Devon’s voice cracked on the last words. I was doing so well! she thought, furious with herself, as the tears began to form. I really was! But all the memories came flooding back now, overwhelming her. She remembered grabbing the vase, as Maxie had told her to. Bringing it down on Bill’s head. Hearing the impact, his neck snapping under the blow.
It was too much. She started to cry. Maxie saw weakness, and pounced on it immediately.
‘You killed him!’ she said cruelly, pointing at Devon. ‘You broke his neck! That’s what did it! How dare you go throwing accusations at me!’
‘You told her to!’ Deeley actually jumped to her feet, her hands on her hips, confronting Maxie, impatiently tossing back the hair that had fallen over her face. ‘How dare you talk to her like that – tell her she killed him – when you were the one that planned it all! I bet you meant all along to get Dev to hit him, so you could blame it on her too!’
Maxie gasped in shock. ‘I can’t believe you’re turning on me like this!’ she said furiously. ‘After everything I’ve done for you! I made sure you two were OK, always! When Mum was fucking up, it was me you came crying to, both of you! It was me who planned ahead and found us safe places to go and shoved chair backs under door handles so none of Mum’s creepy boyfriends could get into our room!’ She was panting now, her hair beginning to come loose from its immaculate French twist. ‘I looked after you! I did everything for you two ungrateful bitches! I made sure we stayed at the same school, and did our exams, and had clean clothes to wear, and weren’t split up and taken into care! I deserved that money!’
Maxie pounded on her chest with a fist.
‘Yes, OK, I took it!’ she screamed. ‘All right? Satisfied now? I deserved it, after everything I did for you! Mum owed it to me – I did her job for her, bringing you two up. I earned it! I took that money and I spent it on stuff to help me fit in at Oxford! I needed to look right – like I was one of them. And I got a good boyfriend, and the right kind of job—’
‘And Bill wouldn’t have let you spend it on that,’ Devon prompted, wiping away her tears.
‘No! No, he bloody wouldn’t!’ Maxie yelled. ‘He wasn’t going to let me touch it – he said Linda would tear us into pieces if we spent it! He never wanted it in the house in the first place, he was so bloody honest – but Mum said she’d tell the social services he was fiddling with us if he didn’t keep it for her. That was what gave me the idea.’ She was gasping in her efforts to spill out the words, determined now that her sisters should hear everything, every last sordid truth. ‘So yes, you’re right about that too. OK? Happy now? Bill and I had a big fight, he said I couldn’t take a penny from that thirty grand to buy stuff for university, and I had to. You remember how poor we were! Or do you? Do you even remember?’
She threw her arms wide, gesticulating at the luxury of her house.
‘This dress is Jil Sander,’ Maxie said. ‘My hair is done by Nicky Clarke, every three weeks. My shoes, Bilberry. Which would cost an absolute fucking fortune if I had to pay for them. My nails . . .’
She flapped her hands furiously at her sisters. Deeley, with her stunning head of artfully streaked hair, her trendy cobweb-knot Nougat sweater, her Seven for All Mankind jeans, her Louboutin boots. And Devon, her pretty diamond studs sparkling, her skin perfect from Dermalogica facials, her lips red with her favourite Fresh lipstick.
‘Get it? And look at the two of you! Look at yourselves! You’re sitting on top of the world now! Think about how far you’ve come! If it hadn’t been for me, you’d have been taken into care – we’d have been split up, abused, all sorts! You know what goes on! Deeley,’ she rounded on her younger sister, who flinched, ‘you’d have been easy meat for anyone! You could never take care of yourself. Without me, you’d be on the streets now, or dead!’
Deeley bit her lip, knowing this was true, her face a picture of unhappiness. Her shoulders slumped. It was Devon who got to her feet to answer this, pulling down her striped silk sweater to cover the bulge of flesh at the top of her jeans.
I feel twice the size of Maxie, she thought miserably. There’s no way you can stand facing your size 6 sister if you’re just about fitting into a size 12 and not feel huge by comparison.
Maxie got thinner, and I got fatter, she realized with a flash of understanding. It’s like I was tied to her in some way. As if we needed to balance each other out.
Well, not any more. If I can stand up to Maxie and say the truth, then I can be free of all of this, finally. Whatever the consequences.
‘You made me kill someone,’ she said, confronting her sister directly. ‘You made me and Deeley help you kill Bill and hide the body. We’ve had to live with that our whole lives, keep it a secret. Sometimes I was bursting to confide, to talk about it – weren’t you, Deeley?’
Deeley nodded miserably.
‘But we couldn’t,’ Devon said quietly. ‘We had to live with it, and not say a word, pretend that nothing had happened. And we did, Maxie, because we thought we’d done it to keep you safe. It was worth it for that.’
‘More like to keep yourselves safe,’ Maxie interjected sarcastically. ‘I told you that Bill was coming after you next. That’s why you helped me kill him, why you went along with it when I told you what we had to do – you were saving your own skins.’
‘God, you’re horrible,’ Devon said furiously. ‘Bill never laid a finger on you, did he? He never touched you like that, and he was never going to touch us either. He was a good man, and you killed him so you could have thirty thousand pounds to spend on turning yourself into a Sloane.’
‘He was a good man,’ Deeley said, echoing Devon. ‘He really was.’
‘Right! Fine!’ Maxie’s stockinged feet rasped on the carpet as she turned round and stamped back to the bar, tipping more vodka into her glass. ‘Here you go!’ She lifted her glass to her sisters, her eyes black now with anger. ‘This is what you want, is it? Bill never fucking abused me, OK? He never did! He was a do-gooder! He’d never have done anything like that! You two were bloody idiots to think for a moment that he would!’
She toasted them, holding up her glass, before drinking what was now neat vodka.
‘It was his own fault,’ she said, coughing a little as the strong spirit went down. ‘He should never have stood in my way. What business was it of his? How dare he stop me trying to make something of myself!’
‘You had to kill him,’ Deeley said slowly. ‘Because he was a scapegoat. Linda had to believe that Bill had gone off with the money. Otherwise, she’d have come straight after us.’
‘Oh my God,’ Devon said, realizing the truth of this. ‘It wasn’t even about you having a fight with Bill. You’d always have had to kill him to keep that money. You probably planned it like that all along.’
She looked at Deeley, their expressions equally horrified. Deeley was pale as bone. Devon found herself walking towards her younger sister, and Deeley came to meet her. They fell into a hug, their heads together, their arms wrapping around each other. Deeley was choking back tears; Devon raised her hand and stroked her sister’s hair as Deeley’s head rested on her shoulder.
Over Deeley’s head, Devon looked at Maxie. She thought of the clichéd expression, ‘seeing someone for the first time’, and rejected it. Devon had always, truly, known who her sister was: she’d seen her ruthlessness, her ambition, her willingness to step on anyone who got in her way. Devon was ambitious, too, always had been. She couldn’t judge Maxie for that. But the rest of it – the lies, the way Maxie had twisted their childhood, killed the only adult who’d ever tried to be decent to them, involved them in it and made them feel as guilty as her – that was unforgiveable.
Deeley was crying now. But she raised her head from Devon’s shoulder, and turned to look once again at Maxie.
‘Who pushed me under the bus?’ she asked, her voice choked with tears. ‘Who sprayed that warning on my front door? Because I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t see how it could have been
Linda. She’d already warned me off. I don’t see why she’d get someone to follow me down to London, or even how she’d have someone who could do it that quickly. She knew she’d scared me enough. She didn’t need to go to all that extra trouble.’
Devon stared at Deeley, taken aback. ‘I don’t get this,’ she started, confused. ‘What are you . . .’
‘I think it was her,’ Deeley said, pointing accusingly at Maxie. ‘I think she did it. Maxie was the one who wanted to scare me off, much more than Linda. Maxie was the one who had everything to lose by me being stupid and poking around at Riseholme.’
But how would she have known you’d gone to Riseholme in the first place?’ Devon said.
This is a turnaround, Devon realized. Deeley’s the one who’s willing to believe worse of Maxie than I am. Little Deeley, who couldn’t say boo to a goose when she was small – who certainly couldn’t say boo to Maxie.
And here she is, managing to stand up to Maxie. She’s being braver than I am.
Despite the horror of the situation, Devon realized that she was deeply proud of her younger sister.
‘Fine,’ Maxie said coldly. ‘Let’s get it all out, shall we? Devon, to answer your question, I had someone following Deeley. After that mess with the magazine article, I didn’t trust her. Not in the least. I wanted to make sure that she didn’t do something else equally stupid and irresponsible.’ She glared at Deeley. ‘And guess what? She managed to do something even more stupid! She went up to Riseholme, gawked at Bill’s old house until she attracted the attention of Linda O’Keeffe – Linda, of all people! – and stirred up this whole bloody shitheap! How bloody idiotic was that! I told the detective agency I wanted reports whenever Deeley did anything that was out of the ordinary, and the guy they had following Deeley rang me from the train back. He thought it was definitely out of the ordinary for her to travel all the way up there, turn around after half an hour and come all the way back. And the way he described the woman you’d talked to, I could tell it was Linda. I was so angry with you I could barely breathe.’
‘You had someone following me?’ Deeley said, eyes widening.
Maxie shrugged. ‘I run a very successful company,’ she said. ‘And my husband’s an MP. Sometimes one needs information that one can’t get from normal sources. It’s fairly standard to have a detective agency on call.’
Devon shook her head in frank disbelief. ‘I honestly don’t know what to say, Maxie,’ she murmured, as her older sister finished off her drink and continued, gesturing with the glass.
‘So, what did I do?’ Her jaw set. ‘I asked him what time the train got into London and went to meet it. And I told him he was off the job the moment the train pulled into King’s Cross. I waited by the barriers and saw you come through,’ she glared at Deeley again, ‘and I followed you out of the station, and I gave you a bloody good shove when you were waiting at the lights. I didn’t mean to kill you, just to give you a scare. Make you sorry you’d ever gone up to Riseholme.’
‘I could have been killed,’ Deeley said, her voice rising in anger. ‘Or really badly hurt.’ She gulped. ‘And you painted those words on the front door as well, didn’t you? While I was away in Jersey?’
Maxie nodded. ‘You needed a good fright,’ she said callously. ‘And you deserved even worse. If you hadn’t gone up to Riseholme, none of this would have happened, you stupid little bitch!’
‘Hey!’ Devon said, just as angry as Deeley by now. ‘Don’t you talk to her like that! How dare you call her names!’ She stared Maxie straight in the eye. ‘I always thought you were looking after us, Maxie. But I was wrong. You were the worst thing that ever happened to us. Worse than Mum, worse than any of her boyfriends. Because we trusted you, and you lied to us and betrayed us. You made murderers out of your little sisters.’
She turned away, pulling Deeley with her. ‘We’re going now. There’s nothing more to say.’
Deeley nodded. Devon was right. There was no point continuing this. But suddenly a crucial thought occurred to her, and she exclaimed, ‘Oh God, wait . . .’ Deeley dashed out of the room. ‘I have to get Alice!’ she called over her shoulder. ‘I can’t leave her here, without anyone who cares about her! I have to take her with me!’
Devon picked up her bag as Deeley ran upstairs. Her head was heavy, her legs felt as if she were dragging lead weights behind her as she walked into the hall. Maxie’s silence was all she needed to hear, confirmation that Devon was right; there really was nothing more to say.
Deeley came down the stairs as fast as she could with a sleeping child in her arms, Alice’s nappy bag slung over her shoulder. She grabbed the stroller as Devon opened the front door for them.
And then Maxie exploded into the hall.
‘How dare you say I’m worse than Mum!’ she yelled, her face blotched with red spots of anger. ‘How dare you! That’s the worst thing, the worst thing you could say to me – you bloody cow— ’
Maxie’s arm was crooked back behind her head, the heavy cut-glass tumbler in her hand. Devon had a split second to react as she realized what was happening: she shoved Deeley out of the door and slammed it behind her, hoping to hell that her sister wouldn’t lose her footing on the steps and hurt herself and the baby. There was no time for Devon to save herself; she ducked down instead, her hands covering her head, her face, as the glass crashed against the door and onto Devon.
‘Get out!’ Maxie was screaming. ‘Get out of my house, you bitch! Get out and never come back!’
Scrabbling for her bag, her left hand screaming in pain where the glass had hit it, Devon grabbed for the door handle, twisting it, frantic to get out before Maxie attacked her again. She fell out into the London night, panting in relief at the sight of Deeley on the pavement, holding Alice, safe and sound.
‘Are you all right?’ Deeley said, her voice so high and scared that its pitch made Alice wake up and wail a protest on realizing that she wasn’t in her nice warm bed.
‘Just about . . .’ Devon tumbled down the stairs to her side.
‘And you got your bag? Tell me you got your bag!’
Devon held it up. Inside was the digital recorder which her assistant used to tape all her interviews; it lived in Devon’s home office, and it had been easy enough for her to bring it in her handbag, switching it on when she placed it on the arm of the sofa.
‘It’s all on tape,’ she said. ‘Everything we said.’ She set her jaw. ‘And we’re taking it to the police station, first thing in the morning.’
Epilogue
Two weeks later
Deeley
It was a beautiful English early summer day: a few white cotton wool clouds scudding lightly across the clear, Wedgwood blue sky, the sun sparking glints of gold off the green blades of grass and the small stained-glass windows of St Bartolph’s parish church. The press photographers and the TV crews, their vans laden with satellite dishes and antennae, were clustered at the end of the old cracked stone path that led through the churchyard, its verges planted prettily with lavender and roses. Bordered by a low stone wall, secured by a creaky old iron gate, the boundary was patrolled by two policemen, who were also there to keep out local inhabitants who might never have been to church in their lives, but couldn’t resist the opportunity to snatch a view of the biggest celebrities who had ever come to Riseholme: a TV star, a rugby player who’d been capped for England, an It girl from the glossies.
The police had also had to clear the graveyard of all the disaffected teenagers who usually substituted school attendance for slumping on the tombs, smoking joints, drinking cheap booze and shouting abuse at each other; none of them had gone too far, though. They were sitting further down the wall, distant enough for the police not to bother them, still pulling openly on their roll-ups. That was Riseholme for you in a nutshell; the police were too worn down to even bother with kids smoking spliffs in public.
But the teens, like the press, were mostly obscured by the ancient oaks whose heavy foliage pressed its br
anches almost to the grass below. It was the first time Deeley had ever been into the churchyard; she’d always been too nervous of the wild kids who hung out there. Now, as they walked out after the ceremony, she was dazzled by how pretty it was, like a tiny green oasis in the centre of ugly, built-up Riseholme. Sunlight dappled shadows across the grass and the grey stone of the gravestones; some late bluebells still clustered in the shadow of the oaks. It was the perfect spot.
She glanced over at Devon, who must have had the same thought, because their small smiles mirrored each other’s. The pall-bearers were leading the procession, six men who had been hired by the funeral director, all in cheap dark suits, badly cut and too shiny in the bright sunlight, pulling across their shoulders. But the coffin itself had been the most expensive in the local funeral parlour’s range, a deep, polished walnut wood with burnished brass handles, solid and substantial without being showy.
Just what Bill would have wanted, Deeley thought approvingly.
On top of it was a big white wreath, roses and lilies on a bed of deep green foliage: simple and beautiful. They’d only managed to find a few relatives of Bill’s to attend the funeral, and they hadn’t sent flowers; Deeley and Devon’s wreath was all there was.
Maybe we should have made it a bit bigger, Deeley fretted. But Bill had hated ostentation, lavish displays of money. He’d have had a heart attack if he’d known what that wreath cost, let alone the coffin. Devon had paid for it all, of course, but Deeley had made the arrangements. Devon had enough on her hands, what with leaving her husband, moving out of their house, and shacking up at the Dorchester with her new Italian lover. Who’s apparently a prince, Deeley thought with great amusement. Trust Dev to go on holiday and promptly snag an Italian aristocrat.
The cortege had reached the graveyard now, the freshly dug plot gaping open like a wound in the lush green grass, ready for the coffin. Deeley stepped to one side of the grave, the vicar passing them to stand at the head, by the newly cut stone. The pall-bearers lowered the coffin carefully onto trestles, and stood respectfully to one side while the last of the service was read. As the few mourners took their places, Deeley found herself facing Devon and Cesare across Bill’s grave.
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