There was absolute silence. All the amusement drained from Hannah’s face as she continued to stare at her father. “And that really fucked me off,” she said softly. “Brought it all back. So I started sending him the e-mails, messing with him, showing I was watching him, that I knew what sort of man he was, and after a while I realized I could kill three birds with one stone: give Luke what he deserved, get some more money out of you, Daddy, but most of all—” She turned her gaze on Rose now, and the expression on her face, the icy hatred in her eyes, made Clara shudder. “Most of all, I’d give you, you murdering bitch, a taste of your own medicine.”
Rose paled. “What are you talking about?”
“I might have left you alone for a few years, but that doesn’t mean I ever forgot what you did. You killed my mother. You took her from me—why shouldn’t I take something from you? Why shouldn’t Luke die? It’s only what you deserved.”
“You were going to kill him,” Clara whispered, the cold realization seeping into her, how close they’d been to losing him.
Before Hannah could reply, Rose cried, “I had nothing to do with your mother’s death! She jumped!”
“Bullshit.” Hannah’s face was still full of loathing. “She wouldn’t have left me. She wouldn’t. I was all she had. You were the last person to see her alive. You killed her.”
Rose stepped toward her. “Listen to me! Your mother was angry—she was out of control! She was extremely ill and she jumped.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Where’s my daughter?” Rose asked desperately then. “Do you know where she is, what happened to her? Tell me where Emily is, for God’s sake, tell me!”
“She’s dead,” was the triumphant reply. “That’s right! She died the same way my mother did, booted into the fucking sea.”
All the color and light drained from Rose’s face. “No . . .” She shook her head. “No . . . I don’t believe you. You’re lying. I know you are.”
“I said I’d meet her up on the cliffs at Dunwich. Told her I wanted to go and remember my mother.” Hannah smiled mockingly. “She thought she was so noble going there with me, standing by the poor abandoned sister she never knew she had, cutting off her parents and striking out on her own to prove a point. My God, she was full of it, such a tedious, sanctimonious bitch—I was doing the world a favor, to be honest. But anyway, now you know. Beautiful, isn’t it”—she looked at Rose and Oliver—“that your daughter and my mother had the same resting place? Kind of poetic, don’t you think?”
Rose stared at her in horror. “No,” she whispered. “It’s not true.”
Oliver, who until then had been watching in stunned silence, suddenly cried, “There was no body! If you were telling the truth, her body would have washed up sooner or later.”
Rose looked round at him hopefully. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s right. There was no body. There would have been, wouldn’t there? There would have been a body!”
Hannah laughed. “Yeah, well, maybe there’s a little pile of Emily bones on some faraway beach somewhere. Fuck knows, who cares?”
“I don’t believe you!” Rose shouted again. “You’re lying. There would have been a body. There would have!”
Hannah stared at her thoughtfully. “She cried out for you, you know. Just as she fell, just as she realized she was going to die. She cried out for her mummy, like a baby. Did I cry, Rose, when you killed my mother? Did I cry too?”
Oliver’s face was full of hatred and despair. “She jumped. Your mother jumped!” He broke down in tears then, doubled over in pain, as Tom pulled out his phone and called for the police.
THIRTY-TWO
THE LAKE DISTRICT, 2017
I live in a quiet village, more a hamlet, really, not far from Windermere. A remote and peaceful place, somewhere my past could not follow me, or so I thought. I moved here from Cambridgeshire after Doug and Toby died, to be near my elderly parents, and when they died, too, I stayed. I’ve built a simple, solitary life for myself, just me and my little dog, Rufus, and if the other inhabitants of this tiny community know my story, if they remember the grim details of my murdered family from the newspapers before I came to live amidst them, they’ve kept it to themselves, and for that, I’ve been grateful.
But now Hannah’s face is once more front-page news, her trial a media circus, a tabloid editor’s dream. It has everything, after all: two beautiful teenage girls, an affluent, successful family torn apart by adultery, kidnapping, suicide, and murder—and not one of us who played a part in the whole awful business has escaped without blame. Each of our actions another scrutinized detail in the story that has had the nation gripped these past six weeks.
Who knows what the outcome will be? Hannah will almost certainly be sent back to prison—there’ll be no wriggling her way out of this one. How she kidnapped Luke, how she confessed to Emily’s murder—though she’s denying that now, of course. But what of the rest of us? Oliver’s affair with Nadia, her death, the abduction of baby Lana. Such a tangled, complicated web.
It’s become clear that Hannah’s allegations of her mother’s murder can’t be substantiated.
