The Forgotten Sister

by Nicola Cornick

  ‘Thanks,’ Arthur said. He gave her a tired smile. ‘And thank you for seeing my point of view.’

  Their eyes met and for a moment Lizzie thought he was going to say something else, something about the affinity they shared, but the moment passed.

  ‘What a nice flat,’ Arthur said as he followed her into the kitchen. ‘I was expecting—’ He stopped.

  ‘You were expecting marble floors and gold leaf,’ Lizzie finished for him. ‘Each to their own, although bling isn’t really my thing.’ The tension inside her eased a little at his evident embarrassment. There was something so self-contained, so controlled about Arthur that it was actually a relief to discover that he was as prone to a gaffe as the next person. But perhaps he was nervous too. It was such an odd situation they found themselves in.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Arthur said. He rubbed the back of his neck. ‘That was rude of me.’

  Lizzie smiled. ‘You made assumptions. People do.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Look, shall we try and start again – with as few prejudices as we can manage?’

  Arthur’s answering smile made her heart miss a beat. ‘That would probably be for the best,’ he said.

  ‘Do sit down.’ Lizzie gestured him to the chair by the window where Johnny had sat the night before. ‘How do you take your coffee?’

  ‘Strong, please.’ She could feel Arthur watching her as she filled the cafetière. She felt strangely self-conscious. Arthur felt simultaneously like a stranger and someone she knew very well. It was beyond disconcerting.

  ‘Where did you leave your car?’ she asked. ‘The parking’s non-existent around here.’

  ‘I left it outside,’ Arthur said. He smiled faintly. ‘The guy from the private parking company promised to keep an eye on it for me. I don’t think he’d seen a car like mine before.’

  ‘It takes a lot to impress them round here,’ Lizzie said. ‘What do you drive?’

  ‘An original Land Rover Defender,’ Arthur said. ‘Held together by mud and rust. He would probably have towed it away but he was afraid it would fall apart.’

  ‘You’re a farmer.’ Lizzie remembered Kat’s breathless disclosures about him.

  Arthur nodded. ‘It’s a busy time of year for me,’ he said. ‘I should be back in Norfolk really. Luckily I have a very efficient and long-suffering farm manager.’ He took the mug from her with a word of thanks and took a deep, appreciative swallow. ‘Ah, that’s good. I thought you’d have a coffee machine.’

  ‘I do,’ Lizzie said. ‘But if you need proper, strong coffee, the cafetière is best.’ She poured for herself and added a generous measure of sugar.

  ‘When we met at Dudley and Amelia’s wedding you were on TV, weren’t you?’ she asked. ‘What made you give all that up to farm?’

  Arthur gave her a direct look. ‘That’s a very personal question.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Lizzie shrugged, ‘it’s part of my stock in trade, I suppose, interviewing and presenting. I was interested, that’s all.’

  Arthur didn’t reply immediately and she thought he wasn’t going to answer at all but then he did.

  ‘It felt very glamorous when I started out.’ He spoke slowly, thoughtfully, as though he was thinking back over something he hadn’t talked about in a long time. ‘I was only nineteen – they signed me up for the TV show after I’d just gone to college. Mum was furious when I dropped out; she’d walked away from the whole modelling thing because she said celebrity was corrupt but I just thought she was spoiling my fun.’ He shrugged, a little awkwardly. ‘She said fame bred insecurity and unhappiness. I told her not to be stupid. I’d had my head properly turned.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be the first,’ Lizzie said. ‘And you were very young.’ She was surprised all the same. Arthur seemed so grounded but perhaps he had learned the hard way what was real and worthwhile and what was not.

  ‘Yeah, well…’ Arthur shifted a little. ‘It was all new and exciting for me, and after a couple of years I met Jenna, my fiancée, and she was a model and an actress and it was very glamorous… It felt as though we were really living, if you know what I mean.’ He looked at her. ‘It’s as though all the special treatment and first-class travel and people fawning over you validates you in some way, but I guess you’ve experienced that for yourself.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Lizzie said. ‘It’s easy to believe in your own legend. You need to be very sure of who you are before fame happens if you’re not going to get spoilt.’

  A smile touched Arthur’s lips. ‘Who knew you were so wise?’ he said.

  ‘Bitter experience,’ Lizzie said lightly. ‘I was very young when I started and it did spoil me. I can’t deny that. I do try to be aware of it now but a sense of entitlement can be a hard habit to break.’

  Arthur’s smile lingered. ‘You don’t do a bad job,’ he said, and she felt as though he’d given her a present.

  Arthur broke the moment. ‘I think I must have been unbearable,’ he said. ‘Jenna and I were so full of ourselves.’ He pulled a face. ‘But underneath it… Jenna was totally messed up. I tried to help but it wasn’t enough.’

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ Lizzie said. She remembered Kat saying that Jenna had died of anorexia. She wondered whether that was where Arthur’s tendency to try to save people stemmed from. It must have been appalling to lose his fiancée like that and to feel so helpless.

  ‘Was that why you turned your back on it all?’ she asked. ‘A change of direction?’

  ‘It wasn’t really that different,’ Arthur said. ‘I’ve always loved the countryside and I was making shows that focussed on animals and nature – you know the sort of thing. Farming is just a different emphasis, really. I went to the US to study agriculture. My mother lives in the States these days and it’s a kind of second home to me. I studied at Cornell and then went to Uppsala in Sweden for my postgraduate degree.’ He didn’t make any reference to how Jenna’s death had made him feel and Lizzie didn’t push. The fact he’d told her it was a very personal question showed how significant it still must be to him.

  ‘I’m thinking of doing something different,’ Lizzie said. ‘Well, not different exactly, but more writing and composing. I was the songwriter for my band back in the day and I really enjoyed it.’ She caught herself up in time before she told him more. It was easy to talk to Arthur because she felt close to him and difficult to remember that there was more that divided them than brought them together.

  ‘Anyway, come back through,’ she said awkwardly.

  She was very aware of Arthur following her through to the living room. He went over to the seat by the window, sparing one long, appreciative glance for her bookshelves and a second one for the view before turning his attention back to her.

  ‘I’d forgotten that you lost your mother when you were even younger than Johnny,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘That must have been very painful. No wonder you have such an affinity with him.’

  He caught Lizzie off guard. Grief ambushed her, visceral and raw. She swallowed hard. ‘I don’t remember my mother very well,’ she said, trying to sound as though it didn’t matter. ‘I was too young.’

  ‘Earlier on I brushed you off when you asked something that was still very personal to me,’ Arthur said wryly. ‘Now you’ve done the same.’ There was tension in the line of his shoulders. ‘I guess that until this issue with Johnny is resolved we’d better just stick to the straightforward stuff.’

  ‘There’s not much of that around,’ Lizzie said, with feeling.

  ‘No,’ Arthur said. ‘I suppose not. OK, let’s just go for it. Last night when we spoke you said that you’d got something you wanted to tell me in person, something to do with Johnny’s visit.’

  ‘Yes.’ Lizzie realised that her fingers were knotted together tightly with tension. She sat forward, deliberately unlocking them and wrapping her hands about her own coffee mug. The heat of it was soothing.

  ‘Johnny and I talked about lots of things last night,’ she said slowly. ‘How he was feeling about Am
elia’s death, his parents, Dudley…’ She rubbed her eyes. They felt gritty and sore this morning as though she had spent the night in a smoky room. ‘I thought he just wanted to talk to someone who was a step removed from everything, you know?’ She looked at Arthur. ‘You’re all dealing with the grief as well, and you in particular are trying to hold everything together and you’re worried about Johnny…’ She smiled at him. ‘I thought perhaps Johnny needed a break from all that and space to talk.’ She took a breath. ‘Well, I suppose he did, but that wasn’t all.’

  Arthur was watching her, his gaze stead and perceptive. ‘What happened?’

  ‘For a start, Johnny told me that he and Amelia had been telepathic,’ Lizzie said bluntly. She looked at Arthur, waiting for a reaction, but he said nothing. She could see what Johnny had meant about him being the strong and silent type; he had such a good poker face.

  Arthur stirred at last. ‘You did cover a lot of ground,’ he said.

  ‘You think?’ Lizzie said sarcastically.

  Arthur laughed. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to be unforthcoming.’

  ‘Yeah, you did,’ Lizzie said and Arthur spread his hands in a gesture of surrender.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I only hesitated because…’ He stopped, shrugged. ‘I guess I always feel wrong-footed with you because we have this strange psychic thing going on and I’m just not really comfortable with any of that stuff…’ He made a slight, dismissive gesture. ‘Anyway, it’s true about the telepathy in the sense that Johnny and Millie always seemed to know what the other was thinking or where the other one was. They would do some curious sort of party trick where one of them would think of a word and they would both write it down and it would be the same. It was uncanny.’

  ‘OK,’ Lizzie said, ‘that’s interesting. I thought it must be true but I wanted to be sure.’

  ‘I didn’t want to believe it at first,’ Arthur admitted, ‘because I couldn’t understand it.’ He sat back in the big chair, stretching his long legs out in front of him. ‘After a while, though, I got used to it. It was just Millie and Johnny – just the way they were, like Anna gets belligerent when she’s unhappy. It was a part of their characters and their relationship.’ His gaze came up to hers, suddenly very direct. ‘I’d never experienced telepathy myself, though, until you touched me. I don’t like feeling you can read my mind whenever you choose.’

  Lizzie’s heart jumped in her chest. ‘I thought we weren’t going to talk about us?’ she said. ‘But since you brought it up, I don’t like it any more than you do. It’s never happened to me before. I usually read objects, not people, and I don’t even enjoy doing that.’ She could feel herself becoming hot and bothered under Arthur’s steady dark stare.

  ‘It seems I’ve met someone even less comfortable with the fey stuff than I am myself,’ he said. He sounded grimly amused. ‘How inconvenient it must be for you to possess that gift when you don’t want it.’

  ‘It’s not funny,’ Lizzie said crossly. ‘And anyway, I thought you just said you didn’t believe in it?’

  ‘I didn’t say I didn’t believe in it,’ Arthur said, ‘just that I wasn’t comfortable with it. There’s no point in denying something that is patently obvious even if both of us would prefer it not to exist.’

  ‘Yeah, we’re stuck with it,’ Lizzie said. ‘I promise not to invade your privacy with my mind tricks. It’ll be fine as long as we don’t touch each other.’

  ‘Right,’ Arthur said, with a scrupulous courtesy that for some reason made her feel even more hot and bothered.

  ‘Returning to Johnny,’ she said frostily. She couldn’t immediately see how Johnny’s gift of telepathic communication with Amelia was relevant to what had happened the previous night. It had certainly given him a greater understanding and acceptance of her own gift of psychometry, and yet Lizzie felt that there had to be more to it than that. She knew there was. She just couldn’t see the connection yet…

  ‘When Johnny left last night, he took with him a stone carving that had originally come from Oakhangar Hall,’ she said. She shifted uncomfortably. ‘You may remember at Amelia and Dudley’s wedding… There was an angel holding a crystal gazing ball. It smashed and cut my hand – the glass ball, I mean. You patched me up.’ She tried to sound as casual as she could. ‘Someone must have slipped the angel into my bag thinking it was mine because I found it much later and never got around to handing it back.’ Embarrassed, she avoided Arthur’s gaze. ‘Anyway, like I said, Johnny took it last night.’

  ‘Sure, I remember,’ Arthur said. ‘Do you mean you gave the carving back to Johnny last night – or he took it?’

  ‘He took it,’ Lizzie said bluntly. ‘Technically, of course, it wasn’t mine in the first place. But I didn’t realise until later that he had stolen it back. I thought I should tell you in case it had any significance.’ She waited, hopeful, but after a second Arthur shook his head.

  ‘I don’t know why he would do that,’ he said. He met her eyes. ‘Presumably you didn’t tell the police that bit because…’

  ‘Because I didn’t think it would help the situation to suggest that your brother was a thief,’ Lizzie said, ‘for a number of reasons.’

  ‘I guess that’s true,’ Arthur conceded. ‘Well, there must be a good reason he wanted it, but—’ He stopped, frowning.

  ‘He knew where it came from,’ Lizzie said, ‘and he knew I had it. The more I think about it, the more I think the whole evening – the whole “I want to talk to Lizzie Kingdom” thing – was all about getting it back.’ She leaned forward, eager to try to explain. ‘At one point in the conversation Johnny said that the evening wasn’t really how he’d imagined it would be. He said I was being so nice, which made it more difficult. But he didn’t say what was difficult. At the time I assumed it was because he wanted to hate me for monopolising Dudley and upsetting Amelia in the process, but now I wonder… I wonder if all along he was planning to steal the stone angel and he felt bad about it.’

  Arthur’s frowned deepened. ‘I don’t get why it was so important to him,’ he said.

  Lizzie sighed. She felt deflated. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’m wrong then. It just seemed significant, and I thought I should tell you.’

  Arthur’s phone pinged. ‘Sorry,’ he said, reaching into his pocket. ‘I should probably take this.’ He scrolled through the message quickly. ‘It’s Anna,’ he said. ‘She says Dudley’s place is like a fortress. The paparazzi are out in force. Apparently, there’s been some story leaked to the press that Dudley is the father of Letty Knollys’ baby.’ He looked at Lizzie, brows raised. ‘Did you know about this?’

  Lizzie shook her head. ‘I’ve no idea if it’s true or not about the baby but apparently they were having an affair. Johnny told me last night that Amelia had hired a PI to follow Dudley and that was how she found out.’

  ‘What a sleaze.’ Arthur looked disgusted. ‘This will make the story of Millie’s death and Johnny’s disappearance even more of a circus.’ He put the phone away. ‘God, I knew Dudley was a self-absorbed shit but really?’ He shot Lizzie a sharp glance. ‘You’re upset,’ he said, and it sounded almost like an accusation.

  ‘I’m sad,’ Lizzie corrected him. ‘I’m sad for everyone whose lives Dudley has buggered up so carelessly and I’m sad that I stood by him for so long. I’ve been pretty blind and now I feel stupid.’

  ‘Don’t beat yourself up.’ Arthur’s tone had softened. ‘Dudley’s fooled a lot of people.’

  ‘He was so cute as a kid,’ Lizzie said sadly, ‘and so loyal. But I guess people change.’ She drained her coffee mug. ‘There’s something else,’ she said. ‘Johnny also left this behind, either deliberately or by accident, when he took the stone angel.’ She reached up to the bookshelf, where she had left Johnny’s little green notebook. She handled it gingerly but there were no repercussions, no echo of the emotions she had experienced the previous night when she had held it. It was as though its potency had vanished. She passed
it to Arthur, making sure their fingers didn’t touch. ‘I might as well tell you I did try to do a reading on it. I wanted to see if I could find out where Johnny had gone and what was going on with him.’

  ‘And what did you see?’ Arthur asked.

  ‘It felt full of energy,’ Lizzie said slowly. ‘Anger and fear and determination. Whatever Johnny wants, wherever he’s gone, he’s desperate. I don’t mean—’ She put out a quick hand towards Arthur in reassurance then withdrew it equally quickly. ‘I don’t mean he planned to take his own life,’ she said. ‘Quite the reverse. There’s something he’s desperate to achieve. It consumes him. But I don’t know what it is.’

  Arthur said nothing. His gaze was dark and inward-looking. Lizzie had the impression he was thinking very hard and very quickly, sifting information, considering and rejecting what to tell her. There was something there, a deeply held secret, but she shied away from reading his mind. She had promised she wouldn’t and she wasn’t going to break that promise and undermine the fragile trust they were building

  ‘I would have thought,’ Arthur said slowly, ‘that the thing Johnny wants more than anything in the world is to have Amelia back again. That’s what he told you. That’s what we all know. But as that isn’t possible…’ He shrugged. ‘I really don’t know what else he might be planning.’

  Lizzie shivered, remembering Johnny’s words the previous night, his fierce protestation that he would do anything he could to bring Amelia back. She could hear the echo of his voice:

  ‘If only I’d realised in time—’

  Realised what? she wondered. He had not said.

  ‘Have you read the book?’ Arthur flicked through the notebook. ‘Do you know what’s in it?’

  ‘No,’ Lizzie said. ‘I couldn’t. It was too…’ She hesitated. ‘The emotions it stirred up were too powerful,’ she said, and was glad when Arthur merely nodded. He might not be comfortable with the paranormal stuff, she thought, but at least he was accepting.

  ‘I’ll take a look,’ he said. ‘It might help.’ He slid the book into his pocket; sighed. ‘Before I go,’ he said, ‘would you mind telling me exactly what happened when Johnny disappeared?’ He spread his hands. ‘I know you told me – and the police – that you fainted and when you came around Johnny had gone, but how did that all come about?’