by Ali Ahearn
Edward had whispered it in her ear the first time they’d made love. On their third date.
‘Frannie,’ he’d whispered. ‘My Frannie.’
And, in that instant, she’d become exactly that. His Frannie. No-one had ever looked at her with such focus, such intensity. She’d been utterly lost. Used only to inattention, his constant interest, his spoiling of her, had been a revelation. Shopping for lingerie in Kensington, dining at the Ritz, surprise mini-breaks.
The easy way he’d said, I love you, Frannie. And apparently meant it.
She’d fallen hard and fast.
Her mother had been unimpressed. ‘But, darling, he’s so …’
‘So what?’ she’d demanded.
‘Regular.’
Frances had been too astonished to laugh. Her mother had said ‘Regular’ like it was an affliction. She had nodded and said, ‘Yes. Precisely.’
Most normal mothers boasted about their daughters dating lawyers or doctors. Not hers. Frances’s man would have had to have turned up in a blue police box to impress Lizzie Tripton. It wasn’t her mother’s fault. A third-generation suffragette with a teenage crush on Jon Pertwee was always bound to be a little unconventional.
Her father had been noncommittal. Joni had been … well, she’d been Joni. Things hadn’t been going well for her and she’d been too self-absorbed to care.
And G? Frances suspected her grandmother hadn’t much liked Edward either. But she’d understood what he represented to her granddaughter. She’d simply looked him up and down and said, ‘Lovely.’
G had always been in her corner.
A shaft of pain, and another knock, dragged her back from the past and Frances snipped the last flawless bud with extra viciousness. The shearing noise settled into her marrow and nestled there like a child snuggling into its mother’s bosom.
That was for Frannie.
She checked her reflection in the hideous oval mirror Edward had bought at Sotheby’s. Vestiges of Frankie Tripton, stirred up by her grief, lurked behind her expertly kohled eyes.
The insecurities. The desperate craving to be loved.
Out of habit, Frances’s hand crept to her neck. Even after all these years, it surprised her to find the string of pearls there, instead of the simple silver locket.
She caressed their luminescent perfection, as familiar as her own fingerprints.
Another trinket they couldn’t afford.
She felt a rage build and, with one vicious yank, she was free of them. She didn’t allow herself the satisfaction of watching them bounce and scatter on the parquetry floor. But their pinging and clattering played like Puccini in her head.
A beautiful symphony.
She’d had orgasms that hadn’t felt this good. Or, at least, she used to.
She glanced back in the mirror. Frankie had gone. Her poised Frannie reflection looked back at her. Like a Madonna in greyscale. The sleek blonde bob that had cost three hundred pounds at Marcia’s on Kew, the porcelain complexion, the perfectly arched brows.
But today, not even her Chanel eyeliner could hide the crazy in her eyes.
The knocking persisted, and Frances took a moment before walking calmly to the door and pulling it open.
‘Mrs Sutcliffe?’
A man in a three-piece suit, and with a mouth that looked like it had been carved by Michelangelo, stared at her. He held himself awkwardly, like he was expecting her to lunge suddenly. He looked too young for the old-fashioned suit. Like a boy playing at being grown-up. All he needed was a bowler hat and an umbrella, and he could have been George Banks from Mary Poppins.
He checked his watch in the same irritating way as Edward did, and Frances fleetingly considered running the scissors straight into the crisp whiteness of his business shirt, just above the V of his Savile Row waistcoat.
He was obviously one of Edward’s minions. And, mouth or no mouth, she hated him on sight.
‘Mrs Frances Sutcliffe?’
Or maybe she didn’t.
Hearing Frances roll off his tongue pulled her out of her murderous fantasy and momentarily relieved her of her desire to scream a very bad F word.
Frances Sutcliffe did not use the F word.
And she supposed, whoever this pompous boy–man was, it was hardly his fault that the spineless Edward had sent him as his emissary.
From her doorstep she could just see the graceful iron curves of Palm House peeking above Kew’s barren treetops, elegant even in their wintry nakedness, and she remembered who she was.
‘Yes. I am she.’
The man on the doorstep eyed the scissors for a moment before plunging into speech. ‘My name is Nigel Lathbourne. I’m from Schuster, Schuster, Lathbourne and Lathbourne.’
Frances fought the urge to laugh. Who could say that with a straight face? She suddenly understood Joni’s Tourette’s-like habit of giggling at inappropriate times. But, as always, it hurt to think of her sister. And today she was hurting enough.
She concentrated instead on his very beautiful mouth and wondered how it would feel brushing against her nape.
‘I dare you to say that three times. Really fast.’
Nigel Lathbourne blanched and took a small step back as he graced her with an awkward smile. Her bleak mood ratcheted up another notch. God, what was she doing? Flirting with strangers on her doorstep?
Frances Sutcliffe did not flirt, any more than she indulged in F words.
None of the schools her father had enrolled her in had offered Flirting 101 and, even if they had, she would no doubt have failed miserably. Her sister, on the other hand, would have passed with flying colours.
Joni had O levels in flirting.
Except Frances had been doing it more and more lately. Flirting, that is. Or attempting to, anyway. And not just with men with beautiful mouths. Any man was fodder for her fantasies.
The balding, potbellied taxi driver from three days ago was a classic example. He’d called her luv and she’d sat in the back of his cab squirming as her hormones dreamed up a graphic scene of hastily parted clothes and urgent fumblings.
And, just this morning, the barely legal teenager with work-roughened hands who had delivered Edward’s peace offering had received the treatment. The barely legal things she’d fantasised about doing to him were still making her blush while simultaneously igniting a fire in her kickers. Hell, Prince Philip had even looked good when she’d seen him on last night’s news.
She’d told herself it was just a phase. A direct result of marrying the only man she’d ever slept with. Sexual curiosity colliding with the natural peaking of her sex drive.
She was almost thirty, after all.
Lord alone knew how she’d got to this age with only one lover to her name. She would have thought growing up with a mother who was the original free-love hippy would have rubbed off. But then, she’d always been a daddy’s girl.
And when Daddy was a six-foot-four military policeman, getting a date wasn’t easy. Getting laid had been nigh on impossible. Most boys brave enough to date her usually became a squeaking mess when her father answered the door. Attempting anything more than getting to first base had been completely beyond them after her father’s bone-crushing handshake.
Joni, who had never sought their father’s approval for anything, hadn’t felt similarly constrained. Joni had had enough sex for both of them.
Nigel Lathbourne cleared his throat and stuffed his hands in his pockets as he rocked back and forth on his heels. The action drew her gaze downward. He was tall, with – she glanced at his feet – very large shoes.
‘Mrs Sutcliffe?’
His barely concealed impatience dragged her back from thoughts stuck well and truly south of his fascinating mouth.
‘My law firm represents your grandmother,’ he continued.
Frances felt as if Nigel had prodded the fresh bruise inside her that was still all purple and black and mushy, and she reached for her neck, finding nothing at all now. She felt a momentary s
urge of panic and tamped it down.
He spoke again. ‘The funeral was this morning.’
Frances swallowed hard against the coal-like lump in her throat. She nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘The will reading was scheduled immediately afterwards but had to be postponed, as you and Ms Tripton, the two main beneficiaries of the estate, did not attend.’
Joni hadn’t gone? Frances felt another jab to the bruised spongy tenderness. She’d have bet Edward’s hideous collection of modern art that her sister would have been there.
In fact, that was why she’d stayed away.
She’d known, through G, who’d had an incessant compulsion to keep Frances up-to-date on Joni and her life, that her little sister was also a regular visitor to the tiny council flat. For the Big Brother eviction nights. As Joni had been evicted more times than a professional squatter, Frances had always been struck by that particular irony.
After seven years of avoidance, her grandmother’s funeral was not the place that Frances wanted to face her sister again. Since the … incident … all contact had been severed.
And Joni had been damn lucky that had been all that was severed.
Aware that Nigel Lathbourne was waiting for a reply, she grappled with her off-kilter cognitive processes.
‘“Estate” sounds a little grand.’
Frances had always felt like she was walking through an episode of The Bill the times she’d ventured into the council estate her grandmother had called home. She’d half expected to hear Reg Hollis call out, ‘Oi, you’re nicked!’ whenever she’d walked to the more-often-than-not-broken-down elevator.
The only thing of any value G had was her beloved flat-screen television.
‘She came into some money last year. From an ex-lover, I believe.’
Money? Frances felt a leap in her pulse that was due purely to self-interest.
Then self-loathing took over. Her grandmother was dead. G, the one stable adult influence she and Joni had growing up. The only person in Frances’s family who loved her enough to sit with her regularly through episodes of what Joni had once described as the most depressing game show on earth.
Yes, she knew that Countdown made watching paint dry seem positively zippy. She knew it wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But it had been hers. And G’s. And this was just one of the many reasons she loved her. One of the many things she’d miss. No amount of money could make up for that kind of loss.
Besides, G would have had to have slept with Richard Branson to dig Frances out of the financial black hole she was in. And Maggie Tripton had never been keen on bearded men.
‘The reading’s been rescheduled for four p.m. In our offices.’ Nigel Lathbourne reached into his fob pocket and handed her a card.
Their hands brushed as she took it. The pads of his fingers were soft, unlike those of barely legal florist boy, and she wondered fleetingly how they’d feel stroking down her belly.
‘It’s imperative that you come.’
Frances blinked, his words slicing through her fantasy. Imperative? Or what? She’d be thrown in the Tower? Put on the rack? Beheaded?
As if Nigel/George knew he’d erred, he softened his next words. ‘Please. Your grandmother was most insistent that both you and Joni, er … Ms Tripton be there.’
His slip yanked her out of the strange disconnectedness infecting her brain. Her grey eyes bored into the green of his.
He’d been to Joni’s first.
‘Well.’ Nigel cleared his throat. ‘I must be off. I’ll see you at four, Mrs Sutcliffe.’
She barely had time to register his words before Nigel Lathbourne gave a little bow, turned on his heel and all but ran down her garden path to a waiting taxi. She blinked. She didn’t usually inspire quick getaways – but Joni certainly did.
Frances stayed at the open doorway for a long while, trying to process the information. Joni. God, please, no. Anyone but Joni.
Joni, who had betrayed her so deeply. As only a sister could. There was so much between them – too much for one small room to contain, surely?
She felt the nerve in her left eyelid jump and her vision doubled.
Bloody hell, they weren’t even in the same room yet and Joni was already making her twitch.
Chapter 2
Joni. Feathers, Fur or Fins. 2:30 p.m.
Just five minutes, Joni promised herself as she sprinted up the lane to the animal shelter that she ran. She might have been the sole director of the struggling outfit, but most of the time she just felt like the den mother. Five minutes with her babies and she could handle anything.
Stepping past the English Holly next door, she saw him. Two and a half feet of indignant melancholy. Even before her brain registered outrage at such a glorious creature being left tied to the gate in the November drizzle, she’d named him. Yeats. He looked at her with outrage and pathetic appeal, as only an Irish setter can.
As ever, a chorus of woofs, chirps and howls greeted Joni as she pushed through the door of the little consulting room. Kelly, the vet, rolled her eyes at the effect Joni always had on the animals in the back, expertly whipped her stethoscope from her neck and muttered darkly, ‘Jakers, how the hell’re we going to feed him?’
Joni’s eyes swept the room, from the six-foot-high poster of Che Guevara, to the wall-to-wall magenta shelves crammed with books, doggy treats and stress balls. Even the slogan she’d scrawled jauntily across Che’s chest wasn’t helping. It was going to take more than ‘Have a Che Day’ to get her to Liverpool Street on time.
‘Where do we start, boyo?’ Kelly was almost whispering as she ran gnarled hands through matted hair, wet and sticky against the dog’s emaciated frame. It took a lot of sweet talk and jelly dog treats to get Yeats to agree to the physical. The vet was gentle but the terrified dog growled piteously every time Joni made to move away. He only wanted her. And she couldn’t have left her newest charge alone.
Not at his lowest moment.
Liverpool Street, 4:07 p.m.
Fuck, she really had not wanted to be late.
Mind you, neither had she exactly intended to be early.
Joni didn’t want to look too desperate for the money that she knew in her heart didn’t exist. But, on the other hand, she didn’t care for the attention afforded by waltzing in after everyone was seated, either.
She’d planned to be right on time. No hellos, explanations, or (worst of all) post-funeral small talk.
On the way in on the train, she’d stared out at the November bleakness of London Fields, and wondered why she’d agreed to go. The wondering had continued even as her thirst spiked when spotting the Pub on the Park at London Fields.
Don’t judge me, she thought, noticing the man beside her spy Des writhing in the pocket of her yellow corduroy jacket. This little guy’s been through enough. Des seemed to relax, and settled with the tiniest of rodent sighs.
The familiar light industrial chaos of Cambridge Heath and Bethnal Green hadn’t yielded any answers either. By the time she de-trained at Liverpool Street and indecorously sprinted the three minutes to the offices of Schuster, Schuster, Lathbourne and Lathbourne, she still didn’t have a clue why she was there.
It can’t just have been Baby Lathbourne’s flecky, mint-jelly eyes. After all, he was the worst kind of superior fool. The lawyer kind.
And it certainly wasn’t any kind of lame pipedream that her financial woes might be solved by a hand of mercy extended from the grave.
As she yanked open the glass door of Messrs Schuster and Lathbourne, Joni decided it was just about G. She had never been able to say no to her. Not that this made Joni unique. No-one said no to the Queen of the Broadwater Farm herself.
As Joni burst into the cool hush, the woman working the front desk raised the single eyebrow that ran from the upper left of her forehead to the upper right.
Impressive.
Joni had always admired women who refused to pluck, even though they reminded her of her mother, who treated her body hair
like some sacred endowment with which one should never, ever fuck. Scanning the shiny name badge clipped efficiently to her lapel, Joni smiled and mentally named her Hairiet.
Right now, Hairiet looked positively Arctic. ‘Yes?’
‘Um …’ Joni tried to telepath a message to Des. No wriggling. If the mere sight of her had pricked this woman’s distaste antenna, she could not even begin to imagine what a tiny furry passenger might provoke.
‘I’m here for a reading.’
Hairiet’s eyes narrowed. She consulted a list resting at a neat right angle to her hand.
‘Name?’
‘Joni Tripton.’ Her name came out all squashed and apologetic. She was sure she felt Des give her a tiny kick. Muscle up.
‘Oh, Ms Tripton!’
Like a flash from the blue, Hairiet spontaneously metamorphosed into some kind of warm, hairy Nigella Lawson. ‘So pleased you could make it! Please follow me.’
Hairiet was up and out of her chair with startling efficiency, gently touching Joni’s elbow and guiding her down a caramel-coloured hall towards the back of the offices, where a sign on a door said: Do Not Disturb. Conference in Progress.
‘Don’t worry, pet,’ she assured Joni, with one final squeeze. Joni wondered what she’d done to redeem herself. ‘They’re expecting you.’
And, indeed, when she inched through the door, which Hairiet flung open with a flourish, and into the intimate meeting room, all eyes were upon her. But she didn’t know whether it was because they were, in fact, expecting her, because she was now (Joni checked her watch) thirteen minutes late, or because of the startling impact of her yellow jacket with purple stockings and tartan ballet flats.
Or perhaps whether it was just, as usual, the whole green-hair thing.
‘Hiya.’
After the initial stunned silence, the little crowd rallied, murmuring politely, and Joni was able to take in the room. It was lushly carpeted in deep maroon, and furnished with an elegant square conference table and expensive-looking paintings.