The Woman Who Lied(22)

‘Unbelievable!’ Emilia spits. ‘She’s not once said sorry to me in all these years.’

Ottilie puts down her knife and fork. ‘She must know there’s another woman on the scene, thinks it’s you, and wants info out of me, not that I’d ever tell her anything. I hope you know that.’

Emilia pats Ottilie’s arm. ‘Of course.’ Ottilie has always been fiercely loyal to her, right back to when they were in their first year at boarding school and Emilia was being picked on by an older girl.

‘She sounded a bit pissed on the phone. She also wanted interior-design tips and asked how I had started my business. I bet she was mortified the next day.’

Emilia pushes her plate away. She doesn’t know how she’d feel if Ottilie decided to be friends with Kristin again. The betrayal still runs too deep. She was the one who had brought them together – these two separate but, at the time, most important people in her life. She and Kristin had been on the same English literature course and had bonded over their love of alternative guitar bands, regularly going to gigs together. Ottilie, finding it hard to settle to anything, as is her way, would come to Brighton whenever she could to hang out with them.

‘I’ll never forgive her, don’t worry, Mils,’ says Ottilie, as though reading her mind. She finishes her coffee. ‘Do you want another?’

Emilia says she does, but she can’t really concentrate after that.

As soon as she steps into her house she feels it. The chill in the air. She walks into the kitchen, and freezes when she sees the Velux windows. They are wide open, like three gaping mouths, mocking her. The praying-mantis killer in her latest Miranda Moody thriller, Her Last Chapter, accesses his victims’ homes by their skylights. Yet nobody, apart from her editor, has read that book yet. So this, she hopes, is at least a coincidence.

A floorboard creaks overhead and her blood runs cold.

Someone is in the house.





15





Daisy,

1998

Daisy remembers waking up early on the morning she found her mother dead. It was Sunday, 15 February 1998, and it was still dark. She doesn’t know what it was that filled her with a sense of dread as soon as she opened her eyes. It was as though something had shifted in the universe, alerting her to the horror she would soon face. For a few moments she lay there, still, her heart beating beneath her pink gingham duvet, as she remembered the noises she’d heard in the night, the muffled voices, knowing that once she got out of bed everything would change.

The first sign that something was off was the light that still glowed in the hallway. Her mum always turned the lights off before she went to bed but sometimes she would fall asleep in front of the television, and Daisy would hear her in the early hours making her way up the stairs. The second was the unmade bed in her mum’s room, the feeling that it hadn’t been occupied all night, the air too clean and not filled with sleep. In trepidation Daisy descended the stairs, hoping her mum had fallen asleep in front of the TV again, that she’d hear the reassuring sound of the early-morning presenters. Instead, she was met with an eerie silence. The hallway light might have been on, but the rest of downstairs was in darkness.

‘Mum?’ she said. Her voice sounded small. ‘Mum?’ she said again, louder this time. She pushed open the first door on the left, her eyes sweeping over the living room and adjusting to the gloom. It was unusually tidy: no cups or plates left out on the coffee-table, no empty crisps tubes rolling around on the floor, no biscuit wrappers or newspapers littering the surfaces or shoved down the sides of the chairs. For someone who cleaned other people’s houses, her mother wasn’t that bothered about their own. The heavy floral curtains were drawn, the television off. But lying on the sofa, on her side, fully dressed, her eyes closed, was her mum.

An overwhelming feeling of relief swept over Daisy. She’d just fallen asleep in front of the telly, that was all. She looked peaceful as Daisy approached her, a curl of her dark hair falling over one eye. Daisy was tempted to move it away and tuck it behind her ear, like her mum always did for her. Daisy pulled at her nightie so she could bend her knees to squat down, and gently shook her mother’s shoulder. ‘Mum. You fell asleep. Wake up.’

As soon as Daisy touched her mother, she knew. She was so cold, her skin a strange bluish-white that made her look like the pierrot doll she had. And then she saw it. The circle of dark red that had stained her mum’s favourite pale pink blouse. ‘Mum!’ Daisy screamed then, and began shaking her vigorously even though she knew it would be fruitless. ‘Mum! Wake up! Wake up! Please … Please …’ She sobbed, bending over her mother’s cold, still body. She didn’t know how long she stayed like that but eventually daylight was seeping in around the curtains.

There was only one person she could call. Her dad. He was there within ten minutes, prising her off her mother’s dead body and calling the police.

‘Yes,’ she heard him say into the phone, panic and fear in his voice. ‘It’s my ex-partner. Her name is Jennifer Radcliffe. She’s … ah …’ She heard the catch in his voice as he turned to his daughter, his eyes red. ‘There’s no pulse.’

It was all hectic after that, the cosy two-up-two-down she’d shared with her mother invaded by officials roaming around the house like rats. One lady with a kind face and a swishy ponytail tried to steer her out of the living room and away from her mother. She remembers kicking up a fuss – which was unlike her as she was always polite, unassuming, too shy even to put up her hand in class – as the kind-faced lady coaxed her away.