“Where are you going?”
“Where do you think?”
“Don’t, Molly. You can’t. Dad will kill me.”
“You think I won’t bust the lot of you?” Beside myself, my breath came in sharp bursts. I had a pain in the middle of my chest, like you get from running in bitterly cold weather. “You involved Dad and he covered for you. And,” I said, red-faced with fury, “he threatened the only person who could verify that you were in the same place as Drea that night.”
“He said he would fix it. That was all.”
Like my father fixed everything. “He sold out for you. Now I know why you got clean. I know why you never show your face at the house. You’re a constant reminder of what you and he did. Does Mum know?”
Zach looked straight ahead. I had my answer.
I’d run out of words, out of energy, out of belief and hope and faith. The thought that they had all been in on a bloody awful conspiracy did me in. I felt crushed under the weight of it, physically, mentally and spiritually. I let out a howl. Zach’s arms slid around me.
“Get the fuck away,” I shouted, shaking him off. “Scarlet found out, didn’t she? That’s why she came to see you.”
Zach hung his head. “Molly, I—”
“You destroyed her every belief in the people she loved.” I wasn’t like my sister. I didn’t believe in family, the way Scarlet did. She bought into it; heart, body and soul.
“It wasn’t my fault. It was Richard Bowen’s. He had a thing for her when she and Nate weren’t getting along. She liked him a lot, but then Bowen somehow found out about what happened and threatened to expose Dad and me if she didn’t pay up.”
I lunged towards him. “You knew, and you said and did nothing?”
Zach cowered, put his hands up to protect his face. “We thought it would be okay. She paid him, but he wanted more, said there was plenty of family money she could tap into. She even gave him that bracelet Nate bought for Christmas.”
“He was blackmailing her, for Chrissakes. And you let him?”
He tapped the side of his head. “I’m not strong like you. She said she’d found a way to take care of it, so he’d never bother her again.”
“Fuck’s sake, Zach, instead of coughing up, or having it out with Dad, or going to the police, she drove into him.”
“I swear I never knew what she planned. You have to believe me, Molly.”
Oh. My. God.
Scarlet saw sacrifice as the simplest way out. That way, Zach and Dad didn’t go to prison. Mum wouldn’t be destroyed. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got crucified.
And she was so wrong.
I shook my head in a bid to tame my messed up mind. Angrily wiping away my tears, I stood up. Zach eyed me nervously. “What are you going to do?”
“Speak to the man who lied.”
*
Confronting my father was as risky as drinking with a chainsaw in my hand. I’d once respected him and now I feared him. How betrayed and disappointed Scarlet must have felt.
Dad was in the conservatory eating a late lunch: cheese and pickle, with crackers. He looked up, glad to see me. I’d almost forgotten that the day before we’d buried my sister. Seemed a lifetime ago.
I drew up a chair, scraped it across the floor as hard as I could and, strung-out, sat down opposite with a thump. “Where’s Mum?”
“Shopping. She’ll be back soon. Wants to talk to you about Scarlet’s ashes. Can I get you something to eat?” I didn’t answer. He caught my mood. “Is everything all right? That boy hasn’t been bothering you again, has he?”
“That boy? Do you mean the one you lied about?”
His eyes became suddenly alert, on guard. “Is this about Stanton?” Dad was so earnest it almost made me doubt myself. Almost.
“Was Mallis in on it from the beginning?” My father had used the notebook, with its dodgy references and associations, to ensure that Mallis played along.
He screwed his face into a mystified frown. “Molly, I really don’t—”
“You played me. Don’t pretend you don’t know.”
He pushed his plate away and gave a puzzled smile. “Molly, I assure you I have no idea.”
“You assure me?” My laugh was arid. I fastened my gaze on a pulse in his jaw. The more I stared the more it ticked. “You sat in my living room and spun me lie after lie. You didn’t investigate Drea Temple’s missing status because you didn’t need to. You knew where she was. Dead at the bottom of a mine because you took her there.”
“Molly, you’re not making sense.” The smile went cold, congealing on his face.
“Which bit don’t you understand, Mr Back in the Day? You moved her body from a well. You knew exactly how Drea Temple died and you covered it up. Hiding her body miles away was a genius idea.”
He pitched forward as if he were hard of hearing, did that thing when somebody talks to you in a language you don’t understand. Then he made a fatal mistake. He reached out his hand, in a ‘take mine, trust me,’ gesture.
I didn’t move. Birds sang. Someone in a next door garden mowed a lawn. A dog barked. Normal everyday noises, yet the only sound I heard was shallow breath and the thrum of stone-cold panic. I was first to drop my gaze. It took every part of me for my body not to fold and crumple. This was my dad, the person I’d loved forever, the one I’d believed in and trusted and looked up to, whatever the hell that meant, and now it was all gone. Maybe he understood that. Maybe he knew that there was no going back, that nothing could ever undo his betrayal and would ever be the same. Couldn’t be.
“You would understand if you were a parent.” He spoke while my eyes fixed on the table in between us. “I did what was for the best. I couldn’t let your Mum endure her only son in prison. It would have broken her.”
I looked up, smashed it to him with a dead-eyed stare. “And what about Drea’s parents, her grandmother? What about Rocco Noble?”
“Fair point.”
“There’s nothing fair about any of this.” Or just. “And you had the bloody brass neck to unleash Stanton on Rocco when, all along, you knew that he was onto the truth.”
“Molly,” he said, trying to break through to me, “I did it to save my son. He wouldn’t have lasted a day in prison.”
“You put a family through hell.”
“I did and I’m sorry, but Drea Temple was only another dead junkie.” I gasped at his callousness, but he carried on, his warning stare enough to melt steel. “She had no proper home. She’d chosen a way of life away from her family. She was an addict that was never going to get any better. She was one of life’s losers.”
“You can’t mean that. Damn it, you can’t say that.” And yet he did. He had. Did I even know this man? “You contaminated a crime scene. You covered for a murderer. Those injuries weren’t caused by the fall, were they? Oh my God,” I gasped. “You think Zach killed her, don’t you?”
Dad flinched. “Zach did not murder Drea Temple.”
“How do you know? On drugs, he was capable of anything. What about the blood?”
“How did—”
“He told me.”
Dad’s cheeks sagged. A heavy sigh wooshed from between his lips. “Drea Temple died as a result of drowning. It was unfortunate but there was nothing odd about it. It was a simple accident.”
“Did she sustain defence injuries?”
“Of course not.”
“No signs of a struggle?”
“No.”
Cold silence consumed the conservatory. I stood up, kicked back the chair. “She was standing and fell through backwards,” I said, acting it out. “So injuries would have been to the back of her head, maybe her face as she hit the sides.”
“Precisely,” he said as if I were a slow learner that had finally grasped the basics of arithmetic. “And as you know very well, head wounds bleed a lot.”
“Enough to spatter the walls and beams? Sounds more like blunt force trauma.” I spat out the words in terms my dad would definitely understand. “What was it, a brick, piece of wood, lead piping?”
Anger flashed across his face, pinching and tightening the muscles in his jaw.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I know my son,” he repeated.
“But you didn’t know your daughter. None of us did. Scarlet died to protect your vicious little secret.”
His head jerked up; nostrils dilated. Streaks of red flashed across his cheekbones and his eyes shrank to two tiny pinpricks of rage. I thought he might hit me and, despite my own hot sense of justice and truth finally prevailing, I cowered.
“That’s a monstrous thing to say.” Dad struggled to contain his fury. “How dare—”
“How dare I? How dare you! You put the fear of God into Barry Bevan.”
At the mention of the cabbie’s name, Dad’s jaw jacked open. The red in his cheeks fled to white. Time to go in for the kill.
“Bevan was Richard Bowen’s biological father.”
I waited a beat, watched Dad’s face, merciless.
“But how did —how?” His expression was one of stunned confusion.
“You’re the detective. You figure it out.”