A Deep Deceit (27 page)

He stared at me. ‘You did kill him,' he said.

‘No, Carl, I didn't. Nobody killed him. He died of sclerosis of the liver. There was blood, but you must have seen that he hadn't been stabbed.'

‘He had been stabbed.'

‘Carl, don't be so stubborn. You must have seen that . . .'

‘Must I? Then why didn't you?'

Was it my imagination or was there a sly note in his voice.

‘Carl, I had been badly beaten, I was in shock. You were perfectly calm.' I could still remember vividly how calm he had been, unnaturally so perhaps.

He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘I showed you the knife, you saw it, you saw the blood on it.'

‘Carl, that knife was never used on Robert,' I continued. ‘For all I know you may even have put the blood on the blade.'

His face turned even paler. ‘You'd b-believe that of me?'

I didn't reply. I wasn't going to fall for emotional blackmail, not any more.

‘I'd never do anything to hurt you,' he said again. It seemed about all he had to say.

‘You have hurt me, Carl, you've hurt me beyond measure.'

‘I wanted to hide you away, that's all . . .' he whispered, the same mindless babbling, it seemed to me. ‘I wanted you always to be mine. I had to keep you safe. Maybe I can explain. There are things I should tell you, if I can find the words after all this time . . .'

‘I'm sure there are,' I said, still feeling angry. ‘What happened in America, Carl? You're wanted on a manslaughter charge. Is it true that you killed your daughter?'

‘Is that what they told you?'

I nodded.

‘Then you know, you know what happened.'

I shook my head. ‘Carl, I want to hear it from you. I wasn't even aware that you had a daughter, remember?'

He smiled bleakly. ‘I haven't,' he said in a dead tone of voice. Then he was silent.

‘Carl, just tell me what happened. Please.'

In spite of everything I still wanted him to say there had been a dreadful mistake.

He looked up and I could see the pain in his eyes. ‘I wanted our d-dream to last for ever. I just c-couldn't bear it to end. But I knew it was going to. I could feel it h-happening all over again. The one I loved most, the one I most wanted to protect. It was going to go wrong again and I c-c-couldn't let it. You must see that?'

I didn't see anything at all. He was babbling and talking gibberish as far as I was concerned. And he was stammering badly by then. ‘Of course I do,' I lied. ‘Just tell me, I have to know, did you kill your daughter?' I kept on staring at him. Silent. Waiting.

‘Oh yes, I k-killed her, I killed her all right,' he said eventually. His voice was very soft.

I swallowed hard, fighting to keep control. ‘Tell me what happened.'

He was looking into the middle distance now, unseeing, unaware I thought, even of where he was. ‘My wife never understood, you see. I d-did everything for her. I was so proud when she had our child. I worked hard. She wanted for nothing. But it wasn't enough. She always had to have other people around and she shouldn't have n-needed them, that's how the problems started . . .' There were tears in his eyes.

‘What happened, Carl?' I asked. ‘You must tell me.'

‘She said she was leaving me and taking our daughter with her.' He sounded so strange, slightly hysterical almost. ‘She said she'd had enough of being shut away with me. That she wanted to live. That she couldn't bear to be with me any more.' He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, I c-couldn't let her go, could I? I couldn't lose them. They w-were everything to me. Like you. To begin with I thought she was like you, but she wasn't.' His eyes opened wide as if he was surprised by what he was saying. ‘I just wanted her to stay, wanted them both to stay . . .' He put his head in his hands.

‘So you used drugs, didn't you, Carl? Drugs to subdue your own family, to keep them with you, just like you tried to do with me.'

He raised his head slightly. He had started to cry. Tears trickled down his face. ‘What do you th-think I am, Suzanne?' he asked.

‘I don't know any more, Carl. I really don't.'

‘If you have stopped believing in me, Suzanne, there is no point in anything any more,' he said flatly.

‘Carl, you drugged me, the woman you are supposed to love more than anything.'

He reached across the table in an attempt to grasp my hands again. I pulled away from him.

‘I do love you and I didn't drug you, Suzanne, not really. It was just something to make you sleep.'

That was what he had told me in the dreadful hut. It wasn't the way I saw it, nor the police. Suddenly my anger overwhelmed me. ‘Is that what you gave them, your wife and five-year-old child, for God's sake? Just something to make them sleep? I'm sick of your lies, Carl. Even your name is a bloody lie. Tell me, Carl, tell me the truth, damn you, you bastard,' I virtually screamed at him.

Carl more or less cowered in his chair. I don't suppose I had ever yelled at him before. I had certainly never sworn at him like that, not in all our years together. Several other prisoners and their visitors turned to look at us. One of the prison officers took a step forward as if considering intervening, but he retreated again.

Carl merely stared at me in shocked silence.

When I spoke again I managed to do so in a more or less normal tone: ‘Just tell me. Did your daughter overdose on drugs you had given her, is that true?'

‘The drugs were for her mother, not her.' Carl's voice seemed to come from a long way away.

‘Oh, that's all right then,' I snapped at him. ‘You didn't mean to drug your child, only her mother, is that it? For God's sake, just tell me, Carl, did your daughter overdose?'

‘Oh yes,' he moaned, still cowering in his chair. ‘She overdosed . . .'

‘And she died,' I said flatly.

‘Yes, she died,' he repeated. He was sobbing quite loudly by then. ‘I killed her. That's what you came here to hear, isn't it. It's true. It was all my fault. And I've never f-forgiven myself, never . . . I couldn't let it happen again, I just couldn't. I couldn't lose you as well.'

I felt as if I had been kicked in the stomach. Somehow I had expected Carl to deny it, to have some kind of an explanation. Even after what he had done to me I could not really believe that he had killed his own child. Now I had to. He had told me so himself. He was still babbling on. It was a kind of torture to listen to him.

He put his head in his hands. ‘I c-couldn't let them leave me. As long as I kept them close to me they would have been safe, you see. I just wanted to keep everyone s-safe, all of them, like I did you . . .'

‘Safe from what, Carl?'

Abruptly he stopped crying and stared at me, as if uncomprehending. ‘I guess I'm pretty mixed up, but . . .'

I'd had enough. I certainly didn't want any more of his excuses. I had heard all I wanted to hear. ‘No, Carl,' I told him firmly. ‘I'm not going to listen to any more of this.' I stood up. ‘I will never forgive you,' I said. ‘And I never want to see you again as long as I live.'

I turned my back on him and headed for the door. I heard him cry out in anguish but I didn't look round. I half ran out of the room and the tears were running down my face.

I wasn't crying for Carl. And at that moment I could already feel my love for him turning to hate. I was crying for my own lost life, for all those years he had stolen from me.

Fifteen

I returned to the cottage. After all, where else did I have to go? I arrived there just before 9 p.m., having caught the 5.22 from Exeter, and treated myself to a taxi home from Penzance.

I was exhausted and very hungry. There had been a buffet car on the train but I had not had any appetite for a while after seeing Carl and by the time I arrived in St Ives my stomach had begun to send serious messages to remind me that it had not received any food all day. I made tea and toast, and scrambled a couple of eggs. After I'd eaten I lay down on the sofa. I didn't even have the energy to make it into a bed again.

I think sleep could have been my body's way of providing me with a kind of therapy. Had I been bothering to think about it logically I might have worried about being unable to sleep, but instead the oblivion descended almost as soon as I put my head on the pillows.

Once more I was woken by a hammering on the door.

I peered out of the window. At first I couldn't see anybody, but then, illuminated by the street light on the corner, I watched the tall, bulky figure of Will step back from the porch and tip his face towards me, peering at the upstairs window. The last thing I felt able to cope with was a visitor, so I ducked away. I didn't want him to see me. I waited almost a minute before I looked out of the window again. Mercifully Will seemed to have gone.

I looked at my watch. It was almost 10.30, a bit late to come calling, I thought vaguely. Then I slumped on to the sofa again and tried to recapture the oblivion I had achieved before he turned up on the doorstep, but without success at first. At some time during the night I found the energy to turn the sofa into a proper bed and maybe that helped me eventually to fall into a deep sleep.

I was awoken by another loud knocking on the door. But this time it was broad daylight outside. Morning had presumably arrived. I reckoned the caller could reasonably be one of three people – Will again, Mrs Jackson, or Mariette – and it made little difference to me which. I didn't want to see anybody, not even Mariette – in spite of the undoubted success of our last evening together. I did not even look out of the window but waited quietly for the caller to go away.

After a moment or two I heard Mariette's voice calling through the letter box. ‘Are you there, Suzanne? It's me. Are you all right?'

I continued to ignore her. After a bit she went away.

I had no intention of even trying to face the world. I just wanted to stay hidden away in my bed. I buried my head in the pillow and ultimately cried myself to sleep.

It was different, you see. Until confronting Carl face-to-face in jail I had been kidding myself, I suppose. But Carl had not been able to tell me that the American allegation was all a dreadful mistake. Indeed, he had admitted to me that he had killed his daughter. I was devastated.

I had to accept that I had been quite wrong about him all those years. And to face the strong likelihood that he had known that I was not a murderer, that he had let me suffer those awful nightmares for six long years without telling me the only thing that could have made it all stop – and all so that he could have control over me. So that I would be dependent on him.

The letters were part of the way in which he kept me dependent. That made such a dreadful kind of sense.

Even so, in spite of what I had told him in his cell – that he had stolen my life from me – it wasn't really true. Carl had turned me into a fugitive, Carl had taken my freedom from me, but I had to take some responsibility for that too. I had wanted to run away with him and he had not made me unhappy. He had given me a life, a curiously good kind of life, I had to admit. He had promised so long ago when we met in Richmond Park that he would make me happy and at times he had made me quite blissfully happy. I accepted totally that he had loved me – obsessively perhaps, but truly too, there was no doubt about that.

I could even half forgive him the kidnap. Back at home in the comfort of the little house I had shared so contentedly with him it was hard to recall that I had not long ago been frightened of him. It still didn't seem real, somehow. I was so confused.

Maybe I could eventually forgive him for sending the threatening letters, but what I could not live with, could never forgive or forget, was what he had done before he met me. He had killed his own child – and all through his total inability to let go of anyone he loved. I had suffered enough with guilt because I thought I had killed a violent, drunken monster of a man. Carl had been responsible for the death of an innocent child. He had assumed a different personality and invaded my life, and all the time kept his past, even his real name, a secret from me.

I wondered how he had managed to do that for all those years. We had been so close. At least I thought we had been so close.

I slumped into a kind of trance, reliving my years with Carl, going over and over all that I had learned, all that had happened. I lost track of how long I stayed like that, but I suppose I knew that several days must have passed. Physically I felt lethargic and washed out, but there were no signs that the pneumonia threatened to return.

I ate everything that Mariette had brought, all the eggs and milk and cheese, the potatoes and the other vegetables, and all the fruit plus the stale digestive biscuits and a tin of sardines I found lurking in a corner of the cupboard. I wasn't hungry and had no interest whatsoever in food. I ate automatically and for comfort in the same way that I slept, welcoming oblivion again and again.

But when the food ran out I did not consider shopping for more provisions.

I had little concept of night and day. I kept the curtains drawn all the time. I cocooned myself in my own misery.

At some stage a letter arrived from Carl:

There was more of the same but I was no longer impressed by it. He did not mention his daughter once. In fact, the letter only increased my anger and sense of betrayal. I tore it into small pieces and flushed it down the lavatory.