Page 52 of The Girlfriend’s Secret

He is holding on to me for support.

‘What is it?’ I ask him, afraid that this could be even worse than anything I had imagined. As Scott lets go of me, I see tears rolling down his cheeks.

What has caused this burly man to break down right in front of me? It can’t be all down to what I have said, can it? It can’t just be guilt over what he has done, surely?

There is something else. Something more. Something worse?

‘I did not kill my grandmother,’ Scott says as he takes a seat on the edge of the bed and wipes his eyes. ‘I loved her. I didn’t visit her as often as I should have, but I did love her and I did not hurt her.’

I don’t know what to do now so I choose to say nothing and wait for Scott to speak again.

‘You couldn’t just leave it alone, could you?’ Scott goes on, growing increasingly distressed. ‘You couldn’t just think she fell down the stairs like everyone else thinks.’

‘I don’t know what is happening here, but I think you should leave,’ I say, but I already know it’s not going to be as simple as that.

‘No, I can’t leave here with you thinking I’m a murderer,’ Scott says. ‘It’s not fair.’

I have a sudden crisis of confidence then. Have I got this all wrong? Is Scott actually innocent?

‘You are wrong about me,’ he says, looking up at me through red-rimmed eyes. ‘But you are right about something.’

‘What?’ I ask anxiously.

‘My grandmother was murdered,’ he says. ‘But I wasn’t the one who killed her.’

‘Then who?’ I ask, prepared for whatever bombshell might be about to come my way.

But nothing could have prepared me for the truth.

Nothing could have prepared me for finding out who the real killer is in this family.

THIRTY-SIX

LIANE

PRESENT – VALERIE’S HOUSE

No self-respecting killer should return to the scene of the crime. But that’s what I do every time I come back to my mother’s house.

As I re-enter the home where I pushed Mum down the stairs, I don’t linger in the specific place where she died. Instead, I walk right past it and get on with what I came here to do. The sooner I have sorted, tidied and packed all the things in here, the sooner this house can be sold and then I’ll never have to set foot in it again. The sooner I’ll have the money from the sale sitting in my bank account. The sooner mine and Frederik’s lives will become far better than they were when Valerie was alive.

As I get to work in the dining room, where I am sorting through the lifetime of paperwork that my mother amassed and stored in the large cupboard in here, I know this is merely a means to an end. It might seem like a very boring task, and it is, but it’s still a far simpler task than the one that led me to having to be here today to do this.

The hardest part of this whole plan was always going to be the part where I had to become a murderer.

As I sift through decades of documents that my mother had no need to hang on to, from bank statements to junk mail, I can’t help but think about the day I came to this house and ended my mother’s life. It was a day that had started like so many others, in that it had started with my husband’s alarm clock waking me up early because we had to go to work. I’d never been a fan of Frederik and his early starts, his requirement to rise at dawn so he could get to his workplace for another day and avoid being fired by his boss. Then again, I was hardly a fan of my workplace either. I’d grown bitter and resentful over the years at hearing the sound of that damn alarm cutting through my dreams, stirring me from my sleep, especially after decades of bad sleep due to raising our two children. Scott and Joel had grown and moved out, yet still I was forced into awakening at sunrise and drudging through every day in a sleepy fog of fatigue, and it was all because my husband and I had jobs to go to.

I’d long grown weary of working, but with a mortgage still to pay, one son in Australia who often called for extra funds and another son who had a mechanic business that was struggling to keep going, there was no end in sight. That was even before any potential grandchildren arrived on the scene and squeezed our finances further. Despite loving the idea of grandchildren one day, and the possibility of taking them out for fun days that involved lots of ice cream and trips to the toy store, I knew it would all be tainted if I was still worrying about money in those golden years. But how could it not? Both Frederik and I were begrudgingly forced to face the fact that we’d both likely be working into our late sixties before we reached the age for a state pension in the UK, if not beyond. That meant no time for ourselves other than on weekends, no spontaneous trips or getting to see the world we had missed out on seeing in our youth and, worst of all, many more years of being woken up by alarm clocks.

Neither of us liked it, but what choice did we have? Frederik accepted our situation with his usual humour. But I didn’t accept it. I hated it, and I hated it more and more every day. But perhaps the main reason I hated it was because I knew there was one person who could help us get out of this situation. It was a person who had already escaped the drudgery of work and was spending her time doing whatever she wanted. A person who had more money than she needed but was keeping tight control over it until the day that she died.

My mother.

As I throw away more useless pieces of paperwork, I still resent how Mum had so much money yet didn’t share it with her family while she was alive. Sure, she helped out occasionally, giving cash to her grandkids on their birthdays or at Christmas, or treating Frederik and me to a meal out every now and again. There was that one time she paid to take us all on holiday too, which was a nice getaway, but only reinforced all my other problems when I came back home to them and returned to work. Despite the occasional lavish gifts, none of it made an inherently tangible difference to our lives, and it would have been so much better if Mum could have passed on some of her wealth much sooner in a more meaningful way. Instead of taking us on a simple holiday and giving us an all-too-brief respite from our stresses and strains, she could have gifted me and Frederik all that money to make our day-to-day lives easier permanently. What my mother failed to see was that beneficiaries don’t always need their inheritance when we’re older because by that time we’ve already been working for decades, raised our families and paid off our mortgages. We need it earlier, when the kids are young, when the bills are still high and when the pressure of work is weighing us down every day. Gifting us a sum of money then would have made it all so much easier, not gifting it when we’re old and grey, by which point we don’t have as much time to spend it or many things left to spend it on.

I dropped this hint to my mother on several occasions throughout my thirties and forties, explaining to her how difficult life was for Frederik and me and how we were being squeezed financially from every direction. But all she would do was say the same damn thing.

‘Don’t worry about money. You’ll have plenty of it when I’m gone.’