If only she had left when he told her to, and she almost had.
Christ, Mimi’s performance had been persuasive. It was so good he too had nearly fallen for the story he had concocted on her behalf about the brother in Equatorial Guinea, a poorly paid delivery driver who had been instructed to dump the waste near the playground, and who had later been killed in order to cover tracks. He had been proud of his cunning strategy to convince Anna to flee, once it had become clear that she was more of a liability than he’d been willing to see. He was doing it for her own safety, as much as his. If she was really on the brink of telling David, as she’d said she was, then her life was in jeopardy. And to his credit it had worked, nearly.
She had made it as far as Greece before Clive and his people managed to lure her back with the story of David’s death – which faced her with the prospect of the twins left alone with no family left to look after them but Clive.
She had left him with no choice, hadn’t she? Together, they had whittled away the line between the impossible and the inevitable, until it hung by a single thread that was too weak to withstand the slightest tug.