The Runaway Princess (35 page)

Badger, at least, was pleased to see me home.

J
o came back from Callie Hamilton’s in under two hours, which, considering she’d had to get to Knightsbridge and back, was possibly the shortest appointment she’d ever had with her.

She found me and Badger curled up on the sofa together like a woman and her dog from Pompeii, except I was whimpering involuntarily every so often, and Badger was snoring. He perked up when Jo arrived, though.

“Right,” she said, dumping her bag on the coffee table. “That’s Callie packed off to Paris for three nights. Now you can tell me everything. And it had better be good, because I have nine—count ’em—nine missed calls from Rolf on my phone. That’s nine more than I’d normally expect.”

That was nothing. I’d had so many missed calls from Leo I’d buried my phone at the bottom of my purse hours ago.

I looked up from the sofa. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? I’ve called off the wedding.”

Jo threw her hands in the air in mime-confusion. “Why? Because one newspaper prints some embarrassing photos of your poor mum?”

“No, it’s more than that.”

She rubbed her eyes. “Have you had any tea?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, I’m going to make you a pot of tea, and you’re going to start from the beginning, and we are going to work this out.”

As Jo spoke, her phone rang, and my stomach lurched. Without saying anything, she turned it off, then went over to the big black old-fashioned telephone by the door and took it off its hook. It made a satisfyingly Hollywood clunk.

Then she marched over to the window, swished the curtains shut, and locked the door.

“Anything else? Badger, come here.” He trotted over obligingly, and Jo picked him up and pretended to talk into his furry white stomach. “Hello, journalists. Have you bugged this dog? Because the noises you can hear are mainly his gippy guts.”

I managed a weak smile, and curled up on the sofa, hugging my knees to my chest. Badger jumped up next to me, and the familiar smell of his biscuity coat made me want to cry again.

“You’ve got to tell me everything,” Jo called over the sound of the boiling kettle. “I know you’re a secret squirrel, but if we’re going to sort this out, I need to know all the gory details.”

I flinched. Why was I so worried about telling Jo the truth? It wasn’t as if everyone in the whole world wasn’t about to know.

It was because Kelly had the knack of wiping out my friendships, even now, even from a distance of God knew how many miles.

“So, come on, out with it.” Jo put the tea tray down next to me and pulled the padded satin top off another of Rolf’s enormous boxes of chocolates. Tea and chocolate: Jo’s prescription for everything. “Unless,” she added, “Leo has some kind of weird sexual deviancy thing. You can mime that if you’d prefer.”

I took a deep breath. “Sofia tipped me off that a couple of big newspapers have hired journalists to track down my sister, Kelly.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister!” Jo’s eyes bulged.

“Well, I do. I haven’t seen her for eight years. She left home under a big cloud and we haven’t seen her since.”

“Why didn’t you say?”

I could tell Jo was reining in her natural instinct to revel in the scandal, seeing how much it was upsetting me.

“Because I didn’t want you to know! Kelly put our family through a living hell. She forced my mum and dad to sell the house we grew up in, she shamed my dad into taking early retirement. And then she vanished and left us to sort out her mess, and we never talk about her but she’s there every time I go home and …” I was aware my voice was rising and getting more and more thickly northern with each word.

I stopped and covered my mouth with my hand. Where was this anger coming from? I’d never felt so angry about Kelly before.

“So what did she do?”

I pressed my tongue against the back of my front teeth. “It was awful.”

“More awful than both parents remarrying spouses younger than you?” asked Jo seriously. “Worse than one uncle going to prison for setting fire to a different uncle’s collection of priceless Roman sex toys for the insurance money? I don’t think so.”

“Yes, but it’s all right for you,” I protested. “You don’t
care
what people think! You don’t have to go to corner shops and know that conversations stop when you walk in, and hear the neighbors joking about nailing down their stuff when the Wildes come round!”

Jo’s expression softened, and she pushed the sweet tea into my hands. “Whatever your sister did has no bearing on you. Every family has a black sheep or two.”

My phone rang in my bag, and I cringed. I knew it would be Leo. We stared as it rang and rang, and then it stopped.

“Start from the beginning,” said Jo. “And let me get a pencil and paper—family stuff is really complicated. I know.”

*

S
o I told her. Once I started, I couldn’t stop, and as the words spilled out of my mouth, the undermining little voice in the back of my head noted that it was the first time I’d actually told someone else. I’d rehearsed plenty—editing different bits in and out—but I’d never had a friend I’d wanted to trust with the whole unvarnished truth.

“Kelly was the popular one at school,” I said into my mug of tea, “and she always had older boyfriends. Boys her own age were scared of her. She had that magnetic thing that cool girls have—you know, always wanting the next thing up, and getting it. She didn’t go to university like Mum and Dad hoped, because she messed up her exams, but Dad got her a sales job with a friend of his who ran a garage, and she met Chris there. He was buying a top-of-the-range BMW, for cash.”

I remembered that detail. Kelly had told me so many times: “A cherry-red M6! I knew he had class, Amy. That car smelled of money. …”

“Well, they started going out, even though Chris was nearly thirty. He was into property, doing up cheap terraced houses in Leeds and York, and renting them out to students. Even Dad was impressed with him—he wasn’t a spivvy type, he spoke nicely and he’d been to uni. And he was loaded—well, for round our way, he was. Kelly was living the dream, designer handbags, posh shoes, drinks bought for her everywhere they went. Chris even got her her own sports car, personalized plates and everything.”

“Oh dear,” murmured Jo.

“Anyway.” My face was flushing just thinking about it. “One day Kelly came home and said that Chris had been tipped off about a whole terrace up for sale near the university in Leeds. He’d come up with a business plan that investors could put money into an individual house in the row, so their return could be based on rental income—I don’t know exactly how it worked, but she wanted Mum and Dad to get in on it. And it looked great on
paper
, a good long-term investment.”

Jo’s face said what I was feeling.

“Yeah, I know. But it did. This was ten years ago, remember? Anyway, Kelly was a great saleswoman, and she persuaded Dad to invest a lump sum, and Gran, and a couple of our neighbors, and the guy she worked for … lots of people, it turned out later. Hundreds of thousands of pounds.”

“And it didn’t work out? The market crashed?” said Jo, obviously trying to spare me the pain of saying it.

I half-laughed. “No. I wish. There were no houses. It turned out that Chris was using all the money they were investing to pay off some other investments he’d made that had lost money. He’d done all right at first, but he got cocky and thought he could play the stock market, but he was taking bigger and bigger losses, and he couldn’t stop. One of our neighbors, Roy, started asking questions and tipped off the police, and it turned out the Inland Revenue had had their eye on Chris for a while as part of a big fraud sting, and of course that was linked to other stuff. Worse stuff. I think that was what finished Dad off.”

I fell silent. There were some things I couldn’t say. I’d had nightmares for years about the police raiding our cottage at six in the morning with sniffer dogs, looking for evidence of tax fraud. Kelly had hidden forged deeds in our house for Chris, without telling Dad. I’d never forget the sight of Mum hysterical in her nightie, Dad angry but powerless to do anything—both of them lifelong upstanding citizens and supporters of the police, being treated like criminals.

“The worst thing was”—I didn’t mean to say it, but I couldn’t stop it coming out—“that the police or a journalist found some dirty photos of Kelly that Chris had taken. One of them was her naked on a bed covered in fifty-pound notes. Grinning like a basketful of chips, covered in other people’s hard-earned cash. Of course, it was in every single paper. That was so typical of Kelly. She never
thought
. She never thought about anything.”

Jo covered her mouth with her hands. “Oh, my God. But was she involved? Did she know what was going on?”

I shook my head. “She isn’t the questioning type. As long as the champagne was flowing and all her mates were envying her tacky car, she wouldn’t care.” I knew I sounded bitter, but I was. “It went to court, and she pleaded guilty to some of the lesser charges and got off with a suspended sentence and community service, in return for giving evidence for the prosecution.”

“And Chris?”

“He got seven years for various frauds, but he was bankrupt—no one could recover anything from him. You know our old house that you saw, when we got the wedding dress?”

Jo nodded.

“Mum and Dad sold it to try to pay back some of the people Kelly had persuaded to invest. Dad said he couldn’t face seeing people he’d known all his life in hardship because of our family. He took early retirement—well, he had to, he worked for a bank—and Mum developed anxiety disorders, and put on all that weight.”

I was shocked at the vividness of the memories. It was all coming back, not in mental images, but in the tightness in my chest, the acid taste of shame in my throat. “The trial was in all the local papers for weeks. I couldn’t move schools, because there was no room for me anywhere else. Dad and I dug up a whole allotment that summer, just to get away from everyone talking about us. Probably spoke about two words to each other, but our blisters were massive.”

“Oh, Amy.” Jo’s eyes were wet with tears. “You poor things.”

“We got through it. Mum and Dad blamed themselves for not spotting the signs, or not protecting Kelly—you know what parents are like. I wasn’t allowed boyfriends, even if I’d wanted one, which I didn’t. I found it really hard to trust anyone. I still do.” I swallowed. “Apart from you.”

Jo leaned across and took my hand without speaking.

I rubbed my eyes angrily with my spare hand. “But what makes it worse is that Kelly didn’t even have the guts to stick around. She just took off one night and left a self-pitying note about how everyone was better off without her. We were the ones who had to deal with the whispers and the crummy new house. She’s twenty-eight now, and still hasn’t grown up enough to come back and help Mum and Dad.”

But that was exactly what I’d just done to Leo. Left a note. Vanished. Left him to pick up the pieces. I pushed it away.

“And you don’t know where she is?”

“No idea. We get a Christmas card and birthday cards, and her writing’s just the same, but she manages to post them from really vague places so the postmark’s no help. Some are from London. That’s what’s so scary—maybe Sofia’s telling the truth and those reporters have found her. They know how to track down missing persons.”

“Well, if she’s carried on her life of crime, she shouldn’t be that hard to find.” Jo slapped her thighs and reached for her trusty laptop. “My friend Dennis works for the Met Police, I’m sure he could do a quick check through their various systems. And there’s always prison?”

I lifted my wet eyes to her. “Don’t.”

She pulled an apologetic expression, then looked remorseful. “Oh, Amy, I’m mortified that I pointed out your house when I saw it. I told Rolf about it, what a gorgeous place you’d grown up in, how lucky Leo was to have a real English rose from a real English rose garden. I wish you’d said. It wouldn’t have made the
slightest
difference to me.”

I squirmed. “I can’t bear the thought of Leo finding out—and don’t say, why didn’t I tell him. There was never a good time. And now it’s like a double whammy—not just the Kelly thing, but the fact I didn’t tell him.”

“Would you believe me if I told you that, honestly, no one will care? Worse stuff goes on all the time.”

I looked Jo in the eye, and wished I could make her understand what small village life was like. Static and judgmental and suffocating. “I know that. But my mum and dad will care. They’ll care very much when it all gets raked over again back home.”

She gazed at me very sadly, then rubbed her hands together. “Then we need to find Kelly ourselves. I need details, birth date, description—anything you can think of. Have you got a photo? Does she look like you?”

I shook my head. “No. You wouldn’t take us for sisters, she looks more like my gran. Hang on. I’ve got an album.”

I went into my room, pulling open the divan drawer underneath my bed. Right at the back was my box of valuables, including my own collection of photos that had escaped Mum’s cull. I picked out the slim album and went back to the sitting room to give it to Jo.

“Here,” I said. “She’s not a criminal. She’s just daft. You can tell by looking at her.”

I opened it to a photograph of me and Kelly on prize-giving day at school; Mum had wrestled my hair into plaits and Kelly was sporting her ill-advised perm, which ironically gave her frizz just like mine. She was also sporting a red, swollen forehead and penciled-on eyebrows, caused by her “wondering” if her leg wax would also work on her brows, the night before the ceremony. The end result was half Frankenstein’s monster and half Bette Davis, yet she still looked like the sort of girl who could start a party in a damp tent. She was mugging for the camera as if auditioning for some reality television show; I was looking embarrassed. I was fourteen years old.

Anger and sadness and something else, something more painful, swilled around inside me as Jo turned the page to a shot of the four of us on a beach with our old dog, Jolly Roger. There had been a time when we’d been a really happy nuclear family. Deep down (a long way down right now), I missed feckless, selfish Kelly exactly as much as I was glad she’d effed off out of our lives.