The Vanishing Point

8

Stephanie’s words galvanised Scarlett into action. She tried to slam the door on them, but Nick was too fast and too practised for that. His arm shot out and he leaned his whole weight against the edge of the door for maximum leverage. Scarlett was forced to give ground. As she skittered backwards, Stephanie and Nick pushed their way inside.

‘How could you?’ Stephanie said, her voice scarcely above a contemptuous whisper.

The sound of chopping came from a brightly lit room to the right, followed by Simon’s voice. ‘Who is it, love?’

Stephanie carried on into the warm kitchen. Simon stood at a wooden butcher’s block dicing onions. Seeing her, he stopped in mid-action, the knife clattering to the board, his mouth flapping like a panicked goldfish. At the same moment, Jimmy saw her and clambered out of his chair, hurtling across the short distance between them. ‘Stephie,’ he shouted happily. ‘I love you.’ He threw his arms round her legs, laughing and whooping. ‘Are we going home soon?’ he added, oblivious to the stunned and horrified faces around the room.

‘Steph’s just come to visit, to make sure you’ve settled in,’ Scarlett said, sweeping past Stephanie and grabbing Jimmy. In one seamless motion, she handed him off to Simon. ‘You go and play upstairs with your Lego with Simon. I’ve got things to talk about with Steph.’ Her smile was as convincing as an octogenarian’s toupee.

‘I’ll go with the boys,’ Nick said, following Simon.

‘Stephie,’ Jimmy’s voice was sharp with longing as he was carried out of the kitchen, arms stretching over Simon’s shoulder.

‘Later,’ Scarlett said, shutting the kitchen door behind them. For a dead woman, she appeared in remarkably good health. She was lightly tanned and looked fit, eyes sparkling and skin smooth. Her hair had grown back, a thick and multi-shaded blonde that spoke of expensive visits to a good hairdresser. Probably not in the local village. It was loosely fastened with a silver hairclip. She spread her arms in an invitation to embrace. ‘I am so sorry, Steph. You have no idea how much I hated keeping you in the dark.’

The warmth of Scarlett’s approach almost wrong-footed Stephanie. Almost, but not quite. Struggling to speak, the blood pounding in her ears, she finally found her tongue. ‘How dare you? After what you’ve put Jimmy through. How dare you try to shrug this off like it’s no big deal?’

Scarlett took a bottle of Prosecco from the big American-style fridge and calmly popped the cork. ‘Jimmy’s fine. You saw that for yourself.’ She reached into a glass-fronted cupboard for a pair of champagne flutes. As she poured, she shook her head in a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger way. ‘You know better than anyone how bloody impossible my life was, especially after the cancer. I couldn’t go anywhere, do anything without a pack of paps on my tail. I couldn’t live like that. Nobody could. I’d had it up to here, Steph. The stress made me ill. Literally, they nearly killed me.’

Sweat prickling the back of her neck, Stephanie was struggling to find an even keel in this conversation. Scarlett was so matter-of-fact. Offhand, almost. Not like a woman who has been caught out faking her own death and abducting her own child a continent away. And her own emotions were swinging wildly between relief that her friend was still alive and rage at what Scarlett had done. ‘You could have retired from public life. Moved abroad where nobody knew who you were.’ Stephanie gave a bitter little laugh. ‘Somewhere like bloody Transylvania. I bet you can shop here no trouble without being mobbed.’

Scarlett held a glass out to Stephanie, who waved it away. Scarlett put it down on the counter close to her instead. ‘As it happens, I can. And we did think about that. But it was complicated. A doctor like Simon doesn’t make a lot of money in Romania. And even though it’s cheap to live here, it still cost us a bomb to do this place up. Then there’s other things that don’t come cheap. Satellite Internet, multichannel TV, that kind of thing. And if you want anything better than the basic shit, you have to pay through the nose. So we needed to make sure the money kept coming in. I earned the right to a decent life, Steph. But those fucking jackals were robbing me of it.’

There was something shocking about Scarlett’s complete lack of shame. ‘So you set up the terminal cancer and the Swimathon to make sure the TOmorrow Trust would keep you in the style to which you’ve become accustomed?’

Anyone else would have flinched at Stephanie’s bitter sarcasm, but Scarlett merely smiled and tipped her glass towards her former friend.

‘Pretty much, yeah. Obviously, the orphanage gets a bloody good cut too. Otherwise there would be no reason for them to go along with the set-up. Marina is the go-between. She makes sure everybody’s happy. And they get Simon’s services for next to nothing, which is a big deal when you’ve got as many disabled kids as they have to deal with. You make it sound like we’re on the make, Steph, but we’re doing a lot of good here.’

‘You pretended you were dead.’ The tide of anger had risen high enough to sweep away Stephanie’s initial shock. ‘I wept for you. I held your son while his little body shook with sobs because he’d already lost his dad and now he’d lost his mum too. Do you have any idea the grief you caused to the people who loved you?’

Scarlett’s mouth quirked in what might have been embarrassment. ‘It’s not like there were many of you. Not that knew me. Really, it was only you and Jimmy and George that I gave a shit about. Obviously Simon and Marina were in on it, so they were only pretending. Look, I’ve said I’m sorry, and I meant it. If there had been another way to do it, I would have gone for it, believe me. But I had to keep you in the dark. Somebody’s grief had to be authentic. So Simon and Marina could figure out how to react.’

Stephanie’s mouth fell open. The notion that her personal pain had meant nothing more to Scarlett than a control in a psychological experiment was beyond her comprehension. How could someone treat another human being like that, let alone one who was supposed to be their best friend? ‘You callous bitch,’ she said, her voice quiet, almost strangled.

Scarlett drained her glass and refilled it. ‘I was playing for high stakes, Steph. I’ve always done what it took to get where I needed to be. Don’t act like it’s a surprise. You wrote the book, after all.’

Stephanie felt like her brain was slowly dragging itself up to speed after being mired in a swamp of lies. ‘I saw you dead. I saw you in your coffin.’ Scarlett smiled like a poker tournament winner released from the tyranny of keeping a straight face, and Stephanie suffered another moment of terrible understanding. ‘Oh my God,’ she gasped. Her hand flew to her mouth, as if by stopping the words emerging she could kill the knowledge.

Scarlett nodded. ‘She was fucking impossible, you know that. She wanted Jimmy, she wanted me to sign over the Spanish property to her, she wanted an income. Like any of that would have happened, even if I had been dying.’ She shook her head in disgust. ‘Silly cow thought she could threaten me with exposure.’

‘If she had talked it would only have been a nine-day wonder, Scarlett. You could have called her bluff. By then, you were the brave cancer heroine. The fact that you’d used Leanne as a body double bad girl might actually have earned you a few Brownie points.’ Stephanie’s bitterness leaked into every word.

But Scarlett looked puzzled rather than upset. ‘It wasn’t the body double thing I was worried about. It was Joshu.’