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Chapter 50
Monday 5th April
When I first met Mary, we had an immediate connection. But it wasn’t just that we looked, and sometimes dressed, a little alike. Mary was, despite her wealth and her outwardly luxurious, exciting life with her famous father, desperately unhappy. Gregor Ellis, although he clearly loved his daughter in his own way, was also the most controlling person I’ve ever met, before then or since. He wanted Mary to live her life exactly as he did; he had few friends, and rarely spoke to any of his relatives, even his mother, telling his daughter that relying on family members was a weakness, that one had to make one’s own way in life and that the only way to measure success was by the amount of money one could make.
When Mary’s mother had been alive, he’d been different – or sohismother, Celeste, told me, when I went to New York to live with her and asked her to tell me stories about ‘my’ childhood. Back then, he’d been ambitious, and a little anti-social, but nothing like he was in his later years. Losing his wife changed him, made him fold in on himself, and he took Mary into his cold, enclosed little world with him. She’d never met most of her relations, and few had even seen photos of her since she was a toddler, which made it all much easier for me, of course, later on.
Life was far from easy for Mary, despite the fancy homes and private jets. And when the time came for her to start thinking of going to university, and planning her career, Gregor simply refused to let her have much say. She could go to university, he said, but she must live at home with him for the duration; she could study what she liked, but when she graduated there would be no question of her going out into the world on her own. She would stay with him, and work from home, possibly even become a writer like he was. I believe now that this was probably his deluded way of trying to keep her safe; he couldn’t stop her mother from dying and leaving him, but he could at least try to stop Mary from coming to any harm and leaving him too. But back then, we both saw only the injustice, and the unfairness of his actions. Mary knew that, once she turned eighteen, he’d have no legal right to stop her doing anything, that he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, keep her locked up in a basement; but she also knew her father, and she knew that if she tried to go against his wishes, he could make life very difficult for her.
‘He’s done it before, with staff who’ve crossed him. He’s made up stories about them stealing from him and reported them to the police, stuff like that. You can do a lot when you have as much money as he has,’ she whispered to me one night when I was staying with her, and he’d retired to his study to write.
‘He’s already told me that if I try to leave, he’ll ruin it for me too. He’ll make me unemployable. I hate him, Amanda. Ihatehim. I hate being his daughter. I want to go far, far away where nobody knows who I am, or who my father is. I’ll die if I don’t.’
And that’s what gave us the idea.
I’ll die if I don’t.
We planned it so carefully. For Mary, her father simply not being around anymore, and her being free to do what she wanted, wasn’t nearly enough. She wanted to beentirelyfree of him, free of all of it. She didn’twantto be Mary Ellis, daughter of the great, exalted Gregor. But she was convinced that if she simply vanished, her wider family, even though she barely knew them, would never stop searching for her, and that she’d spend her entire life looking over her shoulder.
‘It’s only him that stops them being involved in my life,’ she told me. ‘Once he’s dead, they’ll want me back in the family. I can’t just disappear, it won’t work. Mary Ellishasto still be around, somehow.’
And so, we made our plan. To make it work, we needed a third girl, and Laney was the obvious choice. She was a young homeless kid, the same age as us. She often slept in a doorway near our college, and we’d give her sandwiches and chocolate sometimes, feeling sorry for her. We talked for hours, Mary and I, about whether we could really do it, whether we could sacrifice Laney for our own ends. But we were eighteen, with all the bravado and selfishness of youth, and both of us were damaged and unhappy and wanted a better life. We thought, back then, that this was the only way we could get it. If I could go back in time, would I change what we did? Yes, yes,yes. It haunts me, wakes me in the small hours, feeds my never-ending nightmares. It made me think, more than once, as the Diary Killer saga unfolded, that finally I was about to get my punishment; that I deserved to die, and die horribly, like Laney did. Sometimes, I can’t believe we really did it. But it’s too late now. Too late for regrets. Too late to change anything. Too late for Laney, anyway.
She had no family, or none who gave a damn about her anyway, and when we invited her to stay the night at Mary’s that weekend she couldn’t believe her luck. Dealing with Gregor was easy; we doctored his dinner with some of his own sleeping pills, in the hope that he’d go to bed earlier than usual and sleep soundly as we carried out our plan. We got lucky there too, because he had a cold that day, and wasn’t feeling great anyway, so when he started to feel sleepy after dinner he stumbled off to bed immediately, muttering about viruses and how they drain your energy, leaving us to look at each other gleefully.
We’d hidden Laney in one of the outbuildings, telling her Gregor didn’t like visitors but that we’d smuggle her in when the coast was clear, and she was delighted to be brought inside to sit in front of a warm fire and be fed roast chicken and red wine. We waited until, sleepy from the booze and the heat, she asked if she could go to bed too. And then we started the fire, and we said goodbye, Mary and I hugging tightly before she grabbed the small bag of belongings she’d packed, handed me her identity bracelet, and slipped out of the house. She’d left her old passport and birth certificate in an envelope in Gregor’s car outside, telling me to say he’d been about to open a savings account for me or something of that sort, and had put the documents in his glove compartment ready to take to the bank in case they needed proof of my identity.
It made things easier for me, having those, and I didn’t ask any details aboutherescape; how she’d organised it, who helped her, where she was going. We both decided it was better for menotto know, for what I didn’t know I couldn’t reveal. And if our plan worked, everyone would thinkIwas Mary anyway, so her whereabouts wouldn’t be in question. All I knew was that it involved a fake passport, and it had taken money – lots of money – to pull off, money she’d somehow managed to steal from her father’s bank account. Again, I didn’t ask. I simply waved her off, tears running down my cheeks, and then I went to bed too, and waited for the fire to take hold.
It didn’t take long. We’d spent hours at the library, researching fire accelerants, hoping that the blaze would be so fierce it would be impossible to find the cause, but deciding that if questions were asked I could simply say I’d heard a break-in downstairs shortly before the fire started, and that the intruder must have set the place alight.
I say it didn’t take long, but of course I needed to delay calling the fire brigade for as long as possible; we knew nobody else would do it, the housekeeper and chef long gone home, the house’s location so remote that no passing car or pedestrian would see the flames until it was too late. I needed to wait long enough to hear the screams from Gregor and Laney’s rooms, and – terrifyingly – I needed to get burned myself. That was part of the plan, and my memories of those seemingly never-ending minutes still infest my nightmares too; Mary’s bracelet, the one with her name engraved on it, searing my skin; my chest burning as flames licked my curtains and smoke stung my eyes; the wails of terror from the two people I’d locked in their rooms, quietly turning the keys I’d slipped from their doors earlier in the day. I finally dialled 999 then, on the extension phone on my bedside table, but by then my room was well alight, and I can still feel the fear that gripped me, hear the sound of glass splintering, remember the feeling of the sickening realisation that my own hair was on fire.
And so they died, Gregor and Laney. It was, we thought, the only way. We’d discussed swapping places without involving anyone else at all, of course; could Mary just run away, head abroad, change her name and start again that way, without us hurting anyone other than Gregor? Could I just simply slip in and take her place once the housekeeping staff had left for the night? But we thought that would raise too many questions: why Mary’s best friend Amanda, who often stayed overnight, was never seen again after the fire, why she didn’t attend Gregor’s funeral. What if the police started looking for Amanda, suspectingherof starting the fire maybe, and then discovered the truth? It was neater, tidier, easier, to make everyone think that Amanda had died and Mary had survived. Weneededthat second body. It was Laney who was going to be the potential problem, but we’d researched death by fire too, in those hours in the library, and of course back then DNA analysis techniques were much less advanced than they are now. We knew that if human remains were very badly burned, it was very difficult to extract useable DNA, and that even identification by dental or medical records was likely to be impossible. And poor Laney had nobody to miss her anyway; no family, few friends other than a handful of other street people. She was just another homeless girl who drifted away, never to be seen again, no questions asked.
We got lucky in more ways than one, I know that. The old house had no fire alarm, just a few smoke detectors, melted into mush by the blaze; I told police I hadn’t heard them screaming their warning until it was too late, and they believed me. We got away with the locked bedroom doors too, although that worried me for a while. But they were never mentioned, and so I assumed the ferocity of the fire had concealed that for us as well. As for the funeral, even though I was still heavily bandaged I couldn’t risk getting too close to anyone who might have known either me or Mary; instead, I clung to Celeste, telling her I was too distraught to speak toanybodyand, like a fierce mother tiger, she batted away well-meaning attendees, not allowing anyone near me, not even Furnbury Hall’s chef and housekeeper, and whisked me away as soon as the coffins were lowered into the ground.
And so it all worked out beautifully. Mary got away, to start her new life. Everyone thought I was Mary, and so I became Mary Ellis, and moved to America to live with ‘my’ grandmother. And it was assumed that Laney was me, the real me, Amanda Archer. But it’s Laney who lies in the grave next to Gregor’s; Laney who I weep for on the rare occasions that I visit the graveyard in Thornton. I don’t go there for Gregor, because why would I? He’s nothing to me, after all. It’s Laney’s death I regret, more than I can say.
My burns, my scars, are my lasting reminders of that night, and of what we did to her. I deserve these scars, this disfigurement. I don’t feel guilt about Gregor, not really. He’d lived a life. But Laney; I think about her every time my fingers brush against the lumpy, pitted skin of my cheek, or catch a glimpse of my deformed left ear in the mirror. It’s her face that floats through the dreams that never leave me. Who knows what her life could have been, had she been given the chance? It torments me, but it’s far, far too late to make any sort of real amends now. And to even attempt to do so would not only destroy my life, but Mary’s too.
Because we’re still in touch, you see, Mary and me. We’re still friends, the closest friends imaginable. She got back in touch once she was free, once she was settled. She’s not Mary anymore of course; she’s achieved what she wanted: a life of her own, a career she loves, with no links whatsoever to Gregor Ellis. Those links are all mine now; I took them on, in return for a life of security and comfort that I could never have imagined as a child. The money I inherited was rightfully hers of course, and although she argued against it at first, saying she wanted to make her own way in the world, I insisted that she have half of everything. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d kept it all. It was her birth right, after all, and I carried on arguing with her about it until, finally, she gave in. And so, every sum I’ve ever received: birthday cheques from her grandmother and other relatives, the ongoing book royalties, all of it, I split, transferring fifty per cent of everything to her bank account. At the end of it all, we’ve both got what we wanted.
And now I need to speak to her, because although I messaged her as soon as I could on Thursday morning to reassure her I’m still alive, I haven’t had a chance to tell her properly about how all this turned out. I’ve kept her updated every step of the way of course; in fact, it was her idea for me, as a last resort, to confess to the killer that I’m not really Mary Ellis at all. And now I have so much to tell her. Especially that, for now at least, our secret is still safe. I pick up my phone, and dial her number.
