I stood motionless. Stunned.
“Steph?” I couldn’t take my eyes off the knife. “What’s going on?”
“Ha, I like how I’m here, holding a knife on you, and you still ask what’s going on. Aren’t social workers meant to have good observational skills?” She was so different; even her voice had changed. The usual soothing, soft tone had changed to a hard, cynical one, full of hate.
“Steph? What the hell? Why?” I choked.
“Why?” She laughed. I stared at her, stunned. My daughter, her niece, could be dead, and she had the audacity to laugh.
“Where is she?” I growled through gritted teeth, lunging towards her.
“Oh no, no, I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she said in a melodic tone, brandishing the knife towards me again. “You might get hurt, and we wouldn’t want that. You’ve got a murder to go down for.”
“WHERE IS SHE?” I bellowed, all of the confusion, despair, and fear pouring out of me at once.
“Well, I’m not going to tell you that, am I? And neither is he, for that matter,” she added, raising her eyebrows at Rhys. “You told me you were a good liar, Rhys. That was a terrible performance. You even had twenty minutes to prepare, for Christ’s sake.”
Rhys shuffled behind me, the embarrassment radiating off him. She’d warned him that we were coming. I felt sick as I remembered how grateful I’d been that Steph was coming along on my wild crusade. Now I was disgusted at how I had thought we’d grown closer since Teigan disappeared.
“But he was a great candidate to be my little helper,” Steph chided. “After all, he’s another person whose life you’ve ruined.”
The sickening knot in my stomach clenched even tighter. She’d manipulated Rhys into helping her, preying on his own grief and vulnerability. “Is she alive?” I begged for more information.
She shrugged. “I think so. She’s not had much food recently, though, mind. I’ve been too busy enjoying all your breakdowns to go check on her, to be honest. That thing with the pills was priceless — I should have filmed it. I thought about letting you go through with it, but that would have been too easy.”
My fists clenched, fingernails cutting into the flesh of my palms, as I processed Steph’s words. She’d been sneaking off to wherever she’d been keeping Teigan, then coming back to supposedly look after me, making me cups of tea and offering me comfort. She was poison.
“How could you?” I spat.
“Well, quite easily, it turns out.” She started shifting the weight from one foot to the other, talking with her hands as if telling a comedy bit. “Initially, I was just going to hide her away for a week, just to watch you suffer a bit. Man, it was fun watching you fall apart every day, but then it was just too perfect an opportunity to waste when you became Suspect Number One. And when you started to believe you’d done it with that PTSD thing … that was genius.”
“Why would you want to watch me suffer? I’m your sister.”
“Because,” she held the knife towards me again. “You made me suffer.” She focussed on Rhys for a moment, who was still standing behind me, unsure of what to do. “You, Rhys, stay where you are, and make sure she doesn’t run past you and try climbing out the window.”
He must have just nodded in response, but I didn’t turn to check. I couldn’t take my eyes off the monster in front of me. “How did I ever make you suffer? I only ever tried to protect you. It wasn’t my fault you went into foster care — I tried to look after you, but they wouldn’t let me because of the pregnancy. You know I tried, Steph,” I pleaded.
“Of course it was your fault,” she snarled. “I wouldn’t have gone into foster care in the first place if it weren’t for you.” She paused for a moment, staring daggers at me. “You know how much he meant to me. You were always Mum’s favourite, but I was Daddy’s little girl, and you just couldn’t stand it, could you? You had to be in control, even then. So you got rid of him.”
After all these years, Steph unleashed the grief and rage that had been stewing inside her all this time.
“No! That’s not what happened, Steph–”
“Don’t give me that bullshit. I saw you,” she said as she wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “I saw you forcing the alcohol down his throat through some sort of funnel. I didn’t know what I was seeing at the time. It was only as time passed that I started to realise what you’d done.”
“No, I–”
“Don’t deny it — you’ll just piss me off.” She was pacing the length of the door now, her knuckles white from gripping the knife. “I started to piece together what you’d done, but who would have believed me? You stole the one person I loved most.”
She’d known all this time what had happened to Dad. This was why she’d gone off the rails and seemed to hate me so much in her teenage years, why she had always resented Teigan, why she had moved as far away as soon as she could. Now she’d come back to get her revenge.
“I tried to move on, you know, I really did.” Steph was pacing the floor, the knife still gripped tight in her hand. “By the time I really understood what had happened, I knew no one would believe me, so I moved away to start a new life, to leave you and your bastard kid behind.”
I gritted my teeth, forcing myself not to react to her words. I needed to show her she was being heard — I had to somehow talk her round.
“I got a job. Met Leah. Life was good. But when you contacted me about that bloody premium bonds money you got from Dad, acting like you were being all noble, donating it to setting up some charity like you’re some kind of saint … well, that really took the piss.” Steph stopped pacing, stared straight at me and held the knife up to eye level. “I wasn’t going to let you get away with that. I’d done enough running away, hiding. I knew it was time to expose you for the bitch you really are.”
“Steph, you don’t understand. Let me explain.”
“Don’t patronise me,” she snapped. “I understand perfectly. You know, it was Leah who showed me what a true sister is — something you never could be. You rejected me after Dad died. You made me an orphan, so now I’m flipping it round.” She pressed the flat edge of the knife against her cheek and tapped it, her eyes looking upwards in thought. “You know, there isn’t a word for a parent who loses their child. Did you know that? There’s ‘orphan’ for losing your parents, ‘widow’ for losing a spouse, but nothing for your child dying.”
“I did it to protect you,” I cried, my eyes desperately searching for another exit. “You’d just turned twelve, and you had no idea how much danger you were in. You still don’t.”
Steph’s face darkened. “How convenient for you to say now. I was fine. I was happy, and you couldn’t stand it. I was meant to go with Dad that weekend to London. Just me and him. But you snatched that all away.”
I winced at the memory. I’d been eating my breakfast at the kitchen table, one week before her birthday.
I’m taking Stephy to a gig next weekend for her birthday, so you better not burn the house down while we’re gone.
I’d swallowed my porridge, the heat from it burning my throat. “The whole weekend?”
“Yep. It’s London, so we’ll stay in a Travelodge.” His eyes had gleamed with the same look I used to fear every night.
I sighed, ready to shatter Steph’s perception of her hero. She needed to know the truth. “Dad was a predator. He was going to start sexually abusing you. He abused me for years, until I got ‘too old’ for him.”
I looked up at Steph. Her face screwed up in disgust, not because she believed me, but because she thought I’d made it all up.
“God, look at how low you’ll go to defend yourself,” she spat. “It’s not enough that you killed him, you have to tarnish his name, as well.”
Behind me, I felt Rhys shifting his weight, no doubt wondering who was telling the truth. “I did it to protect you from him. Every night from the time I was twelve to fifteen … he came to my room. There’s no way I was going to let him hurt you like he hurt me.”
“That’s disgusting — just shut up.” Another flash of doubt crossed her face. “Shut up!”
Maybe I was getting through to her. I softened my voice and stepped slightly closer, pleading with my eyes. “Remember how difficult everything was back then? How depressed I was?”
“Of course you were depressed,” Steph scoffed. “Mum had just died, and you were going through puberty.”
My gaze fell to the floor as the dreadful memories I’d blocked away seeped into my core. How I’d wait in my bedroom listening for a creak along the corridor to warn he was on his way. How I’d shut my eyes and try to go elsewhere in my mind while it was happening. The plans I had to tell somebody, anybody, at school what was happening to me, but staying silent out of fear that Steph and I would be split up. We’d already lost our mum, and I didn’t want to be the one to destroy the rest of our family. The number of times that I had thought about ending it all, but never going through with it because of that haunting feeling of what might happen to Steph if I left her alone with him. I couldn’t let that happen to my little sister. Mum had always told me to look out for her. And now here she was, hurting me in the worst way possible.
“I’m not listening to this pathetic lie any more,” Steph said, ignoring the doubts twitching under her skin. “Now you’re going to listen to me. Teigan’s not in a good way, and, frankly, I’d be quite happy to let nature take its course and you go down for it all. They’ve already got enough on you, and once they find her body with your DNA around her, it’ll be a done deal.”
A fresh wave of anger charged through me as I realised. “You planted the scarf …”
“That’s right. Oh, and I’ve been taking hairs from your hairbrush and planting them with Teig. So don’t doubt for a second that you’ll go down for it.”
The depth of her betrayal was getting more and more brutal. She had me. “What do I need to do to make sure she’s safe? I’ll do anything,” I begged. “Please, don’t let her die.”
Steph rolled her eyes. “I will promise you, right here and now, that Teigan will be safe, as long as you confess all to the police tomorrow.” She stopped and shoved the cold tip of the knife beneath my chin. I winced as I felt the blade pierce my skin. “If you try and pull a fast one, telling them that it’s me, and you’ve been framed and whatnot, then I assure you, Teigan’s body will never be found.”
The answer was clear. I had to save my daughter.