I leant slightly away from him, and saw his eyes narrow on the movement, as though noting my instinctive response and considering its meaning.
His expression didn’t change. But I got the impression he was frustrated.
Obviously, I’d given him the wrong signals in the night club. Holding on so tight while we were dancing, letting him touch me the way I did …
My body was saying one thing, and my brain another, that was all.
Away from the dark, sultry atmosphere of the dance floor, I simply wasn’t sure enough about Jean-Luc to get intimate with him. For a start, there were too many unanswered questions chasing each other around in my head.
‘So …’ I pushed my own bowl away and straight up straight, deflecting like crazy. ‘What did you want to tell me about Lisette?’
He gave me an assessing look. ‘Something I’m not sure you’re ready to hear.’
That interested me.
‘But I was earlier?’
‘People change their minds.’
So he’d noticed my sudden withdrawal, and understood correctly. He didn’t sound annoyed. But there was definite caution in his voice now.
‘Let me be the judge of that.’ I sat back in my corner of the sofa, wedged slightly away from him, and crossed my legs. ‘What is it? What do you know?’
Jean-Luc also leant back against the cushions, stretching one arm along the back of the red sofa. I tried not to stare at his lean body, though it left my mouth dry to imagine him on top of me. His long, tanned fingers drummed the expensive material as he considered me with those dark, intent eyes, his air wary.
‘I’m not sure that I should tell you,’ he said huskily. ‘Not now it comes down to it. Sometimes it’s better not knowing the truth.’
I sighed, and made to leave. ‘In that case … ’
‘Wait.’
As I half-rose from the sofa, his hand shot out and touched me. Not to grab hold of me or to stop me, but simply to make contact. I sucked in my breath, feeling a kind of electric shock as his fingertips brushed the bare skin of my upper arm, about five or six inches below the slinky, black fabric draped across my shoulders.
He too jerked his hand back, as though surprised. But his voice remained level as he added, ‘Stay, please.’
I raised my eyebrows at him, waiting.
‘Bien, oui.’ Jean-Luc leant back with an idiosyncratic little shrug, looking away. It was clear he wanted me to make up my own mind whether to leave or stay. ‘I’ll tell you something about your sister. Something I doubt you already know.’ He paused. ‘But only if you’re sure you want to hear it.’
‘Of course I’m sure,’ I said firmly, though now he had said that, and in such a serious tone, I did feel less certain.
What if Ressier was about to reveal something truly appalling? Something best left in the past, where it could no longer harm either of them.
Still, I could hardly walk away now.
He knew a secret about Lisette.
So I had to know it too. There was no other option.
It would drive me mad otherwise.
Lisette had not been a perfect sister, not by any stretch. She had cheated and stolen and lied, and done many other dreadful things. She had hurt me and Nan deeply, and then left us bereft when she died so suddenly. At times when she was alive, I almost hated her. And after she died, I’d struggled not to feel angry, to blame Lisette for the accident that had killed her and nearly killed me too. And the courts had agreed with that verdict.
But we had been twins, not merely sisters. Identical twins. And that was a lifelong bond no amount of bad girl behaviour could break. Never entirely, anyway.
That mysterious bond had even outlasted my sister, still ringing inside me like a bell five years after her death. Perhaps it was my over-sensitive imagination, but it felt like Lisette was here with us now, a ghostly presence in the room, listening …
I shivered.
‘Go on,’ I said with a sharp tilt of my chin, and settled back on the sofa, this time turned fully towards him. ‘Tell me whatever you know about Lisette, and I’ll tell you if it was worth hearing.’
Jean-Luc nodded gravely. ‘I apologise, as this may distress you, but I shall have to go back to that night in Paris five years ago.’ His gaze sought mine, and I caught an unexpected look of agony in his face. ‘The night of the accident.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
As Sasha came round, her vision foggy, ears buzzing noisily, she heard what sounded like thunder rumbling again, somewhere in the dark countryside beyond the city lights of Paris. Dimly, she remembered that rain had begun to fall again some minutes ago, this time more heavily than before. A veritable downpour, deafening on the roof and windows of the car.
Sasha blinked, staring out at the scarred trunk of a plane tree, only inches away. She groaned, crumpled up against the passenger door in the dark interior of the car. She could not seem to move her legs, there was so much wreckage about her feet and the plastic dashboard was almost in her lap.
She must have bashed her head on something too, because she could feel wet trickling down her forehead.
She put a hand up to her forehead, and it came away red.
Blood.
Sasha stared down at it, incredulous, and her heart started to thump at that point. As though that stupid organ was only now catching up with the seriousness of the situation.
What the hell?
Her sister had been driving too fast. All over the road, tyres skidding in the wet.
Had they crashed?
‘Lisette?’ Her voice was croaky, barely audible above the rain, but she tried again. ‘Where are you?’
Sasha began to shift in her seat, and stopped abruptly, crying out in pain as her twisted body resisted the move.
But her head had turned enough to see what had not been obvious before. The sight horrified her.
‘Lisette?’
Her sister was lying across the ruined remains of a still-smoking airbag, both arms flung wide, limp and unmoving. Above her head, the windscreen had shattered in a starburst pattern, glass bulging outwards, sparkling red in places as though with blood. The gold lamé sheath dress she had worn on stage that night had ripped all down one side, baring smooth tanned skin. Sasha squinted at her sister, trying to sit up straight, but couldn’t see any blood on her body, nor any obvious sign of injury.
‘Lisette? Can you hear me?’
Lisette lay motionless, head turned away, her golden body lashed by sharp, silver batons of rain illuminated in the skewed headlights of another car.
Slowly, memory returned.
Another car had been coming, also on the wrong side of the road, heading straight towards them as they entered a sharp bend lined with plane trees. ‘Too fast,’ she’d told her sister, begging her to slow down. There had been headlights in their eyes, blinding them both, then one of them had desperately dragged the wheel sideways, and …
Suddenly, the driver’s door was wrenched open.
A man’s face looked in.
He put a hand to her sister’s neck, then spoke rapidly in French. Too rapidly for her to follow in her confused state.
‘Sorry, I … Je ne comprends pas.’
‘You’re English?’ His dark eyes roamed over her, coldly intent. When she nodded, he asked, ‘Are you hurt?’ in a French accent. His voice was curt, unfriendly.
‘My legs are trapped.’
‘Can you hang on? This woman is badly hurt. I need to get her clear first.’
‘My sister.’
‘Sorry?’
‘She’s my sister.’
Suddenly, someone else was there too. Another man, who came running across the street in front of the car. She saw him appear, a pale figure distorted by the broken glass of the windscreen, his voice panicked. He too was yelling in French.
The first man straightened and spoke to him in the same language. Then the newcomer opened her door carefully, the metalwork creaking in protest. He peered in, a
heavy-set man in a light grey raincoat, wearing a hat against the rain.
‘I will help you, mademoiselle,’ he said in breathless English, his accent so strong she could hardly understand him. Then he crouched to examine the crushed wreckage about her legs, making worried sounds under his breath and shaking his head.
‘What’s her name?’
She turned her head slowly, very slowly, afraid of experiencing that searing pain again in her neck.
‘She’s my s-sister,’ she repeated stupidly, confused by the agonising sensation she could feel returning to her legs. ‘My t-twin sister.’
‘Yes,’ the first man said patiently, his hands manoeuvring her sister away from the white cloud of her airbag with infinite care, ‘and what is her name?’
‘Lisette.’
The rain had stopped falling at last.
‘Lisette, can you hear me?’ The man bent close to her ear. ‘Lisette?’
‘Is she … ’ She dared not ask the question. But she had to. She needed to know. ‘Is she … ’
‘She’s still alive.’
‘Oh, thank God.’
‘But her pulse is very weak,’ the man added, a warning in his harsh voice. ‘I called for an ambulance. They will be here soon. Your sister needs immediate medical attention.’
That was hatred in his voice, she thought, bewildered by it.
The man was a complete stranger. He had never met her. At least, she didn’t know him, as far as she could remember. Unless Lisette knew him? Maybe he had recognised them from the television or the internet, and disapproved of their lifestyle. The whole celebrity thing. The fast car. The accident. Who knew?
Yet none of that seemed to merit the venom and hostility in his eyes when he first pulled open that door and looked across at her, crushed in the wreckage.
‘It’s okay, Lisette,’ he was saying, as though she could hear him. And maybe she could. Maybe she was perfectly conscious but too hurt to respond. ‘You’re safe now. I have you.’
And indeed he had nearly got Lisette out of the car, backing slowly out with her limp weight against his chest.
That was when Sasha noticed his hands. They were cut and bleeding, covered in something glittering, like tiny speckles of glass. His face too was bleeding, thick red blood oozing from a gash across his temple as he bent to extricate Lisette.
Suddenly, the newcomer moved something metallic down by her legs – perhaps a piece of the engine, by the sudden flash of white-hot pain that shot through her calf – and then apologised at her cry.
But she was no longer pinned, she could move her feet now. She would be free of the wreckage soon, she realised. And about time too, as she could smell smoke and even see a faint plume of grey emanating from under the crumpled bonnet.
But the pain in her legs was too much to bear now, too much …
Her vision began to blur again.
‘You,’ Sasha whispered, staring across at the man with his bloodied face and hands. ‘It was you.’ Her lips could barely move. ‘In the other car … ’
Then her world slipped sideways into icy darkness.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘Do you remember any of that night?’ Jean-Luc asked, watching me carefully. ‘Do you remember me being there?’
My body trembled at the questions, like I was in shock.
I had known, of course, as soon as I saw Ressier waiting for us at the airport a few days ago. My subconscious had been screaming at me that I had seen this man before, and under terrible circumstances, even while my waking mind rejected that as a false memory, pushing it away so I could concentrate on the moment.
‘I remember a man helping Lisette.’ I had sat motionless for the past few minutes, numb with horror after listening to his explanation of how he had dragged my sister from the wreckage that night. Now I stirred, sitting forward with sudden urgency. ‘Yes, I do remember some of what happened. Not all. But I don’t understand. Why were you there?’
‘My wife was driving that night,’ he said.
Another terrible shock, this one like a blow to my head.
I gasped.
Abruptly, those awful details of the court case came flooding back, though I had been on the other end of a video link most days, deemed too unwell to travel back to France.
That first year after the accident had been one long nightmare, not just because of my broken leg and injured spine, which stranded me in a wheelchair for months afterwards, but because I’d been plunged into a deep depression and had required medication just to function. I’d drifted through those drawn-out weeks of the court case in a drug-induced state, barely able to focus on the proceedings, my mind and body still mending.
Now I understood. The pain in his eyes. The way he had spoken to me so harshly when he came to find out if the occupants of the other car were dead or alive.
‘Your wife was Eva Souzette?’ That had been the named driver of the second car, the one that had struck us almost head-on. I recalled her photograph from news reports at the time, a glamorous blonde with a lovely smile. Her front seat passenger – her husband – had survived almost unscathed, but she herself had died at the scene. ‘But your surname is Ressier.’
‘Eva liked to stay independent. She kept her maiden name after marriage.’
‘I don’t remember you from the trial.’
‘You were ill the morning I gave evidence.’
I studied him covertly, considering that. There had been several occasions when I’d been too unwell and depressed to watch the court proceedings, even from my bed via video link. Too spaced out on anti-anxiety drugs, probably, the stress of reliving those awful hours too much for my fragile mind to bear.
‘I do remember something now,’ I said slowly. ‘You gave a short interview to a French newspaper after the court case ended. It was translated in a few of the British papers.’
‘A tragic accident, the judge called it.’ He grimaced. ‘With both drivers equally to blame.’
I frowned, struggling to recall the exact wording of that brusque interview. ‘Your lawyer insisted it was my sister’s fault, not your wife’s. She said your wife was Parisian and knew the roads intimately. But Lisette was British. The lawyer thought she was too far over, driving on the wrong side of the road. That she was drunk, and then over-corrected, lost control and … ’
‘You disagree?’
I met his eyes, unable to lie. ‘Not entirely.’
‘Yet that wasn’t the evidence you gave in court. You defended her.’
‘She was my sister.’
‘And Eva was my wife.’ He paused. ‘And Zena’s mother.’
I felt terrible remorse at once. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, recalling his vibrant daughter, so brave in the face of her illness. ‘Poor Zena. She must have been very young at the time.’
‘Three years old.’
‘To be deprived of her mother so suddenly – ’
He gave a sharp nod, and then looked away. ‘I don’t think she’ll ever recover from that loss.’ His voice was uneven.
I hugged my arms about myself, watching him.
‘Nobody ever does,’ I said softly.
His gaze returned to my face. ‘You and Lisette lost your own parents as children too, didn’t you?’ When I nodded, he grimaced. ‘I apologise. I’d forgotten.’ Then he reached out, and placed a hand gently over mine. ‘I was angry at the time. Understandably, I hope. But as my lawyer also explained, Eva had been drinking too, though not to excess. It wasn’t just your sister. The judge claimed her blood alcohol level was too low for it to be considered a factor in the accident, but all the same … I have a strict no-alcohol rule where driving is concerned.’ He held my gaze. ‘I didn’t realise or I would never have got into the car with her. When it became obvious that she’d been drinking, I begged Eva to pull over, to let me take the wheel. But she refused.’
That surprised me. I couldn’t imagine him allowing someone else to dictate something like that.
He saw the dis
believing look on my face, and removed his hand from mine, leaning back as though to respect my space. ‘We’d been driving back from a friend’s wedding at Senlis,’ he said, with obvious reluctance, ‘arguing the whole journey. I was in a rage with her. And Eva was … Well, she was out of her mind.’
‘About what?’
‘That doesn’t matter now,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘All that matters is that I’ve always held my wife partly responsible for the crash. She was driving like a maniac, too fast and right in the middle of the road going into that sharp bend.’
‘So was Lisette,’ I whispered.
‘Eva was shouting and screaming at me,’ he continued steadily, ‘not even looking at the road ahead. I yelled at her to watch out, that I could see lights coming, but she paid no attention. The two cars met in the middle. Eva braked at the last minute, of course. But with all that rain, the wet roads, the darkness … ’ He shook his head, seeming to remember the events of that night, his face tight with horror. ‘It was, how do you call it? A perfect storm.’
‘Yet you walked away.’
He put a hand to the scar on his forehead, and my brain clicked. Of course. I struggled to recall the harsh face of the man who’d dragged Lisette clear from the car. His bloodied hands, the appalling gash on his right temple.
‘I sat there for a few minutes after the crash, dazed and not really clear what had happened,’ he said quietly. ‘Then I looked across at Eva. The steering wheel had been forced into her chest, crushing it. She was covered in blood, and her eyes were wide open … I knew at once she was dead, that there was nothing anyone could do for her.’
He stopped, swallowing hard, then continued slowly, as though the words were being dragged from him unwillingly, ‘My door wouldn’t open. But the windscreen was badly damaged, so I smashed my way out and crawled across the bonnet. The headlights were still on, thankfully, and I saw the other car – your car – rammed up against a tree. I could see a woman in a gold dress lying across the dashboard. The engine was badly mangled, and there was smoke coming out from under the bonnet.’ He blinked and shook himself, coming back to the present in a rush. ‘You know the rest.’
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