The Girl in the Mirror(83)

“How the hell did you find me, Ben?”

“It was Noah—I . . . I . . .” Ben’s breath comes in short gasps. His fingers dig into my shoulders. He bites his lip so hard I expect to see blood appear. “I can’t believe it! I just killed Summer! I murdered my sister!”

“But you saved me, Ben. You had no choice. She was about to kill me!”

“I know. I figured out her plan.” Ben lets go of me and crawls over to her body. That’s Summer there, lying dead beside us. Truly dead. Ben whimpers at the sight of her. He grabs her gun and hurls it over the edge of the bridge, followed by his rifle. They hit the water with a double splash. “God, I always hated her so much, but now I’ve killed her!” cries Ben. “I’m in deep shit!”

“Think, Ben, we have to think! What do we do now?”

“Quick, we have to hide her body! Or do I call the police and confess?”

“No, wait. It’s gonna be okay. We can get through this together. Oh my goodness, I thought I was dead! Listen, does anyone know you’re here? I don’t think she told anyone where she was taking me. Adam’s out on the ocean with no phone reception. He’s miles away. We’ve got time. It’s the middle of the night. No one’s coming.”

“No, I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I didn’t have time.” Ben’s eyes are wide, but they’re blind with panic. He holds his head in his hands and gives a low moan. “I’m a murderer,” he stammers. “I killed my sister.”

“But how did you know? How did you save me?” I ask.

“I saw Noah—I told you I was seeing Noah. He told me that you couldn’t bear a child. That’s why he left you.”

“That makes no sense,” I say. “We were trying to have a baby the whole time we were married. That’s why we got married.”

“I know, but Summer persuaded him that you were so desperate to stop him from dumping you that you pretended you could have children. She showed him proof. She had films, scans, to prove you had no uterus. She swore him to secrecy, saying you would never forgive her for telling him. And I sat there thinking, but Iris just had a baby. So whose body was it on the scans?”

“Summer’s,” I say.

“Right, but Summer had told you she was pregnant before she disappeared. Once I figured out she was lying—lying about being pregnant, lying about being able to have a baby—I realized her only chance of inheriting was to pass someone else’s baby off as her own. That’s when I guessed that she set you up, that she wasn’t really dead. Everything she did was designed to make you do what you did. Have her baby for her. And once the baby was born, she didn’t need you anymore. She needed you to disappear. Iris, it was the worst moment of my life. What if she had killed you already? I phoned you but it went straight to voicemail. I really started to panic when the hospital couldn’t find you. So I rushed to her house. It wasn’t locked. I found Tarquin sleeping alone and smashed phones in the bathroom—”

“Was Noah with you?”

Ben shakes his head. “No, I didn’t tell him anything.” He pulls out his phone. “I’m calling the police.”

“Ben, are you crazy? You killed someone. Wait a minute. Think.”

“No, Iris, I’m not going to get caught up in lies. I’m telling the truth.”

“Stop a second! You’re not just exposing yourself, you’re exposing me. Everyone will find out about me! If they see me here and Summer’s body, I’ll have some serious explaining to do.”

I can’t get my head around what the police would think, but I know it doesn’t look good for me or Ben.

“I don’t even understand how you knew to come here,” I say.

“That was the easy part,” Ben mutters. “As soon as I asked myself, how would Summer kill Iris, I knew the answer. She was fucking obsessed with crocodiles.”



The world has fallen to pieces. I’m clutching my brother. I’m alive, but I’m so bewildered I can’t even feel grateful to him for saving me. Right beside me is my sister’s body. Her corpse.

“Ben, you threw the guns away, like a guilty person.”

“I know,” says Ben. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“You saved my life,” I say. “I can’t watch you go to prison.”

“You can testify that Summer had a gun to your head.”

“Yes, and of course I would, but who am I? Who is your witness? Someone who’s meant to be dead! Someone who has lied for months to everyone around her. They won’t believe a word I say! They’ll think we cooked the whole thing up together!”

“But don’t you want to come clean?” My brother’s eyes bore into me. “I really thought once you read my emails, you would want to come clean.”

“Let me think,” I say. “This is all so terrifying. I was so scared, Ben!”

Ben waits.

“I want to come clean,” I say. “I desperately want to come clean, but the most important thing is that you’re safe. I owe you everything. God, I’m freezing.”

I try to stand, but I can’t. I sink back into Ben’s arms.

“I tried to tell you, Iris,” says Ben. “I always knew she played games with you, called you names, taunted you with horror stories. And the beauty pageant. She set you up for humiliation, letting you wear the crown and then exposing your true identity in front of everyone, at the same time as she fooled us all into believing she was having periods. That was only a month or so after Dad died, but she was already laying the groundwork for her scheme. She must have known she was infertile—perhaps Dad knew, too—but she’d managed to hide the news from Mum. So she had to make you think she had no interest in the money, to lull you into complacency. She must have panicked when you got married. When I heard she had flown to New Zealand and was trying to save your marriage, I had a feeling she was going to sabotage it, but I never realized how far she would go. Our sister was a monster.”