Ellen wouldn’t listen. She was stronger than I expected her to be. I thought the knowledge that she had lost Finn, that he had chosen me over her, would weaken her and she would go quietly. But it seemed to give her new resolve; as I had already seen, she was tenacious when it came to Finn. She wasn’t going to let me walk back into his life that easily. If she couldn’t have him, she was determined that I wouldn’t either. I tried to explain to her that Finn had made his choice, that it was me he wanted, that he had never stopped loving me. But no matter how hard I tried to persuade her, she refused to leave. Go! I screamed. Go! But she wouldn’t.
I could feel my mind splintering, fragmenting, sapping the little strength I had left. Ellen wouldn’t stop shouting at me, telling me I had to leave, that I should disappear back to my hiding place, back to the place where I had sought refuge all those years before. But the thought of going back to being a nothing person terrified me. If I could just hang on until Finn came back, it would be alright. He would save me and banish Ellen forever.
If only he had done what I’d asked, if only he had got rid of Ellen. I sent him a message telling him as much. But Ellen saw and was angry. Again, she tried to make me leave and when I refused, we began to struggle. All I could think of was Finn, about how he would come back to find he had lost everything. Part of me felt he deserved to. He should have brought me back while he had the chance. But the other part of me knew that my expectations had been too high. He didn’t know my story. I should have told him the truth right from the beginning.
Now it’s too late. Finn can spend hours, days, months, looking for me but he’ll never find me. Not unless I give him some sort of clue, not unless I start him off on the right track. I have a Russian doll in my pocket and as Ellen begins to overpower me, I put it where Finn will find it. Ultimately, it will lead him to the truth about the Russian dolls. And if he discovers the truth about the Russian dolls, he’ll know the truth about me.
And maybe, just maybe, he’ll know where to find me.
PART THREE
FIFTY-TWO
Finn
It hits me hard, Peggy being gone too. Again, I try Ellen’s mobile, and again it goes through to her voicemail. Who else can I call? Tony, I should call him. I’ll tell him everything, come clean about the emails from Layla, tell him Ellen has disappeared. The word thuds into my head. Disappeared. Ellen has disappeared, just as Layla had. I sit down heavily on a chair. One woman in my life having vanished is suspect enough; for it to have happened to another would be damning. There are still those who believed that I killed Layla and disposed of her body somewhere. I have no proof that she’s back. All I have are Russian dolls that could have been left by anybody, emails that could have been written by anybody. Nobody has actually seen Layla, not even me.
Fear numbs me. I can’t phone Tony, not until I’ve thought everything through. In the end, I decide to phone Harry, not Tony. I know Tony believed from the start that I didn’t have anything to do with Layla’s disappearance but even he might begin to have doubts when I tell him that Ellen has gone missing too. She might not be missing, she might have left with Layla of her own accord. But if that were the case, surely she would answer her phone? I know Ellen; she wouldn’t be so cruel as to not answer my messages if she heard them.
Harry will know what to do. He knows as much as Tony does and once he knows the whole story, he’ll be able to advise me. I check the time; it’s just gone seven. He’s usually up at this time. I dial his number. Unbelievably, I get the international ringtone. Harry has gone abroad and hasn’t told me? I wait impatiently but he doesn’t pick up, so I leave a message asking him to phone me, trying not to sound as panicked as I feel. I pace the kitchen, waiting, waiting, and when he hasn’t called within twenty minutes, I call him again. But when he still doesn’t get back to me I begin to get a really bad feeling because I’ve never known Harry to be inaccessible before, even when he’s abroad. If ever he can’t talk, because he’s in a meeting, or in bed with a woman, he always triggers a standard ‘I’m currently unavailable’ text. I try a third time, and a fourth. It’s eight in the morning now and it suddenly occurs to me that it probably isn’t eight in the morning wherever he is in the world. So I try his office number, to find out where he is, how long he’s gone for, but nobody answers, because it’s too early.
And where is Peggy? I’m hoping she’s with Ellen, because Peggy won’t let her come to any harm. But what if she’s run off, what if something happened here last night that made her afraid? I want to go and look for her instead of just sitting here, waiting, but I need to stay here to speak to Tony. But I want to go through everything with Harry first.
At eight thirty I phone Harry’s office again. I’d begun to feel as if I was the only person left in the world so I’m relieved when one of his assistants answers.
‘I’m afraid he’s away,’ Alice says, confirming what I already know.
‘Away where?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know, he said he was going abroad for a few days.’
‘Well, does anyone know where he is? I wouldn’t normally insist but I need to speak to him urgently.’
‘Hold on a minute, I’ll find out.’
She comes back to tell me that nobody knows where he is or when he’ll be back, just that he walked uncharacteristically out of the office two days ago. I ask her if he checks in from time to time and she says he has once, so far. She promises to tell him that I need to speak to him next time he phones. I hang up, unease spreading through me. First Ruby, then Ellen, now Harry. All three of them have gone somewhere, yet no one knows where. Is there some kind of conspiracy going on? Has all this been about Harry and Ellen, as I’d once thought? But where does Ruby fit in? Or maybe she doesn’t, maybe Ruby is simply away on holiday somewhere. The only two things I know for sure is that I’m on my own and that time is marching on.
Tony plays on my mind. If I’m to tell him the whole truth, I need to phone him within the next hour because once he knows about the last email from Layla, the one saying I should have chosen her over Ellen, he’ll wonder why I didn’t phone him straightaway given the underlying menace in the message. But if I don’t tell him the whole truth, I have a few hours. In a few hours I can phone him and tell him that last night, Ellen and I had a row, I went storming off to the cottage and when I came back, Ellen was gone, that she hasn’t been answering her phone, and that I’m now getting worried as I would have expected her to be back by now. The truth, the whole truth? Or only part of it?
I give myself until lunchtime. If I haven’t made any headway by then, I’ll phone Tony and tell him the whole truth. I go through to the sitting room and look out of the window, watching for Ellen’s car coming down the road, trying to get my thoughts in order.
I start with Layla. First, is it really her or someone pretending to be her? I go back over everything, from the appearance of the first Russian doll to the last email I received, and by the end, I can’t bring myself to believe that it wasn’t her. Only she and I knew about the tree stump shaped like a Russian doll on Pharos Hill. Next, I try and work out where she could have been for the last twelve years – but I quickly realise that the most important thing is to work out where she’s been for the last six weeks, since the first Russian doll appeared. Ellen had seen her in Cheltenham, yet Layla had said that she was closer than that, so where? How had she been able to leave Russian dolls on the wall without anyone seeing her? I’d heard a car driving away one day but that was before her closer than you think message, when I had presumed she was in Cheltenham, so it had been logical to presume that it was her. But maybe it hadn’t been, maybe the car had nothing to do with her, maybe she’d been on foot, because she was already in Simonsbridge. Or maybe she got someone to leave the dolls for her.