***
Rachel pretended to sleep, trying desperately to relax so that she would look more convincing to Charlie.
Anything to avoid having to talk to him.
All she wanted to do was to get back to the flat, Lila’s flat. Then she could shut the past out again and go back to the half-life where she had hidden safely for years. An impossible feat now that the biggest part of her past was sitting right next to her, about to invade the only sanctuary she had. What would he make of her existence? Maybe he would be shocked to see the way she lived, just a wistful ghost haunting another woman’s life.
Nothing in the flat had been changed since the day Lila had died. Not a thing. Even the dust just recirculated and settled back exactly where it had come from. Lila’s clothes still hung in the wardrobe, her perfume still sat on the dressing table, her rings remained on the mantelpiece – all as if she had just stepped out of the room. The furniture was exactly as Lila had placed it, still hiding the bald spots on the rugs and covering the stains. Rachel had preserved it all. Like a more sanitary Miss Havisham, she had conserved Lila’s existence in an eternal tableau of fond memories.
There was no bitterness in her desire to maintain Lila’s home intact, just a need to hang onto something old, familiar and warm. Lila’s flat was a home in the way that The Limes never had been, or could have been. Lila had been happy in her London flat, away from her dysfunctional family and all that had come with it. Rachel tried relentlessly to preserve that happiness, constantly hoping that the essence of it would magically transfer itself to her one day.
The flat was her bolthole, her sanity. To someone else it would look precisely the opposite. Hard evidence of her instability. Proof of her inability to cope with real life. Would anybody else understand that if you could force time to stand still and preserve a perfect moment of tranquillity that you could step in and out of that place at will?
Lila (or strictly speaking Lilian) Porter had been the polar opposite of her brother. From what little she’d been told about her father, Rachel had deduced that where William had been dull, Lila had been a bright beacon of life. Where he had been mean-spirited, she had been generous to a fault. Where William had resented, Lila had embraced. In Lila’s company, everyone felt alive. Even Valerie had grudgingly liked her, until Lila had died and had left everything to Rachel. After that Valerie hadn’t liked anyone much.
Frances had needled Rachel to sell the flat – it was London real estate, worth a small fortune. Life-changing in the right hands. Valerie hadn’t thought that Rachel’s were remotely the right hands. Rachel had measured wealth differently and had hung onto the flat even though her decision had been one of the issues that had permanently damaged the family ties. The other issue she still couldn’t, and wouldn’t, talk about.
Ever.
Delia tried Charlie’s mobile number and listened to the dull uninspiring voice on the message service for the umpteenth time. There was no point in leaving yet another message; he hadn’t bothered to pick up the last three. Why the bloody hell did people bother having mobile phones if they were always going to leave the bloody things switched off?!
In frustration, she slammed her own phone hard on the table, dislodging the battery cover in the process and sending it skipping over the tabletop and onto the floor. ‘Sod it!’ she hissed, bending to retrieve it and groaning at the stiffness in her back. She couldn’t be bothered to fiddle with it to reattach it to the body of the phone, damned thing.
A horrible sensation was unfurling in her gut, an instinct that something was about to go horribly wrong. Charlie was incommunicado and Rachel bloody Porter was back on the scene. Adding two and two together she was coming up with nothing other than four, no matter how hard she tried to make it five. If she was right and he was with Rachel, they might well have another dead body on their hands by the time she caught up with him and throttled him for his foolishness. She was too old for all this, and so was Charlie. He was a bloody idiot where that girl was concerned, always had been, always would be.
Delia just had to hope that Rachel wasn’t as big an idiot. If she was, then God help them all.
***
By the time Ratcliffe and Angie reached the hospital that evening, having been told that Frances had been woken, she had lost consciousness again.
According to her doctor she hadn’t said anything of note during the short time that she had been lucid. Ratcliffe’s only conversation had been with Peter Haines, Frances’s rather urbane yet supercilious husband, whose main concern remained the worry that his good name was being linked with something as tawdry as murder. Haines was adamant that he didn’t know where Stella had gone, but had reluctantly agreed to supply a photo of her, though he couldn’t guarantee a recent one.
He had only conceded to their request because Ratcliffe told him that his wife’s purge of The Limes had been so meticulous that they had failed to turn up even the remotest clue as to Stella’s whereabouts – or her intentions. Even with a photograph and the help of the press they would be clutching at straws. If a person as nondescript as Stella wanted to disappear, it wasn’t particularly difficult to make a thorough job of it.
Thwarted by Frances’s insentient state, Ratcliffe called it a day and sent Angie home. God knows they all needed a decent night’s sleep – this case was getting harder by the minute and he wanted to face it head on and fresh in the morning. He’d switched his phone to silent earlier as per hospital policy and hadn’t thought to check it until he got into his car.
He assumed that the message he’d received when it had vibrated in his pocket was from his wife, nagging to know when he would be home. It wasn’t. It was from Charlie Jones, informing him that he’d had to take Rachel back to London to see her doctor. As a man Ratcliffe saw that as a very good idea – the woman was apt to flake out all over the place in his experience, so some medical attention would be a fine thing. As a copper he saw it as yet more buggeration. He hadn’t quite finished with Ms Porter. Having her back in London was going to be an almighty pain in his arse. As if he didn’t have enough of those already.
***
Surprisingly there was a parking space right outside the flat. Instinctively Charlie reversed in and switched off the engine, only afterwards thinking that he should just drop her and drive away. Just the same as all those times long ago when he had stood on this very pavement, looking up at her windows with his courage failing and forcing him to leave things well alone. He had always driven away.
‘Are you going to come in?’ she asked, the tremor in her voice informing him that she was fervently hoping that he wouldn’t.
Out of stubbornness he didn’t even bother to reply, just got out of the van and followed her up the steps into the building.
Inside the flat he remained silent as the wraith of Lila Porter wrapped itself around him like a stale smell. The past felt almost tangible and he had the sensation that he was being ripped backwards through time. That nothing had materially changed in the place was weird; that Rachel had never bothered to change it was stranger still.
In resistance to his reaction he tried to put a positive spin on it and thought of Amy. How she would love this place. She would see it as a giant dressing-up box where she could pretend she was someone else entirely. She had always told him that her ultimate fantasy would be to travel back in time.
It seemed that her mother had achieved it.
Rachel hovered in the kitchen doorway, showing her reluctance to allow him further into her domain. ‘I can do coffee if you don’t mind it black.’
Charlie glanced around again, glimpsing her existence, finding it wanting and dusty and faded. ‘OK.’
He followed her into the kitchen and sat at the table under the window, keeping her in his line of sight, but maintaining a safe distance while he watched her fumble