The Back Road

by Abbott, Rachel

  ‘Tom’s told me why they believe Mimi went after Gary,’ Leo said. ‘Gary says she was raving on about him seeing her in the woods, but he didn’t see a thing. He thought he heard a noise, but when he turned to look, his headlights were shining straight into his eyes. I guess he wanted to get out of there pretty quickly too.’

  Leo’s lip curled in disgust, as it did every time she mentioned Gary’s name. She picked up her coffee cup, and the sisters were quiet for a moment, each lost in her own thoughts.

  ‘Does Tom know how Mimi tracked Abbie down?’ Ellie asked.

  ‘There’s only so much he’s prepared to tell me, but he did say that although Abbie’s surname had changed, her birthday was the same. Just one Facebook app apparently, and the rest was easy, especially for somebody who had spent their years in prison studying IT. They think she’d never planned to meet Abbie, just be her friend in disguise. “Chloe” could have stayed in touch for years with nobody being any the wiser. She’d just intended to stalk her daughter - on and offline. The opportunity on that Friday just fell into her lap. But Abbie rejected her. God knows what Mimi would have done if Abbie hadn’t escaped.’

  Ellie was stirring her coffee entirely unnecessarily, but there was something she wanted to ask Leo and she wasn’t sure how she was going to take it.

  ‘I was wondering, Leo, whether you were struggling to sleep because of the baby.’

  Leo turned to Ellie with a puzzled look.

  ‘What baby?’

  ‘Mimi’s baby. Oh, we know now that there wasn’t a baby, but when you crashed the car you knew that you were probably going to kill a baby, and that must have been incredibly hard.’

  To Ellie’s amazement, Leo laughed.

  ‘I knew there was no baby, Ellie. I’d known since the day before but hadn’t got round to telling you. There was always so much else going on. Mimi had a giant pack of Tampax in her shopping bag. It was a Mimi type con to keep Pat with her until it was too late for him to do anything else. I don’t know what I would have done if she’d actually been pregnant, but I’d rather not think about it. I didn’t intend to kill her either, you know. I thought I could knock her unconscious so that I could get away. But she would have killed me without hesitation.’

  ‘I can’t believe that Pat actually lived with her. Slept with her even.’ Ellie shuddered. ‘What the hell was he thinking? There’s no way that Georgia’s going to take him back now, even though she feels sorry for him. But sympathy doesn’t seem such a good basis for a marriage.’

  Ellie leant down and moved the small table away so she could shuffle along the bench to sit closer to Leo. She leaned slightly against her sister’s good arm, and was pleased that Leo didn’t move away. If anything, she moved nearer.

  ‘Thanks for finding out about Dad, Leo. I know you’ve not told me everything, but that’s fine. I don’t want to hear it just now. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to hear the rest. I trust you, and I know you won’t hold anything back when the time is right. At least I can stop expecting him to make an appearance, and we can decide whether to carry on living here, or to move. I know you didn’t think much of him, but he’s the only dad we’ll ever have. Don’t you mourn him - not even a bit?’

  Ellie knew immediately she shouldn’t have asked that question. Leo’s face appeared to be carved of stone.

  ‘No. He was married to your mother, but in spite of that he came and swept my mum off her feet. Ellie, she was only seventeen when he got her pregnant with me. Seventeen. That’s only three years older than Abbie. And he was thirty-six. Then he went through a mock marriage and lived a lie for all those years. I don’t think my mum had a clue.’

  Ellie nodded her head. She knew that Leo was going to take some persuading to see a good side in him.

  ‘But he made a mistake, Leo. Look at Max and me recently. We’ve made mistakes, but you don’t think that we’re devils in disguise, do you?’

  ‘Of course I don’t. But there are mistakes and mistakes. I might have forgiven him that one, because my mum was so very special, but I couldn’t forgive his neglect. He handed me over to your mother and then ignored me. He didn’t care what happened to me. After my mum died, I was distraught. My world had ended. You tried to comfort me, but how many times did he try? Never. Not once. Too busy out doing whatever he was doing all the time.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? Come on, sis. He was working.’

  Leo didn’t respond and Ellie was quiet for a moment.

  ‘I suppose if he’d been more of a role model, I might have been less suspicious of Max. I instantly leapt to a conclusion - the wrong one. Poor Max.’

  Ellie felt a slight increase in pressure from Leo in mute sympathy.

  ‘Am I allowed to ask? What have you told him?’ Leo said.

  ‘It was a hard decision. I did wonder whether telling him everything would be just an effective way of giving me absolution, and whether I shouldn’t live with the guilt. But Max and I had, until recently, been so close that we could practically see into each other’s minds. My mind would have permanently had a shutter in place, and I knew he would be able to see it and not understand what was behind it. So I had to tell him. I told him everything while you were in hospital.’

  ‘And…?’

  ‘And nothing. He’s angry, but partly at himself. He’d put up quite a few shutters too with that sodding Alannah. And God knows what he thought he was doing, going into property development with Sean!’

  The two women were quiet for a moment.

  But they’d had enough tension in the last weeks, and Ellie needed to help Leo to lighten up a bit. She gave her a gentle nudge in the ribs.

  ‘Anyway, how about you and your dashing policeman then? I hear he has a job offer in Manchester - is that right?’

  Leo laughed.

  ‘He’s not my policeman, but yes. He has been offered a job, and I think he’s going to take it. He doesn’t want a promotion, he says, because he doesn’t want to be too office bound, and he doesn’t need the money. He’ll keep the cottage for weekends, but it’s a bit far for a daily commute so he’s going to look for something else for during the week.’

  ‘Leo, that man was a complete star in all this. What would we have done without him? Do you think that you and he might…?’

  Leo nudged her sister back.

  ‘Enough, Ellie. We get on well, it has to be said, and he does have a few redeeming features.’

  ‘What, you mean apart from his good looks and his calm demeanour?’ Ellie asked with a grin.

  ‘For the record he can be a stroppy bugger so don’t let that Mr Nice Guy act fool you. But apart from that, he’s not the kind of guy to just jump me, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Pity,’ Ellie said with a grin. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Well… he cooks a mean curry, and I don’t think he’s ever likely to call me ‘Babes’. Two huge points in his favour.’

  Ellie laughed and tucked herself in a bit near to her sister, making the most of the moment of closeness and wondering if it could last.

  * * *

  It was good to laugh after the previous two weeks, because there had been so much to cry about. The laughter was almost painful, as if it was something they’d forgotten how to do, and was forcing them to exercise muscles that were weak from lack of use.

  Leo was relieved that they had changed the subject from her father. She had come so close to telling Ellie, but she knew that her sister was still very vulnerable. So despite her blog post, she was going to abide by Ellie’s wishes. Not keep anything from her, but wait until her sister decided she was ready to hear it. For now, it was too much.

  Leo felt sorry about Sean, though. Whatever his crimes and however much he had confused Ellie, he hadn’t deserved to die. Ellie had told her all about the blackmail texts, and how she had ignored them because she believed they came from him. But Mimi had been getting into the house all the time, driven no doubt by her hatred of Ellie as Georgia’s best friend a
nd greatest ally, mixed with her belief that Ellie was having an affair with the person who had knocked Abbie over and ruined all her plans.

  Nobody knew even now why Mimi had thought that Gary was Ellie’s lover, and Leo had never admitted that she had believed the same thing.

  They had found the keys to Willow Farm, which was a huge relief. Pat discovered them when he was clearing out Mimi’s stuff. As Ellie first suspected, Max had put the keys down on the worktop, and Mimi had picked them up.

  It was going to take time for them all to recover, but things were - at least on the face of it - gradually returning to normal. The twins were watching sport with their dad - only the best bits, they said - which for Ruby meant cycling as she was now so proficient without her stabilisers. So it was good to have a bit of time alone with Ellie, sitting in the sunshine.

  No sooner had this thought passed through her head than she heard the hum of an expensive car coming up the drive. They caught a glimpse of Charles’ Aston Martin as it pulled up at the front of the house.

  ‘We’re round the side,’ shouted Ellie, as she heard the car door slam.

  A very different looking Charles and Fiona approached across the lawn. Leo couldn’t quite put her finger on the difference, but somehow Fiona looked more relaxed and at ease with herself, and for once was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. A very smart one, but nevertheless, a T-shirt. The biggest surprise was that they were actually holding hands.

  ‘Hello, you two,’ said Ellie with a welcoming smile. ‘It’s good to see you. Pull up a couple of chairs. I’ll make some coffee in a second.’

  Charles scurried round organising the seating, seeming a bit flustered.

  ‘We thought we’d see how you all are,’ he said.

  ‘We’re fine, thanks,’ Leo said. ‘I’m on the mend.’ She gave them her best smile. Nobody needed to know how she was feeling inside. As she remembered the suspicions she’d had about Charles, she cringed inwardly.

  ‘We’re nowhere near as bad as Bella and Penny,’ Ellie added. ‘They’ve had so much to come to terms with.’

  Everybody was silent for a moment.

  ‘If only the police had found out about Gary earlier and arrested him, most of this wouldn’t have happened,’ Ellie said. ‘Sean wouldn’t be dead, and Mimi wouldn’t have been on the run. We still don’t know how the police finally found out it was Gary. Tom knows, but he says he can’t discuss police business.’

  Charles was looking at his feet. Fiona reached for his hand.

  ‘That’s what we’ve come to tell you,’ she said. ‘It was Charles who finally told the police about Gary. He didn’t see the accident, but he knew that Gary had driven down the back road that night.

  ‘But you were in London, Charles, weren’t you?’ Leo asked

  Charles had still not looked up, and Fiona took a deep breath.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s my fault’ she said. ‘Look, this is terribly embarrassing, but we feel that we owe you an explanation. It’s only in the last few days that we’ve admitted everything to each other, but we felt we couldn’t leave it any longer before we spoke to you.’

  Leo and Ellie exchanged glances, but clearly neither had any idea what this was all about.

  ‘Charles actually came back from London on Friday evening. He was going to surprise me, but when he got home, he saw Gary’s car in the drive. He knew I’d been talking to him about the planning permission for the conservatory, but it was late - too late for a business visit. Or a social call, come to that. And anyway if I’d invited guests, I would have told Charles.’

  She looked up at her husband, and he gave her a gentle smile.

  ‘I couldn’t bring myself to go in,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know what I would discover, and on the whole I preferred not to know, if that makes sense. But I waited. I wanted to see what time he left - if he left at all.’

  Fiona leaned forward.

  ‘But he did leave. Nothing happened. Charles knows that now. He didn’t come home after Gary left. He couldn’t think of any plausible reason for arriving home at one in the morning, given that the last train got in four hours previously, so he went off to a hotel. He followed Gary as far as the top of the back road.’

  ‘My car was picked up on the ANPR system, so I had to go and account for myself. I should have told them then. I know that. But they would have questioned Fiona, and I didn’t want anybody to know about my suspicions. I wasn’t even sure how I would deal with it all myself. It was only after we talked and it all came out that we both agreed I should tell the police, so I called them on Thursday evening and went down to the police station. It seems I was a few hours too late, though. I understand by then that Sean’s body had already been found. I’m so sorry - both of you. I could have prevented so much of this.’

  ‘No, Charles,’ Fiona said, pulling his clasped hand closer and enclosing it in her other hand. ‘You mustn’t take all the blame. I knew which way Gary would probably have gone home, given the amount he’d been drinking. And I knew he was lying when he said on Saturday night that he’d had the Porsche for a few days. I honestly didn’t put two and two together. Of course, he was driving his BMW on Friday night, but just in case he’d been seen he wanted to put people off the scent.’

  Ellie frowned. ‘Oh my God. It must have been Gary’s car that I passed that night. He would have recognised me, and I couldn’t think for the life of me why the person that passed me hadn’t reported seeing my car, because it’s so distinctive.’

  ‘Didn’t you recognise him?’ Leo asked.

  ‘No - that’s the stupid thing. I’d forgotten that I’d passed anybody until Thursday, and then I only remembered it was a dark saloon car. If I’d realised it was a BMW, I might have figured it out - but then Gary turned up in a red Porsche saying that he’d had it for a couple of days, so I’d probably have ruled him out. A waste of effort on his part, because I completely forgot.’

  ‘All irrelevant now. There was no evidence at the scene, but there were minute traces of Abbie’s clothes caught on the grill of his BMW, so he can’t talk his way out of that one. It doesn’t alter the fact that I really should have done something sooner.’ Charles was gazing down at the ground again, looking as if he wished it would open up and swallow him whole.

  Leo was keen to move away from the blame game. They’d all made mistakes.

  ‘Thanks for explaining it to us Charles. It’s one more mystery solved. I’ll go and make us all some coffee, if you’d like a cup.’

  Ellie started to get up.

  ‘No, Ellie,’ Leo said. ‘I’ll go. With that machine, even I can manage.’

  Leo had to escape. If only she’d realised that Gary had been lying about his car, she might have put all the pieces together. She’d kept quiet about him being out on Friday night too, in a foolish attempt to protect Ellie since she believed Gary was the person Ellie had gone out to meet. So she was every bit as guilty as Charles.

  53

  Fiona and Charles hadn’t seemed in the mood to leave, but after they had finished their coffee Ellie had excused herself, saying she wanted to bath the twins with Max. She didn’t like them being out of her sight for more than five minutes at the moment, and was glad that they were going on holiday very soon. She could have all three of them to herself.

  Leo had looked rather alarmed at the idea of being left with Fiona and Charles, and Ellie was relieved to see that that they had gone when she returned to the kitchen.

  She could see her sister through the window, sitting on the garden bench, and she was sorry to see how dejected she seemed. She heard a sound behind her, and realised that Max was looking too. He pulled Ellie’s back tight against his chest and wrapped his arms round her, resting his head on her shoulder as they watched Leo.

  ‘She’ll be okay, Ellie. She had a terrifying experience, and she’s struggling with what she did, but she’s a tough cookie.’

  ‘No she’s not. You know that. She talks a good fight. I don’t like leaving her, Max.’<
br />
  ‘Then she can come with us,’ Max said. Ellie smiled at his thoughtfulness. She knew that wasn’t what he really wanted.

  ‘She won’t do that.’

  ‘Why don’t you pour the two of you a glass of wine each, and I’ll join you in a while? I’ve got a job to do first.’

  Ellie grabbed a cold bottle from the fridge and a couple of glasses and made her way into the garden just as Max appeared from the shed carrying a pump sprayer.

  ‘What on earth is Max doing now?’ Leo asked as Ellie joined her on the bench.

  ‘He’s spraying the roses. According to Gary - who actually does know quite a lot about plants if not much about people - our yellow roses are suffering from some kind of fungus. He cut one - one of my favourites, as it happens – on the night of the party and sneaked it into the dining room to show me that it was diseased. He said he didn’t want to embarrass me in front of our guests.’ Ellie gave a snort of derision. As if diseased flowers mattered in the overall scheme of things.

  Leo smiled. ‘I remember that now. He came looking for you in the kitchen.’

  ‘It was all very peculiar. It’s a mystery to me how a man who cares so passionately about the perfection of plants can be such a pig to his wife. I’d like Max to dig the whole bed up if I’m honest. They’ve always been my favourites, but Sean was forever leaving me yellow roses - even one in the fridge on the night of the party.’

  ‘Bloody hell - was he in John Lewis on Sunday too?’

  ‘Yep - that’s why I was so freaked out. And he’d left one on the doorstep the night you arrived. It was so creepy.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me - I wouldn’t have judged you,’ Leo said, giving Ellie a sad smile.

  Ellie was spared the necessity of answering as her glance strayed above Leo’s head to the path that led to the front of the house. Another visitor.

  ‘Hi. I thought I’d find you all out in the garden. Is it okay if I come in?’

  ‘Hi Tom,’ Max called. ‘Perfect timing. My excuse to stop this job and go and get another couple of glasses.’