Father Unknown (45 page)

Maybe that was why Lucy suggested she went travelling with her and Tom. They wanted to remind her she was still important to them. She blushed as she remembered she’d said back-packing wasn’t her style, and that she thought she might have a holiday in Italy with Ellen.

Ellen’s car was parked at the back of Askwith Court, and as the back door, which was only used by the residents and normally locked, was propped open, Daisy nipped in that way and up the stairs.

Ellen’s door was also propped open, so Daisy stepped into the tiny hall and called out.

Ellen came out of her bedroom and frowned when she saw it was Daisy. ‘What is it now?’ she snapped. ‘I’ve seen quite enough of you for one day.’

‘I had to come round. Mavis was still odd when I got her home,’ Daisy blurted out. ‘I thought I ought to warn you before you phone her that her granddaughter is quite angry with me and she might be nasty to you too.’

‘I don’t blame her for being angry with you,’ Ellen said crisply. ‘Now, clear off home. I’m going away for the weekend, and I’m in no mood for post-mortems.’

Daisy turned to leave, she was too demoralized for any further discussion. But as she turned, the propped-open door jangled something in her mind. People only did that when they were carrying a lot of things out. The door downstairs was also left open, so Ellen must have already put one load in her car and had returned for another.

No one took that much stuff for just a weekend. She was going somewhere for longer than that.

‘Go on then,’ Ellen said, her tone impatient now.

Daisy knew Ellen hadn’t been planning to go anywhere this weekend, otherwise she wouldn’t have said she would phone Mavis and make arrangements for taking her out to lunch the following day. So it had to be a spur-of-the moment thing. But why? Because she was rattled by Mavis thinking she was Josie?

‘Let me stay and help you down with your things,’ Daisy said, and without being asked brushed past Ellen and into her bedroom.

‘Get out now!’ Ellen shrieked at her.

The fright in that shriek, along with the mayhem in the bedroom, told Daisy everything. She was flitting, there were clothes and shoes strewn everywhere. Two half-packed cases lay on the bed, and drawers were gaping open.

‘You
are
Josie!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re running because you’ve been rumbled.’

‘You’re as daft as that old bat,’ Ellen retorted. ‘I’m going away for a weekend, that’s all.’

Daisy pushed her way past Ellen and into the lounge. Calling Mavis an old bat was further evidence to her – the real Ellen, from what she knew of her, would never call her that.

Ellen grabbed her arm as she reached the lounge and tried to pull her back. But it was too late, Daisy had already seen what was there. On the table was a large open cash-box, several bundles of banknotes beside it, and her passport.

‘I’m getting the police,’ Daisy said as she tried to shrug the woman off her.

‘Oh no you aren’t,’ Ellen yelled back. She kicked the door shut behind her and almost in the same movement, lunged at an object on the sideboard.

Daisy tried to get away as she saw what it was, a kind of gold wooden obelisk with figures carved on it. She had admired it on a previous visit to the flat and had been surprised by the heaviness of it when she picked it up. Ellen had said she’d bought it in a flea market – it was weighted with lead and she’d sprayed it with gold paint herself.

Now Ellen held it by the thin end and advanced on her. Daisy backed away but was hampered by a coffee table, then the settee. She had no doubt the woman fully intended to hit her with it, her eyes looked mad now, almost popping out of her head, and her lips were curled into a savage snarl.

Daisy went to leap up on to the settee and over the back, but she had forgotten how tight her dress was, and she toppled forward. She heard the blow coming as she tried to cover her head. There was a rush of air, a dull sound of wood against bone, then a sudden searing pain above her ear before she slipped into unconsciousness.

Chapter Twenty-three

‘Do we have to wait any longer for Daisy?’ Lucy asked plaintively. ‘It’s nearly eight o’clock and I’m starving.’

‘I can’t imagine where she’s got to,’ John said, looking worried. He looked up at the kitchen clock and then at the electric slow-cooker, still gently simmering. ‘She said she was coming home for supper. It’s not like her not to ring if she’s changed her plans.’

Tom came into the kitchen and lifted the lid of the slow-cooker, inhaling the smell of beef, garlic and herbs. ‘Let’s start without her,’ he suggested. ‘She won’t expect us to wait for her.’

‘It’s a shame she isn’t as good at time-keeping and getting her head together as she is at cooking and housekeeping,’ Lucy said with a grin. ‘I bet she’s even made us pudding too.’

‘Turn those spuds on then,’ John said, and frowned. Daisy might not be a good time-keeper when it came to getting to work, but she always let him know when she was going to be late. Besides, family meals were important to her. Just the careful way she had made this casserole and peeled the potatoes too, was evidence she wanted to be home with him and the twins tonight. She had been a bit mysterious this morning about where she was going though. Could something have happened to her?

Leaving the twins to set the table and look after the potatoes, John went up to Daisy’s bedroom to see if he could find her diary. She tended to scrawl telephone numbers in there and with luck there might be one for today.

His luck was in – the diary was by her bed, and for Saturday, 19 May there was a number marked Harriet. Taking the diary with him into his bedroom, he rang the number from there.

Five minutes later, after having his ears bashed by an irate woman who had called Daisy feckless, stupid and totally irresponsible, he had got the gist of what Daisy had been doing today. It also explained her excitement this morning.

John sat there for a few moments mulling over the strange story of Mavis Peters mistaking Ellen for her dead sister Josie. But where was Daisy now? She’d left Harriet’s house soon after five with a flea in her ear, so surely she’d have come straight back here?

It seemed very odd to him that Mavis Peters was still insisting Ellen was in fact Josie. Everything Daisy had told him about the woman led him to believe she was completely in command of all her faculties. And what if Daisy had gone to see Ellen again after leaving Mavis?

A cold chill ran down his spine. While common sense told him he was daft even momentarily to consider Mavis might have been right, he had a gut feeling all was not well with Daisy. He felt he had to ring someone else and get their opinion, and who better than Joel, who was the most rational man he knew?

Luckily Joel was home, he said he’d just walked in as the phone rang. John told him the story and fully expected that Joel would make some disparaging remark about Daisy and tell him to do nothing and wait for her to turn up.

But he didn’t. ‘Going to Ellen would have been the most logical thing for her to do,’ he said. ‘But I would have expected her to phone from there if she was going to be late.’

John said that she’d made supper for the whole family.

‘I’m going to drive over there,’ Joel said without a second’s hesitation. ‘Have you got the address?’

Ellen’s card was stuck in the front of the diary, so John read it out. ‘Do you think this old girl could be right then?’ he asked.

‘Well, let’s just say I care too much about Daisy not to take her seriously,’ Joel said.

As Joel was setting off from Acton, Josie was already half-way to Bristol, driving her silver Golf flat out and muttering the same thing over and over again to herself. ‘It’s all her fault. She should’ve kept her nose out.’

She didn’t know where she was going, this road was just the one she always used to take when things went wrong for her and she rushed to Ellen who always straightened her out. She frowned as she remembered there was no Ellen now, no one to take her in and care for her. But in thirteen years of posing as Ellen, thinking like her, acting like her, mostly she even believed she was her. Josie was dead and buried, with all the bad memories that went with her.

Yet each time a car’s headlights came into her rear-view mirror she felt frightened. Was she being chased? Was Daisy coming after her? Everything was so confusing.

When Daisy turned up at the shop with Mavis she thought she had handled it just as Ellen would have. There was one brief moment of blind panic, but she controlled it and she knew she had convinced Daisy that Mavis was mistaken.

Yet on the way home after closing the shop, she suddenly had a panic attack. What if Mavis stuck by her story and Daisy’s family called the police to investigate? All at once she was trembling all over with fear and apprehension, and making a run for it while she still could seemed the only thing to do.

She had packed one suitcase and put it in her car, then all at once Daisy was there at her door. Up till then Josie had been frightened, but she had a plan and felt she was in control. She was off to the airport to catch the first plane out to Spain or Italy. She had enough cash to live for several months, she would change her name, and start all over again.

Then suddenly Daisy was calling her Josie, saying she was going to call the police. She just had to stop her, and hitting her with that obelisk was the only way.

From then on it was all hazy. She could remember fragments, the girl’s blood on the settee, getting the tow-rope to tie her hands and feet. But it didn’t seem real, more like memories of a nightmare. Yet she could remember very clearly packing her money, passport and jewellery into her vanity case, and going into the bathroom and looking at it for one last time.

She had loved that bathroom. Every time she slid down into a scented bubble-bath she would think of how it had been when she was a girl and had to use the tin bath in the kitchen. The rough patches rubbed against her skin and a draught came under the kitchen door and nearly cut her in half. That image had never left her.

She had many luxurious baths in beautiful hotels later, but almost all of them were spoiled by a man wanting to have sex with her. When she moved into Askwith Court and had her own pretty pink bath, she vowed no man would ever use it. The big mirrors reflected only her, and the soap and the fluffy towels only ever touched her skin. She began to feel clean at last.

She had sobbed as she looked at it, hating Daisy for forcing her to leave it. The whole flat had been a sanctuary, every piece of furniture, every ornament, picture, utensil and cushion chosen by her alone. She’d been happy there for the first time in her life, with no memories of the past, no voices telling her she was no good. She was reborn as the person she’d always wanted to be. Then Daisy came along, like a living ghost of Ellen, and ruined everything.

She could remember locking the front door as she left, and carrying the last two cases down the stairs. It was dusk then, and she hoped none of her neighbours would see her drive out.

If she could recall some things so well, why hadn’t she turned off the M4 into the airport? Where was she going now?

The blue signs on the motorway were very familiar with place-names like Reading and Swindon that had once meant she was getting closer to Ellen with every mile. Yet Ellen had let her down in the end too.

All at once an old memory of the last time she made this same journey began coming back to her. She tried to suppress it, and the events which led up to it, but she couldn’t.

It was a hot sultry evening in the summer of ‘78 and she was at a party somewhere in West London, close to the river. She had just finished filming, six weeks of tacky soft porn for the German market. She was on a natural high that night, for she’d made enough money to get a better place to live, take a holiday and have some fun. She had already had a lot to drink when a man offered her a line of coke. It was good, and she danced, chatted and laughed, having the time of her life.

Much later, the man came back to her and said he was off with his friend to score, and if she wanted some too, she could go with them. She
had
wanted more coke, but she had no money on her. The man said that was no problem, they could stop off at her place to get some, and once they’d scored she could get a taxi back to the party as they were going on somewhere else.

They gave her another couple of lines as they drove to her place in Shepherd’s Bush. She remembered them teasing her as they got out of the car, saying she must have fallen on hard times to live in such a dump. She told them it was only temporary, and that she’d just had a big payout. It was true too, she had nearly a thousand pounds up in that hideous room.

Then suddenly everything turned nasty. As soon as the men were in her room, one of them punched her and demanded to know where her money was. She tried telling them she had been lying and that all she had was about thirty pounds, but it did no good. While one of them held her down with a knife at her throat, the other ransacked the room until he found the money.

They packed up everything she had of value, her jewellery, leather and fur coats, even her stereo. Then they raped her in turn, laughing as they did it. They punched her to the floor and the bigger one pissed all over her as she lay there crying, then they left.

Ellen was the only person she could run to.

The sun was coming up as she drove out of London, crying with the pains of her injuries, stinking of those evil men. They had taken every penny she had, even her cheque-book and bank card. Everything she had left in the world was thrown in the back of the car, but she even had to leave her last valuable, her wristwatch, in a garage in exchange for petrol.

Josie could see Ellen now in her mind’s eye, as she opened her front door. She looked innocent and clean in one of those white cotton nightdresses with ruffles, her bare arms and legs a deep golden-brown.

Yet that time there was no welcoming hug, no concerned words that Josie had a black eye. Ellen just took one look at her sister and turned away, her lips pursed in disgust.