The Silent Twin (26 page)

A
ll hell seemed
to break loose in the minutes that followed. An inconsolable Nick telephoned Jennifer, agreeing to meet her at the hospital as Fiona and Olivia waited in the family room.

Jennifer surveyed the dried blood on her hands. The need to wash them was overwhelming, and she pumped three dollops of sanitiser foam into her open palms, watching it swirl into a foamy pink. Fiona popped her head out of the family room.

‘Has she said anything? Has she said where Abigail is?’

‘Not exactly,’ Jennifer said, keeping her voice low. ‘Is Olivia okay?’

‘Oh. Yes,’ Fiona said distractedly. ‘Do you think I should go back to the house with her?’

‘No. Stay here until Nick comes, and you can travel back together. She needs her dad at a time like this.’

Jennifer set her mobile phone on silent. Her earlier update to DI Cole was rushed, and she wondered what he would make of it all. She was not there to babysit, but she could not help but feel this wouldn’t have occurred if they had left her there one more day.

She turned to see Nick galloping into the ward, a deathly shade of white.

‘Second on the left,’ Jennifer said, pointing down the bustling corridor. ‘They’re treating her now. She’s going to be all right.’

Nick nodded, and strode down the corridor to see his wife.

Tears slowly trickled down Fiona’s cheeks. ‘I can’t believe she did that. She’s self-harmed before, but never this bad.’

But Jennifer had no time for tears, as her mind worked to process the recent information. She had had her suspicions before, but now things were clicking into place she could not afford to waste a second.

Her phone buzzed in her hand. It was Clarkie, a colleague from the child abuse investigation team. And what he had to say was very interesting indeed. Jennifer pushed the phone back into her pocket. She turned to Fiona, who was still standing at the door.

‘Can you let Nick know I’m heading back to the station?’ she said. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

Fiona nodded, drying her tears with a ragged tissue.

Jennifer strode down the corridor, with Fiona’s voice echoing in her ears.

‘Where are you going? The car park’s the other way.’

‘In a minute. There’s someone I’ve got to speak to first.’

J
ennifer was back
in her car within ten minutes. She had spoken to the matron who cared for Joanna’s father during his stay in hospital. She knew something was wrong when Joanna refused to go to the funeral, but never could have imagined the depth of the case. The results of her enquiries were coming in at rapid speed, each one slotting another piece of the jigsaw into place. There was just one more piece to uncover. One more step closer to Abigail. It would come in the form of recovered photos. Everything Joanna said about her father was true. Except for one thing. And it was the greatest betrayal of all.

‘
T
hey said you discharged yourself
,’ Jennifer said, taking a seat across the table from Joanna. Arms in bandages, she looked a hell of a lot better than when she’d seen her last.

‘I couldn’t stay there any longer,’ she said, with a naked expression that took Jennifer aback. This was the real Joanna; frightened, overwhelmed, a little lost girl. ‘I . . . I was stupid. I’m sorry. I just wanted everything to go away.’

‘Have you accepted any help?’ Jennifer said, knowing she couldn’t be monitored twenty-four hours a day.

‘Yes, they’ve made a referral to the crisis team, and I’ve already been in touch. But I told them there’s something we need to do first. We need to talk about Abigail.’

‘Where’s Nick and Olivia?’ Jennifer glanced around the room, hoping to spare the child any more upset.

Fiona answered from the doorway as she took off her coat. ‘They’re upstairs. He bought her a new Nintendo game. You know, trying to take her mind off things.’

Jennifer shuddered as a sudden chill danced down her spine. Left untended, the fire in the Aga had petered out, and it hadn’t taken long for the cold to descend.

Jennifer rubbed her forehead, as if to assemble her thoughts. ‘You said you took your daughter, to save her the trauma you experienced as a child. What did you mean?’

‘I’ve tried to get the memory back, but I can’t. Oh my God . . .’ Joanna said, her head in her hands. ‘Did I do this? Please tell me I didn’t do this.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Fiona said, placing a hand on her forearm. ‘I had no idea it would come out like this.’

‘You should have come to me,’ Jennifer said, rising from her chair. ‘We could have fixed it. But you give me no choice but to take you down the police station for questioning.’

Joanna nodded. ‘I’ve carried a sense of guilt around for years, but every time it surfaced, I pushed it down even further. You’ve got to understand, what happened was so horrific . . . I couldn’t speak about it, let alone return to it.’

‘I wasn’t speaking to you, I was speaking to Fiona,’ Jennifer said.

‘What are you talking about?’ Fiona said, suddenly indignant.

Jennifer’s lips twisted in disgust. ‘Why don’t you tell Joanna what really happened on the day of her tenth birthday?’

‘She knows. It’s not fair to make her relive it again,’ she said, glancing furtively at the back door.

‘To make
you
relive it, you mean. Joanna wasn’t abused by her father
. You
were.’

‘No . . . no, you’re wrong,’ Joanna said. ‘It happened to me. Fiona didn’t know my father.’

Jennifer shook her head. ‘That’s what she’d have you imagine. Think about it. Can you really picture what happened to you or are parts of it fuzzy? Your birthday party, the photo session, it was there, yes. But when you try to remember the fine detail . . . it doesn’t come. Because it happened to someone else. It happened to her.’

‘Fiona? But . . . how?’ Joanna said, swivelling her head from one woman to the other.

Jennifer felt her pulse quicken as the prospect of arrest drew near. But she couldn’t wait hours for the interview to find her answers. She had to draw them out now.

‘What you have is a false memory. You repressed the wicked things your father did. When it started coming out, you didn’t know how to handle it. Fiona was there to step in and change history. Think about it. The eighties music, the spinning top, and the Jack-in-the-box. All reminders of a childhood you wanted to forget.’

Jennifer stared at Fiona, agog. ‘It can’t be true . . . Fiona, why would you torture us like this?’

‘Because she’s not Fiona. She’s your step sister. Isn’t that right, Doreen?’

‘She’s lying,’ Fiona – or rather Doreen – said, her voice jittery as she bit hard into the skin around her thumbnail. ‘That’s the police for you, trying to set everyone else up.’ A trickle of blood blotted her bottom lip, but she seemed oblivious to the pain.

‘I knew something was wrong when I found Joanna in the bath. The scars you described from her years of self-harm just weren’t there. Apart from her wrists, and a few mild cuts on her thigh, there was nothing. It niggled at me. I wondered why you would have lied about something like that? Then I remembered when the psychic came to visit, you said you didn’t believe in the paranormal – yet your previous qualifications say differently. Rune stones, tarot cards, you’ve studied them all. Then I got to thinking about you, and what else you had lied about.’

Fiona’s eyes narrowed in contempt, but her lips stayed tightly pressed together.

‘No . . .’ Joanna said, her mouth gaping open. ‘My step sister is dead.’

‘That’s what she’d have you believe. Doreen had a flatmate, by the name of Fiona Roberts. Everything she said was true. A mother living in Canada, and a diploma in complementary therapies. All belonging to Fiona Roberts. Except that one day she decided she’d had enough, and stepped in front of a train. She was identified by the ID in the pocket of the coat she was wearing . . . Doreen’s coat.’

‘It can’t be . . .’ Joanna said, squinting as she approached the woman before her. ‘Doreen was overweight, with crooked teeth and blonde hair.’

‘She’s changed, that’s all. Lost weight, fixed her teeth, and dyed her hair a muddy brown. When the police came around to confirm that the woman who died was Doreen, she happily stole Fiona’s identity. I traced the ID on the system. It bore an old photo of a chubby-faced woman with blonde hair – much the same as the school photo I found of you both at the age of nine.’

A gasp escaped Joanna’s lips as their eyes locked. ‘Oh my God. It’s you. It’s really you.’ She stumbled back, grasping the chair for support.

Jennifer nodded, relieved. Police had conducted the usual background checks, but her intense digging had uncovered more than she could ever have imagined.

‘It’s not true. For fuck’s sake, don’t listen to her. She’s full of shit,’ Fiona said, shedding her kindly persona.

Jennifer slid an envelope from her pocket. ‘Your stepfather was a keen photographer, wasn’t he? Except his hobby was used for the most despicable act, distributing pictures for people just like him.’

‘No,’ Fiona said, her chin smeared with blood as she bit down harder on her nail. ‘The photos were destroyed.’

‘Not all of them,’ Jennifer said, thankful that her friend in the child abuse investigation team had dropped everything to help her out. ‘The police were in possession of quite a few, seized from raids in the local area. I matched some of the images with your school photo.’

She leaned forward to strike her message home. Her voice was low, the words crawling out of her mouth as she revealed the dirty secrets.

‘I recognised you from the hospital CCTV too, the night you visited your stepfather. The nurses thought it was Joanna, but it would take more than a blonde wig and a red coat to convince me.’

‘No,’ Joanna whispered, backing away from them both as the truth was revealed. But Jennifer had to keep the pressure on. It was Abigail’s only chance. ‘You set off the fire alarm as a distraction, then you smothered him, didn’t you,
Doreen
?’ she said, pronouncing her name in a slow drawl. ‘How did you do it? A pillow? Your hands? He was a weak man, no harm to anyone. Why didn’t you just let him die in peace?’ The anger flaring on Fiona’s face told her that her words had hit home.

‘Because he didn’t deserve to live after what he’d done.’ She spat the words that had been fermenting on her tongue.

Jennifer had her confession, but she did not take a victory from the shattered life of the woman before her.

‘Why? Why would you hurt our little girl?’ Joanna screamed.

Fiona’s eyes turned as cold as ice. ‘Because I had to. The only way to stop the pain is to destroy the memories.’

Joanna threaded her fingers through her hair as it fell from the neatly applied pins onto her shoulders. ‘But why take Abigail? This is nothing to do with her.’

‘Because you saw! You saw and did nothing!’ Fiona screamed, spittle gathering in the corners of her mouth. ‘It was
me
behind the studio door, not you. When you found me, I was so relieved to see your face. But instead, you ran away. I waited for help, but you didn’t tell a soul.’

Joanna said, backed away, ‘I . . . I don’t remember.’

‘Don’t you remember how I used to cut myself when we were kids? While you were messing about with your little scratches, I was slicing into myself with
real
knives.’

Fiona shot up her sleeves to reveal the scars lining her arms. Zebra print patterns and deep cavernous zigzags made Joanna gasp.

‘I came to confront you, but you didn’t even remember who I was.’ A thin, hysterical cackle left her thinning lips. ‘Funny, isn’t it? I had nothing and here you were, with a boarding school private education, and a swanky business, and an investment in a farm. Then I saw the twins, and the memories came flooding back all over again. Except this time, I had a chance to end it all for good.’

Jennifer took a step towards her, her hands open in a gesture of mock sympathy. She would have liked nothing better than to slap the cold steel handcuffs on the woman for picking on an innocent child. But now was the time for reason.

‘Fiona, I know you’re hurting, but please . . . tell us where she is. We can get you help. We can end this now.’

Fiona wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, staring at Jennifer with a venomous gaze.

‘Want to know what’s funny? This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. My plan was to destroy Joanna, not her kids. But when Abigail disappeared, I stayed around to watch her life fall apart. She was so screwed up it was easy to plant the seed that it was her suffering at her father’s hands. Seems only fair, don’t you think?’

‘The sleeping tablets, the Jack-in-the-box . . . that was you?’ Joanna said, disbelief evident in her voice.

A hollow laugh resounded in the room. Fiona paced the kitchen like a trapped animal. ‘Pushing the sleeping pills was giving you the easy way out. I never thought you’d have the guts to actually slash your wrists.’

Jennifer stepped in. ‘And then you thought you’d pick up where Joanna left off, queen of the household.’

‘Don’t I deserve it? After all I’ve been through?’

‘Where is she, you bitch?’ Nick lunged from the doorway, knotting Fiona’s jumper under his fists as he lifted her from her feet. ‘What have you done with my little girl?’

Fiona’s eyes narrowed as they rested on Nick. ‘Go back to your boyfriend, faggot.’

‘Nick, watch out!’ Jennifer shouted, as Fiona wriggled free long enough to grasp a ten-inch blade from the cutlery drawer. The cold flash of steel swished through the air as she lunged at him with the knife, catching his flesh. Nick staggered back in disbelief, as blood seeped through his shirt.

‘Mummy?’ Olivia’s voice filtered through from the hall, making Jennifer’s heart leap into her throat. A chilling grin laced Fiona’s lips as her eyes crawled over to the hall door.

With two deft movements, Jennifer pounced on her, narrowly missing the blade as she swiped a second time. Gritting her teeth, she clamping both hands on Fiona’s wrist, twisting it back until the knife clanged onto the floor. A knee to the stomach winded her long enough to pin her down as Nick caught his breath and joined her in restraining the woman responsible for their misery.

‘Olivia, go back to your room,’ Joanna said, as the little girl tentatively poked her head through the door. ‘It’s okay, sweetheart, just go upstairs. I’ll be up in a minute.’

‘Aw . . . here she is, the little angel,’ Fiona said, her eyes wild. ‘Are you enjoying being an only child? I would have thought it was right up your str –’

Fiona’s words were cut short, as Joanna slapped her hard on the face.

‘Where is Abigail? What have you done with my little girl?’

‘I’ve cauterised the wound,’ Fiona said, as Jennifer and Nick gripped her tightly in an arm lock. ‘It’s over.’

Without ceremony, Jennifer recited the caution for the murder of Joanna’s father. The other offences could follow up later, particularly regarding Abigail. The uniformed back-up she had requested finally pulled into the drive and assisted her in dragging Fiona to the car, still protesting her innocence. But it did not answer their question. Just where was Abigail? Jennifer pushed her head down as she helped her into the back seat of the car, promising to follow on shortly.

‘Please . . . tell me, where have you left her?’ Joanna said, pressing her face against the rear passenger window. But Fiona did not look at Joanna. Instead, her glance fell elsewhere. And suddenly everything became clear.