by Ann Troup
That was the trouble with lies: they always came back and bit you in the arse eventually.
He knew for a fact that over the years Amy had excused his lack of meaningful relationships, his need for solitude, and his moody silences as chronic grief. That was Amy; she could always take something dark and weave it into a bright shiny ideal just by deciding it was the way things should be. Charlie wished he found it so easy to put such a spin on life. The romantic fantasy that Amy had manifested had satisfied her enough that she hadn’t pressed Charlie for details about Rachel; she didn’t want to cause him pain. That was his girl.
If only she knew, he thought, his face contorting into a wry grimace. Charlie had never had the guts to shatter Amy’s illusions about him. An act of cowardice that he was only just beginning to realise had been a big, no, a huge mistake.
There had been other women over the years; he wasn’t a monk. He had never taken any of them home – didn’t want Amy to meet them, and didn’t want them involved with her. So, all he had managed was to establish few brief liaisons that had fizzled out quicker than a damp match. He could honestly say that overall it didn’t bother him. It wasn’t as if his track record with women would stand up to much scrutiny. Something of the kiss of death had followed him where partners were concerned.
Not that Rachel was dead, far from it, though there had been times over the years that he’d wished she were. How much simpler it would have been to just grieve her loss in the same way he had grieved for Patsy, but from behind the bars of a different kind of prison.
Then again, his relationship with Patsy had been much simpler. She had been another one, a woman who couldn’t take him as he was, but at least Patsy hadn’t felt the need to save him from himself like most women did. Why did they always have a desire to save him, when the only thing he’d ever needed saving from was them? Patsy had wanted many things, money mostly. It had taken her death for him to realise that she’d never wanted him at all.
Rachel was the only one who had ever accepted him unchanged, or so he’d thought at the time. That was why hers had been the biggest betrayal of them all. He almost laughed aloud, stopping himself before he disturbed Rachel.
Any chance that anyone had of saving him was so far in the past they’d need a TARDIS to get to it. Perhaps what those women had always said would prove to be true after all. He would die a lonely old man.
If Amy ever found out about Rachel, he was certain of it.
***
Rachel pretended to sleep, trying desperately to relax so that she would look more convincing to Charlie.
Anything to avoid having to talk to him.
All she wanted to do was to get back to the flat, Lila’s flat. Then she could shut the past out again and go back to the half-life where she had hidden safely for years. An impossible feat now that the biggest part of her past was sitting right next to her, about to invade the only sanctuary she had. What would he make of her existence? Maybe he would be shocked to see the way she lived, just a wistful ghost haunting another woman’s life.
Nothing in the flat had been changed since the day Lila had died. Not a thing. Even the dust just recirculated and settled back exactly where it had come from. Lila’s clothes still hung in the wardrobe, her perfume still sat on the dressing table, her rings remained on the mantelpiece – all as if she had just stepped out of the room. The furniture was exactly as Lila had placed it, still hiding the bald spots on the rugs and covering the stains. Rachel had preserved it all. Like a more sanitary Miss Havisham, she had conserved Lila’s existence in an eternal tableau of fond memories.
There was no bitterness in her desire to maintain Lila’s home intact, just a need to hang onto something old, familiar and warm. Lila’s flat was a home in the way that The Limes never had been, or could have been. Lila had been happy in her London flat, away from her dysfunctional family and all that had come with it. Rachel tried relentlessly to preserve that happiness, constantly hoping that the essence of it would magically transfer itself to her one day.
The flat was her bolthole, her sanity. To someone else it would look precisely the opposite. Hard evidence of her instability. Proof of her inability to cope with real life. Would anybody else understand that if you could force time to stand still and preserve a perfect moment of tranquillity that you could step in and out of that place at will?
Lila (or strictly speaking Lilian) Porter had been the polar opposite of her brother. From what little she’d been told about her father, Rachel had deduced that where William had been dull, Lila had been a bright beacon of life. Where he had been mean-spirited, she had been generous to a fault. Where William had resented, Lila had embraced. In Lila’s company, everyone felt alive. Even Valerie had grudgingly liked her, until Lila had died and had left everything to Rachel. After that Valerie hadn’t liked anyone much.
Frances had needled Rachel to sell the flat – it was London real estate, worth a small fortune. Life-changing in the right hands. Valerie hadn’t thought that Rachel’s were remotely the right hands. Rachel had measured wealth differently and had hung onto the flat even though her decision had been one of the issues that had permanently damaged the family ties. The other issue she still couldn’t, and wouldn’t, talk about.
Ever.
Chapter 8
Delia tried Charlie’s mobile number and listened to the dull uninspiring voice on the message service for the umpteenth time. There was no point in leaving yet another message; he hadn’t bothered to pick up the last three. Why the bloody hell did people bother having mobile phones if they were always going to leave the bloody things switched off?!
In frustration, she slammed her own phone hard on the table, dislodging the battery cover in the process and sending it skipping over the tabletop and onto the floor. ‘Sod it!’ she hissed, bending to retrieve it and groaning at the stiffness in her back. She couldn’t be bothered to fiddle with it to reattach it to the body of the phone, damned thing.
A horrible sensation was unfurling in her gut, an instinct that something was about to go horribly wrong. Charlie was incommunicado and Rachel bloody Porter was back on the scene. Adding two and two together she was coming up with nothing other than four, no matter how hard she tried to make it five. If she was right and he was with Rachel, they might well have another dead body on their hands by the time she caught up with him and throttled him for his foolishness. She was too old for all this, and so was Charlie. He was a bloody idiot where that girl was concerned, always had been, always would be.
Delia just had to hope that Rachel wasn’t as big an idiot. If she was, then God help them all.
***
By the time Ratcliffe and Angie reached the hospital that evening, having been told that Frances had been woken, she had lost consciousness again.
According to her doctor she hadn’t said anything of note during the short time that she had been lucid. Ratcliffe’s only conversation had been with Peter Haines, Frances’s rather urbane yet supercilious husband, whose main concern remained the worry that his good name was being linked with something as tawdry as murder. Haines was adamant that he didn’t know where Stella had gone, but had reluctantly agreed to supply a photo of her, though he couldn’t guarantee a recent one.
He had only conceded to their request because Ratcliffe told him that his wife’s purge of The Limes had been so meticulous that they had failed to turn up even the remotest clue as to Stella’s whereabouts – or her intentions. Even with a photograph and the help of the press they would be clutching at straws. If a person as nondescript as Stella wanted to disappear, it wasn’t particularly difficult to make a thorough job of it.
Thwarted by Frances’s insentient state, Ratcliffe called it a day and sent Angie home. God knows they all needed a decent night’s sleep – this case was getting harder by the minute and he wanted to face it head on and fresh in the morning. He’d switched his phone to silent earlier as per hospital policy and hadn’t thought to check it until he got into his car.
He assumed that the message he’d received when it had vibrated in his pocket was from his wife, nagging to know when he would be home. It wasn’t. It was from Charlie Jones, informing him that he’d had to take Rachel back to London to see her doctor. As a man Ratcliffe saw that as a very good idea – the woman was apt to flake out all over the place in his experience, so some medical attention would be a fine thing. As a copper he saw it as yet more buggeration. He hadn’t quite finished with Ms Porter. Having her back in London was going to be an almighty pain in his arse. As if he didn’t have enough of those already.
***
Surprisingly there was a parking space right outside the flat. Instinctively Charlie reversed in and switched off the engine, only afterwards thinking that he should just drop her and drive away. Just the same as all those times long ago when he had stood on this very pavement, looking up at her windows with his courage failing and forcing him to leave things well alone. He had always driven away.
‘Are you going to come in?’ she asked, the tremor in her voice informing him that she was fervently hoping that he wouldn’t.
Out of stubbornness he didn’t even bother to reply, just got out of the van and followed her up the steps into the building.
Inside the flat he remained silent as the wraith of Lila Porter wrapped itself around him like a stale smell. The past felt almost tangible and he had the sensation that he was being ripped backwards through time. That nothing had materially changed in the place was weird; that Rachel had never bothered to change it was stranger still.
In resistance to his reaction he tried to put a positive spin on it and thought of Amy. How she would love this place. She would see it as a giant dressing-up box where she could pretend she was someone else entirely. She had always told him that her ultimate fantasy would be to travel back in time.
It seemed that her mother had achieved it.
Rachel hovered in the kitchen doorway, showing her reluctance to allow him further into her domain. ‘I can do coffee if you don’t mind it black.’
Charlie glanced around again, glimpsing her existence, finding it wanting and dusty and faded. ‘OK.’
He followed her into the kitchen and sat at the table under the window, keeping her in his line of sight, but maintaining a safe distance while he watched her fumble with the kettle. ‘So, what do you do with yourself then? Are you working?’ he asked, as if they were old acquaintances who had just bumped into each other. He felt as banal as the question had sounded.
She poured water in the cups and shook her head. ‘No.’
‘What do you do with yourself then?’ he pressed as she put the cups onto saucers and placed the whole paraphernalia on a tray just to bring it the few yards to the table. Just like her mother would have done – anything to keep up appearances.
She put the tray down, immediately silencing the rattling china that had been so effectively serenading her anxiety. ‘I read a lot, walk, watch the world go by. Time passes – I don’t notice it much.’
He picked up his cup, its dainty fragility looking incongruous in his calloused hand. It almost made him smile. ‘I half expected to find Stella here.’
Rachel hovered, seemingly reluctant to pick up her own cup. He noticed that her hands were still trembling. She gave a wry smile and shook her head. ‘She would never come here. Lila scared her. She had too much life for Stella.’
That a woman long dead yet still so tangibly present had the ability to dismay the living in such an assiduous way scared him a little too. ‘You know I said that Amy thinks you’re dead? She thinks that our relationship is sad and romantic and that I’m tortured by unrequited love and grief.’ He laughed, the sound of it full of scorn. ‘I’ve never had the heart to put her straight. And neither should you – whatever happens she needs to be kept out of this.’
‘I suppose it’s better for her to think that she was left by someone who didn’t choose to go,’ she said quietly. ‘But it’s going to be hard to stop her reading papers or watching the news. I can’t be responsible for that, but she’ll never find out from me.’
Charlie couldn’t help it. The bitterness of what Rachel had done had been burning a hole in his gut for years. That she could talk to him so calmly about it just felt like insult heaped upon injury. ‘Better than knowing that your own mother dumped you without a word? Yeah, I’d say so. Anything would be better than that,’ he said with potent bitterness because the truth of her words illustrated a threat that neither of them could control.
Lila’s kitchen clock ticked loudly, marking the moments that the ugliness of it all hung in the air between them. ‘Better than knowing why,’ she said finally.
He gripped the cup, almost crushing it in an effort not to hurl it at the wall and watch the jagged shards flail her as they fell. ‘What about me? I’m not a little girl who needs to be protected from life’s shit, Rachel,’ he hissed, watching her wince at the suppressed violence of his contained rage and not caring. ‘Don’t you think I deserve to know why?’
‘I didn’t love you; I didn’t want her. I made a mistake.’ Even though she closed her eyes when she said it, unable to look him in the eyes, her words sliced at him like a razor – sharp and sure. The extent of the damage would be delayed by the swiftness of the cut, but he would feel it and it would hit bone.
He stood, moved towards her slowly, every step an exercise in measured control. He felt drunk, surreal, and incapable of coherent thought.
Chapter 9
Peter Haines stared down at the unconscious form of his wife and wondered if he loved her. Wondered if anyone could truly love a woman like Frances? She was admirable in many ways: cultured, elegant and formidable. Qualities quite desirable in a partner, but traits that could hardly be termed as lovable.
This was the first time he had ever observed her in a state of relaxation, albeit enforced. She looked different, not soft, just less determined than she normally did. It was a strange experience to see a woman you had shared a bed with – shared a life with – transformed into a stranger because of a bump on the head. Quite disturbing really.
Before this he had always felt proud of her as a wife. She represented him well, even though she could be a little strenuous in her opinions at times, even though her proprietary efficiency was a little forced. She was a good wife, faithful, but passionless. Her emotions ran cold and had set like stone, only ever emerging as grit-toothed sound bites, and only then when necessary to keep up appearances.
Children might have helped. However, they had never come along, and if he were honest, he wouldn’t have known what to do if they had. He wasn’t a man able to tolerate mess and chaos so maybe it had been for the best. He had no memory of being a child, couldn’t relate to what it was like at all. Even in his mother’s house, proudly populated with pictures of decreasingly younger versions of himself, he couldn’t make the connection, just felt slightly embarrassed by the tight-lipped, two-dimensional boy that he saw staring back at him from the photographs. Sometimes he was sure that he’d been born old.
Despite all that, the one thing he had never, ever anticipated was the prospect of being associated with scandal. Part of the reason that he had chosen Frances for a wife was because her background was good. Her family were a little odd, but of good pedigree, or so he had been led to believe. Never would he have contemplated that they could be capable of the level of depravity that was splashed all over the newspapers. It had come as a shock.
In some respects his other recent discovery had been a greater shock. When Valerie had died both he and Frances had been relieved – not only were they free of an unlikeable burden, they also stood to inherit a share of The Limes. Initially he had held out hope that Valerie had made a will, cutting out Rachel and favouring Frances above Stella. Typically, she had not.
He had assumed that the process of probate would be lengthy but at least straightforward. He’d been wrong. A complication had emerged already. Not only had Valerie not left a will, neither ha
d William, and to top that, there was no evidence that William Porter was actually dead. When Peter had heard from the solicitor that no death certificate was in evidence he had been incredulous until he had discovered that there was no grave either. No funeral had taken place; no notice had been in the papers. William Porter had simply disappeared into the ether.
The only will that had ever decreed ownership of the house was that made by Stella’s birth mother. Technically William still owned the property. For Peter, it was a nightmare situation – one that was costing him eighty-five pounds an hour every time their solicitor even thought about resolving it. If just one of the bodies found had been William, it would have been far more simple. Distasteful, but simple.
Now that he thought about it, the whole thing had been a sham. In selecting him as a husband, Frances had achieved respectability and had managed to disguise herself and her family so that they couldn’t be recognised for what they were. He’d been duped, all his assumptions now proved wrong.
Stella, the single most ineffectual example of the human condition he’d ever encountered, had been someone to be pitied. Valerie, with all her apparent her pride in Frances, had been nothing but guise and guile, all designed to ensnare him and link him to a family of felons and sycophants. As for Rachel, he’d been fortunate enough to never have met her. From what he’d heard it had been a lucky escape.
He couldn’t even bear to look at Frances lying there seeming so peaceful and oblivious. She had nothing worse than a head wound whilst his whole life had been torn apart by her lies. In a fit of pique and disgust he took the flowers he had bought for her and rammed them into the waste bin. He was a decent man, a good man – honourable and upright. He hadn’t been equipped for this deceit. Without a backward glance at his wife he stalked from the ward.