‘Whitby,’ I say. ‘She could be in Whitby. That’s what I keep thinking. That was our safe place. Our happy place. She could be there, couldn’t she? Nothing bad would happen to her there.’
Fiona takes another drag of her cigarette. A gust of wind blows the smoke into the room.
Charles gets to his feet, blustering. ‘I’ll get that email address for you.’
Fiona raises a tired hand to stop him. ‘Don’t. There’s no point.’
Panic claws at me. I don’t want her to continue. ‘She’s probably in Whitby, isn’t she?’
Something seems to crumble in Fiona’s bony frame. It’s like watching a puppet become detached from its strings, the way her shoulders droop, her face falls. Releasing the tension that has been holding her together for so long. She puts her hand on the balcony rail to steady herself. There is a moment of compassion then, gentleness even, in her eyes.
‘You don’t have to,’ Charles says. He makes his way to her. It’s not clear what he intends – I imagine him covering her mouth with his hand. Forcibly preventing the words from escaping. But it’s already too late. She’s given herself away.
A heaviness takes over me then, pushing down on my shoulders, making my legs long to fold beneath me. I’m glad I’m holding on to something to steady me.
‘You know,’ she says quietly. ‘You know she never left this house.’
61
Ellie was so brave as a little girl. She was the kind of child who didn’t cry or make a fuss when she fell over. I never thought of her as someone who needed protecting. I failed her, I think. And I failed Mother.
Charles has joined Fiona on the balcony. He takes one of her hands in his. I stare at them both: the golden couple in this golden house. Underneath all the glossy beauty is something rotten.
‘Did you plan it?’ I say at last.
‘No,’ says Fiona. ‘God, no. We were desperate.’ She looks at me. ‘Have you ever wanted something that badly it blinded you?’ She is quiet. ‘I think you have, you know.’
It occurs to me with a wave of nausea that they will have read all of my emails to Ellie. Everything I ever wrote about Charles.
Fiona gives his hand a squeeze. I think of how I loved him. All that love piled up like dust. How difficult it is to square up that Charles with the person standing in front of me.
‘It all went so wrong,’ Charles says. ‘You have to believe us. We never intended …’
‘You trapped her,’ I say. ‘You hurt her.’
I can’t say the words. The finality of what they did to my sister.
‘She knew what she was getting into,’ Charles says.
‘She didn’t know she was going to die.’ I put a hand to my throat. My skin is wet with tears.
Charles and Fiona are quiet. They can’t say anything to that.
‘And you kept her alive on social media just to protect yourselves,’ I say, with quiet fury. ‘To hide what you’d done from the world. You had her laptop, didn’t you? Her mobile? You could have just got rid of it all.’
‘We did, eventually, after we’d changed the passwords,’ Fiona says. ‘And it’s true that we didn’t want to raise the alarm about Ellie, that we came up with an alternative story. But we also thought it would be easier for you. To keep her going in that way. And it was easier, wasn’t it? To hate her than to miss her?’
I glare at her, the glass tight in my hand. She can’t dress this up as something she did for me. ‘I never hated her. I never stopped missing her.’
But Fiona doesn’t have siblings, so perhaps she doesn’t understand how it works. How even when I felt jealous of Ellie, how even when I wanted the things she had, I would still have been the first to defend her against the world.
‘Even when you saw her with Charles?’ asks Fiona quietly.
‘You knew about that?’
‘We planned it.’
‘And Ellie knew too? No,’ I answer my own question. ‘She wouldn’t do it to me.’
Perhaps, she wanted you to know, Fran, says Dickie’s voice, of all people. Perhaps she wanted to show you what was going on. That something wasn’t right.
‘It wasn’t what you thought,’ Fiona says. ‘He wasn’t kissing her – he was kissing the bump. They’re his babies, after all. Biologically his and hers – created in this house, with an insemination kit I bought myself. We don’t have secrets, Charles and I.’ She touches his cheek gently. ‘I know about your meetings with him too. Your little dates,’ she says. ‘After your emails to Ellie about witnessing Dickie’s death, we decided Charles should find out how much you knew. If there was any way you’d seen me there on the platform that night.’ She draws a hand over her eyes. ‘I don’t think you did, though, did you? You didn’t know as much as you thought.’
I stare at her.
‘Dear Dickie.’ Fiona lights another cigarette and glances at Charles. ‘He thought he was being so subtle with his questions. If only he hadn’t seen Alex’s toes. We’d already booked the operation to separate them. If the timing had been different, if he hadn’t noticed, it would never have … It was only later that we heard about his drawings and, of course, something had to be done about them too.’
‘Dickie. That was hard.’ Charles shakes his head.
‘It was just an idea at first. We thought we’d just try,’ Fiona says, almost apologetically. ‘To see if it could be done. He was drinking again by then, which made it easier. And we knew about that Seventies concert and timed it so Charles and Dickie would leave the bar as it ended. It was easy enough to squeeze myself into the crowd. He spotted me, though …’ She pauses. ‘Before it happened. I reached out as if to pull him back and then …’
‘You pushed instead,’ I say.
‘It was messy – you suspecting something. Telling Ellie. Talking to Caroline too. We wanted to find out what you knew – and Charles was the ideal man for the job.’
Fiona glances at her husband proudly and my eyes follow hers. His handsome face was the perfect disguise. It’s always harder to think ill of the beautiful – I’ve known that since Chesterfield, so why did I forget?
‘Of course, you completely lost it,’ says Fiona. ‘And started talking about the police – we never thought it would come to that. You had too much to lose yourself, being there on the night. We couldn’t have them digging into things, so we had to make it look worse for Ellie, make her seem more suspicious. After that, she could come off social media, disappear completely. Charles thought of Tom – what he’d done to Ellie. And let’s face it, the world is a better place without him.’
‘How?’ I say weakly.
‘That was Charles. Tom had been shouting all over Facebook about his trip to Paris. He’d even tag the bars he was in, so it was easy enough to find him, to follow him home. And Tom was plastered, of course.’
Charles is still quiet, letting Fiona explain.
‘He got an early-morning train back from Paris on Christmas Eve and the news broke the next day,’ she continues. ‘It worked. People started connecting the cases the way we thought they would. Journalists started looking into what happened at Chesterfield. With both of them dead, Ellie became the prime suspect. No one dreamed we’d had anything to do with it, good friends that we were, sheltering Dickie’s wife under our roof.’
Briefly, they seem pleased with their cleverness – or relieved perhaps to be able to tell their secrets, not to have to hold them so close to themselves. I think of everything I’d told Kat. It’s a relief to remember her and Caroline – I’m not the only one who knows.
‘You wouldn’t leave it alone, would you, Fran?’ Fiona says again. ‘You should have.’
‘What did you do to her?’
Fiona pulls a garden chair from the balcony and perches on it. ‘We took such good care of her. I want you to know that. She had the best private healthcare – we didn’t send her to our GP, we sent her to see an obstetrician on Wimpole Street who’d never met me. She went with my ID – all my papers, so tha
t the babies were always mine on the system. We were the same sort of weight, luckily, the same blood type. Ellie knew all my history and Charles went with her to appointments, so he could help her out. She was meant to give birth there and come back here to recover, but the twins had other ideas – they arrived early while she was here, not long after her fight with you.’
Hovering outside her bedroom, trying to think of the right words. I should have burst in; I should have said whatever it took to make her stay.
‘She came to see us.’ Fiona takes a gulp of her drink. ‘But the problem was she’d started to change her mind. She seemed less sure about our arrangement in the weeks before, but especially after Christmas. She’d bring up the presents you’d given her – the books and so on – and how excited you were about the baby. Ellie was such a pragmatist, as you know, but she started to talk about family and compromises. Things like that. At one stage, a couple of weeks before the birth, she even came up with the hare-brained idea of us taking one child each – splitting the twins up. We should have realised then …’
I want to ask, Realised what? But the words get stuck in my throat.
‘It could have worked perfectly,’ says Fiona. ‘It was such a beautiful plan. So simple. I pretended to be housebound during pregnancy – so ill I couldn’t go anywhere or see anyone – and after she had them, Ellie should have simply moved abroad with the money we’d given her. Disappeared. And we’d pick up the little red book from our consultant and present them at the registry office as our own.’
My hand is tight around the glass. ‘What did you do to her?’
‘The birth was barbaric. Beautiful but barbaric. The twins came early, like I said, when Ellie was staying with us. I think she was planning to bolt, even then. She was so upset about her fight with you. She wanted to make it better. She kept saying, “Do you think I should tell her?” She was sitting in that chair.’ Fiona looks over to where I’d been sitting. ‘We said: no, that she should calm down. That it would all be all right. And then her waters broke. Thank God she was with me,’ Fiona says without irony. ‘I helped deliver them. I was the first to hold them. It was a painful birth – Ellie tore herself, but she was brave. I stitched her up. I’ve never felt closer to a person. We were friends, you see, before it all went wrong. But then, as the days went by, she got agitated again.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She started talking about keeping them. She was desperate to tell you, so we had to hide her phone, but she got more and more upset. I started to sedate her a little, with her medication for postpartum pain. Just a low dose at first, to calm her down, but her mood swings got worse. We caught her outside – trying to escape with one of them. In January. The dead of winter. With a new-born.’ She shakes her head. Another slug of gin. ‘A wicked thing to do. So we restrained her after that, kept her locked in the room, and I increased her dose, added it to her water. Her tea. Any way I could. I increased it quite a lot actually.’
The silence between us hardens like ice.
‘She was unbalanced, you see. It’s the same with racehorses. There comes a point – if they’re damaged – when it’s crueller to keep them alive. Beautiful creatures, but then …’ Fiona gazes out from the balcony. ‘It’s actually not the worst way to go.’
62
Ellie’s last days were spent in this house, drugged and restrained. I can’t bear to think about it, about how long she would have lain like that, drifting in and out of consciousness. About how they might have forced the pills down her if she refused to take them. I shiver, though I’m still standing next to the fire. I look at the door; try to calculate how long it’ll take me to get out of the room.
‘Join us on the balcony,’ Fiona says. ‘It’s a beautiful night.’
Fear pins me to the ground.
‘You gave us a heart attack that day we found you in the water,’ she says. The wind lifting her hair. ‘We thought you knew. Christ, we couldn’t have you both in there.’
It takes a couple of moments for the realisation to sink in. The lake. Where I always used to sit. Ellie has been there all this time.
‘How?’ I’m still holding on to my glass. It’s the closest thing I have to a weapon.
‘In Charles’s trunk,’ Fiona says. ‘Weighed down with stones.’
I can picture it – CM Fry. I shake my head.
Charles lets go of Fiona’s hand and comes towards me. ‘It won’t hurt,’ he says. ‘There won’t be time.’
I take a step back.
‘Our girls have a good life. The best life. Everything money could buy. Ellie couldn’t give them that; you couldn’t either. Please don’t make this hard for me.’ He pulls a pained expression, still acting, giving it his best performance, though there’s no need now. ‘You wanted to die, didn’t you? When we found you in the water? You wanted to go.’
The smack my tumbler makes against the fireplace makes us both jump. I look at it, as surprised as Charles. I’m left with the glass’s jagged remains still in my hand.
‘Other people know,’ I tell him, without shaking, without breaking eye contact. ‘Caroline. The press. I’ve spoken to a journalist. You can’t kill all of us.’
I notice how calm I sound, how in control.
Charles stops for a moment; he’s made it around the table. He’s only a few paces from me now. ‘You’re bluffing.’
‘No,’ I say, still clutching the glass. ‘I never could. That’s what you do.’
He hesitates, making up his mind.
‘Charlie,’ says Fiona.
We both turn back to her. She’s climbed up on the balcony rail, sitting on the edge.
‘It’s over,’ she says to him gently. ‘We’re done.’ She sounds tired. Like someone wearily waiting for a bus. ‘We can’t keep going; we can’t keep getting rid of people. It has to stop.’
‘No,’ murmurs Charles. An exhalation so quiet I don’t know if she can hear him.
‘I wanted them so much,’ she says. ‘More than anything. But they were never mine. Not really. And now they’ll be taken away.’
Charles starts to move towards her, but the table is in the way. He’s not going to make it in time.
‘It’s all been too hard,’ Fiona says. ‘Whatever happens next, it’s going to get worse. It’s only going to get worse.’
I want to tell her that I’ll love them, that I’ll give them all the love Ellie never could – not for Fiona’s sake, but for my sister’s, so it’s the last thing Fiona hears. So that my words follow her like Furies.
But Fiona, being Fiona, doesn’t let me finish.
63
Cleanly, neatly, she tips herself back as if she is on a swing. The last I see of her is a flash of her pedicured feet.
The house is silent in the moment afterwards. There’s a depth to the quiet – a stillness, like the bottom of a well. Then, quickly, things change. Downstairs, a child shouts. Charles cranes his neck over the balcony to see and makes a noise like nothing I’ve heard. Worse than how we cried over Mother. How Ellie shrieked. Even more broken than me. You wouldn’t think it would be that way around.
I need to block out the sound of him, to go somewhere else. Under the water with Ellie. Where I want to be. But then he’s on me. Not the Charles I knew, but a roaring creature with an unrecognisable face, his hands warm and tight around my neck.
‘She’s gone. Isn’t that what you always wanted?’ he hisses. ‘It’s just you and me now.’
I can’t move. My breath is rasping, reedy. Very quickly everything is yellow, just as Ellie said. My mind is as blank as a sheet of paper.
He tightens his fingers around my neck and the yellow turns red. Just like that. I try to remember that day in the prep room. How my heart leapt at the proximity of him. How I’d explained the difference between the types of acting. But he never needed my help. I always thought he was more noble than the rest of them, more restrained, but that wasn’t it at all. He was just a better actor.
‘You’
re a big fake.’ My words are strangled and slow. ‘Using other people,’ I croak. ‘Throwing them away.’
‘Shut up, Freaky Fran.’ He laughs nastily.
Dark red turns to purple. I’m struggling to speak now. It won’t be long.
‘It’s OK.’ His voice is softer. ‘You’ll be with her soon. We should have left you in the lake with her that day … Such a gorgeous little thing, your sister. So fit and strong. I liked watching her. I always did.’
My breath is so thin now, I’m struggling to hear him, to focus on the words. I don’t want this to be the end. I’m not ready. I think of my mother stroking my hair. Ellie’s small hand in mine. The bonfire smell of my father’s jumpers. Branwell curled up next to me in the morning. Tiny snatched fragments of what I have loved.
‘I’m like you,’ Charles says. ‘I enjoy watching too – that’s why I was so early on the scene – that’s how the boys got into the pool. I gave them the code – not Juliet – but I didn’t tell them I’d be up in the gallery, watching. And then, just as I was leaving, I bumped into Dickie fleeing for help. I think he always had his suspicions.’
One more breath, as thin as a thread. Then another. I think of Daisy tilting her head back, the way her soft blonde hair falls over her forehead.
Focus on your hand, Fran: what you have in your hand. He has your neck, but your right arm could do it.
Charles is nearly done. As the grip becomes tighter, his rambling grows looser, like something unspooling.
‘But Dickie was loyal. The most loyal person I ever knew. So he never said, never let on that I was there: that I watched what Tom did to her.’
Women don’t fight to kill – that was what our self-defence teacher said. But he didn’t know what I was made of. That I might have it in me to act, after all.
‘I didn’t tell her until the end,’ he says. ‘When she was delirious. Drug-addled. On her way out. I thought it’d give her something to think about. Sometimes it can be fun to find out just how bad you can be, when everybody thinks you’re so bloody good.’
You and Me Page 26