over, perched his large self on the desk and awarded Mike his broadest, most welcoming smile.

  ‘Got an old dear down in the front office,’ he said. ‘Wants to talk to someone important, so we figured you’d do.’

  ‘Oh?’ Mike gave him a suspicious look. ‘And what’s her problem?’

  ‘Says som
eone’s stealing her garden, bit by bit. Trees gone last week and a whole stack of newly planted bulbs last night.’

  He hopped off the desk and was across the office with surprising speed. ‘Nutty as a friggin’ fly biscuit,’ he called back over his shoulder as he hopped it out of the door. ‘But she’s driving the duty sergeant round the bend.’

  Mike got to his feet, half disbelieving, and followed him to the door.

  ‘How come you can’t deal with it?’ he shouted at Miles’s rapidly retreating back.

  The big man laughed. ‘It’s a shit job, Mike. But someone’s got to shovel it . . .’

  A young WPC drifted by with her arms full of reports. She flashed a quick smile in Mike’s direction. ‘Hear they’ve got you dealing with old Mrs Delancey, guv.’

  ‘Mrs who?’

  ‘Old lady in the front office with the . . .’

  ‘Disappearing garden . . . Regular, is she?’

  ‘Set the clock by her, poor old soul. The council had to move her. She can’t look after herself any more and she’s no family. Had to put her in this sheltered housing place. In a little flat. And of course there’s . . .’

  ‘No garden. I get the picture. Someone phoned the home?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Be about an hour, they said. Don’t worry, guv, she’s quite harmless.’

  The young woman went off laughing and Mike mooched along to the front office. ‘Harmless,’ he muttered to himself. ‘I’ll just bet she is.’

  * * *

  Monday 3 p.m.

  Eric had been away from the house for almost three hours. He hurried down the little path, anxious now that he had been gone too long. That something had happened.

  Ellie Masouk came through the kissing gate towards him, pushing her child in its buggy. She looked up at the sound of Eric’s footsteps, then glanced away swiftly as though afraid he might speak to her, engage her in conversation.

  Her unease was written so clearly on her pale, blandly pretty face that Eric almost laughed aloud. He hurried by, feeling her unconscious withdrawal as he passed close to her. Her embarrassment.

  She had no idea who he was, Eric realized. No idea that their paths had crossed before.

  But he knew her. Who she’d been before she’d married Masouk. Who she was and what had happened to her.

  Oh yes. Eric Pearson knew.

  * * *

  ‘It can’t be easy,’ Superintendent Jacques sympathized, ‘having to sift through this lot. Being expected to put the work of fellow officers under the glass.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘It makes for bad feeling, Mike.’

  ‘It’s not exactly my idea of fun, sir,’ he said, realizing that his tone held more frost than was really warranted.

  ‘No, no, of course not, Mike. Not a job anyone would want, I know that. Anyway,’ he continued, pushing himself to his feet again, ‘just go through the motions. We’ll soon have this thing all wrapped up.’

  He turned to go. Mike called after him. ‘It’s not been explained to me, sir. Why assign me instead of someone from internal affairs?’

  The superintendent swivelled back to face him, a frown creasing his forehead. ‘Internal affairs, Mike? This isn’t a formal inquiry, probably never will be. Just a preliminary review of this so-called new evidence that might come up at the appeal.’ He shook his head as though amazed that Mike could think it would go any further and crossed the room again, placed his hands, palms down, on Mike’s desk and leant across.

  ‘That’s not going to be popular, Mike. This talk about internal affairs, it makes it sound as though you think we’ve something to hide.’

  He smiled and backed off again. ‘When DCS Charles requested you for the job I knew he’d chosen the right man. I won’t lose any sleep about you covering this one, Mike, and I don’t expect you’ll have to either. It’s a closed book, my friend. Just needs the i’s dotting and the t’s crossing and we can say goodbye to it once and for all.’

  * * *

  Dora couldn’t wait to get home and tell her husband. It wasn’t that she liked gossip. Not really. Just that this was too good to miss out on.

  Just went to show, didn’t it? These days the council didn’t give a damn about who they housed and where.

  Reaching her front door, Dora glanced across at the tall house. Its blank windows were unlit and gave little sign of life.

  How could his wife stay with him, knowing he’d been accused of something like that?

  Chapter Six

  Monday evening

  ‘Oh!’ The first crash. The sound of glass shattering startled Ellie, sent her hands fluttering nervously to her throat.

  She glanced anxiously at Farouzi, but the child slept on, her smooth, round-cheeked face and soft black curls illuminated gently by the warm pink glow of the night light.

  Another crash. The sounds of shouting in the street. A woman screaming insults and someone laughing. The laughter mocking and abusive.

  Ellie crept over to the window and peered out through the crack in the curtains. The swiftest of glances told her more than she wanted to know. Two boys from the next street — Ellie knew them by sight though not their names — were taking stones from her front garden. From the precious little rockery she had spent so long in building, planting with tiny alpines.

  For a brief moment, her indignation got the better of her fear. She pulled the certain back further, half intending to open the window and yell her protest at the boys.

  Even as reason reasserted itself one of the boys glanced upwards, attracted by the movement of the curtain across the dimly lit window.

  He actually had the temerity to wave at her!

  Horrified, Ellie stepped sharply away. Visions of some vague retribution, because she had seen their faces, filled her already overwrought mind.

  If they broke the bedroom window would the flying glass reach Farouzi’s cot?

  Ellie knelt down beside the cot, releasing the catches that lowered the side. She let it down as softly and slowly as she could, as though the little squeak of the nylon hoops moving against steel runners would be noticed above the rising tide of noise coming from the street.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Ellie whispered, though her daughter slept on, as calm and beautiful and contented as she always was. ‘It’s all right,’ she said again. Half the people in the street, they had kids themselves. No one would let them hurt Farouzi. . .

  A sob rose bitterly in Ellie’s throat as she thought of the Pearson house. Heard the breaking of the windows, the loud, and growing louder, pounding as someone began to beat upon something wooden. In her mind’s eye, Ellie could see her friends, her neighbours, trying to break down the Pearsons’ door.

  There were children in the Pearson house. Children, like Farouzi.

  Abruptly she reached out, gathered Farouzi, her blankets, her teddy, and, carrying them close, made for the bathroom where there was a lock on the door and only the tiniest of windows.

  Ellie had reached the head of the stairs when someone began to hammer on the door.

  * * *

  Johanna Pearson crouched behind the shabby green moquette sofa, her arms circling the two smallest of her brood while broken glass fell in sharp-edged rain all around them.

  She could hear her husband and the older ones in the room above. Eric had the water hose going. She heard the rush of water even above the sound of crashing glass and the jeers and shouts of those getting wet below. They had laid in a good supply of ammunition after the first window had been broken just over a week ago. Those boys. They’d said they had been playing football and the broken window had been accidental, but Eric had prepared the family anyway. Milk bottles thrown out at the yobs chucking stones seemed a fair exchange. And they had a good supply. Eric’s early-morning forays, with Mark and Alexander to help him, had made certain of that.

  Little Danny had begun to cry. Johanna shook him gently. ‘It’s all right, my darlings. We’ve got through this before. Nothing’s going to happen to us.’

  Through
this before. Yes, many, many times before. But, then, God had told her that life was never going to be easy. He’d simply lived up to His promise.

  ‘Danny, Danny, it’ll be all right,’ she said again, straining her ears to hear what had caused the sudden lull of activity in the street.

  Yes, it would all be right in the end. Let Eric just be able to prove that his new evidence was the truth. Let him present it in court and they would be vindicated. Yes, if they could just hold out against the flow of hatred and persecution for a little longer, everything would be fine.

  There was silence now. Silence that in its own way was as menacing as the noise before.

  ‘Yes.’ She spoke her thoughts aloud to her bewildered children. ‘That’s what this is all about. They’re trying to frighten us. Stop us from giving evidence.’

  She scooped the still weeping Danny into her arms and, tentatively, emerged from their precarious cover.

  Eric was downstairs now. Standing by what was left of the front door and shouting at the crowd. She couldn’t hear his words clearly but could just make out the low, reassuring voice of the newly arrived policeman.

  Johanna was not impressed. They were in it, of course. The police. Corrupt as Fletcher and the rest and out to protect the ‘Named’ against the ‘Unnamed’. Against the likes of the Pearsons.

  Holding Danny closer and murmuring a prayer to give her strength, Johanna Pearson made her way across the room, feet crunching and slipping on the shattered glass, and went downstairs.

  * * *

  ‘Ellie! For God’s sake, Ellie! Open the door. It’s me, Dora.’

  Dora!

  Still clutching a by now wakeful and bewildered toddler, Ellie scrambled down the stairs, fumbling clumsily with the door catch in her haste to get it open.

  She almost fell into Dora’s arms.

  ‘There, there, love.’

  As in control as ever, Dora eased Farouzi from her mother’s arms, pushed the door closed and coaxed Ellie through to the kitchen.

  ‘Here, sweetheart.’ She took one of Farouzi’s favourite ginger fingers from her cardigan pocket and held it out. The child seized it eagerly. Dora made her say thank you before letting go. Then she reached out and took Ellie’s hand.