her glass delicately on the low table in front of us, adjusted her sunglasses, and flicked both palms up in a defensive gesture. “There’s a saying about not shooting the messenger.”
“I’m a lousy shot.” It was supposed to put her at her ease. She responded with an imperious look that would take me years to perfect. “Sorry, please carry on.”
“A rumour, nothing more, and definitely not the sort of thing for public consumption,” she warned, “but Scarlet suspected Nate was the one having an affair.”
“Nate?”
She flashed a worldly look. I felt like a child who’d found out about the birds and the bees – apt in the circumstances. Was this why he didn’t want to show the police the note his wife had left? Was this why he didn’t pursue my sister about her unscheduled stay in a London hotel?
I quickly regrouped. “You say she was suspicious, but she had no evidence.”
“Apart from the bracelet he gave her at Christmas.”
I frowned in confusion.
“Scarlet reckoned it was a guilt gift.”
“Right,” I said, scrabbling to process what I was hearing, “So Scarlet had had suspicions for a while?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And it made her unhappy?”
“Of course.”
“Enough to make her lose concentration on a bright summer day, enough to kill herself and to hell with whoever was driving on the opposite side of the road?”
“Good God, Molly, I really don’t know anything for certain.”
“Well, what are you sure about?” I’d briefly lost volume control. I coughed, flicked Fliss an apologetic smile.
“She spent most of last year moping about Nate,” Fliss continued smoothly, “but then, this year, she was happy. Almost too happy.”
“How can you be too happy?”
“Giddy then.”
Giddy was not a word I’d use to describe my sister. And then it dawned on me. “Like she was having an affair as payback?”
“I’ll be honest, I thought she’d met someone after we got back from holiday in Jamaica in February. She looked different. Radiant. I think I teased her about having a fling.”
“Which she denied?”
“Fervently.”
I cast my mind back. I didn’t remember seeing much of Scarlet at the time. “Then what?”
“I didn’t see her for a few months until we threw a party for Samuel’s birthday at the beginning of June. Scarlet came, and she looked absolutely dreadful. Frankly, I was worried about her. She stayed on afterwards and I asked what was wrong.” She gave me a long appraising look.
Was this what it was all about? Two people fucking other people and one getting upset enough to —No, no, no. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
My sister had only three boyfriends, tops, before meeting Nate, one of which never went beyond first base. And yes, we talked about things like that. When I ordered a hunky strip-a-gram for her hen night, she almost passed out. She was no prude, but she exuded decency and doing stuff by the book, in every aspect of her life. There had to be more to it. What Fliss described was like a cheap scene played out in a soap in order to push up ratings.
Fliss glanced down at her perfectly manicured nails, examined them and looked at me straight. “I got the impression Scarlet was in a jam. She didn’t want anyone to know, Louis included, but she asked if she could borrow some money. Quite a lot, in fact.”
I felt the air punch out of me. Scarlet was always so careful. She didn’t earn a fortune, but Nate’s job paid well, and they were doing fine —or so I’d thought. “For what?”
“She didn’t say.”
“How much?”
“Twenty-five thousand pounds.”
“And you lent it?” I was aghast. What the hell would Scarlet need that kind of money for? Ironic, really, considering I’d had a go at her for accepting a free handout from Mum and Dad to buy their house in Cheltenham.
“I would have but, ten days later, she changed her mind. Said she’d found another way.”
A way that meant money would never be a problem again? My mind careered into overdrive. “How did she seem when she told you everything was okay?”
“Relieved. Good. Her mood lifted. She seemed better.”
Isn’t that how people who are about to commit suicide behave when they finally make up their minds?
It seemed important to understand the chronology. I had to understand. Mentally, I built a timeline of Scarlet’s last weeks and months on earth. By my estimation, Scarlet’s change of mind occurred after her trip to London. Fliss crashed through my thoughts.
“How’s Zach taken the news?”
“Like Zach takes any news, as if he’s impervious.”
She tilted her chin. “Scarlet often talked about him, more so lately. I think she worried he was about to relapse.”
It would be a miracle if Scarlet’s death didn’t tip him over the edge. I reflected on my visit to my brother yesterday. Subdued, a little odd, but no more weird than usual, yet there had been something. I’d neither forgotten his opening question: What’s she done? Nor that sense he knew something I didn’t.
Fliss angled her face at the sun, a light warm breeze lifting her long hair. “He was quite twitchy the last time she visited.”
“When was this?”
Fliss frowned in concentration. “Must have been shortly before she told me she no longer needed the cash.”
Fear tripped through me. That didn’t fit with what Zach had told me. Which meant one of them was lying, and I didn’t think it was Fliss Fiander.
Dazed, I wondered what twenty-five thousand pounds would have bought my sister; freedom from her adulterous husband, or something else? And how did Charlie Binns figure? If he figured at all in this unravelling mess. As for Zach, was his inexplicable memory loss the residue of a druggie past, or because he was deliberately hiding something from me?
I climbed into my car and called the grotty hotel in which Scarlet had stayed. My enquiry was greeted with a yawned,
