This Girl, That Girl, page 1
Lesley Kara
* * *
THE APARTMENT UPSTAIRS
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Lesley Kara is the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Rumour, Who Did You Tell? and The Dare. The Rumour was the highest-selling crime-fiction debut of 2019 in the UK, and a Kindle No.1 bestseller. Lesley is an alumna of the Faber Academy ‘Writing a Novel’ course. She lives in Suffolk.
Also by Lesley Kara
The Rumour
Who Did You Tell?
The Dare
For Rashid
1
The bus idled in traffic. Scarlett rubbed a circle in the steamed-up window. Soon she would be level with the crime scene – the house where the ‘bedroom bloodbath’ had occurred. At least, that’s what it had been called in some of the more lurid headlines. There was nothing the tabloids liked better than a grisly murder.
Scarlett wasn’t the only passenger craning her neck to get a better view. The couple on the seat in front of her was looking too, and the old guy in front of them. The police tape had long since gone, but flowers were still heaped on the pavement outside. Scarlett wondered how long it would be before they were cleared away and people stopped gawping as they passed. People like her.
She couldn’t recall having seen roadside tributes like these when she was a child, but they were becoming increasingly common. When Fusilier Lee Rigby had been murdered further along this same stretch of road, near Woolwich barracks, the flowers had been there for months on end, flags too, but that had been different. He’d been a young soldier, hacked to death in an act of terrorism. Nobody wanted to forget that. Nobody would forget that.
Rebecca Quilter’s murder had been equally shocking. A fifty-six-year-old woman beaten to death by her fiancé. Just one of so many women killed by their partners. Scarlett had been reading the statistics, and they were staggering. Two women a week in England and Wales alone. But domestic homicide was soon forgotten in favour of the next big story. In Rebecca’s case, the nationals had already moved on.
Scarlett studied the Victorian house with interest, her eyes lingering on the large bay window on the first floor. An involuntary shudder travelled down her spine. They said she’d been attacked as she slept, bludgeoned with the baseball bat she kept under her bed in case of intruders. The reporters had made much of that fact – the irony of it. At least the spineless bastard had finished himself off too. Slit his wrists and bled out. Scarlett closed her eyes and forced the images away.
The bus lurched forward, nosing its way slowly through the traffic. Scarlett hoisted her rucksack over her shoulder and shuffled to the edge of the seat. She pressed the button and waited for the bus to stop before standing up. Some drivers were apt to pull away before she’d made it to the doors. Not all of them noticed her walking cane until it was too late, although since she’d chosen one made from clear acrylic, she couldn’t entirely blame them. This afternoon, a woman with a toddler and a buggy to wrestle with meant that Scarlett had plenty of time. She stepped off the bus into the damp October air and called out her usual ‘Thank you!’
On the pavement, she did the buttons up on her raincoat and headed back towards the zebra crossing, narrowly avoiding a large puddle from that downpour earlier. She was tired now and her back was starting to ache. She wanted nothing more than to get indoors. Later, when she was feeling more rested, she’d take a long, hot shower in her beautiful bathroom and change into her pyjamas, settle down on the sofa for an evening of mindless TV. Anything would do, as long as it was suitably numbing.
As she neared the house where the murder had taken place, the stench of rotten lilies reached her nostrils. A part of her would have liked to pause and read the messages on the cards, but another part couldn’t bear to look. Sympathy for the misfortunes of others was understandable, but when it spilled over into mawkishness it left a sour taste in her mouth.
Her eyes darted in the direction of the house, then back down to the pavement. One of the cellophane-wrapped bouquets had fallen in front of the pathway leading up to the front door – a particularly tasteless arrangement of garish chrysanthemums and frilly carnations. Scarlett nudged it away with her cane.
Her heartbeat quickened. Her brother had been right in one respect. She should never have come here alone. Not this first time. Sometimes Ollie seemed to forget that she was a forty-two-year-old woman and three years older than him. ‘You’re so stubborn,’ he’d said. But he had been wrong about not coming back at all.
She reached into her pocket for her key, walked up to the front door and unlocked it.
This was her home. She had to come back some time.
2
Scarlett stood in the hallway, blood hammering in her ears. She stared at the internal front door on the right leading up to her Aunt Rebecca’s apartment, her mind swimming with violent images. She pictured the police forensics team moving steadily and purposefully from room to room, their white suits rustling. What horrors they must have seen up there.
The nausea that was never far from the surface rose up in her once more, but Scarlett willed herself to ignore it. She lifted her walking cane into the air and tentatively prodded the door with it, just to reassure herself it was locked.
Then she turned her head away and walked along the short corridor to her own front door, past the post the police had piled on to the radiator shelf, and let herself in as fast as she could, pressing her back against the closed door and focusing on her breath. In to the count of three, hold to the count of three, out to the count of three. And repeat.
Apart from a slight mustiness – that strange, stuffy sort of smell that came from the place having had no fresh air let in for almost a month – it wasn’t as bad as she’d feared. This home had been her sanctuary for so long, she was determined it would remain so, despite what had happened upstairs. Only time would tell if she had the nerve for it.
A strangulated sob erupted from Scarlett’s mouth and her cane fell to the floor. She raised her eyes to the ceiling. Little more than six feet from where she now stood, Clive Hamlyn had brutally murdered her aunt. It was horrific. Unimaginable. And yet she had been imagining it, in hideous and graphic detail, for how could she not? No matter how hard she tried to resist the compulsion, her mind kept taking her there, forcing her to watch various scenarios unfold, all of them ending the same way, with the baseball bat raining down blows on Rebecca’s head. Even now, four weeks later, she still couldn’t believe it had happened. Couldn’t believe that Rebecca was actually dead.
Scarlett bent down to retrieve her cane. A spasm of pain shot through the back of her left thigh like a red-hot skewer. She hobbled over to her green velvet sofa and sank into its comforting depths, put her legs up on the cushions and laid back. She’d underestimated the stress of returning, the physical and mental toll it would exert on her. Why, after all these years, did her body still take her by surprise?
As she began to relax, her mind returned to Clive. Quiet, ordinary Clive. Not stupid by any means, but hardly a match for Rebecca’s intellect. When she’d first learned of their engagement, Scarlett had been surprised. She’d assumed that Rebecca would remain single. Her aunt was, as she herself had freely admitted on more than one occasion, an acquired taste. And Clive was nothing like the men she’d previously gone out with. Educated men who’d accompanied her to the theatre, to concerts. Men who’d enjoyed a lively debate with a forthright woman.
Clive had left school at sixteen to work in his father’s electrical shop. Took over the business when he died. He was the sort of man who’d rather stay in and watch TV than go into town to see a play. He’d always been polite. Attentive. But there’d been something not quite right about him, that’s what Scarlett had told the police when they interviewed her. Something a little too attentive. As if he were trying too hard to get his feet under the table, as her dad had been fond of saying. Apparently, one of the neighbours told the police they’d heard him shouting at her in the garden the day it happened, and that they’d heard Rebe
Scarlett sighed deeply and braced herself for the onslaught of self-recrimination. Why the hell hadn’t she said anything? Why hadn’t she expressed her reservations? Because Rebecca would have resented her interference, that’s why. And when the woman she’d looked up to and loved all her life began to change, became forgetful and volatile, prone to odd delusions, Clive had been there, looking after her, supporting her. His dedication had been … convenient. Scarlett closed her eyes. There, she’d admitted it at last.
Scarlett shifted position on the sofa. She’d been eighty miles away in Bedford the night it happened, at a party she hadn’t wanted to attend in the first place. Travel exhausted her, and she was never particularly keen on overnight stays in other people’s houses. Rebecca had rung her earlier that day, while Scarlett was still on the train. She’d got it into her head that Clive was cheating on her with someone young enough to be his daughter and had made up her mind to call off the engagement. She’d been so lucid on the phone, it had been almost like the old Rebecca again. Scarlett remembered thinking that perhaps it was Clive who’d been making her aunt ill all this time, his presence in her life that had caused her such mental distress. She hadn’t even considered how looking after her might affect his mental health.
‘I know that as soon as I see you I’ll start blubbing,’ she’d told Scarlett on the phone. ‘And I need to be strong. You can help me drown my sorrows when it’s all over.’
And now the two of them would never share a bottle of wine again. Never sprawl on Scarlett’s sofa and talk long into the night about their lives and their loves and their worries. Clive had seen to that, and then he’d killed himself. It’s what men like him always did. Removed themselves from the problem. Weak, gutless men who couldn’t cope with rejection.
Scarlett glanced at her wheelchair, tucked neatly into the recess under the peninsular unit that separated the living area from the kitchen. She hadn’t needed it for months, but if this pain continued …
Slowly, reluctantly, she raised her eyes to the ceiling again, half expecting to see a red stain blooming like a rose. She looked away and shook her head.
It had been the right decision to move back in, hadn’t it?
Sometime later, her phone woke her. By the time she’d heaved herself off the sofa and across to the kitchen counter where she’d left it, the caller had rung off. It was Ollie.
She rang her brother straight back.
‘You okay, Scar?’ he said. ‘I was worried.’
Scarlett smiled. It always struck her as amusing that ‘little Ollie’, as she used to call him, the brother she had looked out for all his life, now assumed a protective role towards her.
‘I fell asleep. Sorry.’
‘Fell asleep?’ He sounded incredulous. Scarlett felt a stab of irritation. However protective he was, even after all these years he still didn’t get it, how bone-achingly tired she got, how impossible it was to resist her body’s need for sleep. Not many people did. But she checked herself before reacting. She might be the one who suffered from chronic pain and fatigue but, mentally, she was the stronger sibling. She took after their father in that respect. Dad had been on her side about coming back. ‘I agree with Scarlett,’ he’d said when the police had given them the all-clear to return. ‘All the work we’ve done on that place. It’s exactly how she wants it. How she needs it. To have to start all over again adapting somewhere else would be an unnecessary stress.’
Ollie had stared at his father in disbelief. ‘As opposed to the stress of living right beneath where her aunt was murdered, you mean?’
Scarlett’s eyes wandered over to her rucksack, still on the floor where she’d left it. Perhaps it was too soon. But if she’d stayed with her father and stepmother any longer they’d have ended up falling out. Microtensions had already started to appear. They were all of them too set in their ways. Besides, the longer she put it off, the harder it would be.
‘Scar, are you still there?’ Ollie’s voice sounded urgent in her ear.
She exhaled through her nose. ‘Yeah, I’m still here.’
‘Do you want me to come round?’
‘No, it’s fine. If I need you, I’ll call.’
‘Well, if you change your mind, you know where I am. And let me know how it goes with that funeral firm.’
Scarlett looked at her watch. ‘I might phone them now,’ she said. ‘Get the ball rolling.’
‘Promise me you won’t do anything stupid.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean. Don’t go upstairs. It’ll be too upsetting.’
In her mind, Scarlett had already been upstairs. She’d pictured her hands trembling as she turned the key in the lock, seen herself reaching the top of the stairs, her legs aching from the effort. She knew there’d be no blood. The specialist cleaning firm had disposed of the bedding and the mattress, removed the carpet and cleaned the walls. They’d cleaned the ceiling too. A fact she could have done without knowing. But there were bound to be stains, and an act of such brutality – such savagery – would surely leave its mark in other, less tangible ways.
‘I’ll have to go up at some point.’
‘Yes, but not on your own. We’ll fix a time. Promise me, Scar. I know what you’re like.’
Scarlett gave a long, audible sigh. He didn’t. He really didn’t. Nobody knew what anyone was like, not really. Clive Hamlyn was proof of that.
‘I promise,’ she said.
3
Dee Boswell replaced the office phone in its cradle. This wouldn’t be Fond Farewell’s first service for a murder victim. Last year, she and Lindsay had conducted a ceremony for a seventeen-year-old boy who’d been stabbed in a gang killing. But it would be their first for a murder victim they’d both met. A long time ago, admittedly, but even so …
It was Lindsay, her friend and business partner, who’d made the connection when the news first broke. ‘Wasn’t she that supply teacher we had when Mrs Bell broke her leg?’ she’d said, and instantly Dee had been transported back to 1996, when a frazzled woman in crazy red specs had broken down in tears when they’d refused to get into groups for an A-level English revision class. Miss Patchett, the deputy head, had had to come in and give them all a good telling-off. If it weren’t for the unusual surname and the fact that the papers had said she’d been a teacher, Dee doubted they would even have recognized Rebecca Quilter from the photo they’d printed.
She got up and went to the kitchen. This is what came of running a funeral firm in the same patch of south-east London where they’d lived all their lives. Sooner or later, they were bound to have to bury someone they knew. It was, perhaps, more surprising that it hadn’t happened before. Not that they’d really known the deceased. Was that why she hadn’t mentioned it to the niece?
She made herself a cup of coffee and took it out to the backyard – a small square of concrete enclosed by a red brick wall with a gate leading on to the access road. The air still felt damp, but the sun had just come out through a break in the clouds and, with winter fast approaching, Dee wanted to make the most of it.
When she and Lindsay had first moved into these premises they’d pulled up all the weeds from the cracks in the concrete and Lindsay’s brother, Jake, who’d been in between acting jobs, had blasted the dirt away with a power-washer. They’d bought plant pots and filled them with ivy, ferns and other shade-loving plants, found a metal bistro table and two chairs from B&Q and one of those Moroccan-looking outdoor mats.
Dee gave the chairs and table a quick wipe with an old towel and sat down with her coffee. She eyed the yard with satisfaction. Just because most people who passed through the gate were either carrying a coffin or inside one, that was no reason not to keep this outdoor space bright and cheerful.
Ever since her beloved grandmother died and Dee had sat through her travesty of a funeral, she had nurtured the idea of doing things differently. She had trained first as a celebrant and then as a funeral director, and when Lindsay had grown tired of her career as a beautician and sought her advice about retraining as a mortuary assistant, the idea for Fond Farewells was born.
