She stops, raises her hands to her face, thinks better of completing what she was going to say.
‘What?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ She takes her hands away again, revealing a different expression. More subdued.
‘Just say it,’ I urge.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she repeats. ‘I was only thinking out loud.’
A twisting pain in my gut. I know what she was going to say; what she’s trying to shield me from.
‘You must have thought of it – you must at least have considered the possibility,’ she says more gently. ‘That she might not be here any more.’
It’s worse that she’s still being so careful. That she won’t say the words. I shake my head. ‘You can’t say that …’
‘Why is someone faking her account?’ she asks in the same tender voice. ‘And all the others?’
‘I can’t believe you’d say that.’ My voice is raised. Almost shouting. ‘She could be here in London. You know she could.’
‘She could be,’ says Caroline. But her gaze doesn’t meet mine.
‘I’m leaving,’ I say. ‘I’m going home.’
‘Let me get you an Uber.’ She reaches for her phone.
‘You’ve done enough.’ It’s a cliché, but it makes me feel better to say it.
‘Please, Fran,’ she says. ‘Don’t go like this. Whoever hurt Dickie might have hurt Ellie too. I think we should take care.’
I ignore her, kicking her garden gate on the way out so hard that the pain ricochets up my shins. It’s raining heavily. On my walk to the tube, I find I’m talking to myself loudly, saying no, no, no. I can’t even tell if I’m crying or not. None of it makes me feel any better. There’s nothing I can do to stop the dread.
Most of the shops are shut now. I buy a family-sized bar of Dairy Milk from a late-night newsagent but it’s not enough. When the sobbing subsides, I realise I’m desperate to speak to someone. To spill out my worries, be comforted, reassured. Almost out of habit, Charles appears in my head. The memory returns to me of him in the bedroom. The whisky fumes. The heat of his breath. I don’t want that Charles – I want the old one. From my childhood. Either way, without Caroline, he’s all I’ve got.
I fish out my phone. The call goes straight through to his answerphone.
‘Charles.’ My voice cracks on his name. ‘I’m so scared. I have no idea where Ellie is – it looks like her Facebook account is a fake. And her friends too. I just …’ I don’t know what to say next. ‘Please could you call me as soon as you get this.’
At home, remembering Caroline’s warning, I hook the chain across and drag the chair from my desk to lean it against the door. For good measure, I pile books up on the chair. At the back of the kitchen cupboard I find a dusty bottle of sherry and pour myself half a pint of the stuff, knocking it back with an ancient sleeping tablet. I can’t look at anything in my flat – the globe in the corner, the parcel of books waiting for Rose under the tree, Ellie’s passport on the coffee table. I’ve been surrounded by lies.
56
I wake to the sound of a knock at the front door, something falling to the floor. Footsteps. My heart’s racing but the sleeping tablet is slowing my reactions like fog and by the time I put my eye to the peephole, there’s no one out there. A door slams in the flat below. I run to my bedroom window. Nothing.
In the loo, the fresh smell of marijuana drifts up from the cistern. I sit there, thinking. There is someone who is uniquely placed to know when I’m in the flat or not, whether I’m asleep or not, to nip upstairs and make a delivery. But he’s got it wrong today.
I grab a coat and throw it on over my nightdress. It’s too late to mess around.
When the dealer comes to the door, his clothes and hair are wet, as if he’s been waiting in the rain. His dog is damp, too, cowering at his feet.
‘Was it you?’ I ask. ‘Who delivered the flowers? Let yourself into my flat?’
His eyes are red and bloodshot; his hand is shaking as he lifts a joint to his lips. I think he’s going to deny it for a moment, send me away, but he says quietly. ‘I know it’s not right.’
I stare at him.
‘Ever since the trick on Christmas Day, I’ve been feeling bad about it. I don’t know – it’s nearly 2018. A new year. I thought I should make a clean start, come and talk to you about it.’
‘What trick?’
‘The print in the icing sugar.’ He shifts uneasily.
The footprint. The thing that only Ellie knew about. Think, Fran. Think. I mentioned it in a Facebook message, didn’t I? A reminder between sisters of a secret world – something shared between the pair of us. Something to make her long to come back to me. But someone else’s eyes scanned that message – not Ellie’s. Just as someone else has been reading all of my private musings to her for God knows how long.
My legs feel unsteady, as if they no longer want to do their job of holding me up, but I can’t break down here. I need to be strong for Ellie. I have to get to the bottom of this.
I swallow hard. ‘Who asked you to do it?’
‘I don’t know her name, but she has a posh voice.’
‘Posh.’
‘Yeah, like yours.’
That could be Juliet, I think. Or Fiona. Or Caroline.
That could be anyone I went to school with. The dread surges up then, because there is no one I can trust and the only person in the world I could is missing and I have no idea where she is.
‘What did she look like?’
‘I don’t really know,’ he says.
‘Why not?’
‘I only met her once,’ he says. ‘When she gave me the key. She was wearing big sunglasses and a hat. I don’t think I’d recognise her if I saw her again.’
All these years we’ve exchanged friendly greetings. A nod in the entrance hall, a wave in the communal garden. You wouldn’t call us friends, but the idea that he has been inside my home, laid flowers on my bed, makes me feel cold.
‘Why did you do it?’
He sighs, glances at the flat behind him. ‘It was just money. That’s all it takes for most people to do most things.’
‘I want my key back.’ My voice is icy.
‘You’re not going to the police, are you? I couldn’t … with my record.’
‘Give me my key.’
He reaches into his pocket and hands it over.
All those faces on the internet, each one a double. It seems to me there are two versions of everyone. And he’s no different. How could I be so easily fooled?
‘You thought you could pull the wool over my eyes.’ Even as I say it, it sounds like a daft expression. The kind of thing Mother might have said.
‘Just a minute.’ He disappears, leaving me standing at the door. ‘You might want these.’ He returns, a couple of moments later, with an envelope addressed to Ellie.
I tear it open, but it’s just a marketing mail-out from a dance company.
‘There’s not so much post for her now,’ he says sheepishly. ‘But there used to be more – I wait for the post at the door, take out anything for Ellie and leave it in a brown envelope in my pigeonhole for someone to pick up. That’s where the woman would leave instructions for me, too.’
‘What name do you leave it under?’
‘R Deal.’
R Deal. Roberto Deal.
Our deal.
Occasionally a piece of post would arrive for Ellie, but so rarely I’d always imagined she’d had it all redirected.
‘You won’t go to the police, will you, love?’
I feel so cold, so sick, that I can barely stand up.
‘You’ve done a terrible thing,’ I say. ‘You’ve helped cover up a person disappearing.’ I swallow back bile. I can’t bring myself to say it. ‘Or worse. Something much worse.’
57
My head spins as I climb back up to my flat. If Caroline is right about us getting what we deserve, then perhaps I’m being punished – taunted and followed
by someone whose features I can’t quite make out, just as I once followed Charles and hung back on the periphery. I call her, once the door of the flat is closed firmly behind me, but she doesn’t pick up.
Adrenaline is pumping through my veins now. The metallic taste from the Zolpidem tablet lingers in my mouth, but I’m not going to bed. I’m determined to find answers. I march up to Ellie’s room and go straight to the desk, pulling the drawers out and emptying them on the bed. Bank statements, receipts, old photographs and letters flutter out. I’m going to go through every single one. I look at every receipt, the date on it, the amount, what Ellie bought. The photographs she’d held on to – or left behind, depending on how you wanted to look at it. There weren’t many. One or two of Mother and me, a handful from her years as a barfly, dark photographs, badly lit, crammed with pale, red-eyed faces I didn’t recognise.
At nine o’clock, I send a text to Gareth saying I’m not well, I won’t be in today, and then I switch my phone off and continue my search: opening the drawers under the bed and going through everything there, working my way through her clothes, looking in every pocket, every rolled sock to find out what my sister might have been hiding. Eventually, exhaustion overwhelms me and I crawl into Ellie’s bed and close my eyes.
When I wake, the light in the room has softened. The alarm clock says quarter past three in the afternoon. I lie on my back and look out of the skylight. I think about what Ellie might have packed that day I lingered outside her room – her laptop, her phone, some clothes, her keys. Those are the things someone else might have access to now, and anyone with the key, I reason, and something to hide, would have been through all of this paperwork before. The only reason I found her passport was because it had been hidden, wedged behind the drawers.
On the desk, there’s the Christmas card I’d given her just before she left: ‘To Ellie and Rose. I can’t wait to meet you.’ How Ellie had cried at those presents – the card, the framed scan. I get to my feet with the urge to see it: the last true image of Rose I ever saw. Ellie left it behind. I still have it, locked up in my cupboard along with my Charles collection. I thank Juliet for teaching me about privacy all those years ago.
In my bedroom, I sit cross-legged on the floor staring at the kidney-bean swell of Rose’s developing body: her plump head; a tendril curling away from it like a tadpole’s tail.
‘Is that her hair?’ I’d teased Ellie. ‘A little top-knot?’
She’d shaken her head. ‘No, just a smudge on the image, I think. I’ll check with the doctor.’
I didn’t ask again when I gave her the scan on Christmas Day. She was too upset.
Magic Eye posters were all the rage in the Nineties when we were young – there were galleries dedicated to them. A couple of girls pinned them up in their cubicles. Yet, try as I might, I could never see the other world – the second image – I could never relax my eyes in quite the right way. Another club I couldn’t join.
But I haven’t looked at the scan for so long that it’s as if my eyes have finally relaxed in the interim and I can see clearly at last.
Viewed again, the tendril curling from Rose’s head doesn’t look so much like a smudge: it looks like a tiny, threadlike arm in a place where you wouldn’t expect an arm to be. Unless …
I turn the frame around and examine it from another angle.
I can’t believe I have been so stupid.
There’s another baby beside the kidney bean, cuddled up so close that the separate bodies look like one – as if the head of the first baby belongs to the body of the other.
All this time I’ve been looking for Rose. A single child. When there were always two. Twins.
There’s only one family I know with twins. A family with a nursery upstairs, far away from prying eyes. Who usher their children away from me at every given opportunity. Who never post their faces on the internet.
‘You discover a hatred you didn’t know you had,’ Brenda had said. ‘Your friend understood.’
But she hadn’t meant Caroline. She’d meant Fiona. How could I have forgotten the cosy chat between them when she’d popped into the shop? Fiona leaning on the counter, Brenda desperate to confide in anyone who would listen.
And what had Fiona said? I was so sick I couldn’t leave the house. Maybe that wasn’t why she couldn’t go out, after all. Maybe it was because she was never pregnant in the first place.
My hand goes to my belly, where there’s a deep wrenching pain, and the framed scan slips to the floor.
Ellie, what happened to you?
The impact cracks the glass in two, shattering it into dagger-like pieces.
58
I don’t know how long I sit on the floor staring at the smashed glass, trying to think, to work it out – is it possible Fiona could have taken Ellie’s children without Charles knowing?
Charles in English, his finger running under the text in Mrs Fyson’s class, showing me where to go when I got lost. His same hands lifting Ellie from the pool after Dickie had run to get him. I fish out the old rugby photo from my tuckbox and stare at his face, his golden hair. His eyes looking straight forward, ignoring Juliet while the other boys leered at her.
Charles. My rescuer. The one person who had made Chesterfield bearable for me. Whom I’d loved my whole life. He wouldn’t hurt me, would he?
When I switch on my mobile, I have twenty-three missed calls from Caroline.
The phone begins to flash as she rings again.
‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day,’ she says breathlessly. ‘I was just about to come over.’
‘Caroline,’ I try to stop her, picking at the edge of a carpet tile on the floor.
‘Ellie’s Facebook account,’ she pushes on regardless. ‘It’s disappeared.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Someone’s deleted it – not just hers – Yasmina, Roberto. All of them. I’ve been beside myself trying to get hold of you … And then, I found something. A photograph Dickie saved. It was in a folder on his desktop. It sounds stupid. It’s just called “Ellie’s feet” – I think it might be something he downloaded from Facebook. It’s a photo Ellie appears to have taken of her feet – at the end of a sunbed. The second and third toes are webbed slightly, aren’t they?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That’s right. Like our dad. It was one of those weird family traits …’
‘The thing is,’ says Caroline, cutting me off, ‘Dickie noticed one of Charles’s children had webbed feet on our holiday to Oman. They were messing around by the pool, him and his god-daughter, and he said, “Look at your toes – they must make you swim faster.” And then he went very quiet.’
I remember the sketchbook, the strange aquatic creatures. My belly tightens like a fist. ‘They’re Ellie’s,’ I whisper. ‘The twins.’
A neighbour’s door slams, Caroline is quiet for a moment. ‘What do you mean? What about Rose?’
I lick my lips, try to swallow. ‘Ellie was expecting twins, but she never said, and then she disappeared before she gave birth. I never met Rose – I never saw her.’
Caroline is silent for so long I wonder if she’s still there. ‘Maybe Dickie guessed. Maybe he made the connection,’ she says thickly. ‘Why didn’t he tell me?’
I hated Dickie, God knows I hated him, for what he did to me, to my sister, but the truth is the truth all the same. Snitches get stitches, quips his chirpy voice in my head.
‘He was loyal,’ I say. ‘He had so much history with Charles. They knew each other’s secrets. Like the cat.’
‘The cat?’
‘In the washing machine. The one Dickie killed.’
‘No,’ says Caroline. ‘That wasn’t Dickie. He told me about it – that was Charles.’
‘Charles?’ I have the dizzying feeling of being tipped upside down.
‘Did he say it was Dickie?’
‘I …’ I hesitate. ‘Unless I misunderstood.’
‘Dickie was so traumatised by that – he told me a
bout it when we first got together. The only way he could justify it was as a childish prank. An accident, even. But it was something he could never forget.’
We’re both drawn into our thoughts. Hers of Dickie; mine of Ellie. I need to know what happened to my sister. I need to know where she is. I get to my feet, begin to look for my handbag.
Caroline’s voice is so quiet I can barely make out the words. ‘Do you think they did something to him?’
Dickie’s face hazy with drink on the tube platform. Charles would have known when they were going to be there. It would have been so easy for him to text Fiona; for her to slip in with that group of women. Dickie’s face, unsure whether to be pleased or frightened at spotting his friend standing just behind him.
I pull on my coat as I talk, push my feet into my shoes.
‘We should go to see them,’ says Caroline as if she can hear my preparations to leave.
‘Shall we tell the police?’ I ask, playing for time as I put some dry food out for Branwell.
‘Maybe later,’ she says. ‘I’ll call the babysitter and we can go from here. We can go together.’
I’m sorry, I think, but I can’t wait.
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘See you shortly.’
‘Great.’ She pauses. ‘You promise you’ll come here first? That you won’t do anything silly?’
‘Like what?’ I ask, pulling the smallest, sharpest knife out of the block in my kitchen and pushing it into my pocket.
On Great Western Road, I flag down a taxi and tell him the address. His eyes widen slightly but at least I can pay by credit card.
The ghosts of former journeys accompany me on my way. Times when I travelled to the Cotswolds to sit and watch the house from a distance. I try not to think about that. About how much I just wanted a glimpse of him.
I’d pinned so much onto him I didn’t know what I was looking at.
I sit forward in the cab, my hands clenched between my thighs. The taxi driver is quiet as he drives and I’m grateful for that. My phone rings. Caroline. I don’t answer. Instead, I have an idea. I call Kat and, at first slowly, then all in a rush, I tell her everything we know. I give her Caroline’s phone number and tell Kat to call her in three hours if she hasn’t heard from me.
You and Me Page 24