Sophie Hannah - A Game for All the Family

Lisette soon found out she was wrong. One day, she was eating a lobster salad at the Anchorstone Café in Dittisham, gazing out peacefully at the sparkling water of the river. When she’d finished eating, she asked for the bill, and when a folded piece of paper on a white saucer was placed on the table in front of her, she didn’t think anything of it—until she opened it and saw her sister Allisande’s instantly recognizable handwriting. This was no bill. The note read, “Leave Devon and never return, or I will kill you, your husband and your children.” Lisette whirled around in her chair, but it was too late. Allisande was gone.

Lisette tore up the horrible note and left it in pieces in the saucer. She went inside the café and asked the woman behind the till if she had anyone working for her by the name of Allisande Ingrey. “Not working here, no,” said the woman, “but do you know what? It’s the strangest thing! She was in here only a moment ago. She ordered her usual—look, I’m actually preparing it now!—and she said she was going to grab a table on the terrace, but then I saw her taking off not two minutes ago! She’s never done that before—ordered, then disappeared.”

Lisette looked at the food the woman was preparing. It was two scones, both sliced neatly in half. Also on the plate was a ceramic pot of cream and one of strawberry jam. Both pots were nearly empty. The café woman had spread most of their contents onto the scones.

“I don’t normally do this for customers,” she said, seeing Lisette staring, “but Allisande pays a little extra in order not to have to do it herself.”

Tears came to Lisette’s eyes. This was typical Allisande, who, like Sorrel, always liked to make the minimum effort. Neither of them would ever dream of ordering lobster, for example, because of the hassle of cracking the shell and pulling out tiny bits of meat with a metal implement.

For the first time since she’d run away from Speedwell House, Lisette felt a strong tug of yearning for her sister. (Imagine the pain of that, combined with the fact that the very same sister has just renewed her threat to kill you, in writing this time—it’s pretty horrendous, I think you’ll agree?)

Lisette cleared her throat and asked, “Do you happen to know if Allisande and her family still live in Speedwell House?”

“Oh, no, they haven’t lived there for a while,” said the café woman. “Bascom and Sorrel now live in a bungalow here in Dittisham, actually. It’s just up the hill, if you want to go and find them. Just keep going up and up—you’ll find them in Speedwell Cottage. Named after their former home, you see.”

Lisette gasped. The thought of seeing her parents after all these years . . . She was tempted, but decided she could not bear it. The whole experience would be too painful.

“Allisande lives in London now, but she visits her parents every third weekend,” said the woman. “She’s been far better to them than that other sister, the one that ran off and abandoned them—I can’t remember her name . . .”

“Lisette,” said Lisette.

The woman leaned in and whispered, “According to Allisande—and please keep this to yourself, as I swore I wouldn’t say a word—”

“Of course.”

“Allisande says Lisette killed their younger sister, Perrine, then ran away to avoid being sent to jail.”

Lisette was too shocked to speak. She had assumed her sister would frame the dispensable boatman, Lionel, but had never considered that she herself might be the one put in the frame. But of course, it made sense. How else could Allisande explain Lisette’s sudden disappearance to Bascom and Sorrel? Oh, Lisette could imagine only too well the conversation:

Sorrel: “But where has she gone? And why? I can’t bear to lose a second daughter!”

Bascom: “Neither can I! Aren’t our lives ruined enough?”

Allisande: “She murdered Perrine, Mum and Dad. I saw her, while you two were in the kitchen serving up the breakfast. I saw her running out of the house with Perrine’s body and the bits of bed.”

Bascom and Sorrel would have protested vigorously. They would have said all the obvious things: someone would have seen her; she would have found Perrine’s body too heavy to carry, being smaller and skinnier than her sister despite being older; there was no time for Lisette to have gotten to the jetty, reassembled the bed, put Perrine in it and then gotten back to the house before the meeting in the drawing room started.

Bascom and Sorrel Ingrey would have pointed all of this out to Allisande, in Lisette’s defense. But, when Allisande kept insisting—as she undoubtedly did, more and more desperately, as if she really believed it—they would have eventually conceded that it was just about possible. They would have considered the fact that Lisette had run away without saying goodbye to them, and they would have compared that to Allisande, who was still there being a loving daughter. Having weighed everything up, they would have decided to go along with the lie that Lisette killed Perrine.

Lisette could even imagine her parents defending her for this crime she hadn’t committed. “She must have done it to save us,” Sorrel or Bascom would have said. Perhaps they both said it. “She knew Perrine would one day be released from prison, and then the killing would start again. Lisette decided there was only one way to stop that happening and protect us forever.”

Allisande, of course, would have allowed her parents to impose this charitable interpretation upon the made-up events. She wouldn’t have challenged it, because she believed in family loyalty. Family loyalty means saying nice things about your family in public while secretly issuing death threats.

Lisette was certain that Allisande hadn’t mentioned to Bascom and Sorrel that she’d threatened to kill Lisette. The death threats were part of the truth, and Allisande had chosen all those years ago to make the truth her enemy rather than her friend. In order for Bascom, Sorrel and Allisande to all live happily ever after together, the legend of family loyalty had to survive: Perrine was the only Ingrey who could be acknowledged as rotten to the core. Lisette, if she needed to be cast as a murderer, had to be a noble one who killed to protect Bascom, Sorrel and Allisande. Equally, if Allisande could not avoid pointing out (falsely) that Lisette was a killer, it was essential that she should do this in a noncritical way, praising and sympathizing with Lisette for the crime she had committed—making it as much of a good deed as possible.

Lisette was so, so glad she had run away when she did, and not only because it prevented her sister from setting fire to her in the night or something equally gruesome. She was glad no longer to be part of a family that had left the truth so far behind. Perrine’s evil nature had ended up infecting all of the Ingreys apart from Lisette—and of course her husband and children, who know the truth and are totally on Lisette’s side. It was Lisette’s respect for the truth, and for proper justice, that led to Allisande regarding her as more dispensable than Lionel the boatman.

But what about you, who are reading this story? Do you respect the truth? I haven’t told you what it is yet, have I? I could have done, quite easily, but then you would have taken it for granted. I don’t want you to do that. I think you’ll appreciate the truth more if you struggle for a while to work it out, and then eventually succeed. The harder it is to come by, the more you will value it when you get it. (This is why mysteries are the best kind of stories: because you only get the truth at the very end, when you’re absolutely desperate, and that way of arranging things makes you realize how scarce truth is, in stories and in life, and that it’s really all that matters.)