Shallow Be Thy Grave (19 page)

 “You don’t know the whole story,” said Lily. “She was innocent, before I kidnapped her.”

Madame Beaumont smiled for the first time since Lily had met her. “You kidnapped your own sister?”

“Half-sister. My dad left when I was baby. I tried to trace him but he refused to have any contact with me. Me and Jo, we followed him, found out he had a new family.” Lily picked at the skin on her thumb, pinpricks of blood appeared by the side of her nail. “And yeah, we kidnapped Fiona.”

Madame Beaumont stared at Lily.

Lily stood up. “I wanted to teach him a lesson about how it feels when you don’t know where your family is.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“She was fifteen. Totally pissed off,” Lily couldn’t help a small smile at the memory. “Specially when she found out her dad had lied to her. He’d never told her about me, or my mum. It was her idea to demand a ransom.”

“A ransom?”

“Money. You know, to get her back.”

“Did he pay?”

“He did actually. But I gave him the money back. Couldn’t live with the guilt.”

Madame Beaumont put back her head and laughed. Really laughed. It was infectious. Lily felt herself grinning. She fought with her facial muscles. This was no time for laughter.

“I think you are very brave,” said Madame Beaumont.

Lily sat back down on the bed with a bump. Disappointment that her sister wasn’t here flooded her. The last thing she felt was brave. She wanted to hear more on this radical theory. “Brave?”

“What was your alternative? To remain a secret? This has been the experience of women for too long. That we hide ourselves as people to make ourselves acceptable as wives, mothers, daughters, whatever. It is good for a woman to say to the world, I exist, take notice, I am.”

Lily liked this alternative viewpoint. It was so much more appealing than the way the voices in her head portrayed her role in Fiona’s life. She turned to the French woman. “Nothing good came of it.  It all got messed up. And where the fuck is Fiona?”

Madame Beaumont didn’t answer. She got to her feet and pulled open the top drawer in a small cabinet next to the bed. Lily saw it was filled with letters. Madame Beaumont yelled something in French. She took the drawer out and threw it upside down on the bed. Lily thought she recognised the word ‘merde’ in among the woman’s rantings. Madame Beaumont’s cheeks were bright red. She was shouting at someone who wasn’t in the room - that much was clear. She kicked at the bed, pulled the drawer off the top of the letters and threw it against the wall. She pulled one of the letters out of its envelope and sank down on the bed to read it. She read the first page and the last. When she looked up at Lily tears were streaming down her face. “I always thought, no I must be imagining it, because I never find a letter. You know about the French letter?”

Another time, another place and Lily might have laughed.

“The Frenchman, this is his biggest accomplishment. To write the love letter.”

She threw the letter in her hand onto the bed, where it skimmed across the top of the others.  Lily recognised her sister’s handwriting on a few of them and plucked at the nearest. Madame Beaumont was doing the same with the other set, the ones written in a masculine script. “He wrote to her in English.”

She sounded more pissed off about his choice of language, than the fact he was writing love letters to a teenager.

Lily read the opening line of the letter she’d picked up. It was written on rose pink writing paper. ‘Thank you for your letter,’ she read. An inauspicious start - sounded like the beginning of a Christmas thank you. It soon deteriorated. ‘I can’t believe you love me like you say you do. I love the necklace. I’ll wear it always next to my heart and thinking of you.’

Lily tossed the letter aside. She couldn’t bear to read the neediness in her sister’s letters or her diaries. Her sister hadn’t been needy when she first met her. Lily had created that neediness by destroying Fiona’s relationship - not only with her father but also with her first love, Stuart. Lily felt a surge of anger towards Stuart. What had he been doing? Seducing Lily when Fiona clearly loved him. Perhaps this was all his fault.

Lily went through to the small kitchenette, which jutted off from the main room. She rubbed her face and reminded herself she had to keep focused. She was here to find Fiona, not to judge her, and not to beat herself up about the past. She straightened her shoulders and looked around the tiny space. She found a dozen bottles of wine stored in a rack along with two bottles of champagne and a box of chocolates in the fridge. Strawberries that had seen better days languished in the plastic drawer at the bottom, but nothing that proved or disproved whether Fiona had been there recently. Like in the past week. In one of the top cupboards Lily found the trademark jar of Marmite, almost empty, and on the inside of the door to the cupboard that housed tea-bags, a jar of coffee, two mugs, two champagne flutes and a half dozen small plates, was a post it note. ‘I love you, love you, love you,’ in Fiona’s handwriting.

Lily closed the cupboard doors and went back through to the bedroom. She glanced at the clock on the radio alarm next to the bed. It was almost six and she felt herself start at how quickly the time in the flat had passed. They must have been there over thirty minutes. It was a place where you sensed the hours took on a different meaning, although the alarm clock was a sign that time pressed at the windows. She’d better get a move on. “Er, Madame Beaumont?”

Madame Beaumont sat cross-legged on the bed surrounded by a sea of letters, all torn from their envelopes. She looked up from the letter in her hand, her expression vacant, like she’d almost forgotten Lily was there.

“Sian.”

“What?”

“Please, call me Sian.”

“What are you going do?” asked Lily.

“I’m going to kill him,” she said. She didn’t sound like she was joking.

“I’ve got to go,” said Lily. “I promised I’d be back at six.”

She was anxious to leave, couldn’t believe how such a posh place could feel so sordid. She hated the idea of Fiona as an old man’s mistress. Hated the bed that took up all the space in the room and forced her to think of what they did here. A thought occurred to her. “Is there anything under the pillows?”

She moved around the side of the bed to check. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for - another diary, Fiona’s pyjamas, perhaps just any concrete sign of her sister. As she ran her hand under the pillows they heard a key in the door. Lily stared in horror at Sian. Sian didn’t look as horrified. In fact, the French woman seemed to square her shoulders, ready for battle. Lily fully expected Monsieur Beaumont to freak out the minute he saw his wife on the bed, reading his love letters to their teenage au pair, and she felt alarmed at the idea of being caught between them.

She was already in a crouched position, by the side of the double bed and so it seemed entirely natural to fall to the floor and roll under the bed.  It wasn’t like there was any time to think things through. The door was already opening. Lily prayed for the carpet, thick as it was, to somehow muffle her, swallow her whole. Absorb her breathing, her presence. She heard Sian say something in French, probably something along the lines of, ‘you lying cheating bastard.’

A man’s voice, also speaking in French and she wondered if that was why she didn’t recognise it. He didn’t sound as deep and controlled as when she met him this morning. Probably because he knew his wife was about to cut his balls off. Lily wondered whether she shouldn’t come out of her hiding place, give Sian some moral support. She saw a pair of trainers from her position under the bed, and wondered for a moment what had possessed Monsieur Beaumont to wear them. They weren’t his style at all. Far removed from the tailored suit she’d last seen him in. But then perhaps this was what he wore for his assignations with teenagers.

The argument started in earnest, and she wasn’t in the least surprised when she heard the sound of a slap. She’d been expecting that. Madame Beaumont didn’t look like the sort that would be backward at coming forward once confronted by her husband. Lily hoped she’d give him another one - one from her. Then she heard Sian’s voice sounding like it was being muffled, almost as if a hand was being placed over her mouth and Lily felt alarm flood her body. Lily froze. Was this how people were when they were married? She’d never been up close in a marriage. Never had the chance to observe wedded bliss of any kind, but she could tell that a fight had broken out above her, the bed was pulsating. The man seemed to be saying the same words over and over. Lily wondered whether it was some kind of sex talk. ‘You know you love it,’ kind of thing. ‘Please God, let them not be having rough sex now,’ she thought. Maybe they were one of those couples that thrived on these situations. She’d heard of it before. Jealousy and anger and all those emotions Lily would run miles to avoid - some people used them as a basis for sexual excitement.

Lily winced as the pounding on the bed started to get rhythmic, like Sian was being banged into the pillows.  Lily seized her moment and crept towards the edge of the bed. All she could hear was grunting, panting. She wondered if she could crawl out on her hands and knees and make it to the door. No way was she prepared to listen to the man who’d been having an affair with her sister, make this kind of love to his wife. No fecking way.

She peered out under the edge of the bed. The door was closed. One trainered foot was on the floor. Nike. Just do it, Lily thought, and then forced the random thought from her mind.  Focus. Sian knew she was under here, thought a voice inside Lily’s head. Surely, she wouldn’t want to have sex with her husband while she knew Lily was under the bed? A dozen thoughts crowded her brain, making her wince. She’d heard about voyeurism. There were some strange folk out there. She knew that for a fact.

Lily crawled out a little further, so that her head stuck out from under the bed. The trainered foot was wearing jeans. That also didn’t seem like the Monsieur Beaumont she’d met earlier today. She pulled her head back in, managed to crawl backwards on her elbows, under the bed and out the other side, the side furthest away from the door. She figured that if Monsieur Beaumont went ape shit when he saw her, she would at least have the bed between them. Perhaps she could throw herself out of the window, if the worst came to the very worst. She took a deep breath and steeled herself for confrontation.

Lily pulled herself along the floor on her belly until she was free of the base of the bed. She got herself onto her hands and knees and looked up. The picture she saw wasn’t anything like the picture she’d been expecting to see. The face above the bed wasn’t Monsieur Beaumont’s and it wasn’t engaged in passionate (if a bit rough for Lily’s tastes) sex. Her brain took a couple of nano seconds to reprocess the information her eyes were sending to it.

It was a face she had never seen before, with a kind of scarf tied round the lower half, like a cowboy, and it was connected to a body that had its arms around Madame Beaumont’s neck. Lily knew immediately that this wasn’t some sado-masochistic sex session because Sian’s face had turned a weird colour, kind of purple and blue. The man must have sensed Lily staring at him, because he turned his face towards her, started when he saw her, pushed himself up off Sian and into an upright position. Lily jumped to her feet, faced him across the double bed and roared with rage. There was no other word for it. All the emotions she’d been struggling with for the last few days rose up like a sea serpent and she roared at him, madder than the maddest thing.

It must have been effective, she must have scared the pants off him, crazy lady in lopsided headscarf, because the man turned and fled from the room. Lily stared after him for a split second, until the adrenaline release fired her into action. She vaulted over the bed and ran to the door and looked out. The corridor was empty. Where had he gone? He must be fast. She ran towards the lift, but he couldn’t possibly have called the lift and got in it in the time. The doors to the fire escape were next to the lift. Maybe he’d gone through there. She legged it down the corridor, pushed open the fire doors and peered into the stairwell. She thought she heard the sound of a door closing but didn’t see anything. She couldn’t tell if the sound had come from above or below. She stood in silence for a moment, straining to hear anything that would tell her which way the intruder had gone. She heard nothing. Her thoughts turned to the picture of Sian’s purple face, the bulging veins in her neck.

Lily left the stairwell and sprinted back to Apartment 411. She closed the door behind her and dragged the privacy bolt across. She turned and put her back to the door, leaned against it for support and remembered to breathe. She forgot all about the man as her eyes fell onto Sian, lying on the bed, motionless - her face less blue than it had been but still discoloured. Lily went over to her and shook her gently but Sian didn’t move. Her eyes were opened but unfocused, bloodshot. “Sian, Sian?”

Lily’s voice got louder. She put her hands on Sian’s shoulders and started shaking her but Sian didn’t respond. Lily felt for a pulse, like she’d seen them do in movies, but she felt nothing.

“Oh my fucking God, she’s dead,” said Lily, her voice low and desperate. How was she going to explain this one to anyone? She didn’t fancy her chances with the French police. What was it Andy said? Chances were the last person to see someone alive was the murderer. Oh sweet Jesus.. She tried to unwrap the headscarf that had slipped across her face as she’d chased after the intruder. It had tied itself in knots and she almost strangled herself as she finally managed to pull it from her head.

She laid the scarf on the bed and the thought crossed her mind that she should wipe all her fingerprints from the apartment. She wasn’t sure how you went about this. Did you need polish and a duster? Water and a J-cloth? Or would rubbing with an overpriced silk scarf suffice? As she had none of the former and one of the latter, she picked up the scarf, wrapped it round her fingers and began a sweep of the apartment.  She crossed the room to the kitchenette, remembering opening all the cupboard doors. She began dusting them down like she was some kind of bonkers cleaning lady, the adrenaline in her stomach making her feel sick. She daren’t look at Sian. She’d never seen a dead body before.