And So It Begins

by Rachel Abbott

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘If Gus comes back can you tell him I’ve gone to find Cleo North. There’s something I need to ask her.’

  Without waiting for a response, she turned and ran from the room.

  67

  ‘Aminah, it’s Cleo.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. This is Aminah Basra speaking.’

  Cleo was puzzled at the response until she heard a slight puffing sound which suggested that Aminah was on the move, and she realised that for some reason she didn’t want anyone to know who was on the line.

  Cleo waited.

  ‘I’m so glad you’ve called, Cleo,’ Aminah whispered. ‘We’ve been worried about you. I didn’t want you to think I’d taken sides with Evie against you. I was just trying to be fair on everyone – and Lulu in particular. Please, let’s get together soon and sort this. Please, Cleo. I miss you.’

  Cleo felt choked. Aminah had a soft heart and would never intentionally hurt anyone.

  ‘Why are you whispering?’

  ‘Oh lordy – Evie’s here again. She’s acting a bit weird to be honest. I heard her talking to Lulu. She said, “You’re going to be amazing, Lulu, and it’s all for the best.” She told her she was going to be okay – but why wouldn’t she be?’

  ‘Is Lulu okay?’ Cleo asked, with a sudden thud of fear for the child she missed so much.

  ‘She seems fine. Anyway, I didn’t want Evie to know you were on the phone, but I do want to see you. And I know you haven’t called me for nothing, given our last conversation, so what’s up?’

  ‘Do you remember a few months ago you asked if I was seeing someone and I said no?’

  ‘Yes – of course. And I knew you were lying, but that was your prerogative. Why – is there a problem?’

  ‘He was married.’

  ‘Of course he was. Why else would you not have told me. I sensed that it was over, though – so is he back on the scene?’

  Cleo would have laughed if she’d had a laugh in her.

  ‘No, but his wife came to see me first thing this morning. All the time I was seeing Joe, nobody knew about it except Mark, but Joe’s wife says someone has been spreading gossip, and someone faked an email from me. Aminah, I know you think of Evie as a friend, and I know how hard this is. But I don’t know who else to speak to, and I can’t think of anyone else who would do this to me.’

  Aminah was quiet, and Cleo thought maybe she had overstepped the mark.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry I said that. Forget it. Joe probably told a mate or something. That would explain the gossip, but not the email. I’m clutching at straws.’

  ‘I’m not sure you are, my lovely,’ Aminah said, her voice even quieter. ‘There’s something calculated about all this. I know she doesn’t want to confuse Lulu by seeing you, but she let her child get really close to you and then dragged her away. Lulu asks for you sometimes, you know.’

  Cleo’s eyes filled with tears, but before she could say more, Aminah’s tone changed.

  ‘Okay – lovely to speak to you.’ It sounded as if she was going to hang up, but then Cleo heard another voice in the background. ‘Sorry, Cleo. I forgot to mention that Evie’s here, and she’d like a quick word, if that’s okay.’ Aminah’s theatrics had clearly failed to fool Evie, and Cleo didn’t know how to respond. But she was left with no choice.

  ‘Cleo.’ Evie’s voice sounded friendly enough. ‘I’d like to talk to you about Lulu – and about the future. I’m going up to the house soon to get more of my things. Are you free to meet me there in, say, thirty minutes?’

  Was she going to relent? Was she going to let her see Lulu?

  Cleo didn’t hesitate.

  ‘I’ll be there,’ she said.

  Stephanie left the CID squad room and headed for her car. She wanted to ask Cleo about everything she had discovered and get her side of the story. But she needed a moment to pull herself together. Gus was leaving, and she felt a fool for being upset. After all, she was the one who was refusing to see him. Somehow, though, it was different when it was her decision.

  ‘Stop being so bloody pathetic,’ she mumbled. Taking a swipe at the steering wheel, she switched the ignition on and rammed the car into gear. This was getting her nowhere. She needed to do something.

  It was about a fifteen-minute drive back to town and to Cleo’s house, and when she arrived she was disappointed to see no car on the drive. She walked up to the door in case Cleo was in, but wasn’t surprised when there was no answer.

  ‘Bugger,’ she muttered, uncertain what her next move should be. The sensible thing would be to leave it until she’d had a chance to tell Gus what she had found, but it felt like an anticlimax. She had wanted to present him with a fully fleshed-out story of what had happened all those years ago, and for that she needed to talk to Cleo.

  Thrusting her hands in her pockets, head down, she set off back to her car but was only halfway down the drive when she heard a car horn. She looked up to see a people-carrier that appeared to be stuffed with kids. The window on the passenger side came down, and Aminah Basra, who Stephanie recognised from court, leaned across the child strapped into the front seat. The cacophony coming from the car drowned her words – the radio was playing and the children were all singing along to ‘Firework’ at the tops of their voices. Stephanie could just make out Lulu in one of the two car seats in the back, and she seemed to be laughing at the antics of the other children.

  ‘Pipe down, you lot,’ Aminah said, turning the radio off to shouts of ‘Aw, Mum!’

  She jumped out of the car.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she called to Stephanie. ‘Are you looking for Cleo? You’re one of the police officers, aren’t you?’

  ‘That’s right. Are you looking for her too?’

  Aminah screwed up her eyes. ‘Shit. Has she already left? I was hoping to catch her but it took me a week to get all these kids into the car.’

  Stephanie hurried towards the parked car. ‘You know where she is, then?’

  ‘I think so. Evie asked her if they could meet up at the house, but I came here to try to stop Cleo from going. There’s something not right. I don’t know what it is, but Evie doesn’t seem entirely rational. There’s an intensity about her that I’ve never seen before. She doesn’t look well, and she asked me something strange before she left. She said she’d named me as Lulu’s guardian, if anything should happen to her. She wanted to know if it was okay.’

  Aminah’s bottom lip was firmly clamped between her teeth, her hands clasped together.

  ‘When you say they’re meeting at the house, do you mean Mark’s house?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know what to do now. I was sure I’d be in time to catch her.’ She shook her head. ‘I’d go there, but if Evie and Cleo are both there I don’t think I should take this bunch with me.’ Aminah waved her arm to indicate the children, several of whom seemed to be engaged in some sort of noisy play fight right at the back of the vehicle.

  ‘Leave it with me,’ Stephanie said. ‘You take the kids home and I’ll go and check that everything’s okay.’

  Aminah paused for a moment as if uncertain. ‘If you’re sure…’

  Stephanie nodded and, with a final worried frown, Aminah got back into the car.

  Waving goodbye to the enthusiastic children, Stephanie fixed a smile on her face. But the minute they turned the corner her smile disappeared and she ran for her car. She didn’t like the sound of this at all.

  Hastily she made a call to Gus and left him a message. She needed to tell him what she believed had happened, and it was quicker to explain to him than anyone else.

  As she finished her brief account she thought of where he had been that day. There was something she had to say.

  ‘By the way, I know about Leeds, Gus. I want to wish you luck, but…’ She paused. ‘Oh bugger it, I wish you weren’t going.’

  She hung up and pushed the car into gear.

  68

  Cleo parked the car by the door in the long white wall of
what had been Mark’s house. She wasn’t sure she was ready to go in there again, to see his home without him in it, but if it meant she could persuade Evie to let her see Lulu, she would try anything.

  She pressed the doorbell and waited. Nobody came. She pressed again, and banged on the knocker.

  There were no windows to look through but as she spun round in frustration to return to the car she noticed the garage door was open. Evie must be expecting her to come in that way.

  Making her way slowly past Mark’s car, covered with a fine layer of dust and still parked there all these months since he died, she opened the door that led through to the garden. There was no sign of Evie. She was either in the house or on the other side of the shrubs, where rough ground led to a rocky cliff that plunged steeply into the sea. Cleo remembered Mark saying they would have to fence the area off before Lulu was walking and Cleo hoped Evie had more sense than to bring her here. She moved quietly towards the tall beech hedge and peered round.

  A woman in a black raincoat with shoulder-length dark hair was standing right at the edge of the cliff. She had her back to the garden, but it seemed she knew Cleo had arrived. She called out, but her words were whipped away by the wind. Cleo moved closer.

  ‘Sorry – who are you? I’m looking for Evie Clarke.’

  The woman turned round slowly and Cleo gasped. The person staring back at her had sunken cheeks and red-rimmed eyes, but despite the hair, Cleo knew who it was. Gone was the confident, attractive Evie who had come to take Lulu away just a month ago. In her place was a woman who Cleo could have passed in the street without recognising – except there was something familiar about this version of Evie, something tugging at Cleo’s memory.

  She felt a jolt of unease, and walked slowly forwards as Evie watched her. The ground was sodden from the recent rain, and Evie looked perilously close to the edge.

  ‘Evie, move away from the cliff,’ Cleo said, her initial apprehension at seeing Evie again suddenly turning to concern. ‘You’re too close. It’s dangerous.’

  Evie stared at Cleo, her eyes burning with some inner torment that Cleo didn’t understand. She said nothing, and she didn’t move.

  ‘You wanted to see me,’ Cleo shouted over the sound of waves crashing onto the rocks below. She moved a little closer, wanting to be near enough to hear what Evie had to say, but not too close to the edge.

  ‘It was all for nothing,’ Evie called out, shrugging her shoulders. ‘For so long, I wanted only one thing. I thought I could make the pain go away, but it hasn’t worked. It hasn’t made me better.’ Two deep grooves appeared between her eyebrows as if she was puzzled by her own words.

  Cleo had no idea what she was talking about.

  ‘How about you, Cleo? What about your part in all this? How do you feel about everything you’ve done?’

  ‘Me? What did I do? Except take care of your daughter for months – loved her like my own. And now you won’t even let me see her.’ She hadn’t wanted Evie to know how much that hurt, but her voice cracked. Evie had taken everything.

  ‘Ah, my beautiful Lulu. We need to talk about her – but not yet. The poor child – to have a mother like me and an aunt like you, both riddled and twisted with hatred. Yes, I know how you feel about me, Cleo. You can say the words out loud if you like – shout it to the heavens.’ Evie opened her arms and leaned back, shouting, ‘I hate you, Evie! I hate you!’

  A well of bitterness rose up like acid, burning Cleo’s throat. It was true that she loathed Evie for what she had done, but this might be her only chance of seeing Lulu, so she shook her head and dropped her gaze to the soggy ground at her feet.

  She didn’t hear Evie approach, didn’t know she was standing so close until the toes of two black boots came into view in the mud just inches from Cleo’s own.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to push me over the edge of this cliff? No-one would ever know,’ Evie whispered.

  Cleo’s head snapped up and she leaned back, away from the feel of Evie’s warm breath on her cheek. ‘I’m not going to push you. Why would I do that?’

  ‘You pushed Mia, though, didn’t you?’

  Cleo felt her body jerk, but was silent. Evie had claimed all along that she knew something about Mia, but she couldn’t possibly know what really happened.

  ‘I didn’t push her. You’ve got that wrong.’

  Evie shook her head. ‘Come on, Cleo. There’s only the two of us here now. Why not admit it?’ She inched closer.

  What did Evie think she knew? Cleo felt her heart racing and fought to keep calm.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you, shall I,’ Evie said, her lips almost touching Cleo’s ear as if she was sharing a secret. ‘You see, the timing was all wrong. None of it made sense – and I wasn’t the only one who worked that out.’

  A cold gust of wind forced its way through the narrow gap between them, and Cleo shivered. She was scared of saying the wrong thing, but Evie didn’t give her a chance to speak.

  ‘I forced Mark to come down into the gym with me one day, and he cracked, Cleo. He broke down, because he couldn’t hold it in for a moment longer. He told me everything – what you did, and how that knowledge was destroying him.’

  ‘What do you mean, he told you everything?’ Cleo said softly.

  Evie was so close that Cleo could see a pulse throbbing in her neck. What had Mark said? He knew she hadn’t pushed Mia, so what had he told Evie? Had he admitted what he’d done? Was Evie playing with her?

  ‘He told me you pushed her,’ Evie said.

  She was watching Cleo, testing her reaction.

  ‘He couldn’t have told you I killed Mia. Because I didn’t – honestly I didn’t.’

  Evie laughed – a harsh sound that ripped through the space between them. She stepped away, back to the edge of the cliff, but Cleo’s relief was short-lived.

  ‘Mark knew what you’d done, Cleo. Mia had already gone down to the gym before he left for the airport. He’d stormed upstairs after their argument to wait for his taxi. If she’d fallen, it would have been then. But the time on her smashed watch was all wrong. According to Mark she would have finished her workout and would have been in the pool by then. She was a bit like him, you see. Always stuck to a schedule.’

  Cleo swallowed. Why would Mark say any of this to Evie?

  ‘He said there was only one reason she would have come back upstairs before her swim,’ Evie continued, ‘and that would have been if she heard someone upstairs, and there was only one person apart from Mark who could get into the house. You, Cleo – you, who insisted on having a key to your brother’s home. How does it feel to know your brother died believing his sister was a murderer?’

  Expecting to see triumph in Evie’s eyes, Cleo dropped her gaze.

  ‘I didn’t kill her, Evie. She was dead when I got there,’ she said quietly.

  It was the truth. Mia had been lying at the bottom of the stairs, staring straight into Cleo’s eyes. She hadn’t known what to think, but Mark had told her about their argument, so Cleo had faked the phone call and persuaded him to call Mia and leave a message. Then she had come back to ‘discover’ the body. That was when she saw the broken watch. She remembered her horror at realising the hands were pointing to the time when Mark would have been about to leave the house. She’d had to change it to make her story work and protect her brother. She couldn’t see him accused of murder.

  Evie pushed her hands deep into her coat pockets and stared up at the sky for a moment. ‘I’m sick of the games, Cleo. Tired of the battle. There are no winners, you see, even though I thought there would be.’

  She was talking in riddles again. What games?

  ‘I know you didn’t kill Mia, but Mark was convinced you did and he felt responsible for that. He knew you would never have called his wife to suggest lunch, so why else would you go to the trouble to fabricate such a story? None of it made sense – the timing, the call, the insistence that he should phone Mia to apologise. You had to be hiding something, and as he
hadn’t killed Mia, it had to have been you.’ Evie’s voice cracked. ‘God, that poor man. I let him believe it, even though I knew it wasn’t true.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  It was as if Evie hadn’t heard her. Her eyes were staring into the distance, remembering something that seemed to hurt.

  ‘When I made him go down there he told me that every time he stood at the bottom of the stairs he didn’t see Mia’s body. He saw you, at the top, pushing her. It tormented him, and you never knew. And I let him suffer.’

  Cleo barely caught the last sentence. Evie whispered it, as if to herself. Could it be true? If Mark thought she had killed Mia…

  ‘That’s right, Cleo. In spite of the police concluding that Mia had fallen, Mark thought you had killed his wife. And all along you thought Mark had killed her. You did, didn’t you? And you covered for him.’

  The last sentence was spoken slowly, forcefully, and Cleo stared at the woman in front of her – the woman whose stories of abuse she had refused to accept in spite of what she believed Mark had done to Mia.

  ‘Do you know, Cleo, all the time I was suffering from my injuries, I thought I might just once have seen some compassion in your eyes. Some understanding of what I was going through. But I never did. Maybe everything would have been different if I’d thought you cared. Why couldn’t you accept that he was hurting me when you thought he had killed his wife?’

  ‘It was different. Completely different. Mark would never have killed her on purpose. He might have given her a little push or something – he seemed so confused when I spoke to him. That would be very different from the kind of cold-blooded cruelty that you described. It would have been a mistake – a moment of madness.’

  Evie stared at her, and Cleo knew what she was thinking. A moment of madness – just as Evie had claimed as her defence for killing Mark. She couldn’t read the expression in Evie’s eyes. They seemed sad, defeated, and for a moment Cleo wanted to run. To get away from here. But her feet wouldn’t move.