Val McDermid - The Vanishing Point

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.’

9

Now it was Stephanie’s turn to look baffled. ‘What about Joshu?’

‘Leanne knew about the morphine.’ Scarlett rolled her eyes as if she was dealing with a particularly stupid pupil.

‘What about the morphine?’ Stephanie persisted.

‘Joshu didn’t steal the morphine from Simon. Simon gave it to him. He made out that he was doing it as a favour, so Joshu would leave me alone. But he’d swapped the labels. Joshu thought he was shooting up a low dose, but it was really the highest one legally available. Leanne had seen Simon in the kitchen doing something with the labels and when Joshu died, she put two and two together. But she thought at first it was Simon trying to get Joshu out of the way so he could have a clear run at me. She didn’t realise we were already head over heels in love with each other by then.’ Scarlett smiled sweetly at the last memory, as if that erased the awful truth she’d just revealed.

‘You . . . You set up Joshu, knowing those doses of morphine would kill him?’

‘What would you have done? He was a nightmare, you know that. He was off his face half the time, and if I had died, he would have never let go until he’d got his hands on Jimmy and he’d have completely fucked him up. I couldn’t chance that, Steph. You’ve lived with Jimmy, you know what a sweetheart he is. I couldn’t leave him in Joshu’s hands. I’d tried everything to get him to back off. But he wasn’t having it. I didn’t have any choice.’

Stephanie reached for the glass of Prosecco and drank it in one. Scarlett laughed with delight. ‘That’s more like it. More like old times, Steph.’ She refilled the glass, reaching over to squeeze Stephanie’s arm. Stephanie flinched and drew back but Scarlett didn’t seem to mind. Stephanie had understood Scarlett’s single-mindedness, the drive that had taken her from a no-hope background to the high life. But understanding how it had turned into this cold-blooded ruthlessness was still a step she was finding it hard to make.

‘You killed Joshu to protect Jimmy. Then you killed Leanne to protect yourself.’

Scarlett looked put out. ‘Well, how would anyone have been better off if Leanne had grassed us up? We’d have been sent to jail in disgrace and Jimmy’s life would have been over. And Leanne would have been sitting pretty even though she was as guilty as us.’

‘How do you work that out? Leanne being guilty, I mean?’

Scarlett shrugged prettily. ‘She saw what she saw and she didn’t tell the cops at the time. She tried to blackmail me later. In my book, that makes her as much of a criminal. She had no right to get off scot free and with my son thrown in. And I won’t deny that her last job as my body double saved us a lot of aggravation about what to put in the coffin.’ She grinned at her own cleverness.

‘But Leanne supposedly went back to Spain weeks before you “died”.’ Stephanie made contemptuous quotation marks in the air. ‘What? You kept her prisoner all that time?’

‘It wasn’t hard. Simon had the drugs. He kept her sedated in the dressing room where he was supposedly kipping down. The weight fell off her, which made it look even more authentic. Then when we were ready for my big death bed scene, he upped the dose. She didn’t know anything about it. You could say she spent her last couple of weeks totally blissed out. People pay good money for that kind of thing, Steph.’

If that was an attempt at humour, it fell flat on its arse as far as Stephanie was concerned. ‘And the text I got this morning, supposedly from Leanne? That was you too, was it?’

Scarlett looked ridiculously pleased with herself. ‘Of course it was me. I had to think on my feet with that one.’

‘Not fast enough,’ Stephanie said. ‘We already knew Leanne wasn’t in Spain. We met the delightful chap you sold her house to.’

Scarlett looked mildly disconcerted. Capitalising on that, Stephanie went on the offensive. ‘And Jimmy? What was that about? You kidnapped Jimmy. You’ve put me through hell this last week. I’ve been insane with worry. I’ve hardly slept. I’ve been terrified for him.’

For the first time, Scarlett looked as if contrition might be within her emotional range. ‘Yeah. I felt really bad about that, Steph. If I could have found another way round it, I would have. But I couldn’t just ask you for him back, could I? You’d never have been able to explain that to social services, and they’d have thought you’d murdered him or sold him or something.’ She gave a weird little half-laugh. ‘So I had to kidnap him off you. We did it in America to draw attention away from anything that might point to us. Simon did the dirty deed. Lots of heavy-duty disguise and totally different shoes to change the way he walks. Simon drove up to Canada with him, got him across the border with a couple of Romanian passports, and then they flew back from Toronto. Piece of piss, really.’