Nemesis (37 page)

61

“Are you sure you want to do this?” said Geraint.

“If I don’t,” Natalie told him, “I might never get the chance again.”

The huge chestnut trees in front of the Georgian manor were now almost bare. Autumn had arrived with a vengeance following a stormy week. There were no fallen leaves, or children playing on the tennis court. Even the net had been removed.

Natalie stared up at the house, psyching herself up. There was no sign it was even occupied but she knew their arrival had been noted.

“Geraint,” she said, “would you mind very much if I asked you to wait out here?”

“Do you really think that’s a good idea?”

“I’ll be able to see you from the window,” she said. “You’re my insurance, so to speak.”

“So pleased I’m useful for something!”

“Useful is good, trust me.”

He caught hold of her hand, holding it close. “Be careful,
cariad
.”

She smiled wryly, but when she walked towards the house he did not follow.

As usual, the door opened before she had even got there. The butler politely asked her to come inside and showed her into the same little sitting room as she had been in before, overlooking the empty tennis court. Before the door closed, she heard the sound of 1940s jazz music wafting along the hall, along with the faint aroma of tobacco. Sir Richard Vyne must be home. Would she get the chance to finally meet him? She doubted it.

She moved restlessly to the window. Geraint was leaning against the side of her car, about to light a cigarette. When he saw her he seemed relieved, raising his hand in acknowledgement. She was about to do the same when the door opened and her mother entered.

Magda was dressed in exquisite black cashmere, but wasted no time on preliminaries. “What are you doing here?”

Natalie slid her bag from her shoulder and took out a brightly-wrapped parcel. She held it out to her mother, pleased that her hand remained perfectly steady.

“This is for you,” she said.

Magda did not take the parcel. Indeed, she regarded it as though it were something slightly obscene. “I thought I told you not to come here again. You’re not welcome.”

Natalie
swallowed,
her throat suddenly dry. “After today you’ll never see me again, I promise.” She kept her hand outstretched. The parcel wavered slightly.

For a moment Magda hesitated, her attention caught by the sunlight glinting off the metallic wrapping. Then she turned away, looking instead out of the window, catching Geraint flicking a spent match into a flowerbed.

“You brought a bodyguard?” she sneered.

“Do I need one?”

“What you do is of no interest to me.”

Natalie felt a plunge of disappointment. But had she expected any different?

“I’ll leave this on the table, shall I?” she said, holding up the parcel again.

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

Natalie made a point of placing the parcel, perfectly square, in the centre of the table, before beginning on her rehearsed speech.

“Before I leave,” she said, “I think I have the right to know why you’ve shut me out of your life so completely. You went to pieces when Sarah died yet you seem quite happy to pretend I don’t exist. I don’t understand why you would behave like that. Even if you loved Sarah better than me,” she stumbled over the word ‘loved’, “I’m your daughter too. We could have worked through our grief together.”

All those years of having it festering inside her, and she’d finally said the words out loud, but when she gathered her courage to look at her mother directly, it was only to witness Magda regarding her with increasing distaste.

Instead of the usual fine platinum chain about her neck, today Magda wore a narrow black ribbon with an ornately gothic cross suspended from it. It was the universal symbol of personal sacrifice.

How supremely ironic.

“Why can’t you move on, as I have done?” Magda asked, reaching up and twisting the sliver of ribbon around her fingers. “Why do you have to keep coming back? I’ve put that part of my life behind me now. I have a new life here, with Richard and the boys. The police have already been to see me. They know who killed Sarah; it was that teacher-boyfriend of yours. I said at the time he was no good. You should have listened to me. But you never listen, do you, Natalie? You do exactly what you want to do, and never mind how much you hurt other people with your behaviour; it always has to be about
you
. You were the same as a child.”

The unfairness of this accusation stung Natalie into retorting, “It’s not about me, it’s about justice for Sarah
- ”
but even as she said the words, she heard her father’s voice inside her head.

This ain’t about Sarah. It never was
.

She paused, and said instead, “I suppose you have everything you want now - Richard and your boys, a lovely house, a happy family life? You don’t need me, reminding you of the past.”

Magda didn’t respond. She didn’t have to. They both knew she spoke the truth.

“Was it true that you only married Dad because you were pregnant with Sarah?”

“At the time I felt I had very little choice. My parents had thrown me out so John offered to marry me. I thought he was my hero - but he turned out to be an evil bastard who made my life a living hell.” Magda pushed back her hair, pointed to a silvery scar running down the side of her face. “See that? I received it after having my face pushed through a plate glass window. Every time I look in the mirror I remember him doing it. He hit James Fitzpatrick so hard his jaw had to be rewired and you were so terrified of him you sent his car over the cliff rather than suffer another beating. And you wonder why I want to leave my past behind?”

“I didn’t mean for the car to go over the cliff. It was an accident. Dad was drunk. He hadn’t put the brake on properly.”

“So you say. You seem remarkably quick to forgive him, to listen to him, to take his side in all this.”

“I don’t want to take sides; I just want to find out the truth!”

“We know the truth! Sarah was murdered by her drama teacher because he was obsessed by her. Detective Chief Inspector Bloom called on me and explained everything.”

“Did he explain why Simon left Sarah’s body in that lily pond?”

“Simon Waters
was
psychologically disturbed. He didn’t need a reason.”

“He’d found out Sarah had been having sex with Henry Vyne.”

Magda’s fingers around the cross were instantly still. “That’s not true!” she began, then checked
herself
. She unravelled her finger from the ribbon and then, as though she couldn’t help herself, began to wind it up again. “How can you say such terrible things? Sir Henry was an honourable man, a kind man. He set up that trust, after your father’s accident, to pay for his health care. He let us stay at the Lodge, rent free. He didn’t have to do that.”

“The police found an album of photographs,” said Natalie. “They date from a few weeks before Henry died, right back through to the early 1980s. Photo after photo of young girls, taken in almost identical poses, in the castle library and in the walled garden, probably the only places he knew he would never be disturbed. Sarah was one of them.”

Magda’s fingers tightened over the jewelled cross. “I think you’d better leave now,” she said calmly. “Roberts will see you out.”

Natalie placed herself directly in front of her mother, preventing her from pressing the bell set beside the door. Unless Magda was willing to make an undignified detour around the sofa, she was trapped beside the window. Predictably, Magda stayed put.

“Sarah hated her life,” Natalie told her mother. “She hated what she had become but she kept doing it because she wanted the money. She planned to leave Calahurst with Simon and never come back. They were going to be married but she knew he’d flip if he ever found out what she’d done, so she arranged to steal the photographs back, with the help of two fairground workers. They broke into the castle library but, before they could remove the photographs from the safe, they were caught. In a panic Sarah ran to Simon’s house for help but, just as she knew he would, he flipped. He forced her back to the castle and into the walled garden, where he killed her, leaving her body in the lily pond as a message for Henry Vyne.”

Natalie paused, but there was no reaction.

“What
did you think
, that morning when you realised Sarah had gone?” she asked her mother. “When they found Sarah’s body arranged in that pond, did you think Henry had killed her? Did you think he’d left her there as a message for you?”

Magda glanced at her watch. “Have you finished raking up the past?
Because I have better things to do.”

“One last question.”

“I really think that’s enough
- ”

“How did it feel to kill the man you loved?”

Now she had Magda’s full attention. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“You shot Henry. It was never an accident. You’d loved him for all those years and at first he’d loved you back. Then he jilted you for Clare and you had to watch as he became obsessed with increasingly younger women until finally, in what must have been the biggest blow of all, he noticed Sarah. How hard it must have been for you, seeing him become infatuated with another teenage blonde, yet knowing all along that
you
had been the original. When Sarah was murdered, you thought he’d done it. You kept quiet, thinking that would be the end of it, but then you realised he’d noticed me. So you shot him.”

“And you got to live.” Her mother’s blank expression did not change, and for a moment Natalie was not even sure she’d spoken. “You lived and Henry died. I chose you over him and it’s still not enough for you? You want me to ‘love’ you too? Well, I can’t, because I still love him. No matter what he did, or the kind of person he became, he’s the only man I’ve ever loved. I killed him for you and it turned out he was innocent. Perhaps now you’ll understand why I can’t bear to even look at you, and if you
ever
try to contact me again I’ll have you arrested for harassment.”

At that moment, which should have been the worst in her life, Natalie felt nothing. This was the woman who gave birth to her, who had carried her inside her own body for nine months. And she felt absolutely nothing. She was finally free.

There was only one task remaining.

Natalie picked the parcel up from the table and ripped the paper from it, letting it float to the floor. Inside the parcel was a book, a glossy hardback. It had a black dust jacket with Natalie’s name written along the top, and the outline of a bluebell, picked out in silver.

“This is a copy of my book,” she said, holding it out. “I’ve even signed it for you.”

“I don’t want it,” Magda said coldly. “Simon’s dead. The men who committed the crimes I blamed Henry for, they’re all dead. That’s the end of it.”

The end of it.

A score settled.

But not quite.

“I nearly died too,” Natalie said. “Did you know that? Simon was about to slash open my throat but someone shot him. It was unbelievable. At the exact moment his hand came swooping down with the knife, he was killed. What do you think of that?”

“I think you’re extremely lucky” said Magda.

“The killer had been following Simon. The fact that I was there too, the fact that I was saved, was coincidental.”

Natalie paused, to give her mother the opportunity to speak, but Magda remained silent.

“Do you know, I always thought it odd that none of the other girls in Henry’s photographs came forward after Sarah died? Apparently they preferred to remain silent, to keep their perfect lives unsullied, hoping no one would find out what they did when they were young and foolish. So if someone found those photographs, and was able to put names to all those faces, it would make a perfect blackmail opportunity, wouldn’t? Particularly if you were the kind of person who had a lot of expenses - such as a castle to run, shall we say? Is that why you killed Clare?”

Magda said nothing.

Natalie sighed. “Dad called you his Nemesis but I don’t think he understood who she really was. He seemed to think Nemesis was some kind of goddess of revenge, someone who was determined to get the better of him. In reality, she’s the spirit of retribution - retribution against those who show arrogance towards the gods. You know, you might do well to consider that.”

Still her mother remained silent and, as Natalie had nothing more to say either, she placed the book back on the table and left, closing the door quietly behind her.

Magda watched her through the window. A man stepped out from the shadows of the chestnut tree and Natalie ran towards him, flinging her arms around his neck. He lifted her into his arms, whirling her round before setting her back on her feet and hugging her close. But there was another man there too, emerging from a black saloon.
A man wearing a familiar long black overcoat, accompanied by two others in dark suits.

It was that damned policeman, back again.

Infuriated, Magda turned away from the window, knocking against the table where Natalie had left her book. Before Magda could prevent it, the book slid across the polished wood and hit the floor heavily, causing something to flutter free from its pages. Without thinking, Magda bent to pick it up and found she was holding a photograph of herself as a teenager, smiling seductively at the camera, floating naked amongst a mass of pink and white water lilies.