WHEN Mark spoke Ana felt the clocks had stopped.

 

In his calm, pleasant, well-modulated voice, he told them that Carole had not been the last person to see Sarah alive that morning. He had followed his wife to the cliff walk that early morning.

Stunned silence.

 

“She got drunk the night before” he continued. “we had supper and I opened a bottle of wine but she polished that off in record time and asked me to open another, I didn’t refuse, it would have caused a scene. And as she worked her way through the second bottle she became aggressive. All the anger she felt at her mother and her mother’s boyfriend had turned on me. And I think it was her discovery that I probably have a son, in India, that pushed her over the edge.”

 

As she looked around the room, Ana saw the realisation dawn that not everyone there had the same information. That, in fact, she, Daniel and Holly had kept a secret from their friends, the secret of his son. Mark explained to  Ivan,  Carole, Jonathan, Lynette and Jeff how he had only found out, after Sarah’s death,  from the computer files that Daniel had decoded, that his lover in India had borne a son, whose age and looks showed he was Mark’s child.  Ana saw Jeff catch Holly’s eye and they exchanged a look she could not interpret. Now they knew each had kept a secret the other. Did that make them even, Ana wondered?

 

“But to return to the day Sarah disappeared, or rather the night before. Remember I knew nothing about my son. Sarah became increasingly incoherent and I tried to get her to bed. She kept talking about a diary, she said it would change the way we all thought about her and that only she knew where it was.”

 

He told them he had persuaded her to bed finally and then he had returned to the kitchen to tidy up, put food away, throw away the empty bottles. “I heard her in the study and as I opened the door to see what she was doing I saw her go back upstairs. She had left the study door open and before I closed it again, I looked inside to check everything was OK,  that she had knocked nothing over. And then I saw that something had disturbed the books on the wall shelves, and a couple of them had fallen on their sides.  I went to put them back, you know how obsessive I am about tidy books” and he smiled at his friends, the people Ana realised who knew him best, better than any of the distant family he rarely saw.  “well,  behind the fallen books was a notebook, placed with its back to the wall. No one would see it unless the two books were moved. And I would never have done that, they were what I believe people call “chick lit” these days. Anyway, not my kind of book at all, so clever of her to have chosen that hiding place.” 

 

And there, he told them, he found Sarah’s diary. Her most private writing was not in her computer files at all, but in an old-fashioned, handwritten diary; she had trusted all her secrets to the more reliable pen and paper.

 

“So I took this diary to my bedroom and read it. I had checked that Sarah was sound asleep in her room and I couldn’t sleep anyway. So then I read about her sad affairs. I realised how deeply  my behaviour in India hurt her, although it wasn’t until after she was dead and I found about the child I fully appreciated how deep was the hurt.”

 

“Mark” Daniel said “you don’t have to tell us anything more. This must be a dreadful for you.”

“Oh but I do. I have to go on now, you need to know it all. I woke up to the sound of the back door closing and realised Sarah had gone out. It was only just light. I knew she would still be drunk, and I  worried she would go swimming, so dangerous. And I felt I must talk to her about the diary, to ask her not to involve all of you in our quarrel.” 

 

He had walked, he said,  in the direction Sarah might take, seeing no one but at one point he heard a car engine startup. Not sure what to do, he reached a fork in the path and was standing there, when he saw Sarah running along the path nearest to the cliff edge. She looked, he said, wild, out of control and, for the first time, he was frightened that she might fall. He ran after her, calling her name but after looking back once she continued running. He was sure she saw him. “She looked lost, out of control, she wasn’t rational and then I wondered if she wanted to fall over the edge, to put an end to her pain.”

 

For the first time since he began to speak, his voice broke and Ana saw the gleam of tears in his eyes. Before she could speak, Holly moved towards Mark and put her arms around his shoulders “Mark, my love, you need a drink of water and a strong coffee.  You must stop for a few moments. In any case, I need to go for a wee, and you can’t continue without me.” 

 

Holly left the room and Carole asked who would like more coffee. The tension eased a little and Ana wondered what would come next. She wasn’t sure that wanted to hear what Mark would say. Each time she thought she had a measure of these people, they astounded her. First Carole and now Mark,  had, for whatever reasons, kept secret their involvement with a death. They had lied, if only by omission, to the police, something Ana, however much of a free spirit she thought herself, would never do. Or would she?  Suppose she were Carole? She wondered how far she would go to protect Daniel, if he had gone to meet Sarah that day, to beg her not to reveal their affair.

 

Could she put her hand on her heart and say she would have told the police if she had heard him leave the house secretly.  And Mark. The tragedies in the lives of Sarah and Mark were so profound that she, with her close loving family, could not begin to imagine Mark‘s feelings.  She had always thought him a man of integrity. Perhaps she was wrong. She caught Daniel’s eye and he came across with a cup of coffee. He gave a hug and held her tight for a few moments.

 

Then Holly returned and Mark cleared his throat.” Holly, you are always good at picking up on people’s feelings. I needed a break. So, to continue, I caught up with Sarah and  I managed to hold her so she would stop running. I held her and told her I had read her diary and that she would harm people who cared for her, who were her friends if she made it public. She laughed at me,  she shouted in my face that my friends would change their minds when they found out all about me. I thought I saw hatred in her eyes. Then she twisted her body so hard that I lost my grip on her and she pulled away, so forcefully that she lost her balance and began to fall. She tried to hold on to some branches but she couldn’t and it was so steep there and there were rocks and she fell and she hit her head on a rock and then she just disappeared into the water, all that way down. So far down. I heard the splash.”

 

Ana saw that Mark was exhausted by the telling of his dreadful story and this time it was she who went to him and put her arms around him, cuddling him as if he were a child. Carole was crying now, comforted by Ivan and so it was Jeff who once again took charge of the situation. 
 

“Mark’s story has changed everything”, he said. “Carole is no longer the last person to see Sarah alive. Mark has taken away any suspicion she was involved in Sarah’s death. But it puts Markin a very difficult position, in pole suspect position in fact.”

 

There was silence in the room and Ana tried to imagine what Mayte would think. What would she make of the husband of a dead woman who, it transpired, had lied consistently throughout their investigation? A man who had fathered a son in India which he claimed not to have known about until after the death of his wife?  But there was no proof and if her autopsy showed that Sarah had been still drunk that morning, then the most likely verdict would surely be that her fall was accidental.

 

Without a doubt, Ana thought, that would be the best, or the least harmful verdict for all of us. They were all caught up in this horror in different ways and she speculated what each one was thinking. She wondered who shared her doubt that by confessing to his presence on the cliff, all Mark would achieve was the washing of even more dirty linen in public, as the English saying so aptly put it.

​

She looked across at Daniel and was sure he had similar doubts about the wisdom of Mark repeating his story to the police.

 

Jeff asked Ivan what he thought the police would do if we told them Mark’s story.
 

“Do you know,” he replied, “beyond making life easier for Carole, I don’t think it would help at all” and he looked across at Carole who nodded her agreement.

 

Jeff told them he was trying to organise the facts in a logical way, “he said, “for me, the most important fact is that Sarah is dead and no amount of soul searching will bring her back to life”.

He continued to go through the facts. Carole had already written in her evidence statement that she considered that Sarah was drunk when they met that morning. Mark would confirm she had drunk more than a bottle of a wine the evening before. So they would be aware Sarah was drunk when she ran along the cliff top path. As long as the autopsy report confirmed that her blood alcohol was high then he thought most police investigations would conclude, without evidence to the contrary, that she accidentally fell into the sea and drowned.

 

Carole walked over to Mark and put her arm around him “I don’t want Mark to go to the police. I have to go, I can’t avoid it. But I have said everything. I have told the truth. I am sorry  I lied before but I am telling the truth now. Mark, you’ve been hurt enough. The bad things are out of the box now. We tried to bury them but we couldn’t.”

 

Ana saw how hard she was trying not to cry and she warmed to Carole as never before. Small and so very determined, she had tried to protect the people she loved. Perhaps she had been foolish to think that she could hide her presence on the cliffs but she had almost got away with it. Perhaps Mark could get away with hiding secrets. It seemed everyone had been doing it. Including Daniel.

Jeff continued.  “So, unless anyone has a problem with it, I suggest that Carole and Ivan go to the police station as planned this afternoon. Ana, do you think it would be a good idea to send Carole’s statement over to the police now? Give them a chance to read it before we get there. They can have the Spanish translation you made, so it should all be pretty clear.”

 

Before she answered she looked around her.  The sense of shock in the room was palpable; Jonathan, Holly and Lynette had been silent since Mark’s confession and as she looked across at them, standing close together by the fridge, Jonathan seemed to make up his mind and he spoke, for the first time, she realised, that morning.

 

“Honestly, I think we have to stop talking about this now. I can’t stand any more, I need some time to think about what you said, Mark, and I would actually like to go home and be on my own for a bit.” His voice breaking up, he went on to say that Carole and Ivan must go the Guardia Civil, that was clear, but until they all knew what would happen there, there was no sense in discussing it further. He seemed badly shaken and Ana was glad when Lynette put her arms around him, agreeing that they all needed a break.

 

Ana went across to Mark, who was standing by the kitchen door looking more miserable, more broken and older even than the night he had identified Sarah’s body. “Come into the garden, Mark. Come outside and take some deep breaths of fresh air. I know it sounds silly, but it always works for me.” She took his hand and led him outside, down to the small gazebo next to the almond tree. He stood still and she saw that he was doing what she said, breathing deeply and evenly. “You are right Ana, it does help” he said after a moment or two. “Back then, in the kitchen, I wanted to run out, run all the way to the top of the cliff and jump over. Put an end to seeing the misery I have caused all my friends.”

 

She took his hand and, after a while, he said “ Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” Do you know those lines, Ana? Most people think it Shakespeare, but it’s not, it’s by Walter Scott.  A perfect description of me, don’t you think? I set off this whole terrible chain of events off with my deception. It’s all my fault. And I don’t know if I can live with it any longer.”

 

Ana listened without interruption, seeing from the corner of her eye that everyone else was staying away.  He told her he realised that everything stemmed from his deception of Sarah in India. Without that action, he said, when he followed his passion, none of the rest of the disasters would have followed. Sarah would be alive, she would never have intervened in the lives of their friends, to such devastating effect. Ana thought about what he had said and surprised herself as she answered. I hope I am not turning into a TV physiologist, she thought.

 

“Mark, cariño, we can only blame ourselves for so much that happens. Sarah was marked, cursed, whatever you call it, by the things that happened to her when she was a child. From the little I know, well, I think what triggered her anger, her shame, it wasn’t anything you did or didn’t do. It was learning that  they released the man who abused her from prison, the man who  destroyed her chance of having children .”

 

She saw he was listening to her, he was watching her face as she spoke and so she continued to tell him about a woman she had known in Argentina, one of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the mothers of those who were disappeared during the Argentinian dictatorship. Elena had told her that losing her daughter Martina had been so terrible that she had thought it would destroy her. Her marriage had ended, their grief parted them.Then, when she had considered suicide, she had discovered the other mothers and their campaign and the combination of an aim in her life and the ability to share her grief with others who understood perfectly, had saved her.

 

“I think Sarah’s tragedy was that she didn’t find those consolations.”

“But my dear Ana, that’s what is so terrible. I think she did find those things in India. the relationships she formed with her pupils. Some of the girls she befriended in India had terrible stories they shared with her, and they gave her strength and confidence. And I destroyed that life.”

 

She reassured him that Sarah must have known they would not stay in India forever. From the things Mark had told her, Ana saw he had kept his word to Sarah and he had no more contact with his lover. Mark seemed to take comfort from her words, and he appeared calmer. But Sarah’s words about her time in India, read so beautifully by Holly at the funeral, kept coming into her head and she wondered if perhaps Mark had a point, he had destroyed something good in Sarah’s life.
 

She was rescued from her doubts by the appearance of Holly and Lynette, bringing coffee and a plan of action.