Her Sister's Secret

by E. V. Seymour

  “Bethany?”

  “Richard’s mother. She and Barry were never married. Far too flighty, that one,” she said, shaking her head in disapproval. “She wasn’t nearly good enough for my brother.”

  “What became of her?”

  “No idea.”

  And didn’t much care, judging by the terseness in her voice. “Richard mentioned that Barry drove taxis for a living.”

  “He worked for a cab company here in Cheltenham.”

  I sparked with interest. “When was this?”

  “Worked for Randalls for almost twenty years. Mind, he left a decade ago, had enough by then. More coffee?”

  I declined. My brain hissed and fizzed. It came back to the same window of time: ten years ago. Happenstance or connection? I’d never find out unless I took a gamble.

  “You mentioned Barry’s distrust of the police.”

  “Did I? Would you like another flapjack?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Think I’ll have one,” she said with glee. “They’re so moreish and irresistible, aren’t they?”

  “What made Barry lose faith with the police, Jacqueline?” No way was I going to be fobbed off with a pastry diversion.

  Jacqueline’s eyes swivelled from me to the walls to the door. She lowered her voice. “I can’t really say. Barry made me promise.” She took a bite. Chewed mechanically. Like it was something to do in a crisis. If you eat, you can’t speak.

  “My father’s a police officer. He’d hate it if someone brought the force into disrepute.” Although Clive Mallis was the glaring exception to my father’s rule. By contrast, Jacqueline Bevan was a nice woman, a loyal sister, trusting and without a friend. Wasn’t I exploiting her in the same way Rocco had exploited me? I might have been working with what I had but it didn’t feel good.

  She swallowed, almost choked, took a big glug of coffee. “I suppose now he’s gone, there’s no harm, although I’d rather you kept this to yourself.”

  I smiled, did my best to look confidential instead of eager.

  “Bank Holiday, Christmas, New Year, Barry worked every one of them. The pay wasn’t better, but he’d get decent tips. He wasn’t a wealthy man. Between you and I,” she said, dropping her voice a tone, “he liked a flutter on the horses.”

  “He was in the right place,” I said with a jolly smile.

  She looked perplexed for a second and then broke into a laugh. “Cheltenham. The Races. Oh yes.”

  “You were saying,” I said, fearing I’d destroyed her train of thought.

  “The last New Year’s Eve he worked, he picked up a fare from Cheltenham to Winchcombe. A young man. Bit scruffy. Long hair, all braided. You know the type?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Barry was very particular about his vehicle. Didn’t like taking youngsters he thought might pass out or be sick over the upholstery.”

  “What was the man like?”

  “Well spoken, but I don’t know, Barry said he thought he might be on drugs, or something. He was very chatty, talkative, nervous with it. Kept scratching at his arms.” She leant forward theatrically. “It’s the drugs, poor things.”

  Blood swelled in my head and I had that curdled feeling that warns of impending disaster. I stared blindly.

  “Twenty-four hours later, Barry gets a knock at his door.”

  “New Year’s Day?”

  “That’s right?”

  “Where was this?”

  “Barry lived in Swindon Road.” I knew it. Zach’s old stamping ground in St. Paul’s, grotty back then. He’d always favoured the seamy, uncut side.

  “Anyway, it’s the police. Well, I say the police. It was one officer. He put pressure on Barry.”

  “How? Why?” My voice was hoarse, rasping, and then, with relief, I remembered. Dad returned to work on 3 January. He knew nothing about Drea Temple. The timing was off. It had to be Mallis.

  “He told Barry that he was to forget ever picking up the young man with the long hair. You won’t remember it, but there was a lass reported missing a few days later. Barry always wondered if there was a connection.”

  My mind spun out at the implication. I described Mallis.

  “I wouldn’t know. Barry didn’t say what he looked like.”

  “Did Barry ask to see the officer’s warrant card?”

  Jacqueline wrinkled up her nose. “Don’t think so.”

  “He asked his name?” Must have done.

  “If he did, Barry never told me.”

  “He was afraid?”

  “Very.”

  I suppressed a shiver. “How old was the officer?”

  “Hard to say. Middle-aged, maybe?”

  My throat dried. I took a drink and wound up with milk skin on my teeth and lips. “Where did Barry drop off his fare?” I thought back to the newspaper cuttings. Odds on The White Hart, or Drea’s rental.

  “Dropped him outside Winchcombe, about a mile away.”

  I racked my brains. Why outside? Nothing there apart from fields of sheep. Didn’t make sense.

  “Did the officer say anything else?”

  Jacqueline’s expression stiffened. “He threatened Barry. Said that, if he opened his mouth, there would be consequences.” She glanced from me to the door and back again. “Promised to fit him up for something he didn’t do.”

  I rocked back in my chair so hard I was in danger of doing a back flip. Jacqueline’s smooth features creased with concern. “I expect your dear dad would be appalled.”

  I snatched a smile in agreement. Confused and churned up, I had one last question. “Did he talk to Richard about it?” I held my breath. Everything depended on the answer.

  Her eyes widened. She nodded slowly, then murmured, “I think he did.”

  Chapter 58

  It was as if I stood on the edge of a massive forest fire, with the wind changing direction, and forcing the flames towards me. The second Jacqueline described the young man I knew instinctively she was talking about my brother.

  The drive should have calmed me down. It didn’t. I was wired and fired, and murderous. Zach was weak. Given enough pressure, he would spill his guts.

  Flooring it, I clung on tight as the little car flew down the motorway. Every bit of my body tensed, my focus dead ahead, eyes braced against a sun doing its best to penetrate my shades and sear my eyeballs. If I hadn’t glanced in my rear-view mirror before overtaking, I wouldn’t have noticed the BMW dropping in behind and remaining close. When I overtook, it overtook. Mallis.

  Sweaty fingers slipping on the steering wheel, I changed down and dropped speed, straining to steal a look at the driver. The paintwork of the Beamer dazzled, and, with its tinted windows, it was impossible for me to get a fix without risking crashing the car. Designed to intimidate, I was intimidated.

  Desperately trying to regain control of my body as well as my mind, I took a deep breath, accelerated and changed up to top gear. Consumed by staying on the road, I didn’t even notice when the vehicle turned off and disappeared.

  *

  The curtains of Zach’s trailer were drawn, the door unlocked. I slipped inside. It looked as if it had been looted. Mounds of washing up. Screwed-up dirty laundry. No sign of anyone. I stepped back out into rising heat.

  My gaze searching the orchard, I spied my brother. He had his back to me, “Zach,” I yelled.

  His head jerked up and, as he twisted round, his ready smile tightened and vanished, replaced by slack features, flaky around the edges, and a fuzzy expression in his eyes.

  He wandered over, idly scratching his arse, taking his time, treading carefully like he was avoiding broken glass strewn beneath his bare feet. I knew my brother. Could read how he ticked. If shoved in a corner, he would manoeuvre like crazy, dodge and blindside, and take me down dark, empty, meaningless alleys. I waited for him to reach me and then, with an expression that would snap steel, I socked it to him. “Is Drea Temple the reason Scarlet’s dead?”

  His mouth jacked open. His hands balled
into fists that shot to his temple, as if I’d produced a twelve-bore. And there was fear. Lots of it. It leaked out of his every pore, dripping off him and puddling around his bare, dirty toes. I was afraid too. My brother and Mallis. My brother and—

  “Oh Zach. Oh shit. What have you done?”

  He rounded on me angrily. “I’ve done nothing. I warned you not to meddle. Now look what you’ve done?”

  “Me?”

  “I told you. I told you. I told you.” Each time he spoke, he delivered blow after blow to his head. I stared in horror, utterly sickened that, after my all my digging, it had come to this. If I needed proof of guilt, I had it. Outwardly, I was unmoved. Inside, nausea gripped me, and my pulse raced.

  “Fine. See this,” I said, raising my phone. “One call. That’s all it takes, and I’ll tell the police everything.”

  He gasped. His eyes rolled in panic. At any moment he would take to his heels and run and run and never come back.

  “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me the truth.” The word ‘help’ did not have the desired effect. I expected his face to soften. Less flight or fight. My big brother stood, big and lumbering, wringing his hands, in tears.

  “You don’t get it. You don’t know what you’ve started, what you’ve unleashed.” The more he spoke, the greater my desire to throttle him.

  “Zach, for Chrissakes. Where’s Tanya?” I thought this would snap him back to his senses.

  “Away. At her parents.”

  “Good,” I said, not knowing whether it was or wasn’t. He was shaking and so was I, but I’d get nowhere out here on open ground with the sun shooting death-rays at us. “Let’s talk back at yours. Somewhere,” I muttered under my breath, “where no one can hear.”

  He nodded vigorously.

  Somehow, we stumbled back to his place together. I cleared a space for him to sit down, rinsed out a couple of mugs, found some vile herbal tea bags and made us drinks. Zach, still trembling, reached for tobacco and rizlas. He could have smoked weed for all I cared. I didn’t even bother to ask what he’d dropped, smoked or ingested.

  “How can you live like this?” I angrily pushed a chipped mug towards him. “It’s a shit heap.”

  He shrugged, too busy thinking and rolling, and trying to assemble thoughts that could not be herded together. I waited for him to light up, watched his shaky fingers.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?” I spoke without judgement.

  “Do Mum and Dad know you’re here?” The sly note in his voice put me back on my guard. I should have been afraid of him, but I wasn’t. I was only frightened of what Zach would reveal. My knee jackhammered at the prospect.

  He ran the tip of his tongue along the paper, tamped the tobacco down and plugged the roll-up into his mouth. He took a deep drag, then another. The fight and bullishness vanished as swiftly as smoke from his rolly. His head bowed; shoulders slumped. “It was an accident.”

  “Drea Temple?” An accident was good. An accident I could cope with. Except Scarlet’s death was no accident. I didn’t point out the distinction.

  He looked up, questioning, the slippery expression back in his eye. “How much do you know?” Not nearly enough. He was trying to gauge how much I’d found out, how much he could edit the highlights. “I’m not pissing about, Zach.” I waved my phone in front of his face.

  “All right. All right.” He took an enormous drag, held a breath in and exhaled. “There was a group of us.”

  “Who?”

  A crafty look entered his eyes. Zach hiked a bony shoulder. “Doesn’t matter. People you don’t know. Most of them probably dead now.”

  “Your druggie mates.”

  “Don’t say it like that.”

  How else was I supposed to say it? I flicked my palms up: sorry.

  “We’d hang out together. I met Drea in one of the pubs.”

  “In Winchcombe?”

  He frowned. “How do you know that?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said, imitating him.

  He took a petulant puff, ignored me. “I liked Drea immediately. She was funny, off the wall.”

  “Fancied her?”

  “You’d have to be blind not to. Yeah, I would have shagged her.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  He shook his head, fierce with it.

  “Go on.”

  “We arranged to meet.”

  “The two of you?”

  “Uh huh.”

  I narrowed my eyes. Zach caught on quickly. “The two of us,” he repeated.

  “At her place?”

  Zach shook his head. “She hadn’t paid the rent in weeks and her house mates had thrown her out. She moved around, dossed down all over bu—t” He trailed off, losing his thread.

  “So, she had no place to go.”

  He reached over, caught my wrist, his grip tighter than seemed possible. The acrid smell of tobacco was on his tongue, on his skin, poisoning the air. “You know how I was back then?”

  His face was in my face. I didn’t flinch. “Off your tits. Wasted. Out of it.” Zach was catholic in his tastes. If you could smoke, snort or inject it, he’d take it. I remembered days when he’d howl with stomach pain after he’d checked out with ketamine or ‘K’, as Zach called it.

  His wet eyes bored into mine, grip loosening. I picked up my mug, took a drink that made me heave. “Was Drea under the influence?”

  “Nothing hard core, but yeah.”

  “And you’d got your mitts on a supply?” Of what didn’t really matter. It all had a similarly lobotomising effect.

  He nodded, eyes a gleam in the shadow of the interior. “Quality, really quality.”

  He said it without the ‘t’, in imitation of gangster slang. By qualiie, he meant pure. Probably something that screwed with his brain and made it work harder, spiking body temperature, a killer on a cold night. I could see how this was rolling.

  I flicked my hair as if I had a fly land on my ear. “Where did you go?”

  “The home in a home, we called it.”

  I looked at him quizzically.

  “Some jerk decided to use the site of an old house and build a new one around it. I suppose he was going to knock down the old walls once he’d finished.”

  Clearly, didn’t understand a thing about the building process. I watched Zach’s face. Ghost-pale, he was sweaty with unease.

  “Where exactly is this place?”

  I listened to his answer, a property outside Winchcombe, situated up an unmade drive, set back from the road, easy to miss. A perfect place for murder, I realised, hardly daring to breathe.

  Roll-up extinguished; Zach started on another; a ploy to buy him time that he was fast running out of. “For some reason it never got finished.”

  “And became a home for squatters?”

  Zach shook his head. “Too dangerous.”

  “How dangerous?”

  He stiffened. His savage gaze pierced mine. “Extremely.”

  Chapter 59

  “Let me get this straight, you don’t know what happened?” I was incredulous. Zach had told me a tale where he’d wandered outside and found Drea dead inside.

  “I’d taken enough shit to kill an elephant.” Zach said, mighty defensive, pupils shrinking to pinpricks.

  “What about Drea?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah what?”

  “I don’t understand the question.”

  “What did she take?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  Because now it matters; now it’s important. “Fuck’s sake, Zach, tell me.”

  “K.” He lowered his eyes. “Other stuff too. She liked White Russian.”

  Cocaine. “Enough to kill her?”

  “No, no,” Zach said. “She knew what she was doing. We both did.”

  To me, taking drugs was like roulette. How did any addict know what was safe and wasn’t?

  “And then you wandered outside?”

  “To take a piss, yes.”
/>
  “But you don’t remember how long you were gone for?”

  “I already told you.” Agitated all over again, in between smokes, he smacked his palms on his thigh, as if he were playing bongos. “It was dark. The place was a death trap. I had to find my way out and then back in.”

  Search me why he didn’t drop his fly in the next door room. Wouldn’t someone off his face on crack, or whatever Zach was on at the time, take the simplest course of action?

  I adopted my best humouring tone. “Right, so then you came back.”

  He stood up. Dark patches of sweat stained his T-shirt. Every part of him shook. His eyes were wild. Had he dropped acid in front of me and I’d been too spun out to notice?

  “Sit down.”

  “Molly, if I tell you what happened, my life is over. Please, I’m begging you. I could go to prison.” His pleading expression turned me inside out.

  “Zach, you’re already there.” In a prison of your own making, with walls constructed of lies.

  Slumping down, he put his face in his hands. I reached across and gently touched his arm. “You said it was an accident.”

  “She fell,” he sobbed.

  “Fell? Where?”

  I prised his fingers apart. He stared at me with dull eyes. Snot trickled out of one nostril. “I swear I didn’t know about it.”

  “Didn’t know what, Zach?”

  “About the well.”

  I stared at him for what felt a full minute. God.

  “It had been partially filled in but the boards above were rotten.” He gaped at me, praying I could fill in the gaps so that he wouldn’t have to relive that night, except I think he’d done nothing else but relive that night ever since.

  “So Drea fell through the floor?” Dad’s words echoed through my head: the pathologist found the presence of diatoms, or micro-algae in her bone marrow. The only way these could enter would be via the respiratory system.

  He nodded crazily. “I came back in. Couldn’t find her. It was quiet. Too quiet. Like a snowflake drifting through space,” he said, madly extemporising. “Then I saw. Oh fuck.” He wrung his hands.