‘I’m not allowed to say,’ Paige replied and put her finger to her lips, making a shushing sound. ‘It’s a secret.’
‘You can tell me. I won’t tell anyone else.’
‘But I promised.’
‘Sometimes it’s okay to break a promise. You trust me, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘He took photos of me. He said Mummy asked him to, to show her how I’m growing up.’
Sofia’s body stiffened. ‘What kind of photos?’
‘Running around and next to the trees. He used the camera where you have to shake the photographs and they come to life like magic.’
She was referring to the Polaroid camera Sofia bought him for their holiday in St Lucia. Sofia recalled he’d had it with him yesterday in the garden when she’d arrived home. Sofia hurried to the annexe Patrick used as hisoffice. Fuelled by adrenaline and unease, she didn’t know where to begin her search or what she was looking for. She began with the files in his cabinet, and then leafed through books on shelves and drawers stuffed with papers. There was nothing incriminating. But her relief was tempered by frustration. Her inner voice was never wrong. She knew what she had seen that day by the pool.
The corner of a box poking out from under a stack of old coats caught her eye. Tentatively, she removed the lid and looked inside. It contained a stack of brown A4 envelopes, each addressed to a PO box but with no name, and containing a Dutch postmark on the front. She examined the contents of one. Inside was a glossy colour magazine, containing page after page of indecent images of young girls. Sofia dropped it to the floor, took a step back and began to hyperventilate.
She eventually found the strength to continue and inside the other envelopes were different issues of the same magazine. And at the very bottom was a white envelope, a Dutch address on the front written in Patrick’s handwriting, and containing loose Polaroids. Sofia half closed her eyes as she removed a handful; her worst fears were quickly realised. They were clothed and unclothed pictures of Paige. Patrick hadn’t taken them only for his own gratification, but to share and arouse other like-minded people.
Sofia steadied herself against the wall, concerned her legs might give way beneath her. Despite her spinning head, she grabbed the photos, stuffed them into her pocket, returned the box back in position and ran to her bedroom. Once behind the locked door of the ensuite, she vomited into the sink. She had never felt pain like it, knowing that the man she loved had robbed a child of her innocence, and under their roof.
Before her niece returned home, Sofia made her promise not to tell her mother about the pictures and in return, she would organise a photo shoot at a studio in London for Paige and her friends. Her niece squealed with delight and swore to remain silent.
For days, Sofia couldn’t bring herself to leave the bedroom, blaming a virus on her inability to attend rehearsals for a West End play she was performing later that summer. Patrick checked on her regularly and from under her sheets, she assured him with a sour smile that all she required was bedrest.
It was the toughest decision Sofia had ever made in her life. She was torn in two. Patrick had to be stopped and Paige and other children had to be protected from inhumane men like him. Contacting her lawyer to make an appointment with the police would have been the right thing to have done. Twice she plucked up the courage to call and twice she hung up before it was answered. She was using Paige as an excuse for her inertia – Sofia didn’t want to put her beloved niece through such scrutiny. In addition, it would kill her parents knowing they had put their children in the trust of a man they thought of as family but who had exploited their little girl.
Sofia’s inner voice called her out.You can lie to the world but you can’t lie to yourself.You’re keeping quiet because if you tell anyone, everything you have worked so hard for will be over.
Even in her confused state, Sofia recognised that by exposing Patrick, it would mean the end of the career she loved. Her reputation, her box-office draw, her body of work … none of it would matter once her name was synonymous with a husband who has an active interest in little girls. No director, producer or actor would risk being associated with someone like her.
However, despite how much his warped inclinations sickened her, she couldn’t turn off her feelings for him. He had been everything she’d ever wanted in a husband and a friend. They had plans to see more of the world together, invest in business ventures and start that family. The thought of throwing it all away and starting life again, alone, terrified her. She didn’t have the strength to lose Patrick and her public. So she chose to keep them both.
Standing outside the door of Patrick’s office, she watched as he ransacked the room in search of his missing Polaroids. Defeated, he went to leave, only to discover his wife, her skin ashen and her eyes red raw with sadness. On sight alone, he knew that she was aware of who she was really married to. He opened his mouth but the words weren’t there.
Sofia thrust a business card into his hand. It contained details for Dr Peter Hewitt, a psychiatrist. ‘I’ve made you an appointment for Thursday,’ she said. ‘He’s discreet.’ Patrick offered no argument.
Over the coming months, Sofia made excuses each time her sister asked to come over with the children. She blamed everything from work to illness until eventually, a baffled Peggy stopped asking. It upset Sofia to push her sister away but she couldn’t risk Paige being alone with her uncle.
Meanwhile, when Patrick attended his twice-weekly appointments with regularity, Sofia often seized the opportunity to search his office for fresh evidence of his compulsions. But there was nothing else to be found.
Then after a year of living separate lives and sleeping in separate bedrooms, a desperate Patrick begged his wife to take him back.
‘I know what I did was wrong,’ he offered humbly. ‘Dr Hewitt has helped me to understand why I did what I did … how the things that happened to me as a boyI’ve been doing to others and continuing the cycle. I swear on my life that I’m not that man any more.’
As he went on to explain how he had changed and now had the tools in place to control further urges, Sofia desperately wanted to believe him. She missed waking up to his smell, feeling the light touch of his fingers as they ran across her body and the sound of laughter echoing through the corridors of their home. A year without laughter felt like a lifetime.
Sofia ignored her inner voice and followed her heart. She discarded her contraception, convincing herself that as her fortieth birthday approached, a baby of his own might help to heal the man she loved. And in the weeks that followed, their relationship grew stronger and stronger and she had never felt more loved.
It was only by chance when she opened the doors to air the summer house in the garden that she discovered Patrick was storing fresh editions of his magazines inside a dusty ottoman. It stunned her. But instead of crumbling to pieces, Sofia closed the lid and walked away. She even found a way to justify his behaviour – if he was gaining sexual gratification from magazine photographs, he wasn’t getting it from a child in the flesh. It was the lesser of two evils.
However, to continue living with what she knew about him would take great sacrifice. To keep both her marriage and her career, she couldn’t allow the temptation of their own child to come between them. Without discussing it with Patrick, Sofia booked herself into a private hospital to be sterilised.
As the 1990s merged into the millennium and another two decades passed, the pain of her decision was eased by periods of reliance upon alcohol and tranquilisers. It was only in moments of sobriety that she could admit to herself what a terrible mistake she had made in putting her reputation above all else. She grew to detest Patrickfor backing her into that corner and, eventually, theirs became a marriage in name only. Husband and wife spent more time together in the public eye and on red carpets than they did at home. Charity work, especially fund-raising for hospitals, became her penance for turning a blind eye to Patrick’s crimes. And when he received invitations to accompany her to openings or visiting children’s wards, he never refused and Sofia never took her eyes off him.
One morning, she came off the phone and marched straight to his office, throwing open the door. Patrick was sitting on a sofa, his face obscured by a broadsheet newspaper.
‘My accountant called about a missing thirty thousand pounds from an account,’ she began.
