Poor Leah.

Poor Marie.

Poor Carly.

They’d never told about the things that took place before the abduction. The argument. The way Carly had been so fixated on a boy whose name she couldn’t recall that she’d been careless with her sisters’ feelings. Her sisters’ safety.

She could still feel it. The sun on her skin. See the whites of the twins’ school socks. The blackness of the scurrying beetle. Inconsequential details she shared with the ghost writer. She never shared that Leah hadn’t shut the gate properly. Carly knew Leah blamed herself too.

Carly slotted her car into a space outside her flat and rummaged in her bag for her mobile. Leah should be home by now and she wanted to check she was okay. She wanted to ask whether Leah had any second thoughts about turning down the interview. Perhaps Marie was right. It might be cathartic to share it all, a confession of sorts. Perhaps then they might be left alone, for every year there would be an anniversary, journalists picking over the carcass of their past. If there was nothing left to tell, the meat stripped bare, there’d be no truth left then for them to fight over, would there? And the money? Blood money, but Carly knew that Leah and George were struggling and she hated to think of Archie going without. Her nephew was the light of her life. Sometimes it was more than she could bear that Leah had brought him into a world that was heartless and cruel.

Her fingers skimmed over a tube of Polos, her purse, a packet of tissues but not her phone.

Carly sighed as she remembered she’d been bidding on eBay when Leah had arrived. She’d tossed her mobile onto Marie’s worktop so she could hug her sister. She hadn’t picked it back up. She restarted the car, a blast of cold air shot from the vents before blowing hot once more, and she pulled back onto the main road. Carly thought it might be a good thing that she was returning to Marie’s alone. A chance to talk. A new angle. Carly mulled this over. She’d make Marie tell her exactly what she had in mind.

Chapter Forty-Nine

Marie

One week ago

It was less than half an hour after Leah and Carly had left that Marie stripped off her top that was dripping with perspiration. She was instantly freezing in her grubby once-white camisole but she knew to ride it out. It wouldn’t be long until heat swept through her body once more. A few months ago she had tried to detox herself. Had shut herself in her bedroom with a bucket for vomit and a bucket for the waste that would spew from her body like poison. Her skin crawled and her veins burned and she hadn’t been able to cope. She’d staggered down the street in her pyjamas, desperate for the hit, which she took in the overgrown parking space behind the pizza parlour with the broken glass and the rat that sauntered out from behind a skip, eyeing her as though she was the vermin.