Secrets. Freya North

ever two people deserved cake, it's you and me, Em.’ She passed Em a slice of chocolate roll with a chipper wink. She kept her anxiety hidden from view.

      It is only when she's by herself later that evening that Tess relents and lets her pent-up fear creep around her like an odourless, toxic gas, chilling her to the core like a soundless scream. It has her sweating and short of breath; alternately pacing the confines of the small sitting room or paralysed to the spot. It's a detestable feeling but like severe turbulence during a flight, she has to believe she can weather it and that it will pass. She tries desperately to stifle sobs because if she starts she won't be able to stop. She blinks hard and breathes deeply and eventually she feels calmer. She closes her eyes for a short while, concentrating hard on the colour of nothing behind her eyelids. When she opens them, they alight on the newspaper. She'd found it on the tube home from work yesterday. Right now she is happy to be seduced by the serendipity that, amongst the scatter of all the free London papers in that carriage, the one on her seat was the Cleveland Gazette. She thumbs through it with a sense of urgency, as if the offer she'd chanced upon the day before, which has lingered with her all day today, was so good it would have been snapped up by now and disappeared from the listings.

      But it is there. The house with the sea views in need of a house-sitter.

      She knows the words by heart, but it is the phone number underneath them which now looms large, turning the abstract mini-poem into a real proposition. Tess knows well enough how today's newspaper can wrap tomorrow's fish and chips. But what if yesterday's newspaper had escaped such a fate? If she'd saved the paper from a brief and greasy end at the chippie – in return, might yesterday's Cleveland Gazette become her map for tomorrow? Did it matter that she didn't know exactly where Cleveland was? It sounded far-flung from North London – and any distance from here and all that had happened, had to be a journey worth making.

      I'm crazy, she thinks, as she dials the number. I've been driven completely mad.

      Joe considers not taking the call. But once the ringing stops it starts up again.

      ‘Hullo, my name is Tess and I'm phoning about the ad,’ someone is saying. ‘Could you tell me more?’

      He pauses. Isn't he on the verge of offering the position to Mrs Dunn? ‘Well, I just need someone to oversee the old place when I'm not here. I work away from home mostly.’

      ‘It's old?’

      ‘It was more a term of affection. Detached. Victorian. Six bedrooms.’

      ‘Oh.’ Tess wonders if affection can ever be detached. ‘Where is it, exactly?’

      ‘Saltburn.’

      ‘Saltburn?’

      ‘On the outskirts of town, the Loftus Road. The pay isn't much, I'm afraid, but I'm offering a long-term position. Hullo?’

      Tess is computing the information. Sea views. Immediate start. House-sitter wanted. Wage provided. ‘Is there a garden?’

      ‘Of course there's a garden.’

      ‘You didn't put it in the ad.’

      ‘No – I thought “sea views” would clinch it.’

      ‘Is it a big garden?’

      ‘Not compared to some round here. But sizeable compared to others. A good half an acre. Hullo? Are you there?’

      ‘Currently, I have a patch of paving stones, mostly cracked. And they're not mine anyway.’

      Joe pauses. Suddenly he likes the idea of someone tending his garden who's only had a patch of paving stones that don't belong to them anyway. Perhaps he won't phone Mrs Dunn just yet. ‘Do you want to come and see it?’

      ‘I'll leave first thing and be with you whenever.’

      ‘From?’

      ‘London.’

      ‘London! You do know you're talking a five, even six-hour drive on a Friday? And the weather's meant to be vile tomorrow even for March?’

      ‘That won't matter to me. Thank you so much. You won't regret your decision.’

      Joe frantically replays the conversation to see just when he'd even implied he'd given her the job. But he can't very well ask her now, nor can he object – she's already hung up.

      Tess's grandmother used to say, think before you speak; she also used to say, look before you leap. Tess can imagine how her grandmother would be tutting at her now. She hadn't actually thought about what she was going to say or what she was hoping to hear when she had phoned the number under the ad. What she does know now is that, at a time when she's desperate to run away from the banging and the fear that peppers her life in London, six words in the classified section of a paper from somewhere far away have offered her a way out.

      She still isn't quite sure exactly where Cleveland is. She's never heard of Saltburn-by-the-Sea. But there's a six-bedroom house there, in which she is going to be paid to stay. It might just be the answer to her most impassioned prayers, it might be the solution to her problems. It might assist her need to right wrongs. It could well be a safe-house for her secrets, somewhere to lie low until she is back on an even keel and able to start over. It is a long way from London and that's a start. She has to believe that she can do something about the people who come banging at her door. Had Tess known running away could be such a good idea, she'd have considered it much sooner.

       Chapter One

      There was something about the way the small red hatchback slunk onto the gravel of the drive, coming to a shuddering standstill as if it was giving up, as if it was about to conk out, that reminded Joe of an animal in need of a rest; some poorly-kept packhorse exhausted from an arduous day's work. He watched through the window of his study, on the ground floor, through the tangle of honeysuckle branches which clambered around that side of the house and provided useful camouflage at moments like this. Nothing happened for quite some time; whoever was in the car was staying put. Eventually, the car door opened and Joe watched as a woman climbed out. She stared and stared at the house while still clinging to the open door as if it was a shield. She ducked back in and Joe was prepared for her to drive away, for this woman not to be the Tess of the bizarre phone call last night. She looked nothing like the people who had house-sat for him in the past. But now she was out of the car again, walking around to the other side of it, opening the door, leaning in, apparently rummaging around.

      And then, when she reappeared, Joe thought, oh, for fuck's sake.

      But by now, she was walking slowly towards the front door.

      He considered disappearing elsewhere in the house, feigning not to be at home. But even from this distance and through the network of honeysuckle, her look of awe placated him. Suddenly he wasn't staring at his worst nightmare, but at a scene straight from Thomas Hardy. From his vantage point, he watched as she stood timidly on the weathered slab of doorstep like a peasant girl braving the estate of the wealthy squire. Joe hastened to open the door before she rang the bell, fearing the old mellow clang would all but finish her off.

      ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Are you Tess?’

      Still he couldn't be absolutely sure. Over the phone she'd sounded older, somehow bigger and physically rather more nondescript. If this was Tess, he hadn't accounted for strikingly amber eyes darting from behind a privacy screen of an overgrown fringe. Despite the droop of mousy brown hair, he could see that her features were fine, her skin porcelain pale. Her lips were pursed, as if to imply something on the verge of being either said or swallowed. She was not tall and her slimness diminished her further, yet she stood square and defensive. Joe wondered why she would drench her frame with a drab hooded sweatshirt which fell to mid-thigh length, emblazoned with a college crest that made good design whether or not the establishment existed. He saw that her jeans were old but too scruffy to be acceptably vintage and her trainers were scuffed, with laces that were inexcusably