The Lies We Told(81)

Clara stood frozen as Rose ran past her. Throwing her arms around her son she cried, ‘Oh my darling, my darling boy,’ and then Oliver was there too, kneeling down and cutting Luke free with one of Mac’s knives before he too took his son in his arms.

Luke coughed and spluttered when his gag was removed, crying out with desperate relief. He looked dreadful: thin and bruised, with blood all over his T-shirt, his eyes hollow in his pale drawn face, his arms covered in knife wounds, some of them large and weeping. When Luke looked past his parents to where she stood he said her name with such relief and longing that she jolted out of her paralysis and went to him, holding his thin body to her tightly, all the tension and confusion and fear of the past weeks surging out of her in one loud sob.

Finally she felt him stiffen in her arms and she turned to follow his gaze to where Hannah now stood by the door, her arms still held tightly behind her back by Tom, her eyes bright, almost febrile with excitement. Luke rose unsteadily to his feet and went to her, crossing the room in a burst of energy and fury. ‘You fucking crazy bitch,’ he shouted, his face red with rage, ‘you fucking evil cunt!’

Hannah laughed. ‘Temper temper, Luke.’

‘I’ll kill you, I’ll fucking kill you!’

‘Oh for God’s sake, stop whining,’ Hannah said. ‘I fed you, didn’t I? Sometimes?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Even took you to the potty when you needed it.’

Clara saw Luke’s face burn with humiliation. And then she did something she’d never done before. She went over to where Hannah was standing and she hit her full in the face, so hard that the sound rang out into the room, her palm smarting with the force.

Hannah gasped, her eyes flashing briefly with anger before she recovered and, setting her face in a sneer, said, ‘Well, look who’s found a pair of balls at last.’

Clara looked at her in disgust. ‘What now?’ she asked. ‘You’ll go to prison for this! What was the point?’

‘What was the point?’ Hannah asked. ‘This.’ She gestured towards Rose and Oliver, broken and desperate before her. ‘This was the point.’

‘You said you’d leave us alone,’ Oliver said. ‘We paid you thousands to stay away from Tom, to stay away from all of us. You said that would be the end of it!’

‘Yeah, well. That was until I saw Luke again.’

‘Saw him where?’ asked Tom.

She shrugged belligerently. ‘I’d just come out of rehab, some bullshit thing the courts sent me on last time I got arrested, and I was begging outside Leicester Square station. There he was, like a gift. I recognized him instantly.’ Her face lit up as though she was revisiting a favourite memory. ‘So I followed him to work, and later I followed him home, and it all came back to me.’ She glanced at Oliver. ‘What you did, how you gave me away. There I was, scrabbling about for money, fucking strangers to get by, no place to live, and I thought, I wonder how my dear old dad’s doing.’

She paused, fixing Oliver in her gaze. ‘I got into the habit of keeping tabs on him, and I discovered something.’ She glanced at Clara and laughed. ‘Turned out lovely Luke isn’t such a nice boy after all, is he? Turned out he was fucking the office slapper. And I thought, wow, the old apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?’ She turned her hard gaze on Oliver again. ‘I saw that he was just like you, pretending he was such a decent, stand-up guy while all the time he was a disgusting, sleazy bastard. A dirty fucking user.’ She smiled. ‘Like father, like son.’

There was absolute silence. All the amusement drained from Hannah’s face as she continued to stare at her father. ‘And that really fucked me off,’ she said softly. ‘Brought it all back. So I started sending him the emails, messing with him, showing I was watching him, that I knew what sort of man he was, and after a while I realized I could kill three birds with one stone: give Luke what he deserved, get some more money out of you, Daddy, but most of all,’ she turned her gaze on Rose now, and the expression on her face, the icy hatred in her eyes, made Clara shudder. ‘Most of all, I’d give you, you murdering bitch, a taste of your own medicine.’

Rose paled. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I might have left you alone for a few years, but that doesn’t mean I ever forgot what you did. You killed my mother, you took her from me – why shouldn’t I take something from you? Why shouldn’t Luke die, it’s only what you deserved.’

‘You were going to kill him,’ Clara whispered, the cold realization seeping into her, how close they’d been to losing him.

Before Hannah could reply, Rose cried, ‘I had nothing to do with your mother’s death! She jumped!’

‘Bullshit.’ Hannah’s face was full of loathing. ‘She wouldn’t have left me. She wouldn’t. I was all she had. You were the last person to see her alive. You killed her.’

Rose stepped towards her. ‘Listen to me! Your mother was angry, she was out of control! She was extremely ill and she jumped.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Where’s my daughter?’ Rose asked desperately. ‘Do you know where she is, what happened to her? Tell me where Emily is, for God’s sake, tell me!’

‘She’s dead,’ was the triumphant reply. ‘That’s right! She died the same way my mother did, booted into the fucking sea.’