Sleep Sister: A page-turning novel of psychological suspense

by Laura Elliot

  The pages were filled with information about Sara Wallace. Over the years, Peter had collected everything, every column inch of newspaper space, reviews, features, photographs, catalogues from her exhibitions, a miscellaneous collection that charted the photographer’s success. Eva found prints and transparencies, files of them stacked together, as if they’d been taken from the studio, dumped and then forgotten.

  With her camera Sara Wallace had created another world. The boy sleeping in the shelter of a cardboard box could have been a dog or a heap of discarded rags. Fat women in miniskirts stood on street corners. Wasted young girls lingered on the canal banks. Neon glitter; the Liffey reflecting.

  She was leaving when she noticed his sketchpad. She stiffened as she flicked through the pages. These were no abstract images swirling with life. One woman’s face had been drawn in all of them – a tense, beautiful face. She stared at her own reflection, and yet she knew it wasn’t her, the features too mature. Eva wasn’t beautiful. Her mouth was wide, her forehead too high. She lacked the delicacy that Peter had drawn into this wounded face. Yet she saw herself, her expression framed in mirrors, angry, aroused, laughing, crying. She was able to trace the chronology of these drawings. Two faces battled for supremacy. In the final page Sara Wallace was a ghostly image, ephemeral, submissive. Eva was the stronger. The younger. The victor. Superimposed. A mirror framed in red stones held her face. The same mirror that had held her reflection on those searing nights when she’d stared from its depths. She felt as if she was choking, as if her soul had been taken without permission.

  When she returned to his studio she demanded to know whom he had been drawing. He tried to calm her down, dismayed by her fury.

  ‘It was an experiment that failed,’ he explained. He wanted a theme of reflections and the mirrors in his wife’s bedroom had inspired him. Listening to him Eva felt breathless, as if his hands were on her throat. Possessing her.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ she shouted. ‘You’re strangling me… it’s too much… too much!’ She ran to the white bedroom and tore the mirror from the wall, smashing it to pieces on the floor.

  His hands shook as he picked up the shards. He promised to destroy them all. He gathered her close, not possessively, not even passionately. As if the words she’d screamed had sobered them for a short, resting time.

  Chapter 63

  ‘The Anaskeagh Baby,’ Greg Enright said when he met Beth for the last time in Dublin. ‘Was she bait to keep me on the investigation or do you want to tell me a different story?’

  Beth imagined the past uncoiling like an octopus, tentacles reaching around her children and husband, Marjory’s shrunken face, gossip in the schoolyard and the town square. A media rampage, her face the headline on the evening news. The enormity of the truth overwhelmed her once again and she averted her eyes from the journalist’s challenging stare.

  ‘There’s no story,’ she said. ‘I don’t have any further information on the Anaskeagh Baby.’

  Albert Grant had been brought down but not by her hand. Greg Enright would never betray his source but Beth knew her identity. Marjory hadn’t left her house since her brother’s resignation. She refused to speak to Beth or answer the door to her. When Catherine O’Donovan sent her an invitation to her seventieth birthday party it remained unanswered.

  The O’Donovan family had gathered together for the occasion of their mother’s birthday and, on the night of her party, the old farmhouse blazed with lights. Catherine greeted her guests warmly, flushed and happy to have the people she loved around her. She admired Gail’s new party dress, applauded the funny poem Paul had written for her, insisted on hearing Robert playing his accordion and hugged Lindsey, who presented her with a painting of the hill field on a starry night.

  Beth moved freely among the guests. She was at home here, able to relax with friends. The party was a welcome distraction from the shock of Connie’s death. It had only been two months from her prognosis to her last battling breath. Serene until the end she had bid them goodbye and passed quietly away as a new dawn had brightened the sky. Since then Marina seemed adrift. She talked about returning to London yet made no effort to do so. Connie’s cottage was up for sale and she was living there with Lindsey until a buyer was found.

  The night passed swiftly. The younger children were carried into Catherine’s bedroom when they fell asleep. Marina, who was visiting Anaskeagh, danced across the floor with Jim O’Donovan. The only unmarried brother, he’d made the trip from Australia once again to celebrate with his mother. He spun Marina around so fast that she lost her balance. The suddenness of her fall took everyone by surprise. Jim helped her into a chair and apologised for having two left feet.

  ‘Nothing’s hurt except my dignity,’ Marina assured him. ‘That can easily be restored with another gin and tonic.’

  She gestured to Beth while he was refilling her glass. ‘I’ve had too much to drink,’ she whispered. ‘Take my arm and help me out of here.’

  She allowed Beth and Jess to link arms with her and lead her to a garden bench outside the farmhouse. The noise from the party faded into the background as they lifted their faces to the balmy night air. Marina talked about men, her words slurring as she grew more agitated.

  ‘Unreliable swine,’ she said. ‘They make us invisible. Once we’re past our prime they don’t want to know us.’ She grasped Jess’s hand. ‘You had the right idea, Jess. At least God doesn’t pretend to be faithful to his brides. What’s it like in his harem? Does it give you peace of mind?’

  Jess laughed and freed her hand. ‘Peace of mind is reserved for the hereafter, no matter what path you take. Why are you tarring all men with the same brush? I thought you were getting on very well with my brother.’

  ‘I was, until I discovered he cohabits with kangaroos.’ Marina laughed shrilly. ‘I want to love the boy next door but he’s gone for the younger model. Have you seen Peter’s green-fingered girlfriend?’

  ‘No,’ Beth replied. ‘Lindsey says she’s lovely.’

  ‘I call her Sara Mark Two. She’s only half his age and he’s acting like a Boy Scout who’s discovered a good deed.’

  ‘Don’t call her Sara Mark Two,’ Beth said. ‘It’s hurtful and unnecessary.’

  ‘Sorry, Beth, sorry. I called to Havenstone one night and it was like I was looking at Sara again. Eva Frawley’s planted deep roots in Havenstone and not only in the garden.’

  ‘Eva?’ Jess half rose from the bench, then sat down again when Marina began to cry.

  ‘Oh Christ, I’m so fucked up since Connie died.’ Mascara streaked her cheeks. ‘I spent my life being angry with her. Such a waste. She was right to grab a bit of love and hang onto it. In the end that’s all it’s about. A bit of love to make it worth our while getting up in the morning.’ She wept harder, maudlin tears that she wiped with the back of her hand. She nodded obediently when Beth suggested they leave now.

  ‘Jess, will you say goodbye to Catherine for us?’ Beth helped her to her feet.

  Jess looked at the weeping Marina and sighed before rising to hug her. ‘You’ll never be invisible, Marina. Not to the people who count.’

  ‘You wouldn’t need a degree in maths to count those.’ She sobbed and laughed and leaned on Beth as they walked to the car. She’d clung too long to a girlish dream, not realising that dreams needed to be shattered for the truth to become visible.

  Chapter 64

  The red light on the answering machine winked in Eva’s Cottage Garden. Only one message had been left. A woman’s voice, deep and assertive. Jess O’Donovan hoped Eva would agree to meet her soon. There was something she needed to discuss with her. A story she had to tell.

  Jess O’Donovan spoke hesitantly, as if feeling her way through unfamiliar territory. She seemed nervous, yet Eva, looking into the resolute brown eyes, knew that this woman would not flinch from the truth. They drank tea together, polite strangers who should have been making polite conversation.

  Eva had been right
. A teenage mother, terrified. Her child’s mind closed down to her baby’s existence so that Eva became a growth without shape, without meaning. Something to be destroyed and left beneath a rock. Her sister had run through the night to the lights of a farmhouse and saved Eva’s life. Jess O’Donovan did not use those words but Eva heard them nonetheless.

  An aunt made the child mother strong again. She stopped the bleeding and gave her tablets to banish bad dreams. No one could know she was unclean. She was a shining star. A good girl. She was told to carry her shameful secret to her grave. Otherwise she would destroy the good name of her family forever. And so she remained a shining star. Twenty-six years later, in an African village, she’d confided her secret and returned home ready to confront the past. But fear had destroyed her and she’d chosen death instead. At first Eva didn’t understand.

  ‘Your mother is dead,’ Jess said. ‘Sara is at peace.’ She made it sound like a prayer.

  ‘Sara?’

  ‘Her name was Sara Wallace.’

  Eva wondered how she could breathe so calmly… How she could breathe at all. When she looked down at her hands, clasped tightly in the nun’s strong grip, she realised they were shaking. Jess O’Donovan’s words were far away, somewhere above her head, soaring away from her.

  Tears glistened in the nun’s eyes. ‘I’m so sorry, my dear, so sorry. I realised Peter had contacted you when I spoke to Marina McKeever. She has no idea about your identity, but she suspects Peter’s love for you is based on your resemblance to his wife. It’s important that you know the truth before this relationship continues.’

  Peter Wallace had traced her to Ashton. He knew – that day when she’d sat by the riverbank mourning Faye… He knew. When he’d held her, dominating her with his passion, he knew. When he’d spoken of love, searching her heart for the same passionate response, he knew.

  Soon afterwards Jess O’Donovan left. She embraced Eva and said they must meet again. Eva sensed the nun’s uneasiness, the worry that she’d made a wrong decision. She assured Jess she was fine. She needed to know. Why expend energy on a dead search?

  The crunch of tyres outside startled Eva from her reverie. The garden centre was closed for the evening and when she looked out the cottage window she recognised Greg’s car.

  ‘What’s happened to you, Eva?’ He followed her inside. ‘Why haven’t you answered my calls? I’ve been ringing you for days.’

  ‘I can’t talk about it.’ She walked ahead of him into the small living room.

  ‘Is it that man? What’s he done to you? Talk to me, Eva. Trust me.’

  ‘Go away, Greg,’ she cried. ‘I have to work this out for myself.’

  ‘Let me stay with you tonight?’ he pleaded. ‘Just for tonight. You need me here. We promised each other friendship. This is how it works.’

  They slept fitfully together in her bed. Friends. It had been easy. Her grief separated them, killed any desire that might have flared when their bodies touched.

  Peter Wallace came in the early morning. Greg opened the front door to him. She sensed their hostility flaring. To rattle antlers, to butt and charge and roar victorious would have been a simple way of dealing with a love triangle, if it existed. But nothing existed for Eva except the truth that Jess O’Donovan had seared into her.

  ‘I’ve got to see her.’ She heard his voice break, plead. ‘Tell her I’m not leaving until she gives me a chance to explain.’

  ‘If it’s business it can wait for another day.’ Her husband sounded loudly aggressive. ‘If it’s something else – it can wait forever.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake! What are you? Her bodyguard?’ Peter demanded. ‘This is between me and Eva. You may think you’re helping her but you haven’t a clue. It’s essential that I talk to her – just once. Then I’ll be out of your lives forever.’

  ‘That’s not long enough,’ Greg replied but she came from behind him and said, ‘He’s right, Greg. We have to talk.’

  She had refused to answer his letters, his phone calls, his emails. He had called in vain to the garden centre, to the cottage, but had been unable to bypass Muriel Wilson’s determined stance. Now he was here early in the morning, his face ravaged with guilt, his passion undiminished as he forced her to listen, to understand what had happened between them.

  They walked to the lake. His sister-in-law had told him about Sara’s baby. An incomplete story without a father and no knowledge about the family who had adopted her. He had phoned Jess O’Donovan, pleaded with her to reveal Eva’s name. The nun had refused to divulge it but she had mentioned a village set in a Wicklow valley and a garden centre where Eva had once worked. He’d searched and found Ashton.

  In Wind Fall, he’d seen photographs on the wall of the breakfast room, school photographs, a graduation, a wedding, a young mother with a baby in her arms. Liz had been happy to talk about her daughter. Eva’s life was secure and he’d had no desire to intrude any further. But something, a restlessness, a need to know more about her, had made him return. He’d found her sitting by the river. Her baby was dead, her marriage over. Her grief had been raw enough to touch, to understand.

  ‘I wanted to help you,’ he said. ‘You have to believe me. That was all I wanted in the beginning. To play a small part in your life. I’d be giving something back to Sara, making some kind of restitution for the pain we’d caused each other throughout our marriage. But… I didn’t realise I would fall in love with you.’ His eyes darkened with yearning. ‘I won’t make excuses for what happened between us. You brought me back to life and I think… I know I did the same to you. It was incredible—’

  ‘But did you once stop to think of the pain you’d cause if I found out?’ she demanded. Passion had turned to ash. Only her anger burned, blistering him. ‘Or was that part of the thrill? The ultimate hit. Who did you think I was? Your dead wife?’

  The colour drained from his face. He moved closer to her. ‘I won’t let you distort our love. You can’t destroy what we shared—’

  ‘Shared! When have you ever shared anything?’ Her hand flamed against his cheek. ‘How dare you come here demanding my understanding – my forgiveness – when you’ve destroyed me with your obsession?’

  He tried to hold her, to prevent her walking away. ‘Do you want to cut into my flesh, Eva?’ he asked, his lips almost touching hers. ‘Will that help? Will it?’

  ‘Nothing that gives you relief will help me.’ To believe him would draw her back into his all-consuming love and she wasn’t prepared to offer him mercy. ‘You deceived me from the beginning, just as you deceived yourself. You were in love with a ghost… Or some ideal woman you created. But not with me… you were never in love with me!’ She believed he understood, even when he shook his head in denial.

  ‘I love you, Eva, only you. You have to believe me.’

  The early-morning mist lifted above the water. Cobwebs, glistening in the rising sun, linked the dark reeds. Fragile chains that swayed and broke when the swans stirred in their nest.

  ‘I never want to set eyes on you again.’ She walked away from the jagged sound of his grief – and from a truth that no longer mattered.

  Greg was gone when she returned to the cottage.

  Chapter 65

  Annie Loughrey had spoken of a fever. Greg understood what she’d meant when Eva had opened the door to him. He had been shocked by her appearance – her lank hair and bleak expression. When Peter Wallace arrived the following morning he bore little resemblance to the suave person Greg had seen rising to greet her in the restaurant. Nor did he look like a smooth financier who invested money in struggling garden centres. He was a man who couldn’t sleep. A man whose eyes reflected the same anguish he had seen in his wife’s tormented gaze.

  He watched them walk towards the lake. They faced each other. Angry gesticulations. Greg wondered if she would raise her hand and strike him, willed her to lash out and, when she did so, he saw Peter Wallace flinch and grasp her shoulders. As her head moved back in submissio
n, and it seemed inevitable that they would embrace, he knew he had to leave.

  There was nothing left to hold him here. In this fertile garden, they had once loved against a crumbling stone wall and conceived their child, the swans raking the air with their wings. Unrecognisable now. Everything gone, everything… Yet it nagged him continually, this sense of recognition. The feeling that he and Peter Wallace had met on an occasion that had nothing to do with Eva. The memory was tantalisingly close yet still out of his grasp. And so it would have remained if he hadn’t noticed the book on his shelf. Silent Songs from an African Village. A freebie, he remembered, offered to him at a book launch. A collaboration between a nun and a dead photographer. He suddenly realised why Peter Wallace had seemed so familiar the night he’d seen him with Eva in a Temple Bar restaurant. Greg recalled the speech he’d made at the launch, the emotion in his voice as he spoke about his deceased wife. Another memory clicked into place. He had interviewed Sara Wallace during the motorway protests and attended an exhibition of her photographs. Swans swimming down the centre of a road.

  He replayed the interview in the Elucidate library. A tall blonde woman, cool and distant, her personality at odds with the energy of her photography. He freeze-framed her image. Her resemblance to his wife was striking. The same high cheekbones, her long, slim neck, and the full, sensuous lips that had instantly attracted him to Eva.

  Muriel suggested he wait in the cottage. It wouldn’t be long before Eva returned. She was designing a water feature for a client and had phoned to say she was on her way back to the garden centre.