The Secret Keeper Read online

  THE SECRET KEEPER

  AMANDA JAMES

  One More Chapter

  a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

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  First published by Urbane Publications as Summer in Tintagel in 2016

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2023

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  Copyright © Amanda James 2023

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  Cover design by Lucy Bennett © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2022

  Cover photographs © Ilina Simeonova / Trevillion Images (figure); Shutterstock.com (background)

  Amanda James asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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  A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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  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.

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  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 e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, 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.

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  Source ISBN: 9780008522063

  Ebook Edition © January 2023 ISBN: 9780008522056

  Version: 2022-11-14

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you for reading…

  A Secret Gift

  About the Author

  Also by Amanda James

  One More Chapter...

  About the Publisher

  For Tanya

  Chapter One

  Rosa kneels on the lawn. It is summer, but the grass is damp under her bare legs and she wishes that she had taken the picnic rug that Mummy had tried to give her just now. Mummy said that she was wilful and she’d have to learn from her own mistakes. Rosa wonders what wilful means as she pours water from the blue plastic teapot into a tiny cup and places it in front of Barney, her oldest teddy bear. Wilful is perhaps the same as stubborn. Daddy often says she is stubborn.

  ‘Would you like tea too, Miss Jemima Puddleduck?’

  A stuffed green and brown duck looks at her from its one glassy eye, but says nothing. Rosa nods. ‘Yes, of course you would. You can have a biscuit too.’

  Rosa puts cups in front of all her toys and looks back across the long expanse of grass towards her house. The sun hides itself behind a cloud, but that isn’t the reason she has goosebumps forming along her arms. She feels her heartbeat quicken and she tightens her grip on a biscuit. It crumbles and leaves a sticky smear of chocolate on her fingers. Rosa licks the chocolate, but her stomach rolls and she tries to blot out a voice in her head. Daddy will be angry. Very angry.

  A scream pierces the silent afternoon. It comes from the house and it sounds like her mother. Rosa’s heart thuds in her chest and she leans her back against a tree, draws her knees up under her chin. She stares at a grass stain on her white sock and her whole body begins to shake. A siren wails up the valley and she knows that something bad has happened. Very bad.

  She has been under the tree for what feels like a long time, but then she sees Daddy burst from the house as if he has been fired like a bullet from a gun. His hair is messy and he runs his hands through it with wild jerky movements. Daddy’s tie is pulled to the side and he doesn’t look at all neat. Being neat is something he is very proud of. Rosa tries to make herself small, but he has seen her and runs towards her… fast.

  Daddy kneels beside her and puts his big hands on her shoulders. He shakes her roughly. ‘This is all your fault! Dabbling in evil always ends in disaster, do you hear me?’

  ‘I… I… haven’t done anything…’

  ‘Don’t lie! All this mumbo jumbo about ghostly old ladies appearing in my house and warning you about…’ Daddy’s face looks like a Halloween mask and his mouth twists down at the corners. ‘Never mind. You are going to your room and staying there for the rest of the day!’

  Rosa’s arm hurts where Daddy is squeezing it as he drags her back to the house. Her eyes brim with unshed tears, but she won’t let him see. She is glad she is going to her room, because she doesn’t want to know exactly what has happened, the bad thing that has made Daddy so angry. Rosa has a good idea already, and this makes her so sad that she can hardly breathe…

  * * *

  Rosa’s eyes snapped open and terror gripped her heart. The walls were too close and she didn’t know where she was. Then she remembered and struggled to take a few calming breaths. She’d jolted awake in Gran’s rocking chair from some weird dream, and thought the walls were closing in on her. The dream had begun to fade now, leaving just whisperings in the corners of her mind about herself as a little girl on a lawn… A toys’ picnic… Something bad had happened… and her dad was angry. Rosa had never been claustrophobic, but in the dream she’d felt like she couldn’t breathe, and now as her chest tightened, she knew that if she didn’t get a window open, she’d have to run outside.

  Suspended in a shaft of sunlight the colour of butterscotch, like flecks of gold, dust motes shimmered, twirled and resettled. Rosa caught her breath and watched them, mesmerised by their simple beauty. A layer of dust had been dispersed from the frame of an ancient sash window during her struggle to release the rusty catches. These labours had involved much cursing and a grazed knuckle, but still the catches remained stuck fast.

  Why didn’t she just give in and open the door? No. It was a battle now. The window reflected Rosa from grubby panes, its age and craftsmanship mocking her youth and inexperience. Surreal as this thought might be, she was determined that the window wouldn’t win; she set her jaw and gripped the wooden frame again. A rattled protest – then at last the sash squealed open a few inches, grudgingly allowing into the moribund sitting room the scent of rain-soaked grass and lavender.

  Rosa drew in sweet air to the bottom of her lungs and slowly exhaled. Then silence reclaimed the sitting room. Moribund was not a word that she would have associated with her grandma’s house years ago. Nor silence.

  As children, Rosa and her brothers had filled this house with excited laughter and the thud of running feet, their joy and enthusiasm alive in the fabric of its interior and the strength of its foundations. Rosa’s memories of those days were sometimes winter-warm with open fires, Christmas candles and the scent of pine. Other times, recollections were summer-fresh with the zing of cut lemons and cloudy lemonade, a blue gingham picnic cloth on a green lawn, a rope swing and the sting of antiseptic on grazed knees.

  Moribund was as far away
from those times as the most distant planet in the firmament. Today, it was a perfect description of the house. Dull. Decaying. Waiting to die. Upstairs, Rosa’s grandmother – in a drug-induced slumber – waited too.

  It was inconceivable to Rosa that such a vibrant robust woman could have succumbed so quickly. But Jocelyn Nelson, on her seventy-third birthday had been given the unwelcome present of a terminal diagnosis. The consultant had said around nine months. Three had passed already.

  Rosa absently trailed her fingers through the dust on the windowsill and across the weather-stained pane. Gran would be ashamed to see it. She had always been fastidious and reluctant to accept help around the house. Latterly, Polly, Rosa’s mother, had organised a cleaner once a week to do a ‘quick whizz round’ as she put it. Perhaps the cleaner couldn’t see the point in wasting precious whizzing time on an old sash window, given that the occupant of the house was unlikely to look out of it ever again, or to even leave her room again. Not with her … disease.

  Rosa crossed her arms over her chest and watched the lavender bordering the overgrown lawn shivering in the strengthening breeze. A shiver ran through her too. The thought of what the disease was doing to her gran made her feel like the lavender looked – fragile, vulnerable, weak.

  The disease.

  Its name refused to sit well on most tongues. Instead, it was reduced to whispers or euphemisms, because if uttered, the word cancer would somehow manifest, its physical reality eating into the organs of those uttering it. That’s how it seemed to Rosa anyway. ‘Big C’ was comfortable – reliable even, like some universally accepted logic impossible to live without.

  Never one to dwell on the meaning of life and the sadness of human mortality, Rosa had surprised herself when she’d volunteered to stay with Gran for a few days while Polly ‘popped’ back to France for a few essentials. Polly tended to pop, whizz or nip. Rosa had noticed that her mother’s choice of verbs since her own mother had got cancer were clipped speedy little words, as if she thought that using longer ones might use up the time that Gran had left.

  On a wooden tray, four little sugar lumps sat in a metal dish next to a ceramic milk jug and two china cups and saucers. Rosa couldn’t remember when she’d last seen cups like these, old-fashioned, floral, gold-rimmed. Holding the cups up to the light, Rosa marvelled at their weightlessness and near transparency, and then for one heart stopping second, almost allowed them to slip from her fingers as an imitation of a train-whistle shattered her contemplation.

  Who used shrieking kettles nowadays? Rosa had forgotten how loud the old thing was. Blowing away the steam, she thumbed the lid from the spout and poured boiling water into a teapot. In fact, who used sugar lumps, china cups, milk jugs and teapots nowadays? Jocelyn did and Rosa was glad. It reaffirmed her gran was special.

  Old ways, some might say pernickety even, made up who she was. That didn’t mean that Gran was a stick in the mud or a killjoy, quite the contrary. Large in Rosa’s childhood memories was the sound of Gran’s laughter. Laughter that provided a soundtrack to vigorous demonstrations of hopscotch, flailing on the rope swing with her skirt tucked into her knickers, or rolling down the hill wrapped in an old rug.

  A shadow fell across Rosa’s heart as a futile longing to hear Gran laugh like that again, see her on the swing again, crept through her. A look outside at the old silver birch tree confirmed the rope was still there. Tattered, weather-beaten, grey with age, but still there … so was Gran, for now.

  Trying to be quiet hadn’t involved the possibility of her rubber-soled shoe sticking against old wood. The door creaked open accompanied by a ceramic rattle of assorted crockery on the tray. Rosa held her breath. It looked like Gran was asleep despite having asked for tea, though the poor woman had been waiting a while due to her granddaughter’s unscheduled nap in the rocking chair. And now to cap it all, the less than silent entrance might have disturbed her. Retreat seemed the way forward, but as she backtracked, Gran struggled to a sitting position. ‘I’m not asleep, love, come and sit by me.’

  Rosa placed the heavy tray on the side table, drew back the curtains a little and sat down on the bed. Before she could stop herself, she asked, ‘How are you feeling, Gran?’ What a fatuous question. Gran looked out at her from pale green eyes dulled with morphine and pain, her skin, almost as translucent as the teacups, stretched thinly across protruding cheekbones, her once plump lips now a slash in the white landscape of her face.

  ‘I have been better, Rosa.’ Gran managed a smile and tried to tidy her faded chestnut curls with shaking fingers.

  Rosa swallowed, again cursing at her thoughtless, knee-jerk, socially required enquiry after her gran’s health. Of course she’d been better, but what were you supposed to say to a dying loved one? Rosa inclined her head towards the bottle of morphine on the bedside cabinet. ‘Would you like another dose of Oramorph?’

  ‘Not yet. I’ll see how I go.’

  ‘So, what about a cuppa?’

  ‘Of course, I’d love one. And then I have got something to tell you. A secret that I have never told a living soul.’ Gran’s determined jaw and serious tone conveyed both pent-up emotion and excitement.

  A feeling of trepidation welled in Rosa’s belly and then trickled down again, dragging away her confidence like waves sucking through pebbles on a beach. She was not at all sure that her shoulders were broad enough to carry the weight of a deathbed confessional. Besides, it should be her mother or even her older brothers, Simon and Ben, who had this dubious honour.

  Innate within her consciousness was a little voice of worry. Rosa imagined it whispering, ‘I’m not good with serious or sad things. Please don’t burden me with them.’ The voice of worry must have been had a day off when Rosa had packed her weekend bag and headed back up here to Skipton from her London home.

  And for the first time since she had arrived, Gran, bursting with an untold secret looked more like her old self, eager, excited, alive. At twenty-eight, Rosa should be mature enough to hear it, shouldn’t she? Swallowing down her worries she said, ‘That sounds a bit ominous, Gran. What on earth is it?’ Then her worries resurfaced and found a home on her tongue. ‘But don’t you think you should tell Mum … or someone else instead of me?’

  Gran’s hands shook even more and tea slopped into the saucer. ‘Your mum is in her second home in France, not because she has to get “essentials” but because she can’t cope with my situation.’ She took a tentative sip of tea. ‘Besides, I decided long ago never to tell her, and who else would I tell? You are the perfect person to confide in, little one.’

  Little one. That term of endearment, a blast from the rope swing days, sent prickly nettles behind Rosa’s eyes. Perfect? She hadn’t even visited this house for nearly three years, seeing Gran only at family get-togethers and the occasional visit to her mother’s house. Rosa blinked a few times and took a sip of her own tea. In her defence, her job as a travel journalist had taken her far away, but in hindsight, she should have tried harder to see the woman who had meant the world to her years ago – still did.

  ‘So are your ears pinned back?’

  Rosa pretended to pin them and nodded.

  ‘Okay. You remember your granddad was a bit of an old grump?’ Rosa nodded again. She had been fond of him, but her grandparents’ relationship had been more chalk and cheese, winter and summer, north and south, than bacon and eggs. ‘By the time you knew him he’d mellowed.’ Gran nodded at Rosa’s raised eyebrows. ‘He was a right old bastard when your mum was little.’

  This time it was Rosa who slopped her tea. Never in her life had her grandmother used a word like that and the venom with which Gran had spat it out twisted her stomach. ‘But … why? What did he do?’

  She rested her cup down on the quilt, leaned back against her pillow and stared at a point somewhere behind Rosa’s head, as if watching unpleasant memories playing back in the ether. A sigh. ‘Oh, many things. He drank too much, stayed out all hours, thought he was still a lad with no respon
sibilities.’ Gran gave a short bark. ‘Always said I’d got pregnant to catch him, snare him. Snare him? If he’d been a rabbit caught in a snare I’d have broken his sodding neck… Often wish I had.’

  Rosa’s stomach twisted again. She didn’t like where this was headed and neither did the kitten. An adequate response eluded her, so she just said, ‘I always thought you seemed happy and Mum never said—’

  ‘Your mum never knew. I made sure of that. It was one thing me being miserable, but I wouldn’t allow her to be. If he came home in a mood or drunk, I would take her out for a walk or round to my mother’s, anything so she didn’t realise what a monster she had for a dad.’

  Gran closed her eyes, her chest rising and falling as she tried to regulate her ragged breathing. Anyone could see that this revelation was taking its toll. Rosa wanted it to stop.

  ‘I honestly don’t know what to say, Gran. Perhaps you should rest now, all this is tiring you out.’

  ‘I’ll be at rest soon enough and for long enough.’ Gran smiled wryly. ‘No. I’ll have a dose of that morphine jollop and carry on with my tale.’ She opened her eyes and looked at Rosa. ‘If you are willing to hear it?’