But they owed it to Michael, to Yvonne, to be here. Yvonne had had their backs all these years, eh? Not that Maggie had always appreciated it. That fateful day they’d left Sunnyside, and Yvonne had appeared on the track in front of them, Maggie had yelled at her: ‘You daft cow! You scared the shit out of me!’
Yvonne had apologised and said she had to come and make sure they were okay, that she’d had the horrible thought of what might be happening if Nick had rumbled them.
And that was Yvonne all over.
Duncan had hardly slept since he’d heard she was missing, and Maggie was finding it hard too. Over the years, she and Yvonne had become pals. Most summers, they met up abroad, all five of them, for a week or two in the sun. Isla loved her Auntie Yvonne to bits and the big shocker was that Yvonne returned the sentiment. When Isla was wee they had this game they used to play, ‘naughty horsie’ – Isla would jump on Yvonne’s back and Yvonne would trot round the room neighing and pretending to try to buck Isla off, the two of them laughing their heads off.
Maybe Maggie was wrong about Yvonne being dead.
God, she hoped she was wrong.
She never thought she’d be back here again. Knowing that Nick was at Sunnyside, just a few miles away, was giving her goose pimples.
Back when they’d disappeared, Yvonne and Michael had kept them up to speed with the police investigation. The cops had only questioned Nick once, as a witness, not a suspect, and concluded that there was nothing suspicious about the Clydes vanishing. Yvonne had said that one of the officers had let it slip to her that the theory was that Nick was the teenager from hell and Duncan and Maggie had finally flipped and legged it with Isla to get away from him, leaving the hob on in their flustered state. The extra crockery could be explained in any number of ways.
The cops weren’t as daft as folk thought.
They all sat round the wood-burner while Michael poured out everything that had happened, starting with Yvonne’s disappearance and then jumping back and forward in time so it was hard to work out what had happened when. But it seemed Nick and his new wife had come to stay at Sunnyside for a couple of weeks, supposedly so the wife – who sounded like a right silly bitch – could ‘help him heal’。 And a few days later, Yvonne had gone missing.
Michael kept running his hands through his hair, making it stand on end. If Yvonne had been here, she’d have tutted and smoothed it down. Maggie swallowed.
‘He’s killed her, hasn’t he?’ went Michael. ‘I know he’s killed her.’
‘Why would he do that?’ Duncan was sitting with his face in shadow in an armchair in the corner.
‘Yvonne was trying to get Lulu to leave him,’ said Michael. ‘That alone would be cause enough, for that psycho.’
‘Nick couldn’t have found out what Yvonne did, could he?’ went Maggie self-centredly. ‘That she helped us get away?’ Worst-case scenario was that he had forced Yvonne to give away their new identities and location.
Michael lifted his shoulders. ‘Aw, Maggie, I don’t know.’
‘Teresa,’ Maggie corrected him automatically. ‘We’re Teresa and Peter now.’ Although they made mistakes so often that they’d had to tell everyone that Maggie and Duncan were their middle names and they sort of chopped and changed. And, when Isla was thirteen, they had told her the truth about everything, having come to a decision that she was safer knowing than not, just in case Nick did ever manage to trace them. They’d impressed on her that it was dead important she tell no one, for the safety of all of them. If Isla had been a different, less mature kind of thirteen-year-old, maybe they’d have waited, but it had been a massive relief, coming clean to her and being able to explain all the odd wee things they did, like why her old fogie parents refused to go anywhere near social media.
‘Sorry,’ went Michael. ‘Teresa. Maybe he has found out she helped you. But he’s always hated Yvonne. That’s why I wouldn’t have him in the house, after he left school. I was scared of what he might do to her. When he came back here, I should have taken Yvonne away, off on holiday, until he’d gone. Why didn’t I do that?’
‘You don’t know that Nick’s done anything to Yvonne,’ Duncan kept on.
Maggie snorted. ‘What, it’s just a coincidence that he comes back here after twenty-odd years, and a few days later Yvonne disappears?’
‘But it doesn’t make sense,’ Duncan insisted. ‘At the time Yvonne disappeared, Michael, you said Lulu had taken the car – without Nick’s knowledge – to visit Carol. So he had no transport.’