by Alison James
Her Sister's Child
A heart-stopping psychological thriller with an incredible twist
Alison James
Books by Alison James
The Man She Married
The School Friend
The Detective Rachel Prince series
1. Lola is Missing
2. Now She’s Gone
3. Perfect Girls
AVAILABLE IN AUDIO
The Man She Married (Available in the UK and the US)
The School Friend (Available in the UK and the US)
The Detective Rachel Prince series
1. Lola is Missing (Available in the UK and US)
2. Now She’s Gone (Available in the UK and US)
Contents
Prologue
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
PART TWO
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
PART THREE
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
Epilogue
The Man She Married
Hear More from Alison
Books by Alison James
A Letter from Alison
Lola is Missing
Now She’s Gone
Perfect Girls
The School Friend
Acknowledgements
*
Prologue
She rolls over and reaches out instinctively into the space where her baby was placed.
Her hand hits air, and flaps redundantly.
She sits up in bed and looks around her, head jerking wildly in first one direction, then the other. Perhaps someone lifted the baby off the bed and put her in the Moses basket. She squints over at the corner of the room, but where the Moses basket sat before, there’s just a patch of grimy carpet.
It’s dark in the room, although she has no idea what time it could be. She stumbles out of bed and switches on the light. But this only confirms it. There is no baby.
She checks her stomach but it’s flattened, the skin still slightly domed, but flaccid. The sliding, shifting movement of tiny limbs has stopped. She has definitely given birth; she didn’t dream it. But in that case the baby should be here next to her, lying next to her on the bed. That’s how things were when she crashed out. But the baby is gone.
Someone has taken her.
PART ONE
2019
1
Paula
Paula Donnelly’s trainers dislodge the gravel as she walks along the cemetery path, sending little sprays of stones onto the grass. She’s alone.
She is usually alone when she comes here, every March 15th. Occasionally at Christmas too, if the weather isn’t too hostile. Small clumps of narcissi shine brightly in the sunshine; the sort of fickle spring sunshine that comes and goes constantly. Paula has no sooner put her sunglasses on than she has to take them off again, every time the sun vanishes behind a cloud.
In loving memory of Elizabeth Jane Armitage
15th March 1979 – 22nd July 2003
A much missed daughter and sister. In our hearts always
‘Hello, Lizzie.’
Paula crouches down and brushes stray grass cuttings from the stone. It isn’t really true, what’s written there. The name and dates are true, obviously, but ‘much missed’ was something of an exaggeration. The same with ‘in our hearts always’. Why else would Paula be the only person there today?
‘You’d be forty today, eh?’ she observes. ‘Flipping middle-aged.’
Except that her sister wasn’t middle-aged, had never even got close to that milestone. Unless you counted the way she looked when she died: twenty-four years old, but her face and body by then so ravaged by years of alcohol abuse that she looked all of forty: more.
Paula makes a clearing in the grass directly in front of the stone and sets down the small plastic pot of primulas she has brought with her. She doesn’t like to leave cut flowers, because they look ghoulish when the flowers wilt and rot inside their cellophane wrapping. She hears a crunching on the gravel behind her, and the footsteps come to a halt somewhere just behind her left shoulder.
‘All right, Paul?’
She turns around to see a balding, bulky man looking down at the stone. Uncle Alan, their father’s twin brother, who always had a bit of a soft spot for Lizzie. He’s the only other person who ever shows up here, albeit infrequently.
‘Thought I’d come today seeing as how, you know… it’s her fortieth.’ He extends a sheaf of garage-forecourt carnations, which will turn brown with decay in the way Paula hates so much.
‘They’re lovely, Alan. Shall we see if we can find something to put them in?’
There’s a small shed at the far north-eastern corner of the cemetery with a tap and an assortment of pots and vases gathered up by the groundsmen. Alan shambles after Paula and watches mutely as she finds a faded ceramic plant pot, fills it with water and arranges the carnations in it, tossing the cellophane into the bin.
‘That looks nicer, don’t you think?’
He nods. ‘She’d like those.’
The truth is that Lizzie couldn’t have cared less about things like flowers, but the fiction is comforting. They return to the grave and place the pot next to Paula’s primulas, standing there in silence.
‘Shame, you know, isn’t it?’ Alan observes. ‘That she’s got no one else to remember her.’
She should have, Paula thinks. She should have had a sixteen year old standing here, remembering. Except if her son or daughter had been around, maybe Lizzie wouldn’t even have died. But she doesn’t say anything to Alan, because he – like the rest of the family – never knew about the baby. Nobody did, apart from herself.
‘Shame that she and your mum never made things right,’ Alan goes on. ‘Or your dad, before he passed.’
Paula nods.
‘Does your mum ever come, you know… to visit her?’
She shakes her head, then – keen to change the subject from her family’s failings – asks, ‘Cup of tea?’ There’s a family-run Italian café opposite the cemetery: a North London institution that has been there forever.
Alan shakes his head. ‘I better get back. The trains and that.’ He and his wife Shirley now live in Chingford. ‘Just wanted to… you know… pay my respects.’
‘Well. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it.’
They exchange a brief, awkward hug and Paula heads back to the station to catch the overground to Palmers Green. When she lets herself into the house, all is quiet. Her children – fourteen-year-old Ben and twelve-year-old Jessica – are usually returning from school around now, hurling backpacks to the floor in the hall, loudly demanding whether there are any snacks before thundering upstairs to carry on their peer-to-peer interaction via their smartphone screens. Sometimes
they linger with their friends, chatting in the street or going to the local fast-food place for a burger or fried chicken, just as she did when she was a teenager. Since it’s Friday, with the heady freedom of the weekend beckoning, it’s probably one of those days. Paula’s part-time job takes up Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday every week, plus the occasional Thursday if the dental practice where she works is short-staffed.
Biscuit the dog paces around her, eager to get outside for some exercise.
‘Just a minute,’ she tells him. ‘I’ll take you out for a walk when I’ve had a cup of tea.’
It occurs to her that talking to the dog when they are alone in the house is a sign of going soft in the head, of spending too much time on her own. She has been divorced for four years now: sometimes that feels like a lifetime, and sometimes it’s as though Dave only moved out yesterday. She flicks the switch on the kettle, and tosses a teabag into a mug. While she’s waiting for the water to boil, she walks over to the battered bureau that used to belong to her grandparents and now sits under the kitchen window, its surface littered with unpaid bills, till receipts, letters from school. She rummages through one of the drawers and pulls out a well-thumbed photograph, its colour faded.
It’s a picture of her and Lizzie taken when Paula was still at school. Lizzie was already an alcoholic by then, but she is having one of her better days. Her face is thin, but has not yet taken on the grey, sunken cast of the hopeless addict. Her straight brown hair is freshly washed, the sunlight on it making it gleam almost gold. Paula has her left arm around her older sister and is leaning her head on Lizzie’s shoulder, strands of her own, wavier hair curling against her sister’s neck. They are both smiling. Paula tries to remember who took the photo. Was it their father, still alive at that point? Or their brother, Steve?
Paula thinks about the child she has always believed Lizzie gave birth to, not long before her death. Had it been a boy or a girl? Was he or she still alive? As a teenager she’d been left confused about whether Lizzie had even been pregnant at all. Her attempts to settle that confusion had come to nothing. Now, with the perspective of adulthood, she is quite certain that she was.
‘I’m going to find out, Lizzie,’ she says out loud, speaking so firmly that Biscuit stands to attention, thinking it’s time to leave. ‘If it’s the last bloody thing I do, I’m going to find the truth about your baby.’
2
Charlie
‘Are you going to Nadia’s party?’
Charlie’s best friend, Hannah Watson, follows her out of the classroom at the end of double maths and links arms with her, swinging her backpack by one shoulder strap.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Okay, so I’ve decided to wear my sparkly crop top and that black pleather skirt… what are you going to wear?’
‘I said I don’t know if I’m going.’ Charlie is terse.
Hannah swivels her head and lets her mouth hang open in faux shock. ‘Easy there, missy! Jesus, what’s put you in such a bad mood?’
Before Charlie can answer her, there’s a scuffling at the end of the corridor, and a whirling of male limbs as a group of the boys in Year 13 approach, thumping each other as they go. At the centre of this human Catherine wheel is Jake Palmer. He’s widely acknowledged as the school’s alpha male: tall, with dark blond hair cut in a fade, and brooding, slightly slanted eyes.
Instantly, Charlie drops her gaze to her feet. And Hannah, of course, notices.
‘Oh Jesus, Char, please tell me you’re not still obsessed with him. I thought it was all over between you guys?’
‘It is,’ Charlie mutters, pulling her phone out of her blazer pocket and pretending to be engrossed in something so that she can avoid eye contact. Jake’s friends grunt and point at her as they pass, digging him in the ribs and making obscene gestures with their tongues and fingers. She feels her cheeks burn.
‘Why don’t you come over to mine now,’ Hannah asks, ‘and we can go through outfits, yeah? And watch some smoky eye tutorials on YouTube.’
‘I can’t.’ Charlie pushes her phone back into her pocket and hoists her bag up on her back. ‘I need to go to the shops.’
‘I’ll come with you, then we can go back to mine.’
‘No!’ Charlie snaps, and before Hannah can argue, she breaks away from her and walks off quickly down the corridor.
Once she’s out of the school grounds, she heads to the nearest parade of shops. The small, family-run chemist will expose her to too much scrutiny, so she walks a bit further to the supermarket that has a pharmacy section and the anonymity of self-service checkout machines.
By the time she gets home, she has three missed calls and five WhatsApps from Hannah. She ignores them, locking herself in the bathroom and unpacking the small blue and white box, briefly scanning the instruction leaflet before peeing on the tip of the stick. Then she replaces the cap, shoves it into the pocket of her school skirt and goes into her room to wait.
And, just as she feared, there is a blue line in the second window.
She looks at the plastic stick with a shiver of shock, a lurching sense of disbelief. The instructions say it clearly, and it was even shown in the photo on the front of the pack. A second blue line means pregnant.
Her hand comes up to her mouth as she stares at the stick. Then she rocks back onto the bed, closing her eyes. She pictures his face as he thrust into her, lost in his moment of ecstasy, and quite oblivious to her. But this baby is his, so he has to know about it. He has to know what he’s done.
The next morning, before she has even climbed out of bed, Charlie is decided. She will tell him today. After all, it’s not like she’s just missed a period: she hasn’t had one for over two months. A small, but persistent, shelf of flesh is starting to appear above her pubic bone. Nobody has said anything yet. But they will. They will notice.
Over breakfast her mother complains that she’s being moody. She suggests it’s a case of PMS. If only.
‘It’s not bloody PMS, okay?’ Charlie snarls. ‘What the hell would you know about it?’
Her little brother Olly stares at her open-mouthed, pausing with his cereal spoon halfway to his mouth. Milk trickles off the corner of the spoon and drips onto the tablecloth and their mother dabs at it, irritated, as Charlie slams out of the kitchen and heads for the stairs. She shouts up them after her daughter.
‘Charlie! Come on, we don’t have time for this! You need to leave for school, or you’re going to be late.’
Charlie wrenches open her bedroom door, shouts, ‘I’m just getting ready!’ then slams it again. Sitting down at her dressing table, she scrutinises her reflection in the mirror. If she’s going to confront Jake, she needs to make sure she’s looking her best. She sweeps foundation over her face, buffing it in with a brush in short, expert strokes. Then she contours and highlights – a routine so practised she could do it in her sleep – and creates full Insta-brows over heavily shadowed lids and two coats of mascara on her eyelashes. Finally, a matt lipstick in a natural pinky-brown. Her reflection is now glossy, her olive skin gleaming, the dark brown eyes popping in the required fashion. She takes a selfie, for good measure. For good luck. Sends it to Hannah, as a matter of habit.
Her mother thrusts the bedroom door open. ‘For God’s sake, Charlie, what do you need all that make-up for? You’re going to school!’
Exactly, thinks Charlie. Exactly.
Jake Palmer could have his pick of the girls at Bishop Hereward School. This is one reason why Charlie won’t even approach him unless she’s looking her best. She knows she’s pretty. Quite pretty. But not stunning. If you ranked all the girls in Year 11 according to their relative prettiness, then she would probably be around the seventieth centile. She knows how that works because they covered percentiles in their maths GCSE coursework.
And even with her Insta-ready face on, approaching Jake is difficult. He is holding court in one corner of the playing field, his faithful henchmen flanking him: other boys from Year 13 –
Lewis Jeffers, Scott King and Mikey Thomas. Wherever Jake goes, they go.
As Charlie walks towards them there is nudging and snorting.
‘The missus is incoming,’ she hears one of them say.
‘Hardly the missus,’ Jake scoffs. ‘Only had her once.’
Charlie feels the hot rush of shame scorch her cheeks. She meant to be bold, and brazen, but is automatically lowering her gaze. Her school bag is clutched across her midriff at an unnatural angle.
‘All right, slag?’ asks Mikey. He calls everyone ‘slag’. She ignores him.
‘Jake, I need to talk to you.’
‘Ooh,’ chorus the henchmen. Honestly, they’re like a bunch of cackling women.
‘Grow up,’ she snaps at them, then addressing Jake adds, ‘Alone.’
