The First Cut (36 page)

‘Shall we go in?’ he asked. She nodded and he pushed open the door of Connie’s room.

Connie was propped up in a semi-sitting position, her eyes closed. She looked tiny in the huge bed, her bony fingers clutching the bed sheets. From the centre of her neck a tracheotomy tube snaked away to a machine by the side of her bed, allowing her to breathe without using her mouth or nose. Connie’s breath made a rasping rattle in her throat in the quiet room. A cannula connected the back of her hand to the IV drip by the head of the bed.

‘Her latest stroke affected her breathing,’ Adam said, moving round to the far side of the bed and pulling up a chair.

The nurse dragged another chair from by the door towards the head of the bed, for Nicky to sit on. She stayed standing. This was not a conversation to sit down for. ‘She has difficulty talking so you’ll need to be quite close,’ the nurse said. Her voice made Connie open her eyes. ‘If you have any problems, just ring the bell.’ She pointed to the emergency button hanging from the bedframe and left the room.

The two women stared at each other in silence.

‘What did you want to see me about?’

‘I want to talk to you.’ Her voice rattled in her throat.

Nicky snorted. ‘I can’t absolve you of your sins.’ Connie tried to lift her head off the pillow but she had lost the strength to do it; the tendons stood proud in her neck as she strained. ‘Greg said something when we were in that plane.’ Connie tried to gulp, her hand fluttering to her throat, the IV tube swaying. ‘He was screaming at Lawrence that a woman had phoned the hit man for him.’ Connie began to jerk in her bed, her shoulders heaving in discomfort. Nicky folded her arms. ‘It was you, wasn’t it, Connie?
You
gave the order for me to be killed.’

A fat tear brimmed and fell down a rivulet in Connie’s cheek. Adam sat down on the chair by the bed and leaned over his aunt. ‘Why, Connie? Why did you do that?’

Her voice when it came was a distorted and scratchy whisper. ‘I loved my brother. You and he were the only family I had. I would have done anything for him.’

Nicky felt the anger blooming inside. ‘I don’t believe you. One moment you’re telling Adam to save me while the next moment you’re trying to get me killed.’

A sound came from Connie that might have been a sob. The machine made a beeping noise and then her rattling breath came back. ‘Contradictions make a life.’ Her voice faded away and she had to use more effort to make it audible. ‘Lawrence was shattered when Cathy died; revenge for her death became his driving passion. It was what he lived for. It gave his life meaning.’

‘I don’t have to listen to this justification,’ Nicky snapped. ‘You dragged me all the way out here to this hospital to tell me this? I’d worked it out on my own. What’s really going on?’

‘I wanted him to have a reason to live, so I helped him, even though I knew it was wrong . . . At the end of your life, you look back, you start to see how well you’ve lived it. Well, my life has been a lie—’

‘I read Cathy’s diary. I found what was under the lawn.’ Adam’s head jerked up towards her. Connie’s breath was shallow and panicky, her eyes full of fear.

‘What’s under the lawn?’ Adam was staring at Nicky while his aunt moaned beneath them.

Nicky stared down at Connie. ‘It’s a photo of Greg. Let’s hear it from you, Connie: why is Greg a secret worth digging up a generation later?’

Connie’s chestnut hair twisted and tangled round itself as she thrashed her head to and fro on the pillow. She gulped and gasped for air through the tube in her throat. When she could talk again her voice was a whisper and they both had to lean close to hear her. ‘She shoved her affair in Lawrence’s face, mooning around Hayersleigh with a man half her age, shaming my brother, causing him pain.’

Nicky shook her head. ‘No, Connie! You want confessions, you want to be released from your suffering? You’re talking about Lawrence but I’m asking about
you
. Tell me what you
really
felt! You hated Cathy, didn’t you? Had she stolen your lover? Is that it?’

A line of tears was flowing out of Connie’s damaged eye now, draining away into the pillow. ‘No . . . no.’ Connie plucked at the bed sheets with her ineffectual hands, her back arching off the mattress as some spasm gripped her.

‘You’re pathetic. You want to unburden yourself before you die, and you’re lying even now!’

Connie went rigid for a moment and her mouth contorted into a grimace.

‘I’m getting the doctor,’ Adam said but Connie managed to hold up her hand and collapsed down, a sagging mess in the sheets.

‘You loathed Cathy, didn’t you? She had a husband and baby and a young lover, and you had nothing, was that it? You did this because you were jealous?’

Connie turned her head to stare at Nicky and her hard, unyielding eyes made Nicky lean back. She could see the rage pulsing beneath the papery skin on her face. ‘You – women like you—’

‘Women like me?’

Connie’s anger had given her the energy to rally. ‘You think you know about passion, can understand rejection, but you have no idea.’ The endless rasp in, rattle out of every breath clung to the room. ‘Yes, I hated Cathy. I was jealous of all the things she so effortlessly had that I had never found. I craved her ability to be loved. I was forty. I’d squandered my beauty and my chances—’

‘That’s not true,’ Adam said.

But Connie, with great effort, carried on. ‘I was brittle and ageing and had nobody, doing a job which was about watching people connect and have fun, and deep down I was alone. You think you know about loneliness, Nicky? Try it for decades and see how it fits. Feel that crushing weight on your soul. Cathy rubbed it in and it made me so mad. These feelings of jealousy and hate are all-consuming at the time. I had to punish her . . .’ Connie tailed off as exhaustion overwhelmed her.

Cathy’s searing words on the page from a generation ago came back to Nicky.
The depths of what I’ve got that you’ll never have
 . . .

Connie started to moan again. The anger was spent now, fear contorting her features instead. Her voice was a whisper. ‘They were going to fly to France, so I damaged the fuel line. I never imagined that Greg would survive and she would die. I had destroyed the life of the brother I loved. I couldn’t tell Lawrence what I had done. It was my burden to carry that secret alone.’ Her tears were back now, flowing silently into the cotton beneath her. ‘His thirst for revenge gave him a kind of peace, and my guilt meant I went along with it to ease his suffering.’

Nicky stared in disbelief at the pathetic bundle of bones in the hospital bed. ‘Your brother lived his last twenty years carrying out a revenge on the wrong person?’ Connie’s breath was becoming shallower; she grabbed the tracheotomy tube and pushed it tighter to her throat, willing it to give her the air she needed. ‘And you nurtured that lie, allowed it to flourish, to save yourself?’ Connie stretched her neck, strained to get it higher, as if she was drowning in a rising ride. Her eyes were wide with terror.

Adam stood up so suddenly the chair banged back on the floor. ‘I lost my parents because of you!’

Connie was trying to say something, clawing at the tube in her neck, her skinny legs thrashing under the bedcovers. The veins in her neck stood proud, bulging and straining for oxygen and life. They were a horrid tableau: the two of them staring open-mouthed at the struggling figure in front of them. Connie’s eyes were white circles of fear in her face as she stared at Nicky, her dry mouth working but incapable of speech. Nicky looked down at her. She saw a woman stricken by terror and remorse, a woman whose passions from long ago had unleashed a sequence of events that had cast Nicky into a hell on earth.

‘You’re asking for my forgiveness but it’s not mine to give. It’s the others, whose lives you’ve taken, that you must ask forgiveness from.’

Connie’s thrashing intensified as every sinew in her body strained to cling onto life for a few more seconds.

‘Only God can judge you, Connie. Good luck with that.’ Nicky turned her back and headed for the door.

Adam cried out in agony as Connie went into cardiac arrest. He grabbed the emergency call button and the buzz of the alarm exploded in the room as the door sucked itself closed behind her. She walked away down the corridor while an untidy line of nurses and doctors ran past her to force Connie back to life.

N
icky bent down in front of the grave and arranged the flowers in the pot. A weak sun shone through the bare branches of the large trees that dotted the cemetery, crunchy autumn leaves swirled in the light eddies. It was so peaceful here. It was a good place to end up, she thought, all things considered. She was trying to be positive, but it wasn’t really working. It had all been too soon, so desperately early in the course of a life. She leaned forward and brushed some dust from the grooves of the letter F. ‘For ever in our hearts’ it said. She stood back but she didn’t cry. Not this time.

‘Revenge is cleansing,’ Lawrence had said before he’d thrown himself out, but Lawrence had been wrong. Resolution was what had helped; getting answers was the salve to the nightmare that had started all those years ago on a hot night in Tangiers, that had carried on through that evening she wrestled with Grace’s body in the lake, to her capture at Hayersleigh and the plane ride to hell.

It was cool up here on the hill. Nicky leaned over and caressed the top edge of the gravestone: Grace Peterson, 1976–2006.

She felt a hand close over her own and squeeze. ‘You ready?’ Greg asked.

She nodded. He handed her a trowel. His leg was still in plaster – he had broken it when landing the plane – and he had difficulty moving, so she bent over and dug a hole in the soft grass. He handed her Grace’s wedding ring and she held it in her palm for a minute, watching the light bounce off its smooth edges, before she buried it in the soil. She stood as Greg gently trod on the dirt to fix it all together again. She reached out for his hand and felt his warmth radiate back to her.

Greg turned to her and gave her a weak smile. He had a scar on his forehead now, still purple but beginning to fade. In some ways he had aged terribly in the last two months, but in others the weight had lifted from him and even with his injuries and his crutches he seemed years younger than she had ever known him. He was going to counselling and the nightmares had stopped. His sleep was free of the terrors that had dogged him most of his adult life.

Nicky stood still and looked at him for a moment. He was not perfect; he had made mistakes. But she understood that she too had made bad choices and stupid decisions, and that he was perfect for her. They turned away and walked slowly up the hill towards the cemetery gates, Greg’s crutches tapping out a plaintive note on the concrete path. The road curved away in front of them. Nicky didn’t know where it led, but she was happy to be on the journey with him.

I would like to thank the great team at Hodder for all their help on this book and for their enthusiasm, insight and guidance: Carolyn Mays, my editor, Francesca Best, Jaime Frost and Clare Parkinson. A big thank you also to my agent, Peter Straus, and to my family.