Poor Rachel. How they had betrayed her. I felt sick again.
‘Not yet, and you shouldn’t say anything. The police will need to speak to her at some point, and it’s important she hears it from them first.’
‘You’ll have to go with her,’ I said firmly. ‘We can’t expect her to do that on her own.’
‘Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it.’ Jake sounded tired.
We said our goodbyes and hung up. I wanted a drink, badly. A vodka. Or frankly, whatever I could get my hands on at this point. It was starting to get dark, the sky turning velvety, and the kitchen window cast an amber glow onto the lawn. I pulled myself up and headed back inside.
Mum was in bed. Auntie Sue had half-heartedly tried to talk me out of going to her, and I could see why. The smell of the room stirred deep memories within me.
The curtains were drawn, and I assumed they’d been that way all day. Despite the dark, I could make out the crescent of her body curled under the covers. She didn’t move when I came in. I sat down beside her and reached out a hand to her shoulder.
‘Amy?’ She whimpered.
I sighed. ‘No, Mum. It’s me, Izzy.’
She rolled over towards me. Her wet eyes glinted in the dark. ‘Sorry, love. I thought I was dreaming.’
I swivelled around, stretching my legs out alongside the length of her. I leaned over her pillow, cradling her head in the crook of my arm like a baby. Her hair smelled like apples. A sweet contrast to the sourness of the room. I breathed her in.
We hadn’t been this close – this loving – since before she’d disappeared. Amy and I had spent weeks watching her like this before she’d woken up one day and decided to go. I prayed to the universe that she would recover, willing her back to us. And hopefully this time she wouldn’t disappear completely first.
Auntie Sue was in the kitchen with the kids.
‘Where’s Rachel?’ I asked.
‘She’s gone to bed.’ She motioned upstairs. ‘I’ve put her in the spare room. Mike called, he’s on his way over. I got the impression she’d rather be on her own for now.’
She gestured to the kids with a barely perceptible nod, indicating there might have been more to the story than she could give right then.
‘Poor Rachel,’ I said, shaking my head.
We sat at the kitchen table, all of us at a loss for words. The silence hung over us like harbour mist. Auntie Sue looked drawn, and I could see the worry of the last few weeks etched on her face. The low light in the room cast shadows across her eyes, adding years. One hand covered her mouth, like she was suppressing a cry, or a scream, or something she might regret. She was well-practised in holding it together. But how much more could she take?
A car engine and the sound of a door slamming shut snapped me back to attention.
‘Daddy!’ said Betsy, looking to us for confirmation.
Mike didn’t make it past the doorway before Lucas and Betsy threw themselves at him. Hannah was slower to move, inching her way to her to father and folding her two younger siblings in her arms, making a knot of four.
I had almost forgotten about seeing Mike in Newcastle this afternoon. Not that it mattered so much now. I chided myself for being so suspicious of him. How could I have thought he would hurt Amy? His business dealings might be a bit dodgy, but that didn’t mean he’d been out to kill his wife. And I’d been so quick to assume the worst about him, when all along it was Amy who hadn’t been a saint. Amy who had been cheating with a man who turned out to be more dangerous than she could have imagined.
He was worn down. Threadbare. I recognised in him the same unease I was feeling, the same sense of emptiness, of being stretched to breaking point. And as hard as things had been until now, it was about to get even tougher. There were going to be some difficult questions asked very publicly about Amy and Mike’s private life. Nothing would remain sacred.
Auntie Sue and I herded the kids up with coats, bags and shoes, and we hugged our goodbyes. I promised to call over in the morning.
‘Cup of tea?’ said Auntie Sue.
I was already looking in the fridge. ‘Got anything stronger?’
‘Good call.’ She retrieved a bottle of sherry from the dresser in the corner.
I knocked back my first glass in one go. Auntie Sue looked at me with a raised eyebrow, then shrugged her shoulders and did the same. I poured us both a second.
We sat like that in an easy silence, each of us too dazed to talk and empty of words. A stillness had settled over the house, and only the clock on the mantelpiece sounded out the passing minutes. At last, Auntie Sue spoke.
‘There’s got to be some mistake. Why would Phil Turner want to hurt Amy? Why would anyone want to hurt her? It was an accident… I can’t work out why they’d think someone did this deliberately.’
I shuddered, saying nothing.
Auntie Sue drew a deep breath and shook her head. ‘I don’t know if I can do this again.’ She nodded upwards, upstairs, to where Mum was lying in the dark.
I finished my second glass of sherry and poured a third. My head was swimming and I needed to calm my thoughts so that I could focus. There was too much hurt, and I knew only one way to numb the pain.
‘If it’s any consolation to you, Izzy, I know what you’re going through.’ She pulled her lips inwards, wincing at the memory, and leaned forward in her chair. She smiled at me with sad blue eyes as she raised her sherry. ‘So, let’s toast the aunties.’
‘To the sisters who pick up the pieces,’ I said, chinking my glass against hers.
‘Indeed,’ she said, taking a big sip.
I looked at her, seeing her more clearly than I had in years. She wasn’t just Auntie Sue. She was a whole person, a woman who had left her life to look after me and Amy. Twenty-five years later, here she still was. Still picking up the pieces.
It had never occurred to me how much she must have given up for us. One day she had just waltzed into our lives and started looking after us, filling the vacuum left by our parents, but giving us just enough space for us not to resent her. Caring for us just the right amount.
I had a sudden urge to know the answers to all the questions that the teenage Izzy had been either too self-centred or too preoccupied to ask.
‘You know, I never really thanked you properly. For everything you did for us.’
Auntie Sue gave a little shrug, a barely perceptible tilt of her head, and filled our glasses again, higher this time. I took a sip. ‘Except I never knew – I never thought to ask you…’ I struggled for the right words. ‘I guess I never thought about it before. How much you gave up.’
She sat back in her seat, the leather of the chair creaking, and settled in to her story.
‘I would have done anything for my sister. I was always the practical, sensible one – even though your mum was six years older. We were close, growing up, despite the age gap. Your grandma worked full-time - still quite unusual, for that generation, so me and your mum were often left to fend for ourselves, albeit with the help of a full-time housekeeper. Nobody thought twice about things like that back then.
‘Your mother, my god, she was dangerously dreamy. She would walk upstairs and forgot what she’d gone for. She was forever losing things, and I spent a good deal of my time looking for whatever she had misplaced. Once, she came home with only one shoe!’
She chuckled, and I could picture Mum in her bare-socked foot.
‘I loved being outdoors. Even in bad weather I’d be outside, hiding in one of the dens I’d built in the grounds of our house. My most constant companion was the gardener, an old man called Tye. He taught me how to chop and store firewood, set mole traps, and forage for mushrooms in the woods. He knew different types of lichen by sight, and could tell you what the weather would do based on the colour of the moss. I would follow him around, hanging on his every word.
‘Mum and Dad were determined that both of us would follow them into medicine, but Tye had inspired me to follow a differ
ent path. I graduated in Geology and horrified my parents by accepting a job in Scotland, working on rotation aboard an oil rig off the coast of Aberdeen. You should have seen your grandpa’s face when I told them.
‘Still, at least it was a career. Your mum never quite found her footing. She studied History of Art, which, I think, your grandma pushed her to do in the hope that it would help her find a husband. She came back to Northumberland with a degree but no prospect of a job or wedding. She moped and moped and moped.’
I tried to do the maths in my head. It would have been a few years after Mum graduated until she met Dad. That was a lot of moping.
Auntie Sue took a sip of sherry. ‘So you can imagine how unapologetically thrilled everyone was when your mum got along well with one of the new junior doctors from the hospital. Dad – your grandpa, that is – invited Edward around for dinner one evening. They encouraged the courtship and were delighted when Edward eventually proposed.’
‘That sideshow – the wedding, then you and Amy arriving – meant I could settle comfortably into my own life. Finally, I could live the way I wanted to, away from the scrutiny and expectations. It was only Aberdeen but it felt a world away from the village. I wasn’t Susan anymore, I was Sue. I got my hair cut into a pixie crop and started wearing dangly earrings.
‘I made just enough visits home to deter them all from coming up to Aberdeen. Don’t get me wrong – I loved coming to see you girls, but I was always glad to get back again. I was young, carefree, and living life my way.’
‘Until I got a phone call one day from a kind nurse, who told me that my brother-in-law was in Alnwick Hospital and my family was asking for me.’
I nodded, remembering that awful time.
Auntie Sue wiped a tear from her eye. ‘I had to prop your mum up at the funeral, quite understandable, of course. I’d planned to stay for a week afterwards, helping her find her feet, helping you and Amy. When it became clear that she wasn’t bouncing back, I took another week off work. Back in Aberdeen, I’d called her every day. She seemed to be improving, although some days were better than others.’
Those days – the darkest days of my life – came back to me now. Mum swinging between episodes of depression during which she lay in her bed in the dark, and hyperactive phases where she would describe her dreams in forensic, vivid detail. She would sit outside in the dark, looking for patterns in the stars, convinced that Dad was communicating to her through the universe. Amy and I had worried that if anyone saw her like that, she would be taken away. So we hid it from the world, including Auntie Sue.
‘She stopped coming to the phone, so I would just speak to you and Amy. You girls used to tell me everything was fine, and I believed you. And you sounded OK, for the most part. There were days when I had an uneasy feeling. And of course, I longed to come and see you, but I was stuck on an oil rig 120 miles off the coast. There wasn’t a lot I could do, besides worry.’ She bit her lip.
‘And then, one morning, Diana Wheeler called. I got a message from the office to call her back, and when I saw the name on the notice, my blood ran cold. I could barely dial the number, my hands were shaking so badly. She assured me there was no emergency, but she was worried that people hadn’t seen your mum out for a while, and she thought it best if I could come home.’
‘Well, I was out of there like a flash – they even scrambled an emergency helicopter to take me back to shore. I went back to my flat, threw some clothes a bag and drove straight to Seahouses. And of course, you girls admitted everything – or at least, everything that you knew.
‘I was furious with our Anne – utterly livid. But I had to hide it from you. You’d been doing such a good job of taking care of each other, but you don’t leave grieving teenage girls alone like that. I thought I’d never forgive your mum for what she did.’
A familiar wave of anger rose in me, too. I pushed it away, willing the swell to calm.
‘It was clear that you were ready for help, though. You slept for almost two days, do you remember?’
I nodded.
‘I didn’t know how I’d cope, at first,’ Auntie Sue said. ‘But the three of us muddled through those first few weeks, and before long, I couldn’t imagine life without you and Amy. In the end, there was no choice – I had to give up my old life. I thought I’d go back, eventually, picking up the pieces and carrying on from where I’d left off. But the weeks became months, and then years, and that life slowly faded into memories.’
My gut wrenched with a pang of familiar grief for the life that Auntie Sue had made and lost, and the pain of being asked to sacrifice everything for someone else. My job, my friends, my life in Hong Kong, the life I’d created for myself – it was still going on, just without me in it.
There was something else she wasn’t telling me, a secret that flashed behind the sadness in her eyes, betraying its true depth. She had lost more than she was letting on. And suddenly it occurred to me. Auntie Sue had always been single. It was one of those things that had just been, that I hadn’t questioned, and the circumstances of how she came into our lives meant that I’d never thought to ask.
‘You were with someone, weren’t you? In Aberdeen?’
‘Yes. I was, yes.’ Auntie Sue’s eyes glistened.
I gulped hard. ‘And you gave him up? For us?’
Auntie Sue took a sip of sherry and nodded. ‘Her’, she said. ‘And her name was Emily.’
She wiped away a tear on the back of her hand and my heart broke again – a tightening in my chest that was harsher and deeper than any pain I’d ever known. The irony of my situation was suddenly too much to bear, a parallel line drawn across my family history and binding us in an unbreakable curse. I wept for everything we had all lost.
Chapter Fifteen
I stared at the ceiling from my makeshift bed on the sofa. It was early, too early to be awake, and the house was still. Even though Puffin Cottage was only a short walk away, I had stayed over at Mum and Auntie Sue’s so that I could be there when Rachel woke up. My grief – all the many losses – had balled into one, a tangled knot of wool, so that I couldn’t see where one ended and another began.
I ached for a chance to ask Amy what she had been thinking and how she had got herself in to such a messy situation. I wouldn’t even have been mad with her. We had spent our whole lives easily forgiving each other’s misdemeanours, and this could have been like all those other times when we would argue, sulk, and quickly fall back into the established rhythm of us. And while having an affair was worse than any fuck-ups either of us had made before, I just wanted to see her. It didn’t matter what she had done, or the hurt she had caused, or the chain of events she had set in motion. I craved her face, her smell, the sound of her voice. I just wanted my sister.
After reminiscing with Auntie Sue the night before, I had more sympathy for Mike. Losing Dad had been hard for us, but it had almost killed Mum, and she had never properly recovered from it. As difficult as this was for me, my grief for Amy was nothing next to the pain Mike had to deal with.
The dark clouds of a murder investigation and a trial were gathering on our horizon. There would be courtrooms, lawyers and judges, journalists. Amy’s life would be ripped open and forensically examined, then held up for everyone to see. Nothing would be sacred, and there would be nowhere to shelter from the truth – or from the hurt. I could only imagine what it would do to Mike. I needed to be better for him, and for the kids. And Rachel, and Mum, and Auntie Sue… I needed to be better for all of them.
I wasn’t going back to Hong Kong. I couldn’t. Whatever I’d had before, wherever I had thought my life was going, that was over now. It would be easier for me to cope if I accepted it and moved on. A trial could take months. We would be battered and bruised by the process, from the scrutiny on us, and it would take years to recover – if we ever did.
I had to acknowledge what Amy had asked of me regarding the children, and I wondered if there was more to her wish than it first seemed. Had she k
nown that Phil could do something like this, and made plans just in case? Was that what she meant by running out of time?
Auntie Sue had saved me and Amy, that much had always been clear to me. And now it was my turn. The circumstances weren’t the same – at least Mike was still here. But a murder investigation would shake each of us to our core. It was my job to shelter the children from the storm that was heading our way and I knew then that I would do whatever it took to protect them, however long it took. It would be ten years until Betsy turned eighteen, and by that time, the life I knew today would be long gone.
With my mind made up, I could focus on what to do next. The first priority was to resign from my job and sort out my apartment in Hong Kong, then find somewhere to live here and think about finding some kind of work. I wondered if Mrs Wheeler would agree to a long-term let on Puffin Cottage. Maybe I could move in with Mike and the kids? Their place was big enough… But that would be wrong. Perhaps Rachel and I could get a place and grow together into our new roles – the spinster aunt and the betrayed wife of the murderer. It was almost poetic.
Those were the big things, the long-term stuff. The most pressing concern was how to get Mum, the kids, and Mike – not to mention Rachel – through the next few days. There would be more questions from the police, and at some point, very soon, Phil would probably be charged with Amy’s murder.
The thought knocked the wind out of me, and I shuddered, hugging my knees to my chest for comfort.
I heard soft footsteps coming down the stairs and the door slowly creaked open.
It was Rachel, fully dressed in yesterday’s clothes. ‘Want a cup of tea?’ she whispered.
She knew her way around Mum’s kitchen and didn’t have to search for teabags, mugs or sugar. I closed the door so we didn’t wake anyone.
‘How did you sleep?’ I asked.
Her complexion was ashy, and without make-up, the shadows under her eyes were purple. ‘Not great.’ She leaned back on the counter and wrapped her arms across her chest as we silently waited for the kettle to boil.
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