The Guilty Secret

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• Margaret Pemberton
  
• For my sister Janet and her husband David.
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  
• Chapter Nineteen
  
• Chapter Twenty
  
• Chapter Twenty-One
  

Margaret Pemberton is the bestselling author of over thirty novels in many different genres, some of which are contemporary in setting and some historical.

She has served as Chairman of the Romantic Novelists' Association and has three times served as a committee member of the Crime Writers' Association. Born in Bradford, she is married to a Londoner, has five children and two dogs and lives in Whitstable, Kent. Apart from writing, her passions are tango, travel, English history and the English countryside.

The face looking back at me from the mirror didn't look like the face of a woman who had killed two people, one of them a child of eight.

Titian-red hair hung silkily to my shoulders framing an oval face with straight nose and green eyes. It was a face that had given me no shortage of admirers, and it was a face I could barely look at. Quickly I turned from the mirror, fighting down a familiar wave of panic. It was over. All over. I had to start life afresh. Forget the past and think about the future.

Below me lay the breathtaking panorama of Viana Do Castelo and the Portuguese coastline as it curved hazily southwards towards Ofir. I pushed the thought of Ofir away from me. I wasn't ready for it yet. I needed another few days of seclusion. A breathing space before I put on my mask of normality and was enclosed amid the bosom of family and friends. Seeing again the compassion in their eyes. The careful skirting around the subject uppermost in their minds. Catching them unawares, when the compassion changed to blatant curiosity and it was only too easy to read their thoughts. How did I really feel? What was it like to kill two people? No. I wasn't ready for that yet. Sometimes I doubted if I ever would be.

I had been holed up in the Edwardian grandeur of the Hotel De Santa Luzia for over a week. As a refuge it was ideal. It was perched one thousand feet high overlooking the Igreja Santa Luzia, an imposing religious monument I had not had the energy to enter. Far below lay the town. That too, was still unexplored. It was early in the season and the Hotel had only a handful of guests. I liked it that way. I liked the fact that it was so inaccessible that casual callers didn't stop off on their way to places further north or further south. For the first time in nearly a year I was no longer the object of curious eyes and I was in no hurry to reach Ofir. Perhaps in another week …

There was a soft knock and I walked quickly across the thickly carpeted bedroom, opening the door to the maid who had brought me coffee. She smiled. If the English girl wished to spend the days in her room it was no concern of hers.

I took the tray over to the small terrace and sipped it, wishing it was eight-o-clock and not six, and that I could take my tablets and go to bed. The tablets were my life-saver. They ensured a deep, dreamless stupor instead of the nightmares that left me waking with cries of terror, the sweat pouring off me, re-living again my own private hell.

I finished the coffee and lay down on the bed. If only it were possible to go back in time. How often had I wished that? Every day? Every hour? To go back to the night of Phil's party and the bright lights and the gaiety and laughter. To go back and stay there. Not to walk out into the darkness … It had been a good party. Phil's parties always were. Rozalinda was radiant, her ears and throat glittering with diamonds, Harold watching her with slavish devotion. Rozalinda, our mutual Aunt Harriet had remarked, had been lucky in life. Strange that Rozalinda had been the one to be a success, when as children I had always been the lucky one. Though she hadn't been Rozalinda then. Rose Lucas and as prone to tantrums then as she was now. Though now, an internationally known film star and married to a millionaire, she could afford to have tantrums. When we were children Phil had always said brutally:

‘When you've stopped screaming and shouting
then
you can play. You can't have it all your own way
all
the time.'

But she had. At sixteen she was modelling. At seventeen she was doing television commercials. At eighteen she had her first small film part. At twenty she was a star, and at twenty-three she had married the doting Harold, who had at least a million pounds to his credit and if Phil was to be believed, considerably more.

It was Harold's money that had bought Rozalinda what she called her ‘Enclave' at Ofir. A cluster of luxurious villas for herself and friends and family, set among pinewoods and only yards from what Rozalinda claimed was the most spectacular beach in Europe. There was no fishing village full of Portuguese locals to spoil Rozalinda's private paradise. Only a couple of hotels that she managed to turn a blind eye to. Harold had tried unsuccessfully to buy them out but the Portuguese government had put an end to that little scheme. However, he had been more successful where the owners of the private villas were concerned. Rozalinda had, as usual, got her own way. The ‘Enclave' was as private and exclusive as money could buy. Aunt Harriet spent most of the year there. As yet I had never been. I closed my eyes. Rozalinda was spoilt, but she had shown unexpected depths during the hellish months leading up to the trial and the ensuing nightmare after. Even Phil had admitted that she wasn't as self-centred as he had always supposed. It was her money that had paid my fare to Portugal, offering me the use of one of the villas for as long as I cared to stay. Aunt Harriet was already there and awaiting my arrival. I knew that my dalliance in Viana could only be causing her concern. Dear Aunt Harriet. Always there when needed. Loved by all of us. For Rozalinda and myself she was our Great-Aunt, never fussing over us like our parents did. Always treating us as grown-ups. For Phil she was even more important. His parents had died when he was thirteen and it was Aunt Harriet, no relation at all, who took him into her home, paying for his piano lessons, seeing to it that he had the best teachers that money could buy. When a neighbour had asked her why she spent so much time and money on the child of people who had been comparative strangers to her, she had replied tersely:

‘The boy is brilliant.'

For Aunt Harriet that was enough. She was right of course. Phil
was
brilliant. It was ironic that so far, all his years of study had brought him little renown, whereas Rozalinda's face smiled languidly down from cinema hoardings the world over. He played publicly a couple of times a month, the rest of his time spent in teaching, eked out by two days a week at a local school where he taught not only music, but English and Maths and more often than not found himself with a whistle round his neck surrounded by grubby schoolboys on the sports field. As an actress on the stage, Rozalinda had no real talent, only on film did she spring to life with devastating effect. By rights the fame that was hers should have been Phil's. At least that was my opinion. I wondered if it was Phil's as well. If it was he showed no signs of it. The only thing he ever said, was that they had got the wrong girl. That I was the beauty, not Rozalinda. But if I was, I wasn't sufficiently aware of it. I had done what I had always wanted to do. Become a nurse.

My thoughts were straying along paths that were becoming too painful. I thought instead of Mary Collins, or Farrar as she now was. Mary had made up the quartet of our childhood and Mary was going to be at Ofir as well. It would be good to see her again. Mary's steady grey eyes would hold no pity or curiosity, just the love born of a friendship twenty years old. As children the four of us had lived in Templar's Way, a small village perched precariously on the edge of the North Downs in Kent. My father had been the family doctor, Mary's the village greengrocer. As children it was Mary who was the peacemaker of our squabbles. Mary who persuaded Phil to let Rozalinda come along with us on our expeditions, even when her selfishness threatened to wreck Phil's carefully laid plans for a battle of cowboys and indians in the nearby woods. Rozalinda never would take her turn at being a cowboy. She always wanted the painted face and feathers. I smiled affectionately. She had certainly got them now.

Mary's placidity and gentleness had been the saving of our quartet. Phil always wanted to leave Rozalinda behind and then she would go crying to Aunt Harriet and both Phil and myself would be in disgrace for not being kind to her. I wondered if Rozalinda ever realised what a lot she had owed Mary as a child. She probably did because the friendship between them had outlasted childhood, and though no two life-styles could be as different as Rozalinda's and Mary's, they were still close. In fact Rozalinda had said herself that the next few weeks at the Enclave would be just like old times. The four of us all together again, for she had even persuaded Phil to fly out and join us for a few weeks, luring him with the promise of a quiet room and grand piano on which to practice.

Mary's husband, Tom, would be there too. He had come as rather a surprise. Mary was such a plain and quiet person that no-one had expected her to marry anyone as outstandingly handsome as Tom Farrar. But Tom Farrar had chosen well. Mary's life revolved around him and their two young children and if ever a man was adored, he was. The rest of us visited them at irregular intervals, finding in Mary's peaceful home the rest and solace we missed in our own lives. This would be the first holiday that Mary and Tom had taken away from the children and I wondered how Mary was surviving it. She would be like a mother hen without its chicks, but Great Aunt Harriet had been adamant that she needed the rest.

‘That girl is ageing prematurely,' she had said to me over the telephone whilst persuading me that I, too, needed a complete rest. ‘It will do both of you the world of good to spend a few weeks down here in the sunshine.'