by Camilla Way
“Didn’t you confront her?” Tom asked angrily. “Talk to her?”
“We didn’t know!” Rose cried. “Even Beth had no idea until years later. Hannah always kept her distance, never approaching us or letting herself be discovered. We had no clue that she even knew about us! And then, when she was sixteen and Emily had just turned eighteen, she engineered a way for the two of them to meet. They became friends.”
“And you still had no idea who she was?” Clara asked.
“No! She told Emily her name was Becky, and she never came here to the house, not that I’d recognize her if she did. We knew Emily had a new friend, but I didn’t make the connection. Why would I? The Jenningses lived miles from us in Cambridgeshire. I had no idea Hannah knew about us all. I had no reason to suspect.”
“So how did you find out?” Mac asked.
At this, Rose began to cry again. “One night Hannah told Emily herself. She told her everything. Who she really was. That Oliver was her father, that she and Emily were half sisters, that we’d given her away to near strangers to be rid of her.”
“My God,” Tom said.
“But it was worse than that. Hannah knew I’d been the only person present when her mother died, and over the years she had convinced herself that it was I who killed her, that I’d pushed her!”
“And Emily believed her?” Tom asked.
Rose wiped her eyes. “I don’t think so, thank God. I told her it wasn’t true, of course, that I’d seen Nadia jump, but it didn’t stop her being furious with both of us. Furious that Oliver had had an affair, that we had kept from her that she had a half sister, that I’d ‘covered up’ for her dad. She said we disgusted her, that she’d never forgive us. You know what she was like, how principled she was, so sure of what was right and wrong. There was nothing we could say to make her stay—she was such a stubborn, headstrong girl. She said that she was leaving, that she never wanted to see us again. What could I do? She was eighteen! I couldn’t force her to stay!”
“So you just let her go?” Tom said.
Rose looked at him imploringly. “Oh, darling, she was so very angry with us. I thought she would go away for a few days, a week or so, and then she’d come back once she’d calmed down. And she was legally an adult. I couldn’t stop her. But she didn’t come back. We tried to look for her, but it was no use. And the next day Hannah called us, taunting us, telling us that she knew where Emily was, saying we deserved it, that she’d make us pay for the rest of our lives, that she’d drive each of you away from us, one by one.”
“You should have told me!” Tom cried. “You had no right to keep this from me!”
“We wanted to spare you. . . .”
“But you didn’t! You didn’t! Are you that crazy? Did you not think I suspected something? That I didn’t hear you and Dad talking in corners, whispering away when you thought Luke and I were in bed? Then one night I heard you say it outright. I heard you telling Dad it was his fault she had left, that Emily would never forgive him for what he’d done, that she’d left because of him.”
Rose’s face fell. “You heard that?”
“Why do you think I couldn’t bear to be around you anymore? I knew you knew why Emily had gone. Guilt was written all over your faces. I was just a kid. I didn’t confront you, because . . . well, because I was fifteen—it was easier to get drunk, take drugs, stay out all night, bury my head in the sand. But I hated you—I bloody hated you for lying to me, for pretending you had no idea why our family had fallen apart.” He turned to his father. “I knew it was your fault, that you made her go. I just didn’t know why.”
Clara stared at him, suddenly everything that had confused her about him making sense, and she felt a rush of pity.
“And then when Luke went missing,” Tom continued, “again your reaction didn’t add up. Just like when Emily left, I could tell you were hiding something. It wasn’t shock or bewilderment I saw on your faces; it was guilt. I saw the looks that passed between you, and I overheard you, Dad, begging Mum’s forgiveness, promising that Luke would be okay. And when I asked you outright in that fucking kitchen, the day Clara and Mac came round, when I asked you if you knew where Luke was, you denied it! You lied! I knew you were lying. And now I know why. It’s her, isn’t it? The person who has Luke, it’s this fucking woman! Hannah, my half sister.”
Rose nodded miserably. “Yes,” she whispered.
“And does she know where Emily is?”
“We don’t know. Sometimes she likes to taunt us, telling us she does. Other times she denies all knowledge. We’ve never known what to believe.”
“What does she want from us? Why did she approach me in Manchester all those years ago?”
“Revenge,” said Oliver quietly. “And money. Once she’d made contact with you in Manchester, she phoned us constantly, telling us that she’d seen you, that she was going to tell you everything, that there was nothing we could do about it. That once she’d finished with you, you’d never want to see us again, would disappear from our lives just like your sister. She told us that it was all going to come out . . . my affair, giving her away as a baby, the ridiculous lies about her mother’s supposed murder, all of it. She knew she couldn’t prove any of it to the police, so hurting us through you kids was the best way she could think of to punish us. We were trying to protect you from it all!”
“Jesus fucking Christ! And you didn’t think to tell me about it? You didn’t think I had a right to know about the nutcase who was hanging around me?”
Oliver hung his head. “We paid her a lot of money. Thousands and thousands of pounds to leave you alone. She was broke, homeless, a drifter. She’d . . . been in a lot of trouble throughout her life—drugs, prison. . . .”
“Prison?” Clara asked.
“We paid her the money and it worked. We didn’t hear from her for ten years. I hired a private detective to track her down, keep an eye on her. Her life . . . it spiraled: she was a junkie, a prostitute, constantly in trouble with the police. She was in no fit state to continue to wage her war against us, so she left us in peace for a time.”
Clara couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “This is your daughter. Your daughter! As much your flesh and blood as Emily! Didn’t you care? Didn’t you feel any guilt, any responsibility for this woman? Jesus, Oliver! I can’t believe what I’m hearing!” Oliver kept his head bent, unable to meet her gaze. She felt a burning dislike for him.
“But why after ten years did she get it together to go after Luke?” Mac asked then. “It doesn’t make sense. Why now?”
Rose shook her head. “We don’t know.”
Tom drained his glass of wine. “When did you guess that Hannah was behind Luke’s disappearance?” he asked.
Oliver glanced at him. “Hannah sent us a picture of him, saying he was with her. She said that she wanted more money, that if we didn’t give it to her, she’d hurt him. So we gave her what she asked for; then she said it wasn’t enough. She said if we paid her more, she’d let Luke go. We’ve been going out of our minds, Tom. We know it’s not really money she wants. She wants to torture us—this is her revenge. That’s why she’s keeping it going. The longer she can cause us pain, the better she likes it.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police?” Tom asked next. “Surely that was the first thing you should have done?”
“We didn’t dare!” Rose said. “She seems to know everything about us. Every move we make—when we speak to the police, what we talk about with them, our conversations or meetings with Clara, you name it—she somehow knows about it. We couldn’t work out how she was doing it. Even if we used public telephones, somehow she’d know what we talked about. It’s terrifying. She said if we told the police about her, she’d know and she’d kill Luke immediately. We couldn’t take that risk. And then . . .” Her voice faltered and she took a gulping breath. “And then she sent us pictures of Luke, to
warn us what would happen if we did.”
“Pictures?” Clara asked, feeling sick. “What pictures?”
Oliver pulled his phone from his pocket. “This is the last one that Hannah sent us.”
“Let me see that.” Tom’s face drained of color as he took the phone from his father and stared down at its screen. Wordlessly he passed it to Clara. It was a picture of Luke. He had a large and vivid bruise across his face, a split lip, and horribly pale skin behind his scars, his eyes staring glassily at the lens.
Clara gasped in horror as she swiped to the next photo. It showed Luke’s bound arms, covered in hundreds of small, weeping knife wounds. “Oh no,” she whispered, “oh God.”
“We’ve been waiting to hear from her, to tell us what to do next,” Rose said. “We’re so frightened.” Fresh tears fell from her eyes. “She’s dangerous, Tom. She’s really very dangerous.”
A coldness spread through Clara. “How dangerous?” She looked at Oliver. “When you said she went to prison, what was it for?”
TWENTY-EIGHT
CAMBRIDGESHIRE, 1997
They say that personality disorders, including sociopathy, can come about due to a mixture of biology and circumstance. A neurological malfunction, often inherited, that can be exacerbated by trauma in childhood. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it over the years—in fact I’ve thought of little else—but I still don’t know why Hannah became the person that she did. Perhaps she did inherit her mother’s psychiatric issues; perhaps the discovery of where she came from that day, aged seven, detonated a bomb that had been sitting idle, waiting for its touch paper to be lit. I guess I’ll never know for sure. I try my hardest not to dwell on the reasons why anymore. I last saw Hannah—I no longer refer to her as my daughter—over twenty years ago. I never want to see her face again.
* * *
—
After I overheard Hannah on the phone to Emily that day, pretending to be “Becky,” I was thrown into a panic. I didn’t know what to do for the best. I knew I should call Rose to warn her, but I felt paralyzed. Should I talk to Hannah first, try to persuade her from her plan, whatever that might be? I needed to find out what she was intending to do. When she put the phone down to Emily, I waited in the kitchen for her to come down, my head in turmoil, until sure enough, I finally heard her door open and a few seconds later her tread on the stairs.
She glanced at me as she entered the kitchen, but as usual said nothing, coldly ignoring me as she went to the cupboard and started rooting around for food. I can still see her now. She was wearing black leggings and a T-shirt that might once have been white, her face a mess of last night’s makeup that she hadn’t bothered to wipe off. Yet still her beauty made me catch my breath. I thought again of the strange, fake voice she’d used on the phone, how she’d called herself Becky, and shuddered. At last I steeled myself and cleared my throat. “Hannah?”
She straightened up, a packet of biscuits in her hand. “What?”
I swallowed hard and braced myself. How had I become so afraid of my own daughter? “I know you’ve been meeting Emily Lawson,” I said. “I overheard you on the phone with her this morning.”
For a split second I saw surprise register on her face, followed by a moment of absolute silence, and then she did something that I hadn’t expected her to do in a thousand years: she started to cry. As I watched, amazed, the tears rolling down her face, she put the biscuits down and came over to where I was sitting at the table, then took the seat opposite mine and, putting her head on her arms, began to sob.
Funny to think that I still loved her then, that the sight of her in pain could make my heart twist in sympathy as though it were my own that was breaking. “Oh, Hannah,” I said. “Oh, my darling, what is it?” I reached across the table and took hold of her hand. It was the first time she’d let me touch her in years. “Tell me, please tell me what this is all about.”
It took her a while to compose herself. When she did, she wiped her eyes and said in a voice so small and desolate that it brought a lump to my throat, “I just want them to love me, my real family, I mean. I want to know them, to understand where I come from.” Her eyes brimmed with tears again. “Ever since I found out about my real mother and father, I’ve felt so confused.”
I was astonished. This was the first time she’d ever brought up what she’d overheard all those years before. “I had no idea you felt like this,” I stammered.
And then, suddenly, and to my horror, a wide smirk broke across her face. “Jesus, you’re stupid,” she said.
As I recoiled, she snatched her hand away, then slowly shook her head as though dumbfounded. “You actually bought that, didn’t you?” She laughed loudly, a harsh, ugly sound. “I always knew you were a fucking idiot, Beth,” she went on, “but I didn’t know you were quite this retarded.”
She got up and, walking around the table toward me, leaned down and put her face so close to mine that I could smell the cigarettes on her breath. “What I actually want to do is to fuck them up,” she said quietly. “And not just the Lawsons—all of you.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, my voice shaking.
“I’ve been watching them,” she said. “Watching them for years. My brothers and sister, my father and his dear wife. Sometimes I’d go every day, catching the train over there, following them to school or work.” She paused, raising her eyebrows at me. “They have a nice life, don’t they? A lovely, happy life. While I’ve been stuck here, in this shit hole with you.” I flinched, and she laughed. “How did my mother die, Beth? I heard you talk that day to Rose—I heard her say that she was with my mother when she died, about her body being found in the sea. Rose pushed her, didn’t she?”
My eyes widened in shock. “No! No, Hannah,” I cried. “Of course not! Your mother jumped—she committed suicide.”
“I don’t believe you. Rose killed her. Because my mother slept with her husband. Rose murdered her.”
I shook my head in shock and pity that she had convinced herself of such a dreadful thing. “Hannah, your mother was very unhappy,” I said firmly. “She was ill. She died by throwing herself into the sea.”
“No! She wouldn’t have left me. I was her baby. I was all she had. Rose murdered her. My mother would never have left me alone like that.”
“Hannah, that’s just not true,” I cried. “Your mother jumped—she took her own life. I’m sorry, but it’s true. It was suicide.”
A look of infinite hatred flashed in Hannah’s eyes. “Rose did it, and then she and my father gave me away like I was a fucking stray puppy.”
“Hannah—”
“You all lied to me. All of you. You are all responsible, and you’re not going to get away with it. None of you.”
I stood up. “Hannah, please, Doug and I, we love you so much. We’ve looked after you since you were a baby, and we have always thought of you as our daughter. I only ever wanted you to be happy!”
She reeled around then. “Happy? I have never been happy here. You never loved me, not like you love Toby. I felt it, always, and when I overheard you and Rose talking that day, I finally understood why—because I’m not really yours at all. You lied to me my whole life and I’ll make sure you get your fucking punishment too.” She turned to go. “But first it’s Oliver and Rose’s turn.”
“What are you going to do?” I cried.
She glanced back at me. “All these years I’ve been watching them, following them, seeing how they doted on those kids of theirs. Those three spoiled little pricks have had everything they ever wanted. So one by one, I’m going to show them what their father’s really like. Maybe then Oliver will wish he’d treated me a little bit better. Maybe he’ll regret how he threw me away.”
And then she walked slowly from the room, leaving me staring after her, reeling in shock.
I heard her go out an hour later. The first thing I did was
to try to call Rose to warn her, but the phone rang and rang until finally I gave up. I paced the house, adrenaline and fear shooting through me while I went over and over what Hannah had said, driving myself mad trying to work out what her next move might be. What did she want with Emily? What was she planning to do? No matter how many times I tried Rose, there was no answer: nobody picked up; nobody, it seemed, was home.
When Doug got back later that evening, I pulled him into the kitchen and, shutting the door in case Toby should overhear us, told him what had happened. “I can’t get hold of Rose,” I said anxiously. “Maybe they’ve changed their number since the last time I saw her. It was nine years ago, after all.”
“Christ,” he said, looking at me in dismay. “And you have no idea where Hannah has gone?”
“No. She left, but she didn’t say where.”
At that moment, Toby came in. “What’s up?” he asked, stopping dead and looking from one to another of our faces.
“Nothing!” I said brightly. “Nothing at all. Go and wash your hands for tea, will you?”
We tried to eat a normal meal, but I couldn’t stop the panic pulsing through me. The look in Hannah’s eyes had been so triumphant, so spiteful. Maybe she’d been bluffing, I told myself—maybe I should just wait and see—but I couldn’t ignore the fear that was slipping and sliding in the pit of my stomach, and though I kept trying Rose, no one picked up. As the clock crept closer to ten o’clock, I made up my mind. “I’m going to drive over there, to Suffolk,” I told Doug.
