The Passenger by Daniel Hurst (great book club books TXT) 📕

kick the door closed with my foot, it’s not going to be enough to stop Louise realising I was using it.

‘What’s really in that safe?’ she asks me as I try to shut the wardrobe door again.

‘None of your business!’ I tell her, even though I know she is going to make it her business to find out now.

‘Why are you keeping secrets from me? What’s in there?’ she asks me, trying to open the wardrobe door, but I make sure she can’t do that. The safe is still unlocked, and there’s no way I’ll be able to explain having so much cash in there if she sees it all. I haven’t counted it yet, but I imagine there must be at least fifty or sixty grand to go with the twenty I had already.

There’s no way I can pass that off as savings from my office job.

‘Louise, stop it!’ I beg, and in my desperation to keep my daughter from opening the wardrobe, I end up pushing her back across the room, causing her to fall into my bedside table.

‘Oh, my God, I’m so sorry!’ I say, rushing to my daughter’s aid. ‘Are you okay?’

As Louise gets to her feet, I see that she isn’t hurt from the fall so much as she was hurt by the fact that I caused it, and she pushes past me out of the bedroom in disgust. I know I should go after her, but my safe is still open, so instead, I just brace myself to hear her bedroom door slam again. That’s always the noise that signals the end of one of our arguments, and there it is again, right on cue. But that one was louder than all the previous ones combined.

I want to go in and check on her to make sure she is alright, but then I remember the piece of incriminating evidence is currently still on my person, so I rush back to the wardrobe and open the door.

Taking the ring from the back pocket of my jeans, I put it in the safe before quickly locking it. At least that is one drama dealt with for now. Tomorrow, I will get rid of the ring that could tie me to Charles’s murder, but for now, I need to go and check on my daughter.

I also need to tell her what I keep in the safe, otherwise she won’t stop asking, and she won’t stop trying to catch me using it again. I decide that I’ll tell her about the £20,000 I have been saving up from my office job and that I bought the safe because I no longer trust the banks after the incident with Johnny. That much is true, and she can know that.

But I’ll hold off on letting her know what else is in there.

That much she can never know.

Nobody can.

34

AMANDA

I grip the phone tightly to my ear as I prepare to reveal my deepest and darkest secret.

I haven’t been fighting so hard all this time because of the money. While I hate to lose such a large amount, I wouldn’t be risking my daughter’s life over that. What I have been fighting for is the other thing in that safe that shouldn’t be there.

Charles’s ring.

It’s the one thing that can tie me to his murder if anybody should find it, and it’s still in my safe.

I know I should have just thrown the ring away as soon as I saw the engraving. Then I wouldn’t have had so much to worry about now. I was going to. I took it out of the safe the morning after I brought it home, and I planned to throw it into the Thames on my way into the office that day. But then I foolishly went looking online for a valuation on the piece of jewellery, found a photo of a similar one and saw how much it was worth.

Online estimates put it anywhere between £10,000 and £15,000.

How could I throw that much money away?

Instead, I had made another plan. I would have the engraving removed from the ring so I would be able to sell it on without the new owner seeing what was previously written on it. I planned to have that done somewhere local rather than in London, where the news of Charles’s death would be more prominent. But I underestimated how much of a big name the dead director was in the performing arts world. The discovery of his body and the mysterious circumstances surrounding it didn’t just end up in the newspapers in London. It ended up on the front pages of several national newspapers too, thus making me less confident about having the engraving removed at any high street store in the UK for fear that the engraver would recognise the name.

As the days went by and with the story of Charles’s death not showing any signs of disappearing from the daily news bulletins after his daughter discovered his body, the ring stayed in my safe. So then I formed a new plan. I was going to take the Eurostar to Paris after leaving my job at the end of the week, where I would have the engraving removed by a Frenchman with no knowledge of the murder victim’s name back in London. Then I would be free to pawn it without risk of attracting the attention of the police, and that would be an extra several thousand pounds to help fund the next stage of my life.

But then today happened.

For the last month, my safe has stayed locked, which means I have been in control of the secret it contains. But as soon as it is opened by somebody else, then all that control is lost. I will have no power over what happens next. I could take losing all that money, as painful as it might be considering what I went through to end up with it, but not the risk of being found