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Back Before You Were Gone Save as PDF
Chapters (58)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Eight
  11. Nine
  12. Ten
  13. Eleven
  14. Twelve
  15. Thirteen
  16. Fourteen
  17. Fifteen
  18. Sixteen
  19. Seventeen
  20. Eighteen
  21. Nineteen
  22. Twenty
  23. Twenty-one
  24. Twenty-two
  25. Twenty-three
  26. Twenty-four
  27. Twenty-five
  28. Twenty-six
  29. Twenty-seven
  30. Twenty-eight
  31. Twenty-nine
  32. Thirty
  33. Thirty-one
  34. Thirty-two
  35. Thirty-three
  36. Thirty-four
  37. Thirty-five
  38. Thirty-six
  39. Thirty-seven
  40. Thirty-eight
  41. Thirty-nine
  42. Forty
  43. Forty-one
  44. Forty-two
  45. Forty-three
  46. Forty-four
  47. Forty-five
  48. Forty-six
  49. Forty-seven
  50. Forty-eight
  51. Forty-nine
  52. Fifty
  53. Fifty-one
  54. Acknowledgements
  55. An Eastbourne Murder Mystery
  56. Canelo Crime
  57. About the Author
  58. Also by Sheila Bugler

A wave of nausea washed through Emer. The room started to spin. Somehow, she managed to get back to her chair before her legs gave way. She put her head down between her knees, waiting for the worst of the dizziness to pass. As soon as she was able to, she looked up at Kitty.

‘And that was it,’ Emer said, ‘you started a new life and forgot all about me.’

‘I never forgot about you,’ Kitty said.

‘I know how hard this is to hear,’ Fiona said to Emer. ‘But your father wasn’t a good man. After we took Kitty in, after we’d begun to love her as if she was our own child, Eamon started blackmailing us. We paid him as much as we could for years, but he was so greedy… no matter how much we gave him, it was never enough. We should have gone to the police and told them everything, but we were scared. We were already in too deep. We knew if we told anyone what was going on, we’d lose Annie. And we couldn’t bear that.’

She stopped speaking and a silence descended. Emer could hear her own breathing, loud and fast. Seagulls screeching outside the window. People in the corridor outside the room. Normal people going about their normal lives. While in here, Emer’s whole world was falling apart.

‘The man your husband killed,’ she whispered.

Fiona looked at her, and didn’t look away when she said it. ‘Eamon.’

Her father was dead. Now she knew, with absolute certainty. And the knowledge was harder to bear than she’d imagined.

‘I thought finding you would make everything better,’ she said to Kitty. ‘But it hasn’t. It’s done the opposite.’

‘Isn’t it better to know the truth?’ Kitty said.

‘No.’

Until this moment, she hadn’t realised how important Robert was to her. She’d loved him and believed he’d loved her too. She’d talked to him and told him things about herself that she would never tell her mother. She’d trusted him. But now she knew the truth. Even if he hadn’t meant to kill Lucy, he had hidden her body so her family would never know what had happened to her. He was a manipulative, cold-blooded killer.

Forty-two

‘He’s here,’ Emer said, ‘in the UK. It’s my fault. I told him you were still alive. You said you were in the house earlier. You must have missed him by minutes. But I still can’t believe…’