The Stepmother(102)

 

‘Not too good at the moment.’ I swallow the lump in my throat. ‘She’s unconscious actually – and I’m trying to find out why.’

 

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he repeats. ‘I am sorry she would want to take her own life.’

 

‘Can I give you my number please?’ I delve into my back pocket. ‘If you think of anything…’

 

‘Anything?’

 

‘Anything at all. I’m trying to understand what drove her to this.’ I offer him the card. ‘Please. I’m pretty desperate.’

 

He takes it. A little reluctantly perhaps, but he does at least take it.

 

Kaye, on the other hand, is not going to get out of her car now, so I give up. I don’t want to make a scene here.

 

Not yet anyway.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

As I sit in my hire car on the corner, smoking my fifth fag this hour and thinking, What is it I’m hoping to achieve by all this?, something attracts my attention.

 

I see a girl on the uppermost balcony, in pyjamas and fluffy boots, leaning on the rail, looking down at me. I’m pretty sure it’s Scarlett. When she sees me looking back, she retreats quickly.

 

What is this family hiding? What did they push Jeanie to?

 

And who sent me the diary?

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The next morning I get up really early and finish reading Jeanie’s thoughts.

 

There’s a little note on some of the pages, not that many, that says SK. Scarlett King? It makes no sense.

 

I find some of Jeanie’s self-doubt lacerating. Why did I not see sooner that she was in real trouble? Why didn’t she say?

 

After I’ve called the hospital and they’ve repeated, ‘No change still,’ I drive back to Berkhamsted, and I break into Matthew King’s house.

 

Well okay, I don’t break in exactly. I let myself in with Jeanie’s keys. I set the alarm off – but I’m good with alarms – I learnt at the knee of a master as I was being dragged up – and I manage to disable it quite quickly. Quickly enough, I hope, that it won’t alert anyone.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

It’s cold and empty in this house; this house is cold and empty. There’s no heart. Jeanie probably brought it heart – but she’s lying unconscious in a hospital bed in the Royal Derby.

 

The house makes me shiver, even though the day is warm.

 

I don’t know where to begin, but once I do, as in the cottage in Ashbourne, I will go through everything.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

I start in Jeanie and Matthew’s bedroom. It doesn’t look as if she had much to do with the decoration here. It’s a grand but impersonal room, with pale blue and gold Chinesey-looking wallpaper and a huge wooden bed that doesn’t seem like something Jean would ever choose.

 

I glance in the other rooms, having a quick swipe round Matthew’s study – but his computer is gone, and the filing cabinets are locked. The police have probably got the computer I imagine.

 

I wonder what it is that he kept asking her to sign.

 

Really it’s Scarlett’s room I want to find. I need to know what school she goes to, and it doesn’t take long to discover that, through formal school photos hanging on the wall outside her door, and the maroon uniform in the walk-in wardrobe. And she has more clothes than I could imagine owning – quite something for a teenager.

 

This bedroom is the type of room every little girl dreams of: if you like things flouncy and frilly and pink. The type of bedroom Jeanie and I certainly didn’t know existed when we were her age – except for the rich girls in Enid Blyton maybe or, later, that awful Beverley Hills programme about teens with sports cars and too much Gucci.

 

Does the money make up for the dysfunction? I wonder. We had no money and plenty of dysfunction. Would my errant father and unfit mother have been easier to bear if I’d gone to school in designer labels and holidayed in Barbados?

 

I’ll never know I suppose. At least growing up skint gave us some drive. Just not much security – or enough belief in ourselves, though God we tried. Still, our boundaries may have been blurred sometimes: just look at both our descents from professional heaven…

 

Enough musing. I have another thought – and I run back downstairs, into the lounge this time. Where is their DVD collection?

 

Jean mentioned the family home movies in her diary, ‘the look on Scarlett’s face’. That look had disconcerted Jeanie; she’d found it odd – but I don’t know why.