Simon Beckett - The Restless Dead

There never does. ‘You said she was younger than you?’

‘By five years. We were never that close, to be honest. Too different. She was always the confident and outgoing one. And Emma had this knack of making people like her. When she paid anyone attention she’d make it feel like the sun was shining on them. It just didn’t tend to last very long.’

She gave a self-conscious laugh.

‘Wow. I don’t know where that came from. I must sound like a real cow.’

‘You sound like a sister.’

‘Now you’re being diplomatic.’ She reached for the wine bottle and topped up our glasses. ‘Don’t get the wrong idea. Emma could be lovely. She was great with Fay, even though she wasn’t what you’d call the maternal type. She didn’t really “do” kids, so she treated Fay more like a teenager. A kid sister. Fay worshipped her. That’s why this past year’s been so hard on her. Probably harder on her than anyone.’

I thought about the shadows under the little girl’s eyes, the too-thin arms. Trask’s daughter would have been too young to remember her mother, but at her age losing her stepmother as well must have been a cruel blow. ‘Is that why you stayed?’

I thought I’d overstepped. Rachel didn’t answer at first, watching her fingers slowly twirl the stem of her wine glass.

‘One of the reasons, yeah,’ she said at last. ‘To start with it didn’t seem right to leave, not without knowing what had happened to Emma. We all thought there’d be news fairly soon. Every day you expect the police to call and say they’ve found something, but they never did. And the longer it went on, the harder it was to just say, OK, I’ve waited long enough, I’m leaving. I know Emma was only their stepmum, and that Fay and Jamie aren’t really my family. Except they sort of are now. Does that make sense?’

She was looking at me for reassurance. The light had faded so that her green eyes looked luminous in the dim room. ‘I think so,’ I said.

‘It’s not Andrew and Jamie so much, although God knows it’s bad enough for them. I didn’t know either of them very well before, but by all accounts Jamie used to be cheerful and outgoing before all this. You wouldn’t know it now, and between him and Andrew it can be like walking on eggshells at times. But they’re old enough to cope. It’s Fay who worries me. Maybe if they lived in a city, where there were other people and she had friends around, it’d be different. But out here... there’s nothing for her.’

I looked out through the huge windows at the shadowed landscape. The sky had lost most of its light, and only the rippling glints of the water distinguished the black creek from the surrounding marsh.

‘It doesn’t seem like your sister’s sort of place either,’ I said.

She gave a lopsided smile. ‘That’s an understatement.’

‘How did they meet?’ I waved the question away. ‘Sorry, I’m prying.’

‘No, that’s all right. To be honest it’s good to be able to talk about it.’ Rachel stared down at her glass. ‘A friend of hers was building a new house, and Andrew was the architect. Emma used to dabble in interior design as well as photography, so she wound up doing the interiors. She was always good at that sort of thing, and this wasn’t long after she’d split up with her long-term boyfriend. One of those uber-confident types, into martial arts and self-help. Fancied himself as a musician and a film-maker because he used to make pretentious music videos. He was a real dickhead.’

‘You liked him, then?’

‘Can you tell?’ Her smile quickly faded. ‘In a lot of ways they were very alike. Both extroverted, full of big schemes that never happened. It was always an on-off relationship, and she met Andrew during one of the off times. Six months later they got married.’

Rachel looked over at the photograph of her sister with Jamie and Fay, as though still trying to work out what had happened.

‘I could have dropped when I got the wedding invitation. Not so much that she was getting married, because Emma was always impulsive. But Andrew didn’t seem her type, and as for coming out here...’ She shook her head. ‘Emma needed people around her, she liked galleries and parties. Not mudflats and marshes.’

‘Did you talk to her about it?’

‘I’m her big sister, of course I did.’ There was a smile in her voice. ‘She told me I was too frightened of change, and that she’d wasted enough of her life on “bastards”. Which I couldn’t argue with. She claimed she was ready to settle down, that this house was going to be a showroom for both her and Andrew. He’d design houses, and she’d do the interior design and fill in with a spot of photography. Everything was going to be perfect. And then Leo Villiers came along.’

She broke off, taking a drink of wine. I waited. The dim room had developed the atmosphere of a confessional, and I sensed Rachel was glad to have someone to talk to.

‘Villiers hired Andrew to do some work,’ she went on. ‘He’s got this lovely old house on the estuary, I think Emma has photographs of it somewhere. Villiers wanted it ripping apart and remodelling, so she persuaded Andrew to let her design the interiors.’

I remembered Lundy pointing out Villiers’ house on the mouth of the estuary. A big Victorian place, with bay windows looking out to sea. ‘Did she tell you she was having an affair?’

‘No, but I knew something was going on. She told me there were problems between her and Andrew, and that she was thinking of leaving him. I guessed she was seeing someone else, but she wouldn’t say who it was. I even wondered if...’ She shook her head abruptly, dismissing some unpalatable thought. ‘Anyway, things got a bit heated. I was having my own relationship problems around that time, so I might have overdone the big sister bit. Emma told me to mind my own business and put the phone down on me. That was the last time I spoke to her.’

I could better understand now why Rachel had felt obliged to stay out here with an extended family she barely knew. Guilt was a powerful motive, particularly when grief was added to the mix.

‘Did Andrew suspect anything?’ I asked. ‘About the affair, I mean?’

‘It’s not something he talks about, least of all to me. He admitted once that he thought Emma was seeing someone else, because she’d been making a lot of trips to London. But it was only afterwards, when the police told him she’d been seen half dressed in Villiers’ bedroom and all the rest of it, that he realized who it was. God, that was awful. Andrew went storming out to Villiers’ house to confront him. There was no one there, thankfully, but it was still a stupid thing to do.’

‘When was this?’

‘Oh, it was well before Villiers went missing. And yes, the police do know about it.’ There was a wry note to Rachel’s voice that said she knew what I was thinking. ‘Andrew and Jamie had a big row over it. Jamie accused him of being selfish, and that he needed to think about Fay. He was right, and God knows what would’ve happened if Villiers had been home. But it was weeks before they’d even speak to each other again.’

‘This is none of my business,’ I said carefully. ‘But if Emma was talking about leaving anyway, she couldn’t have just left , could she?’

Rachel shook her head.

‘That was my first thought. But somebody would have heard from her by now. Like I said, Emma needed people, and it wasn’t her style to leave quietly. She was a serial door-slammer; she wouldn’t just pack up and leave, not without scenes and tantrums. And no way would she have left all her things behind. All she had with her was her bag and camera. She left her clothes and passport, even her car. It’s the Mini convertible covered up outside. The police found it abandoned at an old oyster factory not far from here. None of us have liked to drive it since.’