33 Women: A gripping new thriller about the power of women, and the lengths they will go to when pushed...

by Isabel Ashdown

  The two sisters stare at each other for long moments, as though silently agreeing there are insufficient words.

  It’s been months since Celine last saw Pip, but her sister’s appearance is almost unchanged; despite being a woman in her early thirties, she’s still as slight as she was at sixteen. Her children, on the other hand, have grown and changed again, and Celine watches in awe as they stop in their tracks at the foot of the garden, watchful as deer, before galloping across the lawn to the safety of Mother. Beebee is no longer a babe in arms but a sturdy blonde-haired angel standing on her own two feet, a mangled soft dog hanging by the ear between crossed fingers, a thumb resting loosely at the corner of her mouth. She wraps an arm around Pip’s leg, peeping out just enough to blink a single nut-brown eye in Celine’s direction. The older girl, Olive, must be, what, four? She has a mischievous twinkle about her and her curls have deepened from their honey shade into a darker brown. An early black and white image of Delilah comes to mind, and Celine finds herself staring at the poor child, almost believing that she’s her grandmother, back from the grave.

  ‘Celine?’ Pip says, rousing her.

  Celine notices the little girl’s alarmed expression and she smiles widely to compensate, telling her she was simply mesmerised by how much she’s grown. ‘She looks like—’ Celine starts to say, but Pip interrupts.

  ‘Like you? I know. I can’t see a drop of me at all.’ Pip reaches out her hands and lets her tears fall, and Celine is glad she hadn’t finished her own sentence. ‘It’s a bloody mystery, sis,’ Pip says. ‘I stare at these two when they’re sleeping – I stare and I stare, and all I can see is you.’

  Of course, Pip can’t see it, can she? She would hate to think of her children inheriting their looks from Delilah. After all, Pip, with her poker-straight hair and pale complexion, looks nothing like their mother, so why should her kids? Let her believe it is Celine they take after; let her believe their looks come from someone who loves her back.

  Olive scowls self-consciously at the attention, before making crab hands at Beebee, opening her eyes wide in mock threat. The pair streak off across the garden, the youngest one screaming as though her life depends on it.

  ‘How’s work?’ Pip asks, pulling out two seats at the veranda table, and Celine feels some sadness at how quickly they’ve resorted to small talk.

  ‘It’s fine. You know I’m leaving at the end of the year, to set up my own practice? It’s a bit risky, giving up my salary like that, but I’ll work from home at first, until I get enough clients.’ She glances at her sister, and realises how dull she sounds.

  Pip smiles. ‘Still specialising in “securing settlements for sad divorcees”?’ It’s an old joke; it was the way Celine always used to describe her work, poking fun at herself, back in the days when she still tried not to think of herself as one of the grown-ups.

  ‘Yup. Living the dream,’ she replies. She wants to ask Pip if she’s planning to return to her work any time soon, but she knows it won’t go down well, that she’ll only see it as a dig. She suspects straight-laced Stefan prefers Pip to stay at home, rather than returning to the physiotherapy work she spent so many years training for. Better she stays put, playing the pretty wife and mother to his manly provider. Is it enough for you, Pip?is what Celine wants to ask, but she won’t. ‘So, what’ve you been up to?’ is the question she opts for instead.

  Pip merely gestures towards the girls on the far side of the lawn, and Celine finds herself chewing the inside of her cheek to stop herself from being mean. For a while, the sisters simply sit, and sigh, and avoid any talk of Delilah, until Una joins them again.

  ‘Shall we get the dirty money stuff out of the way first?’ Una suggests, pouring the tea.

  Celine shrugs. ‘Sure.’ She’d been relieved to hear that Delilah had appointed Una as executor, freeing them of the responsibility of raking through their mum’s accounts, and she knew Pip would feel the same.

  Una cuts two slabs of cake and hands them to Beebee and Olive, who have returned like heat-seeking missiles at the arrival of food. Pip points towards the far end of the garden. ‘Picnic,’ she says simply, and they’re off again, steering clear of the gardener, who Celine senses is actively avoiding looking in their direction.

  ‘Time to find out if Delilah left us anything useful,’ Celine says, reaching for the milk.

  ‘What, apart from a bunch of mental health issues?’ Pip replies through a mouthful of cake, and they both laugh, rendered teenagers again by the grave nature of their meeting.

  ‘Oh, she’s left you something, all right,’ Una says. She opens up her reporter’s notebook and rests her boots on the chair opposite, sliding her spectacles down and scanning the page. ‘The big things first: Pip – the family home in Kingston, River Terrace – that’s yours, as you’re currently living there. Celine, you’re bequeathed an equivalent market-value sum, as you’ve already got your own place in Bournemouth.’

  ‘So we’re not out on the street,’ Pip says, wincing as she realises how spoilt she sounds.

  ‘This place,’ Una continues, ‘is to be cleared and sold, along with all Delilah’s stocks and shares. She’s left me something too – she wanted to pay off my mortgage …’ Una glances at the girls, obviously embarrassed.

  ‘Too bloody right!’ Pip says, slapping Una’s leg. ‘You’ve been more of a support to us than she ever was – it’s the least she could do.’

  Celine nods her approval, and flaps her hand to make Una continue.

  ‘She’s asked that, once those bequests and any outstanding charges and taxes are settled, the remaining funds are to be shared between her daughters – you two.’

  A gentle breeze dances over the table, lifting the paper napkins and scattering them across the lawn. At the far end of the garden the children have finished their cake and are now chasing each other with piles of grass cuttings, pilfered from the gardener, who pretends not to notice. Celine recalls her and Vanessa playing that way as tots in Canbury Gardens, and Pip too, later on, when she was big enough. She looks at Pip now, and she knows she’s remembering some of the same things, she too feeling the loss of their sister fifteen years ago more keenly today than the recent loss of their mother. Vanessa had been their tether, the middle sister who bridged the gap of their years, and the absence of her name in Mum’s final will is heartbreaking.

  ‘I wish Vanessa were here,’ Pip says quietly, and all Celine can do is anchor her gaze on those carefree girls at the bottom of the garden.

  After an early supper, Pip runs a bath for the kids, and Una takes advantage of the time alone with Celine to persuade her to stay the night and help make a start on the contents of the attic.

  ‘They’re not going to release your mum to the undertakers for at least a week or two,’ she says, easing down the attic steps on the first-floor landing and heading up, large torch in hand. ‘You must be able to take some time off, Celine. It’s a bereavement.’

  Celine’s in no rush to get back to work – in fact her boss has told her to take all the time she needs – but the idea of trawling through the detritus of her mother’s recent years fills her with dread. She’s got no real idea what Delilah’s been doing with herself during these past couple of decades, and this snooping feels like rummaging through the belongings of a dead stranger.

  ‘You said you never had anything of Vanessa’s to remember her by,’ Una calls down. ‘Maybe you’ll find something up here – Delilah’s bound to have kept something.’

  As Celine climbs the aluminium steps, breathing in the musty heat of the confined space, she feels certain she won’t find any evidence of Vanessa up there in Mum’s things. Her sister had given up on their mother years before her untimely death, so the chances of Delilah’s having something of hers is slim.

  ‘You know it’s been fifteen years,’ Celine says as she fumbles along the attic wall. ‘Since Vanessa’s death.’

  ‘Fifteen years this March,’ Una replies through the gloom, and for C
eline there is some comfort in knowing that others are tracking the time too, that Vanessa has not been forgotten by them, even if the same cannot be said for the police.

  Celine locates the overhead light switch, and the attic is lit up to reveal a wide, low-beamed space filled to the eaves with boxes and crates of clothes and paintings and pictures and papers. It’s suddenly clear that they’ve got an enormous job ahead of them, and Celine hopes Una and Pip won’t expect her to stay on for more than a day or two. She just wants to get this job and the cremation out of the way as quickly as possible so that she can return to her quiet life in Dorset with its far-reaching horizons and wide open sky.

  ‘Urgh, look at these,’ Una yelps, bringing Celine back to the present as she holds up a lank old mink coat. ‘There’s a whole box of them here.’

  ‘Charity shop,’ Celine says without hesitation. She remembers the nasty furs – an heirloom – and her mother complaining that the ‘right-on brigade’ had rendered them virtually unwearable. There was a day in Celine’s early teens when Delilah wore one of the minks to the local supermarket, just to be perverse. As she left the shop carrying pink roses and Sancerre, she was roundly egged by a group of dungaree-wearing students, and Celine had thanked God that she hadn’t been with her at the time, simultaneously wishing she’d been able to witness it. Twelve-year-old Vanessa had been so taken with the drama at the time that she’d turned vegetarian the very next day, just to add passive-aggressive insult to her mother’s injury. Celine smiles at the memory, at the way Vanessa would take everything they couldn’t stand about their mother and turn it on its head.

  ‘Definitely charity shop,’ Celine says now, ‘or incinerator.’

  Dedicating one side of the attic to donations, Una and Celine continue to work through boxes of old clothes and handbags, culling Delilah’s belongings ruthlessly, the ‘keep’ pile remaining conspicuously small. When Pip eventually appears at the top step, precariously balancing a bottle of red wine and three glasses, the women gather on upturned crates for a brief pause.

  ‘Hmm, this is good wine,’ Celine says, holding hers up to the light.

  ‘You know Mum,’ Pip says, chinking glasses with Una. ‘Only the best for our Delilah.’

  ‘That bottle probably cost more than my shoes,’ Una replies with a nod.

  ‘And the rest,’ Pip says, topping up their glasses before they’re even halfway empty. ‘She really was a bloody nightmare, wasn’t she?’

  Celine gives a small laugh. ‘The worst.’

  With her free hand, Una drags a nearby box of papers into the centre, plucking a photograph from the top. ‘She was a diva for sure,’ she says. ‘She was unpredictable, and vain – and she never stuck with anything. But she was also a good friend to me for a time.’ She passes the photograph to Celine, in which Delilah appears to be helping out at some local fundraiser. ‘People do change, you know?’

  Celine raises an eyebrow. ‘Delilah?’ she says. ‘The only thing she ever changed was her hair – or her shoes – or her nail colour.’

  Pip laughs. ‘Or her home!’

  ‘Or her husband,’ Celine adds, Pip’s hilarity having a contagious effect.

  Una bellows with laughter. ‘Or her nose!’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Pip wheezes. ‘Yes! She went away for a week with Johnnie and came back with her face in bandages, after a “skiing accident”. I don’t think they’d even left the country.’

  Una is still chuckling as she rummages through the box, casting photographs into one pile, papers and letters into another.

  ‘When the bandage came off it was a completely different nose!’ Celine sighs, wiping her eyes on the back of her sleeve. ‘Remember she got us a cat that same week, trying to deflect attention from her tiny new nose?’

  ‘She ditched the poor cat too, once it became too much bother,’ Pip recalls.

  Celine snorts. ‘Just like everything else.’

  As she puts her glass down, she spots a postcard Una has just dropped on top of the pile. The image is of London Bridge and the Thames, a typical tourist postcard.

  ‘What’s that, Una?’

  Una turns it over and studies the handwriting on the reverse. She looks up, a deep furrow forming between her brows. ‘It’s from Vanessa.’ She hesitates before speaking again. ‘Girls – I thought your mum hadn’t seen Vanessa in the year before she died?’

  Celine feels her stomach tighten.

  ‘The year she was murdered, you mean?’ Pip’s already drunk, clearly. Her filter’s off.

  Celine quietens her with a gentle slap to the wrist. ‘No, none of us had. After that last phone message she left me the March before, there was no more contact. It was exactly a year.’

  Una nods. ‘And you’re sure she hadn’t been here, to visit Delilah?’

  ‘Certain!’ Celine replies, making a grab for the postcard, but Una doesn’t release it. ‘Mum gave a statement to the police, just as all of us did, and she said she hadn’t seen her either.’

  ‘Una ?’ Pip says, sounding afraid now. ‘What’s on the postcard?’

  Una hands the card to Celine. It’s from Vanessa to Delilah, addressed here at Belle France, and dated April of 2004, soon after she was known to have left her boyfriend and the flat they shared in London.

  Dear Mum

  I’ll be with you on Wednesday afternoon, about teatime – hope that’s still OK? It will only be for a couple of days, but I’m really looking forward to catching up with you.

  Love,

  Vx

  Nobody speaks for a moment or two, as each in turn they inspect the brief message and try to make sense of what they’re reading.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Pip says. ‘This was, what, a couple of weeks after she’d left him?’

  Him. Jem Falmer. The bastard she’d been running away from; the man who’d isolated her, cut her off from friends and family, and fractured her collarbone when she’d tried to walk away.

  ‘The police thought she’d been staying in a women’s refuge for at least some of that year, didn’t they?’ Una says.

  ‘Yes, that’s what she said in the voice message. That a place had come up and she was on her way there. I tried to call her back as soon as I picked the message up, but it was too late, she’d changed her number.’

  Una pulls at her earlobe, her detective instincts clearly at work. ‘Maybe she stopped in to see your mother on her way to the refuge. Maybe she needed to borrow some money or something?’

  ‘Why would she have gone to Mum, though?’ Pip asks, hurt radiating from her. ‘Why? When she had us? Celine was still living at home in River Terrace back then – she could have come to us. We would have helped her. If she’d just told us about Jem, we could’ve done something to stop him!’

  ‘No, Pip,’ Una says firmly. ‘Don’t do this to yourself again.’

  Celine reaches an arm around her sister and pulls her to her chest, allowing her tears to soak into the fabric of her shirt. ‘We couldn’t have stopped him,’ she says. ‘Jem Falmer was a monster, and he would have found Vanessa wherever she hid. And he did find her, didn’t he? He found her, when even we couldn’t.’

  A sob escapes Pip. ‘I can’t stand to think of her alone like that – just dumped on the boardwalk. Like she was nothing – like she was rubbish!’

  Celine holds Pip tight, wishing she could somehow take the nightmare away from her. But she can’t; she lives with it too, and she knows it can’t be escaped. And it never gets easier to live with. The media’s unflinching descriptions of her twenty-year-old sister’s corpse, laid out on the boards of Brighton pier, will be etched in her imagination forever. Beaten and strangled; those were the words they printed. Beaten and strangled to death. Celine swallows hard, trying to keep it together.

  ‘But why would Mum say she hadn’t seen Vanessa, if she had?’ Pip demands, pulling away. ‘I really don’t think she would have lied to the police.’

  Una shakes her head. ‘God only knows. But this postcard tells us
Vanessa was heading here just before she went off the radar altogether. If she was stopping off to see Delilah on her way to some refuge, maybe the refuge was somewhere nearby?’

  Pip takes a long slow sip of her wine. ‘But she was found in Brighton.’

  ‘That’s only twenty miles away,’ Una says. ‘You know, one of the biggest problems the investigation team had was in the fact that no one knew where she’d been in that year before her death. And of course, Jem Falmer had disappeared from their London home without a trace—’

  Pip slams her glass down. ‘I’d kill him,’ she says, her face shifting from tears to steel. ‘If I could get hold of him, honestly, I’d happily do time in prison, just to wipe him off the face of the earth. I mean it. I’d do life if I had to.’

  ‘I know,’ Celine murmurs. ‘I know you would, Pip. Me too.’

  Una nods sadly. ‘Anyway, Falmer wasn’t around to be questioned, and none of Vanessa’s friends had heard from her at all.’

  ‘Only because he’d scared them all off,’ Celine murmurs.

  ‘I know they made enquiries at all the refuges in the Greater London area, and Brighton where she was found, with no joy, but this—’ Una waves the postcard between them, growing quietly animated ‘—this small detail could change everything. If we could work out exactly where Vanessa was between April 2004 when she visited your mum here and March 2005 when she was found in Brighton, maybe—’

  ‘You think we can track down Jem Falmer, Una?’ Pip clutches at her sister’s shirt sleeve. ‘You think we can finally put him away?’

  Celine feels woozy with wine and allows her eyelids to close, conjuring up the memory of Vanessa’s face, now somewhat faded with the passing of time. They’d tried to put all this behind them long ago, and the thought of opening up these wounds again fills her with dread. Would she go there, back to those dark places, if it meant bringing that man, that lowlife, to justice?

  When she opens her eyes, Pip and Una are staring at her with an intensity that frightens her.