The Turn of the Key(81)

I don’t know what I had expected—perhaps a show of temper, or even for Rhiannon to start crying and begging to be let off.

But her reaction was neither of those things. Instead, she smiled, rather sweetly, in a way that was totally unnerving, and said, “Oh, I don’t think you’ll do that.”

“Give me one good reason why not!”

“I’ll do better than that,” she said. “I’ll give you two. Rachel. Gerhardt.”

Oh fuck.

The silence in the kitchen was absolute.

For a second, I thought my knees were about to give way, and I groped my way for a barstool and slumped down on it, feeling my breath catch in my throat.

I was cornered. I realized that now. I just didn’t know quite how tight that corner was going to get.

Because this is where it gets very, very bad for me, doesn’t it, Mr. Wrexham?

This is where the police case on me shifted from being someone in the wrong place at the wrong time, to someone with a motive.

Because she was right. I couldn’t ring Sandra and Bill.

I couldn’t do that, because Rhiannon knew the truth.





It will be no surprise to you, Mr. Wrexham, not if you’ve read the newspaper pieces.

Because you will have known right from the outset that the nanny arrested in the Elincourt case was not Rowan Caine but Rachel Gerhardt.

But to the police, it was like a bombshell. Or, no, not a bombshell. More like one of those exploding pi?atas that showers you with gifts.

Because I had handed them their case on a plate.

Afterwards they focused very hard on how I managed to do it, as if I were some kind of criminal mastermind, who had plotted all this in exhaustive detail. But what they couldn’t seem to understand was how temptingly, laughably simple it had been. There had been no forgery, no elaborate identity theft or manufactured papers. How did you obtain the fake identity papers, Rachel? they kept asking, but the truth was, there had been no fake papers. All I had done was pick up my friend Rowan’s nannying paperwork from her bedroom in our shared flat, and show it to Sandra. Background check, first aid certificate, CV, none of it had any photographs. There was absolutely no need for me to fake anything, and no way of Sandra knowing that the woman standing in front of her was not the person named on the certificates she was holding out.

And, I tried to tell myself, it wasn’t much of a deception. After all, I really did have those credentials—most of them, anyway. I had a background check and a first aid certificate. Like Rowan, I had worked in the baby room at Little Nippers, albeit not quite as long as she had, and not as supervisor. And I had done nannying beforehand, though not as much, and I wasn’t sure that my references would have been quite as gushing. But the basics were all there. The name thing was just a . . . technicality. I even had a clean driving license, just as I had told Sandra. The only problem was that I couldn’t show it to her because of the photo. But everything I had told her—every qualification I had claimed—it was all true.

Everything except for my name.

There was luck involved of course too. It had been lucky that Sandra had agreed to my request and hadn’t contacted Little Nippers themselves for a reference. If she had, they would have told her that Rowan Caine had left a couple of months back. Lucky that she never pushed me on the driving license.

And it had been lucky too that she used a remote payroll service, so that I never had to present Rowan’s passport in person and could simply forward the scan she had left on her computer desktop along with our shared bills.

The biggest piece of good fortune was that banks, slightly incredibly, didn’t seem to care whose name was on a bank transfer, as long as the account number and sort code matched up. That had been something I’d never expected. I had lain awake wondering how to figure that part out. Claim that my account was in a different name? Ask for cash, or checks made out to R. Gerhardt and cross my fingers Sandra didn’t ask why? I’d practically laughed when I found out that none of that mattered, that if you paid by transfer you could put Donald Duck in the payee box, and it would go through. It seemed unbelievably careless.

But the truth was, to begin with, I hadn’t even looked past that first stage. All I had focused on was getting that interview, standing in Heatherbrae House, looking Sandra and Bill in the eye. That was all I had wanted. That was the only reason I had answered the ad. And yet somehow, the opportunities had kept presenting themselves, like temptingly wrapped gifts on a plate, begging me to pick them up and make them mine.

I shouldn’t have done it, I know that now, Mr. Wrexham. But can’t you see—can’t you see what it must have been like?

Now, standing in the kitchen with Rhiannon laughing in my face, I felt a great wave of panic break over me, followed by a strange sense of something else—almost of relief, as if I had known this moment was coming, and was relieved to have it over and done with.

For a moment I thought about bluffing, asking her what she meant, pretending I had never heard the name Rachel Gerhardt. But only for a moment. If she had got far enough to discover my real name, she was not going to be thrown off the scent by an indignant denial.

“How did you find out?” I asked instead.

“Because, unlike my dear parents, I bother to do a little digging when a new girl turns up out of the blue. You’d be surprised what you can find out online. They teach it in school now, you know, managing your digital footprint. I guess they didn’t do that in your day?”