The Dare, page 21
I go into the kitchen to use the extension there, but that one’s missing, too. Why are both the phones missing? For fuck’s sake, I’m going to have to use the one in the bedroom. I turn back into the hallway and head for the stairs. Which is when I see that my front-door keys aren’t in the little dish by the phone where I keep them.
Ross must have taken mine by mistake. He’s done that before, ended up at work with both sets in his pocket. Not that it matters. It just means I won’t be able to lock the house when I leave. Even so, I wanted to take them with me, so that Dad and I can come back at some point and get the rest of my things. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Whatever I can’t take with me can be replaced. All that really matters is leaving.
Hang on, though, where are the spare keys? I took them off Catherine last night, didn’t I? They should be in the dish, too. He can’t have taken all three sets.
I try to open the front door, but I can’t. I rattle the handle. He’s locked it. I run back to the kitchen and rattle the handle of the back door, but that’s locked, too, and the keys aren’t in the door, where they usually are.
Exasperation turns to rage. White-hot fury. Ross has locked me in the house and taken all the phones away, knowing I don’t have my mobile either. How dare he do this to me? How fucking dare he! Oh my God. All that searching for my phone in the hospital, then Ross filling in the lost-property form. What’s the betting he never put it in my bag in the first place?
I move swiftly into the living room, my anger now transmuting into a calm, steady determination to get out of this house by any means possible.
The curtains are still drawn, so I yank them back. But even as my fingers close round the brass handle of one of the windows, I know it won’t open. The little keys are missing.
I press my forehead into the glass. Solid, triple-glazed, energy-efficient window units. It was one of the things Ross was so pleased about when he first bought the property. Will anyone even hear if I bang on them and shout? Because that’s what I might end up doing. Unless the ones upstairs are still unlocked. With any luck, he’s forgotten about those and I can alert a passer-by, get them to call the police.
I turn to leave the room. I’ll get out of this house if it kills me.
I stop dead in my tracks. Terror squeezes my heart as I see her, sitting in the armchair in the far corner.
‘Going somewhere, Lizzie?’ she says.
52
My flesh shrinks at the sound of her voice. She’s moving something on the armrest of the chair. Pushing and pulling it backwards and forwards like a child with a toy car. I stare at her, open-mouthed. It feels like all the air has been sucked out of the room. It’s the toy train I saw on the wall, all those weeks ago, the day I went to the university. Was she behind the phone calls, too? She must have been.
I gape at her in dismay. My mind is a whirr. Did Ross set me up for this? But no, he wanted me to go with him to Aberdeen. Why the hell didn’t I say yes? Now, I’m trapped. Trapped with the woman who’s waited twelve years to exact her revenge. The woman who has preyed on my vulnerability and need for friendship from the very first time she set foot in this house. I think of her tears in the study the night of the party. Crocodile tears. All that hatred is still fresh in her mind. It always has been.
Escape strategies spark in my mind like fireworks, but they all fizzle out, one by one.
‘I’m not trying to sell you anything, I promise,’ she says.
I frown, confused. What does she mean? And why is she speaking like that, in an Australian accent? It sounds strangely familiar.
She leans forward, smiling sweetly. ‘I just need five minutes of your time.’
Of course. Ruby Orchard. The reporter I put the phone down on. There was never any story about Elodie Stevens. It was another one of Catherine’s strategies to draw me towards her, to reel me in. And it worked, didn’t it? I took the bait, like she knew I would.
My body is rigid with tension. ‘How did you get in?’
She smiles again. But now it’s the kind of smile that Melissa Davenport and Bethany Charles used to give me. On the surface, it’s just an ordinary smile, but there’s cruelty lurking beneath.
‘I had the foresight to get another set of keys cut.’
Of course. It was probably the first thing she did.
Panic is rising inside me, but I won’t let her see it. I won’t. I straighten my spine and force myself to hold her gaze.
‘I want you to give me my keys and leave right now.’
She wags her finger at me as if I’m a naughty little girl. ‘Don’t give me orders, Lizzie. They’re not your keys anyway. And if anyone’s going to leave this house, it’ll be you. But only when you tell me the truth.’
A fist of anger clenches inside me. ‘You can’t intimidate me any more, Catherine. I’m not that frightened little girl you used to terrorize in the middle of the night.’
She raises her eyebrows. ‘You mean that frightened little girl who pushed my baby sister in front of a train? No, you’re not her any more. You’re all grown up now, aren’t you, Lizzie? But you’re still a liar. And you’re still a murderer.’
Her words expand in the room. She takes a step towards me. My heart thuds in my neck, my ears, but I stand my ground.
‘What do you hope to achieve by this? It won’t bring Alice back.’ I sound a whole lot braver than I feel.
She regards me with distaste, as if I am something unpleasant she is forced to look at. Her top lip curls. ‘What really happened that day, Lizzie?’
‘I can’t remember. You know I can’t remember. You’re a nurse, for Christ’s sake! You know about epilepsy. Why are you doing this to me?’
‘But you do remember having an argument, don’t you? You mentioned it to Ross.’
I close my eyes. It was that conversation I had with him after he found Catherine’s flowers in the bin and we started talking about the accident. I blurted it out. He didn’t seem to take any notice at the time, so I stopped worrying and forgot all about it. But he must have picked up on it. He must have fed the information straight back to her.
The thought of the two of them together, plotting against me, brings on a fresh wave of pain and sadness. That’s what’s been happening this whole time: he’s been studying me, waiting for me to slip up. And yet, I’m sure it wasn’t all pretence. It can’t have been.
Catherine leans in towards me, her face so close to mine I can smell the coffee on her breath. ‘What were you arguing about? What didn’t you tell the police?’ Her voice is pure acid.
My breath judders in my chest.
Her jaw hardens. ‘Was it the same argument you had after the disco? The one where you said you wished she was dead?’
I stare at her in disbelief. The silence between us is solid. Oppressive. How does she know about that? She wasn’t there.
Catherine juts her chin at me. ‘Just because you saw me slap her that time, it doesn’t mean she didn’t love me. It doesn’t mean she didn’t confide in me when she was unhappy. I was like a mother to her.’
The corners of her mouth turn down into a sneer. ‘You’ve lied about your seizures before, haven’t you? Used them to get out of things you couldn’t face. Like that school trip you didn’t want to go on.’
Heat floods into my cheeks. ‘That was just the one time. I did it for Alice. It was Alice who didn’t want to go.’
‘And nor did you. She told me the next day. I caught her trying to forge Mum’s signature on a note to Miss Nandy. Alice was never a very good liar.’ She narrows her eyes. ‘Unlike you.’ Her face is hard and unforgiving.
‘And you!’ I retort. ‘You’ve lied to me ever since the party. And Ross has lied to me even longer.’
Something is starting to unfold in my brain. A dawning realization. His anger when I told him I’d offered her our spare room. His awkwardness the whole time she was here. The look on his face yesterday evening, when the three of us stood on the landing. And last night, after the phone call from the nursing home. The way he talked to me about his past while we lay in bed.
It might just be wishful thinking. Desperate thinking. For all I know, he’s as mad as she is, or why else would he have deceived me like this? But a small voice keeps telling me that, despite everything he’s done, he isn’t like her. He’s different.
‘He doesn’t know you’re here, does he? You didn’t leave of your own accord. He told you to go.’
Her face changes. She looks defensive all of a sudden. I’m right. It hasn’t all been a pretence for him. He feels something for me. I knew it. That’s why he wanted me to go to Aberdeen with him. I feel a sudden pang of regret. He’ll be mid-flight by now, his legs stretched out under the seat in front, plugged into his iPad. That’s why he unpacked my rucksack and put it back on top of the wardrobe, why he didn’t ask me where I was going. Because he didn’t want me to remember. He didn’t want me to go.
And that’s why Catherine is here now. That’s why she’s let herself in. Because she knows she’s lost him.
I fight back nausea at the thought of what she might do. If she blames me for Alice’s death, she’ll blame me for losing Ross, too. And now she has me exactly where she wants me. Trapped in the web she’s so meticulously and stealthily spun.
‘It’s only because of the baby,’ she says. ‘He doesn’t want you.’
My hand moves instinctively to my belly, and so do her eyes.
‘You’re just like your mother. A filthy bitch on heat.’
I reel at her words. ‘What’s any of this got to do with my mother?’
‘Everything!’ She spits the word out. ‘It’s got everything to do with her.’ She fixes me with an icy stare. ‘You really have no idea, do you?’
I stare back at her. ‘No idea about what?’
She inhales, sharply. ‘Your mother wanted something my mum already had.’
I don’t understand what she’s saying. She isn’t making any sense.
‘Something she couldn’t get from your beloved “father”.’ She makes finger quotes round the word and does that nasty little smile again. ‘All that bible shit she used to spout. What a fucking hypocrite!’
I feel as though I’m on the brink of something dark and chaotic. Something unspeakable.
‘He was infertile, your dad. You didn’t know that, did you?’ She laughs, but it’s a horrible, mirthless laugh. ‘No, of course you didn’t.’
Her words don’t compute. All my thoughts up to this point collide in a big messy jumble, then vanish. My mind goes blank. I can’t move.
‘You’re lying!’
‘I’m not. Why do you think my mum was so depressed?’ Her voice sharpens. ‘Because she was betrayed by her best friend and her husband. That’s why. It doesn’t get much worse than that, does it? Except in this case, it does. Mum was so happy when she found out Sue was pregnant because she knew how desperately she wanted a baby of her own. She knew it was probably her last chance. But then she worked out whose baby it was and, by that time, Mum was pregnant too.’ She shakes her head in disgust. ‘Nice work, Dad.’
I try in vain to control my breath, to understand the full extent of what she’s saying. There’s a terrible emptiness inside me. Like an ache that keeps on expanding till it’s all there is. My entire world has been thrown into the air and, now that the pieces are falling, none of them are landing in the right place. I feel cut off from my own body. Frozen in shock and … and grief. My dad is not my real dad. I clamp my hand to my mouth and stagger back. Mick Dawson is my biological father.
53
I press my lips together and shake my head, as if, by continuing to deny it, I can make it go away.
I wrap my arms round my chest. This means that Alice and I were half-sisters. Oh my God. This means Catherine and I are half-sisters, too! The shock of it is turning into a physical pain, as if I’m being held in a vice. When finally I manage to speak, it’s like the words are being squeezed out of me. My voice is thin and reedy.
‘But … but why didn’t they tell us? Why didn’t we know?’
Catherine shakes her head, a bitter smile on her lips. It seems impossible that we’re related. Impossible.
‘Because that’s what they agreed,’ she says. ‘Your parents and mine.’
I lower myself slowly on to the settee. My parents’ deception goes deeper than I thought. I’ve been living in a bubble all this time. Sealed off from the truth. Even when I found that card and they finally had the chance to come clean, they still didn’t tell me. All that stuff Mum said on the phone about Sheena accusing her of being a stuck-up busybody might well have been true, but it wasn’t the whole story, was it? It was nowhere near.
Catherine goes on talking. ‘I wasn’t meant to know, but I was good at listening in. Ross and I worked it all out. We were an ace team of detectives, the two of us.’
The nauseous feeling that’s been swirling around at the back of my throat suddenly gets a whole lot worse at the mention of Ross’s name. All those times he’s sat with my parents, chatting away with them, drinking Dad’s whisky, paying compliments to Mum. He hasn’t just deceived me, he’s deceived them as well. All the time, he knew their guilty secret. Even if he does regret tricking me, even if he really does love me now, it’s too much to forgive.
‘Mum didn’t want you to be part of our lives, couldn’t bear to be reminded of the betrayal. And that suited your parents, too. They had their precious baby at last, and that was that. They moved away and it was all just swept under the carpet.’
My head is screaming at me that it’s not true, that it’s all a product of her sick, twisted mind, but my heart knows different. My heart knows she’s telling the truth because it all makes perfect sense. The connection I felt with Alice. How instant our friendship was, how profound. The way my parents never approved of us being friends. The conversations we could never have. How odd they’ve been acting lately.
Catherine stares in the direction of the window, her eyes glazed. ‘I used to pretend she was mine, you know. Alice. Mum got better, eventually, started being a mother again, but Alice belonged to me. She always did. She was the only good thing to come out of that whole sorry mess.’
My lower lip starts to wobble as things fall into place. I know what she’s going to say even before she says it.
Her eyes refocus on me, narrow into hate-filled slits. ‘Then she met you and everything changed. She didn’t need me any more. And you can imagine what it did to my mother when she found out who you were. It dragged all that heartache up again, sent her spiralling back down into depression.’
Her fists clench. ‘And we both know what happened next, don’t we?’
She takes a step closer. ‘So now you will tell me, once and for all, what happened that day. From the very beginning, right through to the argument and the moment you decided to kill my sister.’
She lowers her voice. ‘I told her everything that day, before the two of you went on your stupid walk. I thought it was about time she knew the truth. If you hadn’t killed her, she’d have told you, too. She’d have told you that she was your sister. How does that make you feel?’
Her words land like a blow, but I force myself to hold her gaze.
‘I didn’t kill Alice. I never touched her. You have to believe me. We were arguing, yes, but I didn’t push her. I had a seizure. I blacked out.’
‘Don’t lie!’ she hisses through bared teeth. ‘You couldn’t stand it that Alice was so much prettier and more popular than you. You were eaten up with jealousy. Admit it.’
My eyes swim with unshed tears. I’m damned if I’ll cry in front of her. ‘You’re wrong! I loved Alice. She was my best friend.’
But even as I’m saying these words, I know that Catherine’s right. I was jealous of Alice. Of course I was. I hated the fact that she was everything I wasn’t: pretty, confident, popular. I hated the fact that she’d danced with Dave Farley even after he’d humiliated me in front of everyone. And I hated the way she kept doing that annoying little smile, the one she’d been doing ever since we set off on our walk, because I was so sure it was about him, and what had happened. I was so sure she was going to tell me he’d asked her out, and then it would all be over. I’d have lost her.
Catherine gives another of her scornful laughs. ‘Your best friend? You mean like your mum was my mum’s best friend?’ She scowls. ‘Like mother, like daughter. Jealous, bitter bitches.’
‘No! That’s not true! It was a silly row. We were thirteen, Catherine. Thirteen! We were children.’ My words tumble out in juddery gasps. ‘I’d never have done anything to hurt her. It was an accident. A terrible accident!’
But how is she going to believe me when I don’t even believe myself? All those nightmares I’ve had over the years, horrible scenes of us fighting on the track, of me pushing and shoving her in fury. The shock and fear in her face. I’ve always told myself they were another symptom of post-traumatic stress, but what if those things actually happened?
I thought my discovery about Ross and Catherine was a dream, but it wasn’t, was it? That turned out to be real. So maybe the nightmares are real, too.
Maybe they’re memories.
54
A sudden pain shoots up the side of my abdomen, like something tearing the muscle apart. It disappears almost as fast as it arrived, but whatever it was, it’s a stark and visceral reminder that I need to protect myself and my baby. I need to get away from Catherine. Get away from this house.
I stand up, slowly, trying to ignore the trembling in my legs. Catherine’s gaze travels down to my bare feet. Her eyes widen in surprise. And that’s when I feel it: a trickle of something wet reaching my inner ankle.
I look down in horror. I’m bleeding.
‘I need to call an ambulance. Where’s the phone? Give me the phone!’
