Her Sister's Secret

by E. V. Seymour

  “How did you see? Wasn’t it dark?”

  “We had torches.”

  “Then what?” I nodded for him to continue.

  “I inched over. Didn’t want to get too close, and—” He let out a slow moan.

  “Come on, Zach,” I urged him. “Tell me.”

  “I saw blood. There was blood,” he repeated, agonised.

  “She hadn’t gone to the bottom, right?”

  “It was worse. She’d got wedged somehow.”

  I briefly closed my eyes, tried to visualise. Bloody hell. “Upside down?”

  “No, no. She plunged straight through backwards and then got stuck below the water line.” Zach’s shoulders heaved up and down in despair. It sounded plausible. It did. But;

  “If the stupid owner hadn’t tried to block it up, she would have stood a chance.”

  “The blood, where did you say it was?” Cranial injuries, Rocco had written.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was it on her or—”

  “Christ, Molly, on her head, on the wall, on the beam. Jesus, Molly, I don’t know. Head, face, building what does it matter?”

  It mattered. It made the difference. Bile filled my mouth. “Are you sure you’re telling me the truth?”

  “I am. I swear I did not hurt her.”

  I locked eyes with his. Would Zach even know? “It was only the two of you? Nobody else?”

  “Yeah. Course.”

  “Okay, then what?”

  “I panicked. I mean I really lost it.”

  “And?”

  “I got the fuck out of there.”

  “Was she dead?”

  His face contorted in anguish. “I don’t know,” he whined, obviously haunted by the possibility that she wasn’t. “I couldn’t tell. I had no phone, so I went to get help.”

  “Good,” I said weakly. I wanted to find something in this that would redeem my brother in my eyes, but I was running on empty, running on fumes. “Then what?”

  His eyes darted to the door. “There’s a phone box down the road. I reversed the charges.” His shoulders rounded, eyes looking everywhere but at me. A terrible thought broke loose, and fear marched straight at me, grabbed hold of my throat with its greedy fingers, and would not let go. Oh God, couldn’t be, but if it did, everything made sense. And Scarlet, poor Scarlet, had paid for them all.

  “You phoned Dad, didn’t you?”

  Zach looked up. “I’m sorry,” he said, “so sorry.”

  Chapter 60

  “Where are you going?”

  “Where do you think?”

  “Don’t, Molly. You can’t. Dad will kill me.”

  “You think I won’t bust the lot of you?” Beside myself, my breath came in sharp bursts. I had a pain in the middle of my chest, like you get from running in bitterly cold weather. “You involved Dad and he covered for you. And,” I said, red-faced with fury, “he threatened the only person who could verify that you were in the same place as Drea that night.”

  “He said he would fix it. That was all.”

  Like my father fixed everything. “He sold out for you. Now I know why you got clean. I know why you never show your face at the house. You’re a constant reminder of what you and he did. Does Mum know?”

  Zach looked straight ahead. I had my answer.

  I’d run out of words, out of energy, out of belief and hope and faith. The thought that they had all been in on a bloody awful conspiracy did me in. I felt crushed under the weight of it, physically, mentally and spiritually. I let out a howl. Zach’s arms slid around me.

  “Get the fuck away,” I shouted, shaking him off. “Scarlet found out, didn’t she? That’s why she came to see you.”

  Zach hung his head. “Molly, I—”

  “You destroyed her every belief in the people she loved.” I wasn’t like my sister. I didn’t believe in family, the way Scarlet did. She bought into it; heart, body and soul.

  “It wasn’t my fault. It was Richard Bowen’s. He had a thing for her when she and Nate weren’t getting along. She liked him a lot, but then Bowen somehow found out about what happened and threatened to expose Dad and me if she didn’t pay up.”

  I lunged towards him. “You knew, and you said and did nothing?”

  Zach cowered, put his hands up to protect his face. “We thought it would be okay. She paid him, but he wanted more, said there was plenty of family money she could tap into. She even gave him that bracelet Nate bought for Christmas.”

  “He was blackmailing her, for Chrissakes. And you let him?”

  He tapped the side of his head. “I’m not strong like you. She said she’d found a way to take care of it, so he’d never bother her again.”

  “Fuck’s sake, Zach, instead of coughing up, or having it out with Dad, or going to the police, she drove into him.”

  “I swear I never knew what she planned. You have to believe me, Molly.”

  Oh. My. God.

  Scarlet saw sacrifice as the simplest way out. That way, Zach and Dad didn’t go to prison. Mum wouldn’t be destroyed. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got crucified.

  And she was so wrong.

  I shook my head in a bid to tame my messed up mind. Angrily wiping away my tears, I stood up. Zach eyed me nervously. “What are you going to do?”

  “Speak to the man who lied.”

  *

  Confronting my father was as risky as drinking with a chainsaw in my hand. I’d once respected him and now I feared him. How betrayed and disappointed Scarlet must have felt.

  Dad was in the conservatory eating a late lunch: cheese and pickle, with crackers. He looked up, glad to see me. I’d almost forgotten that the day before we’d buried my sister. Seemed a lifetime ago.

  I drew up a chair, scraped it across the floor as hard as I could and, strung-out, sat down opposite with a thump. “Where’s Mum?”

  “Shopping. She’ll be back soon. Wants to talk to you about Scarlet’s ashes. Can I get you something to eat?” I didn’t answer. He caught my mood. “Is everything all right? That boy hasn’t been bothering you again, has he?”

  “That boy? Do you mean the one you lied about?”

  His eyes became suddenly alert, on guard. “Is this about Stanton?” Dad was so earnest it almost made me doubt myself. Almost.

  “Was Mallis in on it from the beginning?” My father had used the notebook, with its dodgy references and associations, to ensure that Mallis played along.

  He screwed his face into a mystified frown. “Molly, I really don’t—”

  “You played me. Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

  He pushed his plate away and gave a puzzled smile. “Molly, I assure you I have no idea.”

  “You assure me?” My laugh was arid. I fastened my gaze on a pulse in his jaw. The more I stared the more it ticked. “You sat in my living room and spun me lie after lie. You didn’t investigate Drea Temple’s missing status because you didn’t need to. You knew where she was. Dead at the bottom of a mine because you took her there.”

  “Molly, you’re not making sense.” The smile went cold, congealing on his face.

  “Which bit don’t you understand, Mr Back in the Day? You moved her body from a well. You knew exactly how Drea Temple died and you covered it up. Hiding her body miles away was a genius idea.”

  He pitched forward as if he were hard of hearing, did that thing when somebody talks to you in a language you don’t understand. Then he made a fatal mistake. He reached out his hand, in a ‘take mine, trust me,’ gesture.

  I didn’t move. Birds sang. Someone in a next door garden mowed a lawn. A dog barked. Normal everyday noises, yet the only sound I heard was shallow breath and the thrum of stone-cold panic. I was first to drop my gaze. It took every part of me for my body not to fold and crumple. This was my dad, the person I’d loved forever, the one I’d believed in and trusted and looked up to, whatever the hell that meant, and now it was all gone. Maybe he understood that. Maybe he knew that there was no going
back, that nothing could ever undo his betrayal and would ever be the same. Couldn’t be.

  “You would understand if you were a parent.” He spoke while my eyes fixed on the table in between us. “I did what was for the best. I couldn’t let your Mum endure her only son in prison. It would have broken her.”

  I looked up, smashed it to him with a dead-eyed stare. “And what about Drea’s parents, her grandmother? What about Rocco Noble?”

  “Fair point.”

  “There’s nothing fair about any of this.” Or just. “And you had the bloody brass neck to unleash Stanton on Rocco when, all along, you knew that he was onto the truth.”

  “Molly,” he said, trying to break through to me, “I did it to save my son. He wouldn’t have lasted a day in prison.”

  “You put a family through hell.”

  “I did and I’m sorry, but Drea Temple was only another dead junkie.” I gasped at his callousness, but he carried on, his warning stare enough to melt steel. “She had no proper home. She’d chosen a way of life away from her family. She was an addict that was never going to get any better. She was one of life’s losers.”

  “You can’t mean that. Damn it, you can’t say that.” And yet he did. He had. Did I even know this man? “You contaminated a crime scene. You covered for a murderer. Those injuries weren’t caused by the fall, were they? Oh my God,” I gasped. “You think Zach killed her, don’t you?”

  Dad flinched. “Zach did not murder Drea Temple.”

  “How do you know? On drugs, he was capable of anything. What about the blood?”

  “How did—”

  “He told me.”

  Dad’s cheeks sagged. A heavy sigh wooshed from between his lips. “Drea Temple died as a result of drowning. It was unfortunate but there was nothing odd about it. It was a simple accident.”

  “Did she sustain defence injuries?”

  “Of course not.”

  “No signs of a struggle?”

  “No.”

  Cold silence consumed the conservatory. I stood up, kicked back the chair. “She was standing and fell through backwards,” I said, acting it out. “So injuries would have been to the back of her head, maybe her face as she hit the sides.”

  “Precisely,” he said as if I were a slow learner that had finally grasped the basics of arithmetic. “And as you know very well, head wounds bleed a lot.”

  “Enough to spatter the walls and beams? Sounds more like blunt force trauma.” I spat out the words in terms my dad would definitely understand. “What was it, a brick, piece of wood, lead piping?”

  Anger flashed across his face, pinching and tightening the muscles in his jaw.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I know my son,” he repeated.

  “But you didn’t know your daughter. None of us did. Scarlet died to protect your vicious little secret.”

  His head jerked up; nostrils dilated. Streaks of red flashed across his cheekbones and his eyes shrank to two tiny pinpricks of rage. I thought he might hit me and, despite my own hot sense of justice and truth finally prevailing, I cowered.

  “That’s a monstrous thing to say.” Dad struggled to contain his fury. “How dare—”

  “How dare I? How dare you! You put the fear of God into Barry Bevan.”

  At the mention of the cabbie’s name, Dad’s jaw jacked open. The red in his cheeks fled to white. Time to go in for the kill.

  “Bevan was Richard Bowen’s biological father.”

  I waited a beat, watched Dad’s face, merciless.

  “But how did —how?” His expression was one of stunned confusion.

  “You’re the detective. You figure it out.”

  Chapter 61

  “All right. All right. Keep your pants on.” Lenny threw open the door, took one look. “What’s wrong?”

  Agitated, I bowled in, almost colliding with the console table in the hall. I’d tried to phone Rocco en route but the line registered as being discontinued. When Rocco said he’d cleared out, I thought it was temporary. I didn’t think he meant excommunication, rip and run. Sending an email from my phone to his work address resulted in a failure notice.

  “Through to the lounge,” she said. “It’s cooler in there.”

  “Did I get you out of bed?” The way her robe hung off one shoulder, she’d clearly slung it on. I glanced at my watch: 3.05 p.m.

  She wrinkled her nose. “It’s not a crime. You gave me the day off, remember?”

  “’Course.” I looked up at the ceiling gingerly. “I haven’t disturbed you, have I?”

  “I wish.” Lenny’s laugh was genuine. “Do I need to put the kettle on?”

  I looked at her soulfully.

  “Booze?”

  “Can I leave my car here?”

  “Sure.” She gave me a shrewd look. “Does Rocco Noble have anything to do with your unexpected visit?”

  If only it were that simple.

  While she fixed drinks, Lenny indicated I sit down. “Gin,” she declared. “The only drink in a crisis.” I sat down on a mauve coloured Chesterfield in a room that resembled an abstract painting knocked up by a four-year-old. The walls were painted in alternating raspberry and Grecian blue, the contents mostly identifiable purchases from the shop, the exception a high-tech sound system.

  Lenny returned, deposited an ice-cold glass in my hand and sat down beside me. She swung her legs up onto my lap, rather like a cat stakes its territory. Normally, I’d protest, but normal counted for nothing these days.

  “Now I’m sitting comfortably, you’d best begin.”

  So, I did. It took me fifteen minutes to blurt out the whole sorry tale, from my refusal to believe that Scarlet’s alleged depression led to the accident, her involvement with Richard Bowen, his attempt to blackmail her, the terrible revelations about Zach and my father and his connection to Rocco Noble, to Scarlet’s final desperate act.

  “Christ, that’s awful,” Lenny said, visibly shocked. “Poor Scarlet.” Sombre, I took a big gulp of gin. “And poor you,” Lenny said. “There’s no easy way to put this but most addicts are liars.” She spoke without judgement, simply a statement of fact. “Did Zach have anything to do with Drea Temple’s death?”

  “My heart says no.”

  “What about your instinct?”

  “Is there a difference?”

  “Your heart is what you want to believe. Your instinct tells the truth.”

  “Then no.”

  “But she was murdered?”

  I met Lenny’s eye. Rocco thought so. Why else would my father behave in such a reckless way? And the blood spatter – how had that happened? “Which means that, if Zach didn’t do it, the killer is in the wind.” I told Lenny about Rocco’s warning.

  Lenny pulled a face. “I feel bad for saying what I did about him.”

  I smiled weakly.

  “I need more booze,” Lenny announced, swinging off the sofa. “You?”

  “Please.” I handed her my glass. While she was gone, I took out my phone and spotted a text from Chancer: ‘Need to talk. Are you free?’ His timing was terrible.

  Lenny plonked a tray of drinks in front of me. “Brought the bottle and there’s ice in the bucket. Thought it could be a long afternoon. You can stay if you want. The bed’s made up in the spare room.”

  “Thanks, Lenny, but I’d like to sleep in my own home. I’ll grab a cab.”

  “Well, the offer’s there if you change your mind.”

  She viewed me with a hawkish expression. “What are you going to do?”

  I ran my fingers through my hair. “About my father?” My family resembled a cheap film set; nothing solid behind us except fake computer-generated images. Would I dismantle it all? I honestly didn’t know.

  “About everything. Rocco? Zach? Dear God, was your mum in on it?”

  “Not sure.” Was that what their argument was about the evening I dropped by? And did my father somehow steer Nate away from attracting any more attention when he spoke to him in the study?<
br />
  Lenny waited a respectful beat. “Whatever you decide, there will be consequences.”

  Out of my depth, I nodded in dismay.

  “Do you think Dusty could help?”

  “Can’t see how.”

  “She’s family. Older, wiser, she might be good in a crisis.”

  My aunt was not an obvious choice, although she had known my father for a very long time. I let out a sigh. “I guess a phone call wouldn’t hurt.”

  Chapter 62

  Dusty took a big swallow of gin. “I’m not going to defend my sister. If she knew about Drea Temple, she’s as guilty as your father in my book, but it’s important that you understand the dynamics that govern their relationship.”

  I baulked inside. How important?

  “You remember our conversation at the barbeque?” Dusty said.

  “Some of it.”

  “There’s a reason your mother is not the easiest individual.”

  I wondered what else might be revealed. My questioning look said as much.

  “When we were kids growing up, we weren’t very well off. Actually,” Dusty said, ejecting a lemon pip, “we were bloody hard up.”

  I had no idea. Us children had had next to nothing to do with either of our grandparents. In fact, it felt positively discouraged. My father’s parents were both now dead and I believed only my grandfather on my mother’s side was alive.

  “Our father was a gambler,” she continued, “and when he wasn’t gambling, he was drinking. It was quite a wretched upbringing. I lost count of how many places we moved from, each one a little smaller and cheaper than the previous home.

  “Your mother, like me, wanted nice things in life. Nothing wrong with that,” Dusty said firmly.

  Things started to make sense. My mother needed stability and then she met my father. “Dad was her saviour.”

  “He rescued her. She owes him a great deal.”

  Lenny eyed me nervously. “See, that’s not so bad.”

  “They are very much a couple,” Dusty continued. “Your father is a daffodil when it comes to your mother. She views him as the really dependable type of man you go to when you’re in a hole.”