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“No, he told me to pretend that she was my best friend or to stay away completely. That night you left her, Lucy had a massive meltdown at the hospital. She wasn’t relieved to have been rescued. She was so angry that they sedated her so they could bring her home, and then the doctor told my dad about how the injury was self-inflicted, and he started looking into the clinic staff.”
“Did he talk to Simone? Dr. Pevensey.”
“He tried, but she washed her hands of it all after one of her colleagues was killed in the crosshairs. After that, he started going through the reports from the night she turned up. The CCTV footage from your square. He turned over every fucking rock and stone he could to work out whatever was eating at him.”
“I know the fucking feeling.”
“Look, Freddie, I don’t know the answers, but I do know that he knew something about her disappearance that stopped him from looking for her all those years ago and made him dubious of her return.” Turning from the window, she pauses to look me square in the eyes. “I also know that my father wasn’t into gardening, but his hands were covered in mud. You know what I did after I cleaned his hands?”
Resentment twists her face as tears fill her eyes again, the sadness so potent that I can smell it on her like spoiled fruit. Soured, bruised, and rotting from the inside out.
“I left him,” Laura sobs, choking on her tears enough that my hand jerks to slap her on the back in case she needs help. “I had to leave my father to make sure that I cleaned up anything that could out your brotherhood. It’s what he always told me to do if anything happened to him.”
There’s a moment of silence as I wait for her to get to grips with herself again. Once I know she’ll be able to answer me, I ask, “What did you find?”
“Nothing. Everything was gone. The fire was on in the private apartment, and the safe was open. His personal laptop is gone, and I don’t know if his phone was on him because by the time I’d searched all the places he’d told me to, Lucian was there already and…”
“He didn’t let you go near him again?”
“No.”
“I know that you don’t think your dad would…do this,” I blow out in a long breath, trying to maintain my cool. The conversation is getting harder the deeper we get into it, and as much as I want to remain detached, it’s becoming impossible. There’s just too much going on in my head to compartmentalise. So I focus on the one thing that might actually get us anywhere. “If you think he was destroying evidence or burning documents—”
“I don’t care what he was doing, he did not take his own life!”
“All right, why don’t you tell me what happened, then?”
A long sob rips from her as she shakes her head. “I wasn’t there. Why did I leave him?”
“Oi, look at me and take it from the top. You wanted me to listen, well, here I am…listening.”
“Are you going to tell me I’m wrong all over again?” When I shake my head, Laura nods at me, moving to sit in one of the chairs. “It was her. My father never once got involved with my mother’s gardening, but he had the mud on his hands. That’s what she did at all these random times—she’d go and tend to the same fucking patch of dirt.”
“What do you think Lucy was hiding?”
“You already have that look on your face.”
Schooling my expression so that she doesn’t clam up and try to do another runner, I sit in the chair beside hers. “What look?”
“Like I’m talking shit, but if you think about it, like really think, as if she’s just another person that you have no past with…” An exasperated sigh vibrates from her. “Pretend she’s an unconnected part of the puzzle this once.”
“Okay.” The moment I reply, the fog that stems from my guilt rises inside me. It takes everything to shake it off and listen to Laura.
The more I listen to her tell me about her suspicions, the heavier the looming feeling in my chest becomes. My insides twist, coiling tighter and tighter.
“I’ve thought about it so many times. When I brought her those clothes and she snapped at me, I was only trying to get her to tell me what happened the night she disappeared. I was trying to understand how she went from being there to being gone. Then my dad started pressing to know how she ended up on your doorstep, and she was screaming at him. Something about not being his puppet anymore.”
The pounding of my heart begins to race at her words. “Puppet? Did she say anything else? Ever mention something like Petrushka?”
“You mean like a babushka doll?” Looking at me confused, she seems to be thinking back. She’s somewhere in her head when she pulls out her phone and shows me a photo of Harry’s almost empty desk. “Like one of these?”
“I don’t know…maybe. Would that mean anything to your sister?”
“Do you remember that time that she had bronchitis and ended up in hospital?”
It must have been a couple of months before Lucy disappeared. “I don’t remember much, just that your parents wouldn’t let me see her.”
“My parents never visited her. I remember thinking it was odd that my mum stayed away from the hospital, but it didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. When she came back home though, she had a proper suitcase in her room, and I swear she had one of these on her dressing table for a while…”
