‘No, it’s not over,’ she said. ‘It will never be over.’
With a cry of frustration Clara went to one of the other doors and, finding it unlocked, switched on the light to find a bedroom with a mattress on the floor, a small wooden cabinet by its side, on top of which was a key. She snatched it up and went back to the locked door. Inserting the key with shaking hands she turned it and pushed the door open. The room was in darkness but when she found the switch she cried out in horror. There was Luke, lying on the bed, gagged and bound with thick electrical tape, his eyes bulging at her as he let out a desperate, muffled cry.
Clara stood frozen as Rose ran past her. Throwing her arms around her son she cried, ‘Oh my darling, my darling boy,’ and then Oliver was there too, kneeling down and cutting Luke free with one of Mac’s knives before he too took his son in his arms.
Luke coughed and spluttered when his gag was removed, crying out with desperate relief. He looked dreadful: thin and bruised, with blood all over his T-shirt, his eyes hollow in his pale drawn face, his arms covered in knife wounds, some of them large and weeping. When Luke looked past his parents to where she stood he said her name with such relief and longing that she jolted out of her paralysis and went to him, holding his thin body to her tightly, all the tension and confusion and fear of the past weeks surging out of her in one loud sob.
Finally she felt him stiffen in her arms and she turned to follow his gaze to where Hannah now stood by the door, her arms still held tightly behind her back by Tom, her eyes bright, almost febrile with excitement. Luke rose unsteadily to his feet and went to her, crossing the room in a burst of energy and fury. ‘You fucking crazy bitch,’ he shouted, his face red with rage, ‘you fucking evil cunt!’
Hannah laughed. ‘Temper temper, Luke.’
‘I’ll kill you, I’ll fucking kill you!’
‘Oh for God’s sake, stop whining,’ Hannah said. ‘I fed you, didn’t I? Sometimes?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Even took you to the potty when you needed it.’
Clara saw Luke’s face burn with humiliation. And then she did something she’d never done before. She went over to where Hannah was standing and she hit her full in the face, so hard that the sound rang out into the room, her palm smarting with the force.
Hannah gasped, her eyes flashing briefly with anger before she recovered and, setting her face in a sneer, said, ‘Well, look who’s found a pair of balls at last.’
Clara looked at her in disgust. ‘What now?’ she asked. ‘You’ll go to prison for this! What was the point?’
‘What was the point?’ Hannah asked. ‘This.’ She gestured towards Rose and Oliver, broken and desperate before her. ‘This was the point.’
‘You said you’d leave us alone,’ Oliver said. ‘We paid you thousands to stay away from Tom, to stay away from all of us. You said that would be the end of it!’
‘Yeah, well. That was until I saw Luke again.’
‘Saw him where?’ asked Tom.
She shrugged belligerently. ‘I’d just come out of rehab, some bullshit thing the courts sent me on last time I got arrested, and I was begging outside Leicester Square station. There he was, like a gift. I recognized him instantly.’ Her face lit up as though she was revisiting a favourite memory. ‘So I followed him to work, and later I followed him home, and it all came back to me.’ She glanced at Oliver. ‘What you did, how you gave me away. There I was, scrabbling about for money, fucking strangers to get by, no place to live, and I thought, I wonder how my dear old dad’s doing.’
She paused, fixing Oliver in her gaze. ‘I got into the habit of keeping tabs on him, and I discovered something.’ She glanced at Clara and laughed. ‘Turned out lovely Luke isn’t such a nice boy after all, is he? Turned out he was fucking the office slapper. And I thought, wow, the old apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?’ She turned her hard gaze on Oliver again. ‘I saw that he was just like you, pretending he was such a decent, stand-up guy while all the time he was a disgusting, sleazy bastard. A dirty fucking user.’ She smiled. ‘Like father, like son.’
There was absolute silence. All the amusement drained from Hannah’s face as she continued to stare at her father. ‘And that really fucked me off,’ she said softly. ‘Brought it all back. So I started sending him the emails, messing with him, showing I was watching him, that I knew what sort of man he was, and after a while I realized I could kill three birds with one stone: give Luke what he deserved, get some more money out of you, Daddy, but most of all,’ she turned her gaze on Rose now, and the expression on her face, the icy hatred in her eyes, made Clara shudder. ‘Most of all, I’d give you, you murdering bitch, a taste of your own medicine.’
Rose paled. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I might have left you alone for a few years, but that doesn’t mean I ever forgot what you did. You killed my mother, you took her from me – why shouldn’t I take something from you? Why shouldn’t Luke die, it’s only what you deserved.’
‘You were going to kill him,’ Clara whispered, the cold realization seeping into her, how close they’d been to losing him.
Before Hannah could reply, Rose cried, ‘I had nothing to do with your mother’s death! She jumped!’
‘Bullshit.’ Hannah’s face was full of loathing. ‘She wouldn’t have left me. She wouldn’t. I was all she had. You were the last person to see her alive. You killed her.’
Rose stepped towards her. ‘Listen to me! Your mother was angry, she was out of control! She was extremely ill and she jumped.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Where’s my daughter?’ Rose asked desperately. ‘Do you know where she is, what happened to her? Tell me where Emily is, for God’s sake, tell me!’
‘She’s dead,’ was the triumphant reply. ‘That’s right! She died the same way my mother did, booted into the fucking sea.’
All the colour and light drained from Rose’s face. ‘No …’ she shook her head. ‘No … I don’t believe you. You’re lying, I know you are.’
Hannah laughed. ‘I said I’d meet her up on the cliffs at Dunwich. Told her I wanted to go and remember my mother.’ She smiled mockingly. ‘She thought she was so noble, going there with me, standing by the poor abandoned sister she never knew she had, cutting off her parents and striking out on her own to prove a point. My God, she was full of it – such a tedious sanctimonious bitch! I was doing the world a favour, to be honest. But anyway, now you know. Beautiful, isn’t it?’ She looked at Rose and Oliver. ‘Your daughter and my mother had the same resting place. Kind of poetic, don’t you think?’
Rose stared at her in horror. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘It’s not true.’
Oliver, who until then had been watching in stunned silence, suddenly cried, ‘There was no body! If you were telling the truth, her body would have washed up sooner or later.’
Rose looked round at him hopefully. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, that’s right. There was no body. There would have been, wouldn’t there? There would have been a body!’
Hannah laughed. ‘Yeah well, maybe there’s a little pile of Emily bones on a faraway beach somewhere. Fuck knows, who cares?’
‘I don’t believe you!’ Rose shouted again. ‘You’re lying. There would have been a body. There would have!’
Hannah stared at her thoughtfully. ‘She cried out for you, you know. Just as she fell, just as she realized she was going to die. She cried out for her mummy, like a baby. Did I cry, Rose, when you killed my mother? Did I cry too?’
Oliver’s face was full of hatred and despair. ‘She jumped. Your mother jumped!’ He broke down in tears then, doubled over in pain, as Tom pulled out his phone and called the police.
32