by Rebecca Tope
She spun away with a small cry, leaving three trapped passengers to plunge over a low wooden platform and into the cold water. The door that Nicola had left open swung itself closed as if slammed by an invisible hand. ‘We won’t drown,’ said Simmy to the others. ‘It’s not deep enough.’ But the Hawkins women in the back were both squealing, and the car kept rolling onto its side and sinking down into water that was a lot deeper than might have been expected.
The heavy metal box that was the car embedded itself on its right side, tipping Simmy painfully onto the gear stick and then the steering wheel. The engine went on running for a moment, before dying with a gurgle. Cold water poured in over Simmy’s feet and then knees. ‘Don’t panic!’ she said. ‘Candida – can you see if you can open the driver’s door? It’s on your side.’
There was no way they would drown, she kept telling herself. They’d be cold and wet, but not dead. But the car was sinking lower and Candida was making no progress getting the door open. She was having to reach over the driver’s seat and could get no leverage on the door handle, and no weight behind it to shove it open. Lights from the nearby street cast a dull orange glow through the car windows. ‘Somebody must have seen us,’ cried Jane. ‘Surely they must.’
It had all happened so quickly that Simmy could well imagine that the whole incident could have gone unobserved. There was no activity on the waterside on a cold December evening. Cars driving past would hardly notice movement amongst all the clutter of kiosk and uprights that bordered the jetties, even if they were barely twelve feet away. The roof of a car sticking out of the water might eventually attract attention, but there was no guarantee.
Candida was crying as she pushed ineffectually at the door. Her mother was making strange bleating sounds, at the same time as throwing her weight against Simmy’s seat, as if hoping to dislodge it completely. ‘Don’t do that,’ Simmy ordered her. ‘It’s making things worse.’ Water had reached their waists, as they awkwardly strained to lift themselves away from it. Already Simmy’s feet were numb. ‘How deep is it here?’ Candida asked hysterically.
‘I have no idea,’ Simmy gasped back. The car being on its side actually helped, in a way, she realised. It was, after all, wider than it was high. She guessed they had a foot or two to go, and the water really couldn’t be deep enough to swallow the whole car.
‘I’ll try and open my door.’ She pulled the handle set into the inside of the door, and exerted all the upwards pressure she could, clumsily trying to find something to brace against. Pain exploded in her pelvis and ribs. ‘Aargghh!’ she screamed. For the first time, stark fear gripped her. If she couldn’t move, she would be in the car until she died. She waited for the pain to subside, aware that her scream had frozen the others into silence. She fought to prevent herself from collapsing into absolute panic. Pain, fear, confusion, shock – and many allied reactions – turned her flesh cold and her mind numb. Somewhere she understood that the situation was not entirely unprecedented, but unlike the earlier one, she was conscious this time and required to save herself if remotely possible. She was also not alone.
There were two people in there with her, neither of them handicapped by physical injury. They had to be able to open one of the doors. Dry land was only three or four steps away. The car was stuck in soft shingle and mud, so it was unlikely to sink any further. Simmy forced herself to think in simple factual bytes. ‘Help the girl to push,’ Simmy shouted at Jane. ‘Don’t just sit there.’
Wasn’t panic meant to galvanise people into superhuman feats of strength? Didn’t they rip the doors off planes to escape after a crash? Where was the survival instinct when you needed it?
‘I can’t undo my seat belt,’ came a strangled reply. ‘I’ve been trying and trying.’
‘What?’
‘It doesn’t work properly. I had to force it in and now it won’t release.’
‘Shout,’ ordered Simmy. ‘Scream as loud as you can.’
The resulting noise couldn’t fail to alert somebody, she was sure. The idea occurred to open the window beside her, for the sound to carry. But there was no handle – just an electric button, which was unlikely to work, now the car had died. But she tried it anyway, and the glass slid down a few obliging inches. ‘Again!’ she ordered.
‘All right,’ came a new voice, muffled but authoritative. Simmy had no idea where it came from, and for a second imagined it was a supernatural being of some sort. An angel, perhaps.
The door she was hoping to open was wrenched violently away from her, and she pushed her head up and out to see what was happening. Water flowed around her knees, swilling into her lap and completing the ruin of the lovely wool and silk skirt. ‘Who’s in here?’ said the voice.
A woman was bending down to peer into the car. Simmy reidentified it from an angel to Gwen, partner of the treacherous Nicola. But the recognition brought no new fears with it. She was considerably beyond drawing any sort of rational conclusions from whatever might happen from here on.
Nobody answered the question. ‘Just get us out,’ shrilled Jane. ‘For God’s sake.’
Gwen appeared to pause, to assess the nature of the task. But before she could take action, another woman splashed up to the car, sobbingly distraught. ‘Gwen!’ she howled. ‘Don’t! Oh, Gwen! Why are you here?’
There was the sound of a sharp slap, and a high-pitched shriek. ‘I’ll speak to you when this is dealt with,’ said Gwen. Her voice was at least as icy as the waters of Lake Windermere.
The commotion at last attracted attention from capable passers-by, and men materialised who levered the car valiantly back to a more normal angle, and then wrenched open the driver’s door and hauled Candida out from the back with little ceremony. Jane’s imprisoning seat belt was laboriously severed, once Simmy had been transported to dry ground. All three of them were escorted or carried up the tortuous winding path through the grounds to the Belsfield, as the closest building with heating and light still operating. Nobody, it seemed, had thought to call an ambulance.
With Gwen and Nicola, also in need of drying out, they made a group of five tear-stained, shivering, bewildered women. Wide-eyed hotel staff whispered in huddles, unsure of what might be expected of them. They had been put into a small room that looked as if it was normally used for discreet private lunches. A man who might have been the manager said the police had been informed, and were on their way.
Candida was the first to recover enough to speak. ‘You tried to kill us,’ she accused Nicola. ‘Are you mad or what?’
Nicola was blindly clinging to Gwen, ignoring everyone else. She was still sobbing loudly, and appeared not to hear the accusation. But Gwen heard it. She gripped her partner by the upper arms and forced her away. ‘What were you thinking of?’ she shouted. ‘Stop crying and tell me.’
‘Oh, Gwen! I did it for you. For us.’ The words were slurred, but quite audible. ‘You said … I promised you … we promised there were no children.’
Gwen glanced at the others, then back at Nicola, who received a violent shake, like a dog in need of punishment. ‘What do you mean? What are you saying?’
Nicola wailed out a garbled explanation that took no heed of the arrival of DI Moxon and two other detectives. Simmy caught his eye and waved at him not to interrupt.
‘Gwen – you remember, when we first met. You made me swear I’d never been with a man, never had a child. You said that was the absolute most important thing for you. Remember?’ Gwen nodded cautiously. ‘Well, it was true. I never did. I did swear, and I do, still. I can’t bear men. You know that. But I didn’t understand that you never wanted there to be children for other reasons.’ She wiped her face with her hand, and gave a bubbling sniff like a heartbroken child. ‘It wasn’t just jealousy about the … sex side of things, was it? You needed there to be no claims, nobody who might want something. I didn’t see that until a few days ago. When those flowers came, you said that if you discovered I’d lied to you, it would all be over between us.’
For the first time, Nicola looked at the others, fixing her gaze on Candida. ‘Those flowers were what did it, finally. When I discovered you’d sent those flowers, I knew you must have been speaking to Nancy. She must have told you the whole story, despite all her promises. How else would you have known it was my mother’s birthday? I couldn’t let her get away with it, could I? What might she do to me next, otherwise? I flew straight down to her house, without even thinking what I was doing. I was so completely furious with her.’ She wailed afresh, and pushed her head against Gwen’s resisting shoulder. Then she kept on talking, mainly to Candida, who was cringing shivering on a handsome Victorian dining chair, and shaking her head hopelessly at the accusations.
‘You did get it all from Nancy, didn’t you? After all the trouble I went to to make sure there were no records, it was still all inside her head. And she was such a horrible woman. No kindness in her.’ She turned her attention to Jane. ‘Was she kind to you?’
‘Not very,’ said Jane tightly. ‘But she told us everything we needed to know.’
‘Not the birthday, though,’ muttered Candida. ‘I got that from the birth certificate.’ She raised her head slightly. ‘I got all the birth certificates, you see.’
‘And Nancy did it all for money,’ spat Nicola, unstoppable. ‘She sold me to you, just as she did nineteen years ago.’
Assorted frowns and blinks greeted this. ‘Sold?’ said Gwen, dazedly. ‘Did you kill Nancy Clark? Nic? Is that what you’re saying?’
Nicola raised her head and gave a grotesquely proud smile. ‘Davy told me how. It’s quite easy really. And painless if you do it properly.’
Again, the room jolted at this new revelation. ‘Davy helped you?’
‘Oh, no. She had no idea. She was just rambling one day about the easiest way to kill someone. They do it with animals, apparently. You need a big syringe, full of air. Sometimes you have to do it twice. It must go directly into a blood vessel, of course. I’d got it in a little bag in my car, all ready, after the last time she threatened me. But I never really imagined I’d use it on her.’ She moaned gently. ‘It worked, though. I didn’t think it would, when it came to the point.’
‘Nicola, you must shut up. You’re saying too much. You’re hysterical.’
But the hysteria that had hovered five minutes earlier had subsided and Nicola was sounding all too horribly rational. Simmy’s fuddled brain had grasped one or two significant elements in the outpouring, and was slowly making deductions. ‘Did you throw me into the ghyll?’ she asked.
‘Sorry,’ said the woman.
‘She’s mad,’ said Candida. ‘She’s my biological mother and she’s mad.’
‘Why?’ shouted Simmy, making her ribs hurt in the process.
‘You brought those damned flowers and spoilt my mother’s birthday. That’s why I was at her house. I heard you ask her about grandchildren, and in just a few words sow the seeds of suspicion. She told you far too much. You were sure to work it out, especially as you could contact her whenever you liked. You’d got this girl’s name and address from the order for the flowers. I thought you were nosy enough to follow it up.’
The irony made Simmy feel even weaker than before. ‘Your mother didn’t tell me anything. I had no wish to pry into your business. It was everybody else who kept it all going, not me.’
‘I had to stop you,’ Nicola insisted doggedly. ‘You were a danger. I wish I’d had the syringe with me when I saw you, but instead I had to shove you over the bridge. Sorry,’ she repeated.
‘You’re not sorry at all. You’ve just tried to kill me all over again.’
‘And me. And Candy,’ said Jane Hawkins. ‘Who else did you think should be stopped?’
Nicola said nothing. Candida stood up and went to within an inch of her, bending down and looking her in the face. ‘You’re mad,’ she said again. ‘How would driving us into three feet of water kill us? We saw you do it. We already knew you were my mother. Whatever did you think you could do to hide that now?’
‘I thought it was deeper. It made sense at the time,’ Nicola mumbled. ‘Nobody else knows but you three. Nobody at all.’
Simmy had been watching DI Moxon, standing quietly by the door with his two minions. How unusual it must be for them to hang back like this, with none of the noise and bustle and frightening shouts that one saw on documentaries. What would Ben have said about it? Shouldn’t they issue the convoluted police caution, without which they couldn’t quote anything they were hearing Nicola say?
‘But how?’ Gwen croaked, her face grey. ‘How did you sell a baby, when everyone says there was no way you managed a secret pregnancy?’
‘I sold an egg. Five eggs, to be exact. It was the first clinic to do egg donation. Only one of them worked, thank God.’
‘And they paid you? Was that legal?’ Everyone automatically looked at the police officers for an answer, but none came.
‘They called it expenses. It was Brenda’s idea, in the first place.’
‘Who the bloody hell is Brenda?’
‘Brenda Kitchener. She went to Australia, without me. She said she wanted a baby, but her ovaries didn’t work, and we decided she could have one of mine. But then she changed her mind, while I was in the clinic.’ Nicola’s sobs returned louder than ever. ‘She betrayed me.’
‘Her loss must have been my gain,’ said Jane Hawkins. ‘They phoned me late at night and said if my cycle was at the right point, they could offer me an egg at short notice. My husband and I drove ninety miles at midnight to get there in time.’ She smiled at Candida. ‘It was like a miracle. I was forty-two. It was absolutely the last chance.’
Candida had retreated a short way from Nicola. ‘This is really all my fault,’ she whispered. ‘I wasn’t satisfied with what they told me. I wanted the whole truth, the whole story. I ferreted out all the certificates and worked out who everybody was, and then I wanted to meet them all. I never had a grandmother. I liked the idea of Granny Joseph, so I sent her some flowers.’
Moxon finally stepped forward. He stood stiffly in front of Nicola and told her she would be taken in for questioning with regard to the unlawful killing of Miss Nancy Clark. Then he recited the caution. His colleagues escorted her out of the room. She made no resistance. Gwen watched her go with a ghastly grimace, lips pulled back to show her teeth, eyes bulging.
Then Moxon turned to Simmy. ‘You need a doctor to check you over,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you to one.’
‘I’m all right, I think. Except for my ribs. I hurt them when I tried to push the door open.’
‘Your crutches are still in the car, I suppose?’
‘I suppose they are. Will they go rusty?’
He was tired, drained, overloaded. The scene he had permitted to unfold without interruption, probably against all regular procedure, had been gruellingly emotional. Which perhaps explained why he laughed so outrageously at her innocent question.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Russell was outside the hotel with a small group of people Simmy didn’t recognise. Across the road there was a vehicle with a flashing yellow light, and men issuing loud orders to each other. The car, she realised, was being extracted from the lake. She was in a wheelchair, somehow provided by the hotel upon request. It had never occurred to her before that hotels might stock such things, but she was glad of it. She had been quietly worrying about her crutches for several minutes before Moxon mentioned them, and wondering how she was going to get home without them. The soaking skirt had been pulled off, and a large white towel wrapped around her lower half, giving rise to further embarrassment and worry.
‘I presume she is mad,’ she said to Moxon, who was personally pushing her chair. ‘She didn’t seem at all repentant.’
‘Not for me to say.’
‘Why didn’t you interrupt? It was so weird, the way you just stood there listening.’
‘I couldn’t see any reason to. Her partner needed to hear it and understand as much as possible. After this,
there might not be another chance. And I thought you might be feeling the same need.’
‘Good God! Don’t tell me you were doing it for me.’ She smiled up at her father, who was listening attentively but uncomprehendingly to this exchange. ‘Dad – this man is a real Sir Galahad.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Russell, his face a picture of doubt.
‘I was going to take her to a doctor,’ Moxon told him. ‘But she might be better off just going home and to bed. It’s up to you.’
Decisions did not come easily to Russell Straw. ‘What d’you think, Sim?’ he asked.
‘Home,’ she said. ‘I don’t need a doctor. They can send someone tomorrow to look at my wounds and put some new dressings on.’
‘Have they come off, then?’
‘I’m afraid so, but don’t worry. I don’t think any harm’s been done.’ She shivered. ‘Well, not physically, anyway.’
‘Get her warm,’ urged Moxon. ‘I’m needed somewhere.’ He leant over Simmy. ‘Somehow I feel I have you to thank for quite a lot of what’s happened.’
She shook her head. ‘No you haven’t. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything at all, right from the start. I was just there like a dummy.’ When she tried to think of somebody who had done something, the only name she could find was that of Nicola Joseph. And a quote from somewhere about evil prevailing when good people do nothing.
Russell and Angie got her into the house with some difficulty, the wheelchair’s mechanisms a mystery to all three of them. At last they were all in the warm kitchen, the heating turned recklessly high and mugs of hot, thick chocolate grasped in all three pairs of hands. ‘I need this as much as you do,’ said Angie. ‘After all that hassle getting you from the car.’
‘Sorry,’ said Simmy.
‘Tell us what happened,’ ordered Angie. ‘Every detail.’
‘No, I can’t.’ Images of the dark car filling with water turned the whole world into a terrifying trap that she couldn’t bear to confront. ‘It was too horrible. I’ll have nightmares for years over it, I expect.’