Nemesis (32 page)

51

The school was less than five minutes’ drive away. As Alicia drove between the large silver gates, she was cheered slightly by seeing one of the other mothers shoot past in the opposite direction. In the back of her car were a couple of squabbling children, still wearing what appeared to be Munchkin costumes. At least she wasn’t the only one to be late.

Alicia parked beside the main hall. Will was sat at the top of a small flight of steps by the entrance. He was so engrossed in his Nintendo he had not even noticed her arrival. Alicia began to feel a little less stressed.

“Hello, darling,” she said, walking up and ruffling his hair. “Sorry I’m late.”

He did not glance up but merely grunted.

“Where’s Lexi?”

“She’s in a mood because she didn’t like her Glinda the Good costume. She said it made her look like a loo roll doll.”

Alicia could imagine. “She is still here?”

“Sure, I guess so - oh bugger, I’m dead!” He gave the Nintendo a hard slap.
“Bloody thing!”

Under the circumstances, Alicia let it pass. “Here,” she said, handing over her keys. “If you get into the car, I’ll find your sister. Do have any idea at all where she might be?”

“The girl’s dressing room?
Duh!”

“Where would I find that?”

“Backstage.”

Alicia raised an eyebrow.

Will
sighed
extravagantly. “You go up the steps onto the stage and then down through the wings. All the other doors are locked.”

“Thank you, darling. Now, you run along and get into the car. I won’t be long.”

Without taking his eyes from the Nintendo, Will heaved himself up from the step and trudged off down the path. Alicia continued into the school.

The hall was empty. There wasn’t even any sign that it had recently been occupied. All interior doors were shut and the blue velvet curtain was drawn across the stage.

“Hello?” she called. “Is anyone here?”

No one replied. She waited a few moments to be certain, but there was nothing. Had everyone gone home? Surely the staff wouldn’t leave Will
on his own
?
Unless they had assumed that, as he was the headmaster’s son, his father was somewhere in the school building?

She crossed the hall and mounted the steps that led to the stage, fumbling with the curtain until she found where the two sections met, and then stepped between them. There was no one here either, not that she expected there to be, but on each side of the wings she could see a glimpse of the corridor that led backstage.

“Lexi?
Are you here?”

The stage creaked as she walked across it and down another short flight of steps into the corridor, which was also deserted. By now she was beginning to feel irritated. What if Lexi wasn’t here at all? What if she had gone home with a friend? Once again she cursed the fact that she had left her mobile phone at home. Lexi might have sent her a text message explaining everything; she’d be none the wiser.

The corridor was shaped like a ‘U’, leading from one side of the stage and around the back to the other. At regular intervals were doors, which were in the majority locked. Hopefully they were only store rooms - for costumes, equipment and the like. She had already passed the boys’ dressing room. Presumably the dressing room for the girls was directly opposite?

It would be quicker to walk back across the stage, but there was always the chance she might miss Lexi coming out from one of these rooms instead. So Alicia went the long way round, pausing only to rattle each locked door with growing frustration.

Then, as she rounded the final corner, she heard voices talking softly. She paused to listen, but as her footsteps ceased, the sound of the voices ceased too. Had she imagined it?

There was an open door at the end of the corridor, although the room beyond was in darkness. It was the girls’ dressing rooms.

Alicia hesitated on the threshold.
“Lexi?”

A smothered giggle.

Was Lexi playing a silly trick? Or was this some other random teenager? Alicia’s patience began to wear thin.

She entered the dressing room. There were no windows, and therefore no natural light. There were benches around the walls and hooks above to hang clothes. Between the benches were banks of pink lockers. Filling the central space was a long rail of brightly-coloured costumes, all individually wrapped in plastic. There were a couple more Munchkin outfits hanging lopsidedly from the hooks above the benches, and another for the Scarecrow, already shredding straw. A pink gown had been discarded altogether, heaped on the floor.

Alicia automatically picked it up and hung it on one of the spare hangers. It was a voluminous ballgown. Beautiful - in an ostentatious Charles Worth kind of way; such a shame it had been left screwed up on the dirty floor.

Will’s last remark came back to her.

“She’s in a mood because she didn’t like her Glinda the Good costume.”

Poor Lexi, thought Alicia, with a faint smile. Surely Simon would have known he would never get her to wear a gown like this, costume or no costume? He’d have had more success if he had cast her as the Witch. As least she could have worn her favourite black.

It solved the riddle of where Lexi was - somewhere back here, crying her eyes out. Alicia stepped around the rail, confidently expecting to see Lexi huddled up on a bench. But instead of one person there were two, standing close together, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip.
A man and a woman.

Simon was half sat on the edge of a dressing table. One thumb was hooked casually into his belt loop, his other hand rested on the bare back of a woman wearing a 1920’s style cocktail dress. She was standing between his legs, which meant all Alicia could see of her was the white-blonde hair.

“Natalie?”

Simon glanced up and smiled.

The woman turned her head.

Then shrieked, “
Mum
!”

Lexi
?

Alicia felt as though she’d landed in a parallel universe. How could this chic beauty be
her own
gothic princess? How could the sensible Lexi, who’d always been more interested in books and music than boys, have allowed herself to fall for the cliché of being seduced by a teacher?

Lexi wrenched the blonde wig from her head and dropped it onto the floor, as though that would make it better. Then, while Alicia was still searching for the right words to say, her daughter was the old Lexi once again, awkward and uncertain.

In a flash of inspiration, Alicia understood how an urbane man like Simon could be attracted to a gawky teenager. In the blonde wig Lexi was a younger, prettier and more biddable version of Natalie. Who had once been a younger, prettier and more biddable version of
Sarah.

Was there any man in Calahurst who had not been obsessed with Sarah?

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you, Lexi,” she said, forcing herself to remain calm. “I’m so sorry I’m late. Are you ready to go?”

Lexi regarded her uncertainly, and then glanced at Simon, as though for approval.

“It’s probably for the best,” he said.

Alicia inwardly fumed. If anyone knew the best for her daughter it was herself.

It was with incredible effort she curved her mouth into a pleasant smile. “Could you wait in the car for me, Lexi? I’ll be with you in a moment.”

Lexi, with one last, nervous glance at her mother, grabbed her bag from the dressing table and slipped around the costume rail and out of view. A moment later, Alicia heard Lexi’s high heels, tap, tap, tapping along the corridor and out of earshot. And she prayed, as she had never prayed before, that Lexi would do exactly as she had been told, and get into the car. If she didn’t, Alicia had no idea what to do next.

In the meantime, however, let battle commence! Because Alicia was quite sure that if she had any kind of sharp implement handy, she could easily and quite dispassionately plunge it straight into Simon’s chest.

“You’re taking this very well,” he said.

It was a strange thing for him to say.

“How am I supposed to take it?” she asked coldly.

He shrugged. “Shout, threaten me with bodily harm,
throw
things?”

Is that what he wanted? “Why would I do that?”

“I would have thought it was obvious. That stiff upper lip of yours must have gone into overdrive. I’m seriously impressed.”

The rage that simmered within Alicia threatened to boil over. It took every ounce of willpower not to launch
herself
at him and rake the smirk from his face with her fingernails. But if she did that, he would have won. This was not random, she was sure of that. This was personal.

“I have always thought you a deeply unpleasant person,” she said carefully, “but I never thought you were stupid.”

“Stupid?” The corner of his mouth lifted. “OK, I’ll bite. Why am I stupid?”

“Caught in a compromising situation with an under-age student? You can get ten years in prison for that. It will be the end of your career at the very least.”

“I suppose it would, if you had any kind of proof, or evidence, or even a witness. Unfortunately there are none and even your family’s connections to the County’s finest, will not count for anything in a court of law.”

He was right. Her only proof was Lexi herself - and how could she put her daughter through the rigours of a court case? That was assuming Lexi would even agree to testify against him.

“Whereas I could counter-claim that your children are neglected.”

“What?”

“Each time you forget to collect them from school, it is recorded on their attendance record. Did you know that?”

“I may be a little bit absent-minded, but it hardly constitutes neglect!”

“Lexi tells me everything
- ”

“Only because you gave her attention!
You capitalised on the anxieties of typically insecure teenager and wormed your way into her confidence.”

“I told her that her parents found her an inconvenience, which is the truth.”

“It certainly is not! How dare you? I love my children!”

“You have a strange way of showing it. Lexi has always known you and James only married because you were pregnant. You got together because of her, you stayed together because of her and Will. She’s watched your marriage collapse, while her father works his way through a succession of blondes not much older than herself, and she holds herself entirely responsible.” He shook his head and tutted. “It was text book stuff and far too easy to persuade her to transfer her affections to me.”

“You
bastard
!”
Instinctively she raised her hand to slap him but he moved too fast, catching hold of her wrist and forcing it down.

“I expected something more original from you, Alicia. All your advantages in life, all those opportunities
- ”

Something stirred in her memory. Simon had said this before, when he’d dropped the children off at her house.

“Why did you choose Lexi?” she asked him.

“She’s very attractive. Have you never told her so?”

“There are prettier girls in the village, more sophisticated girls. Why take an innocent fourteen-year-old, plaster her in make-up and stick a blonde wig on her? Effectively you’ve made her into something she’s not.”

“As much as I admire your attempts to understand my psyche, I would point out that Lexi is wearing a costume.”

“A costume for what?
Jean Harlow does Glinda the Good? I think not!”

“To be honest, I don’t particularly care what you think.”

“That’s a shame, because what I think is this. Wearing that stupid wig, Lexi is the spitting image of Sarah Grove, which why you’ve been dating Natalie all these years. I’ve always known how you like to control what she does, where she goes, who she meets, even what she wears. It doesn’t bother her, because she sees it as a sign that you care. After the disaster that was her childhood, Natalie needed someone in her life that cared.

“But she hasn’t been that child for a long time, Simon. She’s thirty; she doesn’t need a father figure in her life anymore and quite soon she will tire of you bossing her about, if she hasn’t done so already? Is that why you’re attracted to Lexi? Here’s another vulnerable girl you can tell what to do and what to wear and what to be? Because I’ll tell you this, you’d never have been able to do that with Sarah. She’d never have looked twice at a creep like you. That’s why you hate James so much. Not because he got the job you wanted, which is what I always thought, but because he got to have the only woman you really wanted - Sarah Grove.”

“Shut up!” He slapped her with such
force,
she fell back against the rail of clothes. “You know nothing!”

As she fell, her arms flailed, and she was able to catch hold of the costumes and keep herself upright, but the side of her face burned painfully and there was a ringing in her ears. As she stared up at him, quite terrified, his expression told her she was onto something. But her sense of self-preservation kicked in and she knew she had to get out before he did worse. The important thing was to get away, to take her children as far from this damaged, twisted man as she could, and to repair her fractured relationship with her daughter.
To regroup.