The Darkest Secret by Alex Marwood Page B

from anonymous misery to total, public isolation.
    My tea has gone lukewarm. I drain it and get up to make another. God, what a family. There will be a large turnout at Dad’s funeral when it happens, I have no doubt of that. He’s a rich man, and rich men are powerful, and people like rich men because, although trickle-down doesn’t work as a society-wide principle, it sure as hell does work if you can get yourself next to the people with the money. He was a charming man, one who married four women and could probably have had half a dozen more if he’d had the time. His parties were the best parties, with the best champagne and the highest-quality canapés, and the funeral will have more of the same, and people will go a long way, and say a lot of nice things, for a sniff of vintage Bolly and some truffled foie gras.
    Will they even notice that his family aren’t there? That, of the four wives and five children, there’s only the last one and the toddler who can’t get away? Does it matter? We weren’t the important thing about Sean Jackson’s life. He barely even paused for breath after his third daughter vanished, before he was diving into another marriage, another set of condos on the seafront in Dubai, chewing on fat Havana cigars and slapping the shoulders of smiling politicians. Of course there will be people at his funeral. And I can’t leave Ruby to brave it by herself. Standing all alone in that sea of social mourners. I can’t do it.

Chapter Eleven
    Myocardial infarction. I’ve always found it a comical-sounding phrase for something so serious, but then my British ear is trained to hear the breaking of wind at a thousand paces, and the fact that it’s the cause of my father’s death doesn’t cancel out the Pavlovian smirk. I read it several times after I got the email from Maria, and the actual meaning didn’t sink in until the fourth or fifth.
Myocardial infarction
. I need to just refer to it as a heart attack. It’s the only way to make it real.
    I scan the email each time I stop for queues and lights and mini-roundabouts on the dreary haul through Croydon towards the M23 and Claire’s ‘run-down smallholding’. If Maria’s sent me the details she’ll probably have sent them to Claire as well, but I need to have it all straight in my head, in case I end up being the one who has to explain it all to Ruby. The best part of five days, we’ll be together, and it’s not all going to be small talk.
    They live in Sussex. On the edge of the Downs, outside one of those villages that have remained cute by dint of belonging in its entirety to an aristocratic estate. I’m impressed by its beauty as I pass through: front gardens neat even in winter, not a wheelie-bin or a caravan to be seen. The shop, with its cute little multi-paned window that makes it look like a Thomas Kincaid painting in a Kentucky trailer park, sells pesto and ‘locally sourced produce’. You can tell what the tenants are like.
    I buy a goat’s cheese and tomato tartlet and eat it sitting on the war memorial; I never feel well enough for breakfast and I’m starving now, unsure what will be coming my way for the rest of the day. Goat’s cheese and tomato tartlet. Whatever happened to Cornish pasties? At least they haven’t gone the whole hog and called it a
tartelette
, I suppose.
    I get the print-out of the email out once more as I sit on the steps, smooth it out on my knee and read as I eat. I wonder idly if the polite woman who showed me through to the viewing room is the same person who sawed open my father’s breastbone and pulled off the top of his skull. Probably. No one’s got the budget to keep a show-pathologist around for the visitors. Maria’s cut the name off, has just said that they’re satisfied that the cause of death was the heart attack, that it was so huge that even if whoever was with him had