The Vanishing Point (34 page)

7

S
tephanie’s knees gave way beneath her. She crumpled to the ground with a soft moan, unable to believe the evidence of her eyes. Her eyelids fluttered and for a moment, she wondered whether she was going to faint. Then Nick was on his haunches next to her, his comforting arms around her. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘Did I just see what I think I saw? Bouncing down the steps of a place that looks like Dracula’s weekend retreat? Was that Scarlett?’

‘I can’t believe it,’ Stephanie said. ‘I was with her till right before she died. I saw her in her coffin.’ She shook her head, as if to clear it of craziness. ‘It can’t be Scarlett.’ Then the light dawned. ‘Think, Nick. Who’s missing? Who’s not where she’s supposed to be?’

Relief broke over him, lightening his expression. ‘Leanne. It’s Leanne.’

‘The devious, twisted bastards,’ Stephanie said, sounding almost admiring. ‘They’ve been plotting this ever since Scarlett told Leanne I was going to be Jimmy’s guardian. She’d grown to love him. She was desperate to keep him. And the selfish, greedy bastards figured out a way to do it that means they get access to a chunk of the money as well, with Simon set up as the doctor in the house. With Simon and Marina controlling the trust fund, I bet Simon and Leanne are sitting pretty out here in their castle in the woods.’

Nick stood up. ‘Thank Christ I didn’t go to Essex police with our theories about Leanne being murdered. I’d have been a bloody laughing stock. Nick the Greek with egg from head to toe.’

‘They’re still criminals, Nick. They abducted Jimmy and, like you said, they must be living high on the hog off the back of the TOmorrow trust. We’ve got as much leverage against Simon and Leanne as we had against Simon and Marina. We can still get Jimmy back.’

Nick’s answering smile was grim. ‘Damn right. I’m ready when you are.’

Fifteen minutes later, they set off up the short paved driveway. Nick had insisted they wait, sitting in the car with the doors open. ‘Don’t close the door. The click of the lock, that’s the kind of artificial sound that really carries in places like this. We’ll give them a little bit of time to settle into their normal routine. That way they’ll be nice and relaxed and not expecting the shit to hit the fan.’

Then he had a better idea. ‘Let’s push the car across the gateway. That way, if they decide to make a run for it or call reinforcements, they’re fucked.’

And so he let off the handbrake, and with scarcely a sound, they pushed the tinny little car forward until it completely blocked the entrance to the house. To get through themselves, they had to treat the car itself as a kind of passageway they had to scramble through.

Nick must be able to hear the thudding of her heart, Stephanie thought as they approached the house. It felt like wading through a fairy story. The house gleamed with recent maintenance, its shutters immaculate, its stucco spotless, its metalwork rust free. Window boxes filled with flowering bulbs perched on every sill and balustrade. Warm light glowed through the blinds in the ground-floor windows. The Brothers Grimm meet a TV makeover show.

They climbed the four steps to the porch as quietly as possible. Then, ignoring the doorbell, Nick hammered with his torch on the heavy wooden planks of the door. They heard no footsteps approaching, so closely did the door fit its frame. Without warning, it swung back on its hinges. The woman who answered it wasn’t facing them. She was looking over her shoulder, laughing at something someone inside had said or done.

Stephanie thought she was going to throw up.

The woman turned to them and all the animation and colour drained from her face. Lot’s wife must have looked a lot like that, Stephanie thought irrelevantly. Time itself seemed to slow as she struggled to make sense of what – or rather who – she was seeing. ‘Hi, Scarlett,’ she said. She heard Nick’s sharp intake of breath behind her. ‘Aren’t you going to ask us in?’

8

S
tephanie’s words galvanised Scarlett into action. She tried to slam the door on them, but Nick was too fast and too practised for that. His arm shot out and he leaned his whole weight against the edge of the door for maximum leverage. Scarlett was forced to give ground. As she skittered backwards, Stephanie and Nick pushed their way inside.

‘How could you?’ Stephanie said, her voice scarcely above a contemptuous whisper.

The sound of chopping came from a brightly lit room to the right, followed by Simon’s voice. ‘Who is it, love?’

Stephanie carried on into the warm kitchen. Simon stood at a wooden butcher’s block dicing onions. Seeing her, he stopped in mid-action, the knife clattering to the board, his mouth flapping like a panicked goldfish. At the same moment, Jimmy saw her and clambered out of his chair, hurtling across the short distance between them. ‘Stephie,’ he shouted happily. ‘I love you.’ He threw his arms round her legs, laughing and whooping. ‘Are we going home soon?’ he added, oblivious to the stunned and horrified faces around the room.

‘Steph’s just come to visit, to make sure you’ve settled in,’ Scarlett said, sweeping past Stephanie and grabbing Jimmy. In one seamless motion, she handed him off to Simon. ‘You go and play upstairs with your Lego with Simon. I’ve got things to talk about with Steph.’ Her smile was as convincing as an octogenarian’s toupee.

‘I’ll go with the boys,’ Nick said, following Simon.

‘Stephie,’ Jimmy’s voice was sharp with longing as he was carried out of the kitchen, arms stretching over Simon’s shoulder.

‘Later,’ Scarlett said, shutting the kitchen door behind them. For a dead woman, she appeared in remarkably good health. She was lightly tanned and looked fit, eyes sparkling and skin smooth. Her hair had grown back, a thick and multi-shaded blonde that spoke of expensive visits to a good hairdresser. Probably not in the local village. It was loosely fastened with a silver hairclip. She spread her arms in an invitation to embrace. ‘I am so sorry, Steph. You have no idea how much I hated keeping you in the dark.’

The warmth of Scarlett’s approach almost wrong-footed Stephanie. Almost, but not quite. Struggling to speak, the blood pounding in her ears, she finally found her tongue. ‘How dare you? After what you’ve put Jimmy through. How dare you try to shrug this off like it’s no big deal?’

Scarlett took a bottle of Prosecco from the big American-style fridge and calmly popped the cork. ‘Jimmy’s fine. You saw that for yourself.’ She reached into a glass-fronted cupboard for a pair of champagne flutes. As she poured, she shook her head in a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger way. ‘You know better than anyone how bloody impossible my life was, especially after the cancer. I couldn’t go anywhere, do anything without a pack of paps on my tail. I couldn’t live like that. Nobody could. I’d had it up to here, Steph. The stress made me ill. Literally, they nearly killed me.’

Sweat prickling the back of her neck, Stephanie was struggling to find an even keel in this conversation. Scarlett was so matter-of-fact. Offhand, almost. Not like a woman who has been caught out faking her own death and abducting her own child a continent away. And her own emotions were swinging wildly between relief that her friend was still alive and rage at what Scarlett had done. ‘You could have retired from public life. Moved abroad where nobody knew who you were.’ Stephanie gave a bitter little laugh. ‘Somewhere like bloody Transylvania. I bet you can shop here no trouble without being mobbed.’

Scarlett held a glass out to Stephanie, who waved it away. Scarlett put it down on the counter close to her instead. ‘As it happens, I can. And we did think about that. But it was complicated. A doctor like Simon doesn’t make a lot of money in Romania. And even though it’s cheap to live here, it still cost us a bomb to do this place up. Then there’s other things that don’t come cheap. Satellite Internet, multichannel TV, that kind of thing. And if you want anything better than the basic shit, you have to pay through the nose. So we needed to make sure the money kept coming in. I earned the right to a decent life, Steph. But those fucking jackals were robbing me of it.’

There was something shocking about Scarlett’s complete lack of shame. ‘So you set up the terminal cancer and the Swimathon to make sure the TOmorrow Trust would keep you in the style to which you’ve become accustomed?’

Anyone else would have flinched at Stephanie’s bitter sarcasm, but Scarlett merely smiled and tipped her glass towards her former friend.

‘Pretty much, yeah. Obviously, the orphanage gets a bloody good cut too. Otherwise there would be no reason for them to go along with the set-up. Marina is the go-between. She makes sure everybody’s happy. And they get Simon’s services for next to nothing, which is a big deal when you’ve got as many disabled kids as they have to deal with. You make it sound like we’re on the make, Steph, but we’re doing a lot of good here.’

‘You pretended you were dead.’ The tide of anger had risen high enough to sweep away Stephanie’s initial shock. ‘I wept for you. I held your son while his little body shook with sobs because he’d already lost his dad and now he’d lost his mum too. Do you have any idea the grief you caused to the people who loved you?’

Scarlett’s mouth quirked in what might have been embarrassment. ‘It’s not like there were many of you. Not that knew me. Really, it was only you and Jimmy and George that I gave a shit about. Obviously Simon and Marina were in on it, so they were only pretending. Look, I’ve said I’m sorry, and I meant it. If there had been another way to do it, I would have gone for it, believe me. But I had to keep you in the dark. Somebody’s grief had to be authentic. So Simon and Marina could figure out how to react.’

Stephanie’s mouth fell open. The notion that her personal pain had meant nothing more to Scarlett than a control in a psychological experiment was beyond her comprehension. How could someone treat another human being like that, let alone one who was supposed to be their best friend? ‘You callous bitch,’ she said, her voice quiet, almost strangled.

Scarlett drained her glass and refilled it. ‘I was playing for high stakes, Steph. I’ve always done what it took to get where I needed to be. Don’t act like it’s a surprise. You wrote the book, after all.’

Stephanie felt like her brain was slowly dragging itself up to speed after being mired in a swamp of lies. ‘I saw you dead. I saw you in your coffin.’ Scarlett smiled like a poker tournament winner released from the tyranny of keeping a straight face, and Stephanie suffered another moment of terrible understanding. ‘Oh my God,’ she gasped. Her hand flew to her mouth, as if by stopping the words emerging she could kill the knowledge.

Scarlett nodded. ‘She was fucking impossible, you know that. She wanted Jimmy, she wanted me to sign over the Spanish property to her, she wanted an income. Like any of that would have happened, even if I had been dying.’ She shook her head in disgust. ‘Silly cow thought she could threaten me with exposure.’

‘If she had talked it would only have been a nine-day wonder, Scarlett. You could have called her bluff. By then, you were the brave cancer heroine. The fact that you’d used Leanne as a body double bad girl might actually have earned you a few Brownie points.’ Stephanie’s bitterness leaked into every word.

But Scarlett looked puzzled rather than upset. ‘It wasn’t the body double thing I was worried about. It was Joshu.’

9

N
ow it was Stephanie’s turn to look baffled. ‘What about Joshu?’

‘Leanne knew about the morphine.’ Scarlett rolled her eyes as if she was dealing with a particularly stupid pupil.

‘What about the morphine?’ Stephanie persisted.

‘Joshu didn’t
steal
the morphine from Simon. Simon gave it to him. He made out that he was doing it as a favour, so Joshu would leave me alone. But he’d swapped the labels. Joshu thought he was shooting up a low dose, but it was really the highest one legally available. Leanne had seen Simon in the kitchen doing something with the labels and when Joshu died, she put two and two together. But she thought at first it was Simon trying to get Joshu out of the way so he could have a clear run at me. She didn’t realise we were already head over heels in love with each other by then.’ Scarlett smiled sweetly at the last memory, as if that erased the awful truth she’d just revealed.

‘You . . . You set up Joshu, knowing those doses of morphine would kill him?’

‘What would you have done? He was a nightmare, you know that. He was off his face half the time, and if I had died, he would have never let go until he’d got his hands on Jimmy and he’d have completely fucked him up. I couldn’t chance that, Steph. You’ve lived with Jimmy, you know what a sweetheart he is. I couldn’t leave him in Joshu’s hands. I’d tried everything to get him to back off. But he wasn’t having it. I didn’t have any choice.’

Stephanie reached for the glass of Prosecco and drank it in one. Scarlett laughed with delight. ‘That’s more like it. More like old times, Steph.’ She refilled the glass, reaching over to squeeze Stephanie’s arm. Stephanie flinched and drew back but Scarlett didn’t seem to mind. Stephanie had understood Scarlett’s single-mindedness, the drive that had taken her from a no-hope background to the high life. But understanding how it had turned into this cold-blooded ruthlessness was still a step she was finding it hard to make.

‘You killed Joshu to protect Jimmy. Then you killed Leanne to protect yourself.’

Scarlett looked put out. ‘Well, how would anyone have been better off if Leanne had grassed us up? We’d have been sent to jail in disgrace and Jimmy’s life would have been over. And Leanne would have been sitting pretty even though she was as guilty as us.’

‘How do you work that out? Leanne being guilty, I mean?’

Scarlett shrugged prettily. ‘She saw what she saw and she didn’t tell the cops at the time. She tried to blackmail me later. In my book, that makes her as much of a criminal. She had no right to get off scot free and with my son thrown in. And I won’t deny that her last job as my body double saved us a lot of aggravation about what to put in the coffin.’ She grinned at her own cleverness.

‘But Leanne supposedly went back to Spain weeks before you “died”.’ Stephanie made contemptuous quotation marks in the air. ‘What? You kept her prisoner all that time?’

‘It wasn’t hard. Simon had the drugs. He kept her sedated in the dressing room where he was supposedly kipping down. The weight fell off her, which made it look even more authentic. Then when we were ready for my big death bed scene, he upped the dose. She didn’t know anything about it. You could say she spent her last couple of weeks totally blissed out. People pay good money for that kind of thing, Steph.’

If that was an attempt at humour, it fell flat on its arse as far as Stephanie was concerned. ‘And the text I got this morning, supposedly from Leanne? That was you too, was it?’

Scarlett looked ridiculously pleased with herself. ‘Of course it was me. I had to think on my feet with that one.’

‘Not fast enough,’ Stephanie said. ‘We already knew Leanne wasn’t in Spain. We met the delightful chap you sold her house to.’

Scarlett looked mildly disconcerted. Capitalising on that, Stephanie went on the offensive. ‘And Jimmy? What was that about? You kidnapped Jimmy. You’ve put me through hell this last week. I’ve been insane with worry. I’ve hardly slept. I’ve been terrified for him.’

For the first time, Scarlett looked as if contrition might be within her emotional range. ‘Yeah. I felt really bad about that, Steph. If I could have found another way round it, I would have. But I couldn’t just ask you for him back, could I? You’d never have been able to explain that to social services, and they’d have thought you’d murdered him or sold him or something.’ She gave a weird little half-laugh. ‘So I had to kidnap him off you. We did it in America to draw attention away from anything that might point to us. Simon did the dirty deed. Lots of heavy-duty disguise and totally different shoes to change the way he walks. Simon drove up to Canada with him, got him across the border with a couple of Romanian passports, and then they flew back from Toronto. Piece of piss, really.’

‘But why? Why make it so complicated? Why didn’t you just make Simon Jimmy’s guardian in the first place? Or even Marina, if she was in on it?’

For the first time, Stephanie thought she saw something shifty flit across Scarlett’s face. ‘Either of them, tongues would have wagged. The hacks would have been all over it. Why was some Romanian nanny getting custody of Scarlett Higgins’ kid and taking him off to Romania? What sort of life was he going to have? Or why was some doctor getting the kid? Was he Scarlett’s secret lover? And why was he taking the kid off to Dracula’s back yard?’ She sighed. ‘Questions, questions, questions. I don’t want to sound mean, Steph, but you were the boring option. My mate, my ghost writer, the woman who was there when Jimmy was born, the person who more or less lived with us through the cancer. You’re his godmother, and that made you the obvious person to take care of him.’

‘And I did take care of him.’ Stephanie’s chin came up in defiance. ‘I couldn’t have taken better care of him if he’d been my own. You want to know the truth, Scarlett? He feels like my own. Never more so than this last week, after you took him off me.’

Scarlett dipped her head in acknowledgement. ‘I’m glad to hear it. But now I need him here with me. I’m sorry. When I asked you to take him on, I didn’t mean it to be temporary. I’d convinced myself I could let him go. Told myself he’d be better off without me, just with you.’ She was serious now; there was emotional depth to what she was saying, unlike when she’d been talking so nonchalantly about murder.

‘What changed things?’

Scarlett twirled the stem of her glass between her fingers, making the bubbles dance in the glass. Outside, it had started to rain, the rising wind throwing handfuls of drops against the windows. To Stephanie, it felt like a film set. It was hard to believe she was living through this disturbing scene for real. Any minute now, Nick was going to burst in with Simon and Jimmy, telling her she’d fallen for a grotesque practical joke.

‘What changed things?’ She sighed. ‘We thought there would be more kids, me and Simon. Giving Jimmy up – I’d squared that with myself on the basis that we’d have kids together. But once we’d been here a few months and nothing was happening, Simon ran a few tests. Turns out that the chemo I had for the breast cancer fried my eggs as well. I’ve got more chance of flying to the moon than I have of conceiving again.’

‘So you wanted Jimmy back. Since you couldn’t make a replacement, you thought you’d just snatch him back.’

She folded her arms across her chest. ‘He is mine, after all, Steph. Not yours.’

‘No, he’s not mine. But he’s not yours either. He’s not a possession. He’s a little boy we both owe a duty of care to. He’s the one both of us should have the honesty and the decency to put first. What’s best for Jimmy, that’s how it should be.’

Scarlett’s old smile was back. The lopsided, charming one that always provoked an answering smile in whoever was the target. This time, the old magic failed. ‘And that’s how it’s going to be from now on. I made a mistake, letting him leave my world. Now I’ve fixed it. He’s going to stop here with me, Stephanie. You just have to accept that.’

The icy certainty in Scarlett’s voice made Stephanie’s skin crawl. The unspoken threat was in her level gaze. This was a woman who had organised two cold and calculated murders already in pursuit of what she wanted. Implicit in her words was the menace of what she would exact from Stephanie if she didn’t simply walk away from a boy who was, after all, not her son. Nobody had to know what had happened here.

Except Nick, of course. Honest, passionate, inconvenient Nick.

As if to bolster up what she hadn’t said, Scarlett added casually, ‘You’ll have to stay the night. The roads round here are bloody awful. Even the locals regularly come off those bends and plunge to their deaths. You and Nick would be taking your lives in your hands if you went off in the dark in the middle of a storm.’

It was, Stephanie thought, like being trapped in a Brothers Grimm tale. Most of which, if she remembered rightly, didn’t have a happy ending. If they stayed the night, would they make it to morning? Would their food be drugged? Would their throats be cut in the night, their bodies fed to whatever wildlife roamed the forest? She was sure there must be wolves, or at least wild boars. And everybody knew that pigs ate anything and everything. Would wild boars be any different?

Or would they be doped up and put in the car, sent crashing down a sheer drop to certain death? Such a terrible tragedy, and all arising from a desperate desire to talk to that nice nanny and that helpful doctor who were closest to the boy who’d been mysteriously kidnapped. Simon had always been so convincing with her, he’d have no trouble with the local police who, she was sure, were understandably close to the local orphanage and its benefactors.

Thus far, Scarlett had always done what was necessary to achieve her goal. She kept it simple, but she kept it ruthless. Letting her believe her plan was working might be the only way to survive this. Stephanie let her eyes drop. ‘OK,’ she said, hoping she sounded defeated. ‘We’ll be gone in the morning.’

‘You think you can convince Nick the Greek to keep his mouth shut about Jimmy? It’s not like we have to tell him about the other stuff, after all.’

Like he’s not smart enough to work it out for himself.
Stephanie managed a sly smile. ‘He’ll go along with whatever I say. It’s not like this is an official visit or anything. He’s got no authority here.’

Scarlett appeared to accept what Stephanie had said, but Stephanie caught another of those flashes of ice behind her eyes. Scarlett was keeping the peace, that was all. They weren’t safe, her and Nick. Quite the opposite. They were like Damocles, sitting at dinner waiting for the hair suspending the sword above his head to snap. All they could be certain of was that at some point, they would be killed.

Knowing what she knew now, there was no way Scarlett could allow them to leave alive.