Let Me Lie(102)

I couldn’t watch. I turned away and heard the heavy drag as you travelled into the tank; a loud, dull clunk as you hit the bottom.

Silence.

I had stopped crying, but my heart ached with loss and guilt. If the police had arrived right then, I think I would have told them everything.

Not Laura.

‘Now we need to clean up.’

It was Laura’s idea to fake the suicide.

‘If we report him missing, they’ll see you as a suspect. They always do.’

She made me go over the plan again and again, then she left. I didn’t sleep. I sat in the kitchen, looking out of the window at the garden I’d turned into a grave. I cried for you, and – yes – I cried for me, too.

Laura drove to Brighton as soon as it was light, waited for the shops to open and bought a mobile phone. An untraceable SIM card. She called the police; said she’d seen you go over the cliff edge.

Every day I expected the police to come. Every day I jumped when the door went. I couldn’t sleep; couldn’t eat. Anna tried to tempt me with scrambled eggs, scraps of smoked salmon, tiny bowls of fruit salad, her eyes full of her own grief, even as she tried to lessen mine.

But the police didn’t come.

The weeks went by and you were declared dead, and no one pointed a finger or asked a question. And although I saw Laura often, and although we’d never agreed it, we never spoke of what had happened. What we’d done.

Until your life assurance paid out.





SIXTY-SIX


ANNA


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 dishevelled 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 realise 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 cot?’ 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.’ She takes a step towards me, one arm outstretched, 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 patronising, 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; 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 realise 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&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.’