I pull myself up to a sitting position and get clumsily to my feet. The ringing in my ears hasn’t lessened but Ella’s screams have become whimpers. What will this do to her? She won’t remember this night, not consciously, but will something be buried deep in her subconscious? The night her grandmother held her hostage.
Laura.
I didn’t know he’d need to dig up the sewers, Mum said in the car, otherwise we’d never have . . .
Laura knew. Laura helped her.
The two women stand facing each other, Laura’s hands on her hips. Mum glances to the table, where the gun lies innocently where she left it. She’s too slow. Laura follows her gaze, moves fast.
Fear pounds in my chest.
Laura pulls her sleeve over her hand, wrapping the fabric around her fingers as she picks up the gun. She’s methodical. Careful.
Terrifying.
“I didn’t double-cross you.” Mum’s defensive. I want to tell her to calm down, but I can’t find my voice.
“You owed me, Caroline.” She walks to the sofa and sits on the arm, the gun held steady in her hand. “It was all quite simple. If I hadn’t been there you would have been charged with Tom’s murder. I saved you.”
“You blackmailed me.”
Pieces of the story slot into place.
Not Dad threatening Mum, but Laura. Not Dad who tracked her down. Laura.
“You?” I can’t comprehend it. “You sent the anniversary card?”
Laura looks at me for the first time. She takes in Ella, my disheveled hair, the shock that must surely register on my face. “You were supposed to dismiss it as a crank. Nothing more sinister than the crackpot letters you got when Tom died.” She shakes her head. “It was a message for Caroline, really, to make her realize who she was up against. I sent her a copy.”
“And I suppose the rabbit was a message, too, was it? And the brick through the window? You could have killed Ella!”
Laura looks momentarily confused; then she smiles. “Ah—I think you’ll find that came from a little closer to home.”
I follow her gaze, to where Mum has her face in her hands.
“No . . .”
“I just wanted you to stop digging into what had happened to us. I knew that if you found out the truth, she’d come after you, too, and—”
“You threw a brick through the nursery window? Onto your own granddaughter’s crib?” The words sound as though they’re coming from someone else, hysteria making them shrill and uneven.
“I knew Ella was downstairs—I’d seen her from the garden.” One arm outstretched, she takes a step toward me, but Laura moves faster. She stands, holding the gun in front of her. She jerks it to the left. Once, twice. Mum hesitates, then steps back.
Who are these women? My mother, who could hurt her own daughter? Her own granddaughter? And Laura—how can you know someone all of your life, yet not know them at all?
I turn to Laura. “How did you know where Mum had gone?”
“I didn’t. Not at first. I just knew she hadn’t killed herself.” She looks at my mother, who is sobbing noisily. “She’s very predictable.” Her tone is patronizing, scathing.
A wave of revulsion hits me as I think of the way she consoled me after his death; how she helped me through the memorial service. Dad might have died at Mum’s hands, but it was Laura who hid his body; who masterminded the suicide scheme; who concealed the crime. I remember her insistence that I go through Mum and Dad’s study—her generous offer to do it for me—and realize now that she was searching for clues to where Mum had gone.
“I’ve got a copy of that photograph, too, you know. You and Mum, in that shitty B and B in the arse end of nowhere.” Just for a second, there’s a crack in Laura’s voice. The tiniest hint that underneath this steely control is something more. “She never stopped talking about it. How much you’d laughed. How it was a world away from real life. From her life. She loved it.” Her shoulders slump. “She loved you.”
Slowly, she lowers her arm. The gun hangs loosely by her side. This is it, I think. This is where it stops. Everyone’s said what they need to say, and now it ends. Without anyone getting hurt.
Mum takes a step toward her. “I loved her, too.”
“You killed her!” Instantly, the gun is raised. Laura’s arm is ramrod straight, her elbow locked in place. The glimpse of vulnerability I saw has vanished. Her eyes are narrow and dark, every muscle rigid with rage. “You married money and you left her in that damp shit pit of a flat and she died!”
“Alicia had asthma,” I say. “She died from an asthma attack.”
Didn’t she?
I feel a flash of panic that this, too, is a lie, and I look to my mother for reassurance.
“You didn’t even go and see her!”
“I did.” Mum’s close to tears again. “Maybe not as often as I should have done.” She screws up her eyes. “We drifted apart. She was in London; I was in Eastbourne. I had Anna and—”
“And you didn’t have time for a friend with no money. A friend who didn’t speak like your new friends did; who didn’t drink champagne and drive a posh car.”
“It wasn’t like that.” But her head drops and I feel a wave of sadness for Alicia, because I think it was. I think it was like that. And, just as with the way she treated Dad, she’s seen it too late. I make a sound—not quite a cry, not quite a word. Mum looks at me, and everything I’m thinking must be written in my eyes, because her face crumples and she’s begging silently for forgiveness. “Anna and Ella should go. They’ve got nothing to do with this.”
Laura gives a humorless laugh. “They’ve got everything to do with it!” She folds her arms across her chest. “They’ve got the money.”
“How much do you want?” I don’t mess around. Whatever she wants, she can have.
“No.”
I look at Mum.
“That money’s for your future. Ella’s future. Why do you think I ran away? Laura would have taken it all. Maybe I deserved that, but you didn’t.”
“I don’t care about the money. She can take it. I’ll transfer it all to whatever account she wants.”
“It’s simpler than that.” Laura’s smiling.
The hair on the back of my neck stands up, a prickling sensation creeping down my spine.
“If you give me all your money, people will ask questions: Billy, Mark, the Inland bloody Revenue. I’d have to trust you to keep quiet, and if I’ve learned one thing from this”—she glances at Mum—“it’s that you can’t trust anyone.”
“Laura, no.”
I look at Mum. She’s shaking her head, one step ahead of me.
“As far as anyone else is concerned, I came here to save you and Ella,” Laura says. “Mark helpfully told me where you’d be when he canceled the party, and my sixth sense told me you were in terrible danger.” She widens her eyes as she acts out her pantomime, hands raised, fingers splayed on the hand not wrapped around the gun. “But when I arrived, I was too late. Caroline had already shot you both and killed herself.” She pushes the corners of her mouth downward in mock dismay, then turns to me. “You’ve seen Caroline’s will. You were there when it was read. ‘To my daughter, Anna Johnson, I leave all financial and material assets, to include all property in my name at the time of my death.’” She quotes verbatim from Mum’s will, spitting out the words.
“Mum left you money, too.” Not a fortune, but a healthy inheritance that honored Mum’s long-standing friendship with Alicia; her duty to Laura as godmother.
Laura continues as if I haven’t spoken. “‘In the event that Anna has passed away before the execution of this will, I leave all financial and material assets to my goddaughter, Laura Barnes.’”
“It’s too late,” Mum says. “The will’s been read—Anna’s already inherited.”
“Ah, but you’re not dead, are you?” Laura smiles. “Not yet. The money still belongs to you.” She raises the gun; points it at me.
My blood freezes.
“If Anna and Ella die before you, I inherit the lot.”