Nemesis

by Marley, Louise

  Siân’s gaze slid away. “Yes.”

  “You’ve had no contact from him in all this time?”

  “No.”

  Natalie gave up. Taking her phone from her bag, she pretended to check her messages. In reality she had none, not even a good luck one from Simon.

  As the car pulled up outside her hotel, she glanced across at Siân. “See you at dinner tonight?”

  Siân inclined her head but said nothing.

  Natalie headed up to her room to shower and change for dinner. When she arrived at the restaurant later than evening, to be effusively greeted by Julia and the rest of the editorial team, Siân was conspicuous by her absence.

  *

  The following day, another PR girl took over from Siân and the remainder of the book tour passed without incident. By late afternoon Natalie was back in Calahurst. She let herself into her apartment and dumped her overnight bag in her bedroom. A large mug of Java Sumatra should wake her up, and then she could catch up with one of her favourite TV shows. The thought of dialling out for pizza and opening a bottle of wine also appealed.

  Her kitchen was tidier than she remembered. She put it down to her cleaner having a blitz, until she picked up her kettle and found it was warm.

  There was a bottle of wine missing from the rack and the oven had been set to ‘reheat’. Inside, on the centre shelf, were a couple of small green cartons with the familiar gold logo of the local Indian takeaway stamped on one side.

  Simon was on the sofa watching TV. On the coffee table was the remainder of a takeaway, packed neatly back into its box. Natalie could smell the coriander and cumin before she saw the green carton - the twin of the one in her oven. Sometimes she felt he knew her better than she knew herself. And that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

  “Hello,” she said, and hoped she didn’t sound nervous. “I wasn’t expecting to see you tonight.” After the row they’d had the last time she’d seen him, she hadn’t expected to see him at all.

  He clicked the mute on the TV remote. “You know you’re always forgetting to eat. I thought you’d be hungry after your trip, so I bought a couple of takeaways.”

  “Thanks.” She slumped onto the sofa beside him, sliding off her shoes and squeezing her toes into the thick white pile of the rug. After a day crushed in high heels it was bliss.

  “There’s also a bottle of wine chilling in the fridge,” he said.

  It was as though the argument had never happened.

  She smiled at him. “Shall I fetch a couple of glasses?”

  “Not for me, I’m driving.” He indicated an empty coke can, squashed into the takeaway carton. “I’ve got to take the drama club for an extra rehearsal later this evening. I’d cry off but we’re doing The Wizard of Oz this year and they’ve worked really hard.”

  “You’re leaving already?”

  “I had thought you would return earlier.”

  “Then why don’t you come back after drama club? Please?”

  His mouth finally curved into a smile. “After two hours of listening to Year 7 murder Follow the Yellow Brick Road? I’ll be shattered! It’ll have to be another time, Natalie.”

  He leant forward to kiss her cheek - the kind of kiss you gave a maiden aunt, thought Natalie, and re-angled her face so that the kiss landed on the corner of her mouth - not quite on target, but good enough. Although she noticed he kept his eyes open throughout, so she wasn’t quite forgiven.

  “Perhaps we could meet up at the weekend?” she suggested.

  He got up from the sofa, scooping up the takeaway carton from the coffee table as he passed. “If you think you can fit me into your schedule.”

  If that was meant as a joke, he really needed to work on his delivery.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, not quite sure what she was apologising for. “You knew I was going to London, so why did you even come round?”

  “I had the mistaken idea that you might want to see me.” With that, he disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, presumably to load his one knife, one fork and small glass tumbler into the dishwasher.

  Natalie felt like screaming. Sometimes Simon could be so infuriating. She didn’t understand him at all.

  She noticed he’d left a DVD behind on the table and leant forward to pick it up. She thought it might be a recording of the rehearsals he was doing for The Wizard of Oz, but written across the disc in his distinctive handwriting it said: The Camilla Hoffman Show.

  Oh bugger! Had he watched it? No wonder he was in a mood. But if he had seen it, why hadn’t he mentioned it?

  When he walked back into the sitting room, she held the DVD up. “You recorded my TV interview?”

  “Yes, I made some notes on your performance. When you have the time, I’ll take you through them.”

  “Notes?” She felt a sense of unease steal over her, that took her right back to her teenage years. “I thought it went OK. I sold the product, dropped in some personal stuff, everything you trained me to do … ”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were planning a book about your sister?”

  At least now it was out in the open.

  She hesitated for a moment, before admitting the truth. “You would have stopped me writing it.”

  “I would have counselled caution,” he said.

  When he didn’t say more, she said, “You understand why I had to write it?”

  He regarded her for a few moments and then said, “No, actually. I appreciate you have unresolved issues regarding your sister’s death, but there are other ways you could have dealt with them.”

  “Like visit a shrink? Look how well that turned out.”

  He grimaced. “Charles is that kinky ‘doctor’ character, right? Why didn’t you ever tell me the whole of it, Natalie? You know I’d have bloody killed him - strung him up by his own fucking tie backs.”

  Natalie felt suddenly cold. In the TV interview she hadn’t mentioned the thick cord that Charles used to tie back the curtains in his office - and all the other things he’d thought to do with it. So how would Simon know? Unless -

  “You’ve read the book … ”

  “One of my ex-students now works for the Calahurst Echo. He saw an advance review copy and phoned me for a quote. I was grateful for the heads up. At least now when I’m door-stepped by the press, I’ll know what I’m supposed to have done. Because you do realise what you’ve accused me of, don’t you? Abusing my position as a teacher to seduce one of my students?”

  “No one is going to think ‘the teacher’ is you.”

  “Sometimes your naïvety astounds me. I’ll be the first person they’ll suspect. Or, if I’m lucky, perhaps the second after James Fitzpatrick. There’s nothing people love more than the rumour of a scandal, particularly if it’s unsubstantiated. Those tiny provincial minds can run riot with very little evidence. You should know. You’ve had a lifetime of experience. And therein lies the problem. People will look at you and me, and think, ‘Ah yes, he’s done it once, he must have done it before’.”

  Too late she remembered that if there was one thing guaranteed to wind Simon up, it was to be reminded of the way they had first met.

  “We didn’t begin our relationship until I’d come back from university.”

  “After reading your book, do you think anyone is going to believe that? Journalists will ask around and soon find out how I personally coached you through your exams, helping you get the necessary grades to get into university. They’ll want to know why I went to all that trouble for you. The kinder ones might suggest I felt sorry for you, the not-so-kind will say it was because I wanted to get into the knickers of a sixteen-year-old girl.”

  “Simon!”

  “I suppose what I find most hurtful,” he was saying, “is your utter lack of loyalty. All credit to you - you took the opportunities you were given and you ran with them. Look at everything you’ve achieved, all those books you’ve sold, the millions you’ve made. But while you’re living up here in your ivory tower,
do you ever consider the rest of us? Do you ever think about what it must be like to be me, stuck at that bloody school forever and never progressing beyond Head of English & Drama, all because of my relationship with you?”

  She was ashamed to realise she had never given it a second thought. “Is that why James Fitzpatrick was promoted over you?”

  “The Governors were quite matter-of-fact about it.”

  “Oh, Simon, I’m so sorry - ”

  He sighed. “That’s your problem, Natalie. You never think first but you’re always sorry afterwards - and I’ve got the point where I’ve had enough. You’ve written this book and stirred everything up - what is it that you’re expecting to happen? Do think that Welsh traveller is going to turn up here after all this time and say, ‘Yep, it’s a fair cop, I did it’? It isn’t going to happen! You’ve moved on from your appalling childhood and made a huge success of your life, but now you’ve written this grubby little book reminding everyone who you are and where you came from. I think it’s a huge mistake, I do really.”

  “I didn’t need to write the book - my entire life story is one click away on Google - but I’m not ashamed. Why should I be? If I’d wanted to hide from my past, I could have changed my name and moved away. This way, I can be an inspiration to others - ”

  “An inspiration?” he derided. “Listen to yourself! You’d have been more of an inspiration if you’d done something different. As far as I remember, it was always Sarah who wanted to be a writer, not you. Yet from the moment she died you took on her dreams and aspirations, you cut your hair in the same style, wear the same kind of tarty clothes and even dated the same men. It was as though you didn’t trust yourself enough to be ‘you’.”

  “That isn’t true - ”

  “Of course it’s true! All I ever hear from you is Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. You need to move on from the morbid fascination you have with her death. And get rid of these fucking water lilies,” he gestured towards the prints she had hung up on the wall, “they make my stomach turn over just looking at them.”

  “What? No, I can’t, I won’t - ”

  “Then let me do it for you.”

  He reached out and lifted one of her water lily prints from the wall. It was one of her favourites, somewhat larger than the others, and was a copy of a panel Monet had intended to hang in the Orangerie, in the Tuileries gardens in Paris. Before she could get her head around what he was intending to do, Simon had raised the picture high above his head - and then deliberately dropped it. As soon as it hit the floor, the whole thing shattered; the glass exploding out across the room.

  “There you are,” he said, slightly breathlessly, “that wasn’t so difficult.”

  Natalie didn’t know how to react. She wanted desperately to cry, but thought that if he knew how much she had been affected by the broken picture he was likely to go ahead and smash all of the others. She was vaguely aware of a stinging pain from the sole of her foot, where she must have trodden on a shard of glass, but it hardly seemed important. So she waited, perfectly still, to see what he would do next.

  “This obsession you have is consuming you,” he said, and she could tell by the low, tight way he was speaking, that he was so utterly furious he could hardly get the words out. “If you want to continue with this relationship, if you ever want me to move in with you, if you want to get married and have kids and all the rest of that romantic crap you keep harping on about, I want all evidence of Sarah purged from this apartment. Do you understand? Everything. You can phone up your publishers and get them to pull that bloody book too. Somewhere inside your head is the real Natalie Grove, not this shadow of Sarah. One day I’d like to meet her, but until that moment you can consider our relationship terminated.”

  16

  Simon had asked her to choose.

  She’d chosen Sarah.

  Without another word he’d left, leaving her to clear up the broken glass and wonder at his complete insensitivity. OK, so he was trying to put a point across, but he knew how much these Monet prints meant to her - one for every year of Sarah’s death. If he was unhappy with her behaviour, there were other ways he could have dealt with it. Why did he have to be so nasty, so cruel?

  She was better off without him.

  If felt weird though, to be single after all this time. To have no one to confide in, to consult, or to answer to. Weird, but good too. Maybe she’d ‘celebrate’ with that bottle of wine.

  But when she tipped the glass into the kitchen bin, she saw a note on the table. It was a single sheet of paper torn from a shorthand notebook, written in Simon’s hand, and it wafted onto the floor as she passed, catching her attention. She picked it up.

  Charles phoned - urgent.

  The number listed was for Charles’s mobile phone but he didn’t answer until the seventh ring. She imagined him lying in bed, reaching for the phone over a sexy little blonde who bore a remarkable resemblance to the girl called Summer.

  “Speaking,” he said in his usual arrogant way, without bothering to state his name. In the background she could hear a dinner party. Soft music and gentle voices, the chink of glasses and the clatter of cutlery on plates. It was a life going on as normal.

  “Hi, it’s Natalie,” she said. Her foot was beginning to sting. She lifted it up to check on the plaster she’d hastily slapped over the wound. It was grubby but still intact. She hobbled into the sitting room and dropped onto the sofa.

  “Thank you for returning my call,” he said. The sound of the party seemed to fade, as though Charles had also moved to another room. “Your father says he wants to talk to you. He was most insistent.”

  “Is he having one of his good days?” She could not resist the taunt.

  Charles either didn’t understand what she meant or didn’t care. “It’s up to you whether you see him,” he said. “Visiting time is almost over but I’ll tell the staff to expect you. I’m popping by myself later. We can talk then if you wish.” The line went dead.

  Her shoes lay on the floor beside the sofa. She carefully squeezed her sore feet into them and headed for the door.

  It wasn’t as though she had anything better to do.

  *

  John was alone in his room. He was sat in his wheelchair, staring through the window, even though there was nothing out there but the dark. A copy of her book lay on the table beside him.

  She picked it up. “Where did you get this?”

  He didn’t turn his head, or even acknowledge her presence, so she threw the book back onto the table. It skidded across the polished wood and came to rest against the ceramic pot which held his citrus plant. The glossy green leaves quivered but the lemons did not fall. John didn’t even turn his head.

  “I told you I’d give you an autographed copy, so why did you have to go and buy one?”

  His hands moved from his lap to grip the wheels of the wheelchair and manoeuvred it round to face her.

  “Or did someone give it to you?” she asked him.

  He let his gaze drop to the citrus plant and pulled the ceramic pot a few inches towards him, so it returned to its central position.

  “Does it make you look bad?” he said at last. “Me, having to buy my own copy? Your mother always worried about what other people thought.”

  Was it any wonder, when any given day Magda was liable to have a number of bruises she could not easily explain away?

  John picked her book up, flipping the pages until he reached the back, pausing at the black and white photograph of Natalie and Sarah on the inside cover. Then he shut it abruptly.

  “I thought you wanted to see me?” she said. “I thought it was urgent?”

  The book was dropped back onto the table, making her jump. “Not urgent,” he said. “Important.”

  She waited for the revelation. It took a long time coming.

  “I did follow your career,” he said. “I never read your other books - fiction ain’t my thing - but this one was different. You can pretend all you like that it’s made
up, that it’s about a man trying to find out who killed his wife, but I can see what’s really there. It’s about you and Sarah.”

  Natalie kept quiet. This was the first conversation she’d had with her father since - well, ever. She did not want the break the spell. Not until she’d extracted every last piece of information from him.

  “I knew you were writing it,” he said. “I knew you were asking questions and nosing around like the bloody police. Didn’t get very far, did you?”

  It was true that she’d revisited those who had given evidence at Sarah’s inquest, and had asked them to tell her their stories again. It wasn’t a secret; she didn’t care who knew - yet her father was locked away in here, with no visitors except for herself.

  “Who told you I was asking questions?”

  “You’re an idiot,” he continued, neatly evading having to give an answer. “Digging over stuff that’s better left buried? Who do you think is going to be interested?”

  “Don’t you want to know what happened to Sarah?” she asked him. “Sometimes I think I’m the only person in the world who cares.”

  His face reset to inscrutable. “Sarah’s dead. Knowing the details won’t bring her back.”

  “It’ll help me achieve closure.”

  “Closure? Don’t quote that bloody doctor at me! I get enough of his crap during the week.”

  “OK, OK; it will help me get on with the rest of my life. Is that better? I feel I’m living my life in limbo, marking time until I find out the truth.”

  For a moment he said nothing, then, “On TV, you talked about Sarah having a boyfriend who was a gardener? Did he work at the castle? Did I know him?”

  Natalie saw an opportunity. John had always hated the idea of his daughters maturing into young women, of them wearing make-up and suggestive clothing, and forming relationships with men. It was time to speed things up a little.

  She rested her hands on each side of his wheelchair and leant towards him. “‘The gardener’, ‘the teacher’, ‘the doctor’ - these are all names that appear in Sarah’s diary. They’re the code names of the men Sarah had sex with.” She stared right into his eyes. “So cut the crap and tell me who you think ‘the gardener’ was.”