A Mother's Secret Read online

  A MOTHER’S SECRET

  T J Stimson

  Copyright

  Published by AVON

  A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

  Copyright © T J Stimson 2019

  Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2019

  Cover photograph © Tom Hogan/Plain Picture

  T J Stimson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008332563

  Ebook Edition © [month] 2019 ISBN: 9780008328702

  Version: 2019-04-11

  Dedication

  For my nephews,

  George, Harry and Oliver.

  Your Daddy would be so proud of you.

  Charles Michael Francis Stimson

  1974–2015

  Epigraph

  Yet each man kills the thing he loves,

  By each let this be heard,

  Some do it with a bitter look,

  Some with a flattering word,

  The coward does it with a kiss,

  The brave man with a sword!

  The Ballad of Reading Gaol

  Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Now

  Four weeks earlier

  Chapter 1: Monday 11.00 p.m.

  Chapter 2: Tuesday 7.20 a.m.

  Chapter 3: Tuesday 10.00 a.m.

  Lydia

  Chapter 4: Wednesday 7.30 a.m.

  Chapter 5: Wednesday 10.00 a.m.

  Chapter 6: Friday 11.30 a.m.

  Chapter 7: Saturday 2.00 a.m.

  Chapter 8: Saturday 7.30 a.m.

  Lydia

  Chapter 9: Saturday 8.30 a.m.

  Chapter 10: Saturday 10.00 a.m.

  Chapter 11: Saturday 11.00 a.m.

  Lydia

  Chapter 12: Saturday noon

  Chapter 13: Sunday 6.30 a.m.

  Chapter 14: Tuesday 2.00 p.m.

  Chapter 15: Wednesday 8.00 a.m.

  Lydia

  Chapter 16: Wednesday 11.30 a.m.

  Chapter 17: Wednesday 2.00 p.m.

  Chapter 18: Wednesday 4.30 p.m.

  Lydia

  Chapter 19: Thursday 9.00 a.m.

  Chapter 20: Thursday 10.00 a.m.

  Lydia

  Chapter 21: Saturday 10.00 a.m.

  Chapter 22: Saturday 11.30 a.m.

  Lydia

  Chapter 23: Sunday 2.30 p.m.

  Chapter 24: Monday 12.30 p.m.

  Lydia

  Chapter 25: Monday 11.30 p.m.

  Chapter 26: Tuesday 2.30 p.m.

  Lydia

  Chapter 27: Tuesday 6.00 p.m.

  Chapter 28: Tuesday 8.30 p.m.

  Lydia

  Chapter 29: Tuesday 9.30 p.m.

  Lydia

  Chapter 30: Thursday 4.30 p.m.

  Lydia

  Chapter 31: Thursday 5.30 p.m.

  Chapter 32: Thursday 7.30 p.m.

  Chapter 33: Thursday 8.00 p.m.

  Chapter 34: Friday 2.00 a.m.

  Chapter 35: Saturday 7.00 a.m.

  Chapter 36: Saturday 8.00 a.m.

  Chapter 37: Saturday 2.15 p.m.

  Chapter 38: Sunday 9.55 a.m.

  Chapter 39: Sunday 1.30 p.m.

  Chapter 40: Tuesday 7.30 a.m.

  Chapter 41: Thursday 3.00 p.m.

  Chapter 42: Friday 2.30 p.m.

  Chapter 43: Friday 4.30 p.m.

  Chapter 44: Friday 6.30 p.m.

  Chapter 45: The present

  Six months later

  Chapter 46: Saturday 11.00 a.m.

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  Now

  I crawl back into bed and stare blindly up into the darkness. I won’t sleep; not tonight, not for many nights to come. I doubt I’ll ever sleep soundly again.

  I start to shake. The adrenalin that brought me this far suddenly drains away and I begin to shiver so violently my muscles cramp. I press my fist against my mouth to still the chatter of my teeth. If I had anything left in my stomach, I would be sick again.

  I’ve always thought of myself as a fundamentally good person. I’m not perfect, but I’ve spent a lifetime trying to do the right thing. I rescue spiders from the bath; I stop traffic to let a mother lead her row of ducklings across the road. I literally wouldn’t hurt a fly. A month ago, I’d never have believed myself capable of killing a mouse, never mind murdering another human being in cold blood.

  But human nature has an infinite capacity to surprise.

  We teach our children to fear dark alleys and strangers, but the real danger is much closer to home. You’re more than twice as likely to be murdered by someone you love than by someone you’ve never met. If you’re a child, it’s nearer three times. If you want a reason to be scared, look in the mirror.

  Evil doesn’t have two horns and a tail. It’s ordinary, just like me.

  Those jealous husbands who bludgeon their wives to death, the women who smother their babies, the estranged fathers who lock their children in the car and connect the exhaust. Ordinary men and women, all of them.

  Just like me.

  Four weeks earlier

  Chapter 1

  Monday 11.00 p.m.

  Maddie opened her eyes. It was dark; she struggled to orient herself as her vision adjusted to the gloom. She was in the nursery: she could just make out the silhouette of Noah’s cot. She had no idea how she’d got here. When she groped for the memory, it’d been wiped clean.

  Her throat felt raw and hoarse, as if she’d been screaming. She moistened her lips, and tasted blood. Shocked, she touched her mouth, then looked down to see a dark smear on her fingertips. Had she fallen? She and Lucas had been arguing, she remembered that, though she couldn’t remember what the row was about. Had she stormed out of the room? Walked into a door?

  She closed her eyes again and thought back to the last thing she could remember. She and Lucas had been upstairs, in their bedroom; her husband had just come out of the shower, spraying her with water as he towelled his thick, dark hair. Her heart had skipped a beat, as it always did when she saw him naked, even after six years of marriage, the intensity of her craving for him almost frightening her as she’d pulled him hungrily onto the bed.

  She suddenly remembered: with perfect timing, the baby monitor on the bedside table had flared into life, an arc of furious red lights illuminating the bedroom. Not that the alarm had been necessary; Noah’s screams had echoed from the adjoining nursery, loud enough to wake everyone in the house, and probably everyone on the street, too.

  Lucas had told her to let the baby cry. That’s why they
had been arguing. Lucas had told her to leave Noah. It was just colic, he’d grow out of it – Come on, Maddie, just leave him …

  And then her memory simply snapped in half, like a spool of tape at the end of the reel.

  She exhaled in frustration. She had no way of knowing if she and Lucas had argued five minutes or five hours ago. The doctor said her memory lapses were normal, the product of exhaustion and the pills she was on. Nothing to worry about, he said. Nothing to do with what had happened before. She had three children, two of them under three: of course she was tired! Of course she forgot things! It’d all sort itself out if she was patient.

  But it was happening more and more often: whole blocks of time, lost for good. It’d started around the time she’d found out she was expecting Noah, and had got worse in the nine weeks since his birth. No one watching her would notice there was anything wrong. She didn’t collapse or black out. But suddenly, in the middle of doing something, she would find she couldn’t remember what had just happened. A few seconds, or a few minutes of her life, gone forever. Her memory stuttered and skipped like a home movie, with blank spaces where pivotal scenes should be.

  All she could remember tonight was the baby screaming, Lucas rolling away from her in frustration …

  Noah wasn’t screaming now.

  Galvanised by fear, she sat up and switched on the nightlight. She’d been holding him in her arms, but they were empty now. He wasn’t in his cot, he wasn’t on the floor. She couldn’t see him. She leaped up from the chair in panic, and then she saw him, crushed against the back of the seat. Somehow, he’d slipped out of her arms and become wedged between her hip and the side of the rocking chair, his vulnerable head pressed against the wooden spindles. Terror flooded her as she crouched on the floor and pulled his limp body onto her lap. His eyes were closed, his face still and pale, except for the vivid red imprint of the chair on his cheek.

  She put her ear to his chest, praying for a heartbeat, pleading with a God she didn’t believe in. Please let him be OK. Please let him be OK.

  Abruptly, Noah squirmed in her arms and let out an indignant but healthy cry. Maddie gave a strangled half-sob, half-laugh and snatched him up against her shoulder, her throat clogged with grateful tears.

  ‘Mummy?’

  She practically jumped out of her skin. Nine-year-old Emily stood silhouetted in the doorway to the hall, her long nightdress giving her the air of a Victorian ghost.

  ‘Emily! Did Noah wake you?’

  Her daughter nodded sleepily. ‘Can’t you make him stop, Mummy? I’m so tired.’

  Maddie felt thick-tongued and groggy, as if she’d awoken from a drugged sleep. ‘Me, too, darling.’

  Emily leaned against the rocking chair, her long, fair hair brushing against her brother’s furious scarlet face. The screaming baby grabbed a fistful in his tiny hand. ‘Can’t you give him some medicine or something?’

  ‘It doesn’t really help.’ Maddie gently freed her daughter’s hair from Noah’s grasp. ‘Go back to bed, Em. You’ve got school in the morning.’

  ‘I feel hot.’

  She felt her daughter’s forehead. A little warm, but not enough to worry about. ‘Get some sleep, and you’ll be fine.’

  ‘I can’t sleep. He’s too noisy.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Maddie sighed, standing up and switching Noah to the other shoulder. ‘There’s not much I can do. Why don’t you try putting a pillow over your ears?’

  ‘Nothing blocks that out.’

  Maddie closed the door as Emily stomped back down the corridor to her own room, praying the noise didn’t wake two-year-old Jacob too. She paced the small nursery, shushing and rocking the baby, so bone-tired she was almost asleep on her feet. She felt ninety-two, not thirty-two. Her back ached, and her eyes were raw and gritty. Her breasts throbbed with the need to nurse, but when she sat down to try, Noah stubbornly refused to feed.

  She got up again and pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the nursery window, looking down into the inky garden as she jiggled Noah up and down in an attempt to soothe him. There was nothing lonelier than being awake when everyone else was asleep.

  Unplanned isn’t the same as unwanted, Lucas had said. But he was wrong. Noah hadn’t been a happy accident, not for her.

  Oh, she loved him beyond words now he was here, there was no question of that. She’d walk over hot coals for him, of course she would. She was his mother; there was nothing she wouldn’t do for any one of her children. But it’d taken everything she’d had to put herself back together after Jacob, and she hadn’t been sure she’d had it in her to do it again.

  Emily had been an easy infant; even though Maddie had, quite literally, been left holding the baby when her daughter’s father had been killed five months into the pregnancy, she’d coped better with single motherhood than she’d expected. It’d helped that Emily had apparently read the textbook on how to be the perfect newborn. She fed every four hours. She smiled on cue at six weeks. She put on exactly the right amount of weight and hit all the correct percentiles for her age. Maddie had taken Emily to the animal sanctuary where she worked, and her daughter had cooed beatifically in her pram in the sunshine for hours while Maddie groomed horses and mucked out stables. She’d listened to other mothers at her postnatal classes complaining about mastitis and sleepless nights and wondered what their problem was.

  Her mistake, she’d realised when Jacob was born, had been having her easy baby first. She’d confidently assumed motherhood would be just as straightforward second time around, especially since this time she didn’t have to do it all alone.

  She couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Chapter 2

  Tuesday 7.20 a.m.

  Lucas noticed the red marks on Noah’s face as soon as he came into the kitchen. He crouched down beside the baby’s bouncer, stroking Noah’s cheek with his thumb. ‘What happened to you, kiddo?’

  Maddie busied herself with Jacob’s Weetabix so her husband couldn’t see her face, too afraid to admit she’d flaked out last night with their baby in her arms. Thank God Noah was none the worse for wear, apart from the marks, which were already starting to go. ‘I think he got himself wedged in a corner of his cot,’ she fibbed. ‘He must’ve pushed his face up against the bars.’

  ‘Poor little bugger.’

  ‘It’ll fade.’

  Lucas dropped a kiss on Noah’s head, then straightened up and started emptying the dishwasher. Maddie surreptitiously watched him as she stirred Jacob’s cereal. She never tired of seeing her husband do simple domestic tasks like make coffee or empty the bin. Part of it was sheer novelty; her mother, Sarah, had raised her alone after her father’s death when she was two, so she wasn’t used to seeing a man help out around the house.

  She also found it strangely erotic to watch her big bear of a husband wipe down a kitchen counter or neatly fold tea towels. At six-feet-five, he dwarfed everything he touched; the plates seemed like toys from Emily’s tea set in his huge hands. She and Lucas were a marriage of opposites on many levels, not least of them physical. She barely scraped five-feet-two, the top of her head just level with his broad chest. He was dark-haired to her sandy blonde, brown-eyed to her blue. He could have picked her up and tucked her under one massive arm. She couldn’t even get him to roll over in bed when he snored.

  But despite his mountain-man appearance, Lucas was actually a cerebral, dreamy, indoor sort of man; his weekdays were spent at a drawing board, designing buildings for a small, local architectural firm, and in his downtime at weekends he did crosswords or read obscure Russian novels. For Maddie, on the other hand, there was no ‘weekday’ or ‘weekend’; she ran an animal sanctuary, which was a twenty-four-seven commitment. She didn’t have time to worry about what to wear, never mind what to read; most mornings she flung on the same filthy jodhpurs from yesterday and dragged her hair back into an unwashed ponytail. Her hands were callused from years of mucking out stables and lunging ponies, her fingernails broken and dir
ty. If she put on a skirt, it was a noteworthy event.

  No one who met Lucas and her separately would match them as a couple. And yet theirs had been a whirlwind romance, love at first sight. Four months after meeting in the jury room at Lewes Crown Court, they were married. Six years on, in defiance of the friends who’d said she had no idea what she was rushing into, they were as much in love as ever.

  She’d known, of course, that Lucas must have baggage; as her best friend Jayne succinctly put it, no one got to thirty-four without a few fuck-ups along the way. But, recklessly, she hadn’t been interested in his past; only in their future, together. Even now, she still knew very little about his life before they’d met. He rarely talked about his childhood or adolescence, for good reason. When he was just thirteen, he’d rescued his four-year-old sister Candace from the house fire that had killed both their parents. Looking back now, Maddie wondered if their shocking bereavements had been part of what drew them together. She understood better than most that to survive tragedy, sometimes you had to close the door on the past.

  But her first instincts had been right. He was a good husband, a wonderful father and stepfather. He brought her a cup of tea in bed every morning and rubbed her feet at night when she was tired. And they’d made beautiful children together, she thought fondly, as she put Jacob’s breakfast on the high chair in front of him. Both their sons were a perfect blend of the two of them, with ruddy chestnut hair and hazel eyes. Only Emily looked like she didn’t belong. She was growing more like her biological father with every passing year.

  As she stirred the lumps out of Jacob’s cereal, Maddie felt an unexpected rush of tears. She blinked them back, cursing the pregnancy hormones that left her so vulnerable. Emily’s father, Benjamin, had been her first boyfriend, a veterinary student in his final year at the same college as she when they’d met. Quiet and painfully shy, Maddie had always found it hard to make friends, having been raised by a widowed mother too busy with her charitable causes to have time to show Maddie how to have fun. At twenty-one, she’d never even been on a date until Benjamin asked her to join him at a lecture about animal husbandry.