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I brought his pint back to the table. I’d bought myself a Diet Coke. There was a flask of vodka in my handbag. I rooted around and dug it out. Amazing Graham, the landlord, knew I couldn’t afford to pay pub prices for spirits and that I brought my own with me; he turned a blind eye. Men of a certain age are generally kind to me because they still appreciate a pretty face but are terrified of very young pretty faces. Young women now are aware and demanding. They don’t accept flirtatious favours – all power to them, they don’t have to, that’s progress – but I still take what’s on offer. I will until I have the agency to tell creeps to fuck off. When I say agency, I mean money.

I poured a healthy measure of vodka into my Diet Coke and thought about Emma. ‘She doesn’t trust you, Mattie, and honestly, she’s right not to, isn’t she? I mean, you’re not in love with her.’ Worth underlining, I felt. I set my face in an expression of concern. ‘Well, you have no choice in the matter. You’ll have to sign the prenup to prove to her how trustworthy you are, or else she might not even go through with the marriage.’

‘No, shit, no. That won’t work. She’s shown me a draft. If I sign it, we have to be married for five years before I see any decent money. I’m not doing five years.’

I was glad to hear his revulsion at that idea. I touched his arm and murmured soothingly, ‘No, of course not. I’d hate that too. But I’m sure it won’t come to that. I’ve an idea. With all this evidence we’re gathering, we can change tack.’

‘Change tack how?’

‘You don’t have to divorce her on grounds of unreasonable behaviour. We can get her committed.’

The word spilt across the little table. The old boys on the table next to ours were playing dominoes; was it my imagination or did they pause? Lean our way? I put my head closer to Mattie’s.

‘Committed? Like in an asylum?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure that’s what they call them nowadays. That’s such an awful word. So loaded. I just mean we could get her put under observation or something. Get her help if she’s drinking too much and behaving destructively because of it. Same tactic, we’re just looking for a slightly different outcome.’

‘She doesn’t need help.’

‘But we agreed, we’re going to make it look as though she does. Right? It’s already happening. We don’t need to give that more thought.’ I had to keep him moving along. ‘We’ve been through this. You’re engaged to her. She wants a prenup. You’re marrying her for her money; if there’s a prenup, you won’t get any money when you divorce her, but you have to sign the prenup if you want her to marry you, because she thinks you’re marrying her for her money. Is this really so hard to follow?’ I was steamrolling him. Of course I was. He has a tendency to look back, check over his shoulder. It’s not useful and it’s not sexy either, come to that. I pushed on. ‘So, you sign, you marry her, and when she starts to appear unstable, you can get power of attorney. Then you will be in charge of her money and we can go back to plan A, filtering off cash. It will be easy, as you’ll get legal access to everything. Then, once we have enough, you can divorce her. Or not. I mean, if she’s in an institution, you might not want to bother. We would be free to do as we please anyhow.’ He stared at me, slack-jawed. ‘Are you getting this?’ I snapped.

‘Yeah, I think I am. It’s just …’

‘Just what?’

‘It’s just a lot. It’s pretty ruthless. I mean, committed.’

‘The Priory is practically a spa. She’ll be fine. We’ll be rich, Mattie. Isn’t that what you want?’

‘Well, yes, but …’

‘And she’ll be out the way. Gone. Keep up, Mattie.’

He gave me a dark look at that comment, but he signed the prenup. It was a step closer.

Obviously I couldn’t follow them to the Maldives to watch the nuptials. Instead, I moved into Woodview while they were away. Mum stayed over too, because she didn’t want me to get lonely. She understands how hard this has been on me. I caught her going through Emma’s jewellery again. She’s light-fingered; lost all concept of private ownership when she was inside. Theft is not what she went in for, but prison provides quite the education. Mum went in after a domestic with my dad that ended badly. For him. He had it coming, but while that makes a catchy song line in the musical Chicago, it doesn’t make much of a defence for murder. She went inside a victim of a crime of passion and came out with a general sense of amorality and specific abilities for theft, fraud, self-defence and God knows what else. Let’s just say she’s resourceful.

‘She wouldn’t miss it if I took one or two of the smaller bits,’ she said. ‘She has so much.’

‘You can take one piece,’ I said firmly. ‘Scatter other bits around the house so she thinks she’s mislaid stuff. Put it in weird places, like the fridge, so she wonders how it got there.’

Mum slowly turned to me and glowered. ‘I know the plan, Becky. I designed the blueprint.’

The looks she spews are killers. I swear I felt my blood cool and slow. I was born just before she went to prison, and although we were able to be together in the mother and baby unit until I was eighteen months, I have no memory of her at that time, so I don’t know if she learnt to glare like that inside or whether it was always her way. I like to think her hardness was born of necessity. It’s more understandable that way. Forgivable even. She doesn’t have to be hard with me. I’d do anything for her. I am. I get it that she’s not in the habit of trusting or being trusted. Who is? She wasn’t the only one punished for my father’s death. We don’t talk about the sixteen years she spent inside, the years I spent in care. I would talk about it with her, but she’s never asked. I once mentioned sleeping with a chair up against the bedroom door so no one could get into my room, and she said, ‘Living it once was shit enough, why pick at the scabs?’ I guess she feels bad that I went through it, that she couldn’t mother me. It’s not her fault. If it’s anyone’s, it’s my dad’s.

I like to think that if she’d never had to go to prison, she would have been the same as other mothers, that she would have smiled and laughed, read bedtime stories to me and made packed lunches every day; maybe she’d even have cut off the crusts. When I was a young kid, I used to make up stories to comfort myself. I’d imagine her winning the mums’ race on school sports day, tearing along the track and snapping through the ribbon, everyone cheering. I think I got the image from that iconic picture of Princess Diana winning the parents’ race at Prince William and Harry’s school. I must have, because I’ve never seen my mother run. I imagined her spooning medicine into my mouth when I was ill or booking me dentist appointments, brushing my hair, teaching me how to swim. Mum stuff. No one did any of that for me, but so what? I have great hair, straight teeth. Self-sufficiency is an important life skill and my mum gifted me that.

By the time she got out, I was modelling. Too old to be mothered in the conventional way. We’re close, though. Tightly bound by what we missed out on, rather than tied by conventional shared experiences. When she first started talking to me about this opportunity with the rich woman she cleaned for, I felt something I hadn’t felt before. I felt protected, looked out for. She knew Mattie and I needed cash, that we were struggling. It’s not like she has a cash box under the bed or a trust fund that she can draw on. Sharing this opportunity was all she could do to give me financial security, and all parents want to help their kids out if they can, right?

I watched as she slipped a fine gold chain bracelet into her jeans pocket. Then she spat into a bottle of toner. She shook the bottle and said, ‘Don’t use that.’

I sighed, bewildered. Spitting into skincare products wasn’t on brief. Emma wouldn’t be disturbed by something she wasn’t aware of. It struck me as a petty, nasty act. Undisciplined. I’m not above petty or nasty, but I like to be effective. On strategy. ‘Why did you do that?’ I asked.

Mum ignored me and continued to root through the jewellery boxes. I didn’t push. I left the room, went downstairs to watch Love Island. Sometimes my mum’s whole Game of Thrones Cersei Lannister vibe is a bit weird.



36

The pub was heaving. It had that particular Saturday-night thrum that is the result of people gathering determined to have a good time, willing to pay for it tomorrow. I was alone in my cloud of apprehension, my eyes trained on the door, waiting for him to enter. We had been in London when he got her message. We drove back together.

‘I wonder what it can be?’ I’d asked.

He’d kept his head facing forward but his eyes slid to me. ‘Did you ask your mother to do something?’

‘No,’ I said hotly, but I could see he didn’t believe me. ‘Why would I want to make mischief today and spoil our day out?’ I reasoned.

He sighed. Unsure whether to believe me, unsure if it mattered. My mother might have done something whether we’d asked her to or not. Clearly Emma had run into some trouble. She’d texted him asking him to get home as soon as he possibly could.

He drove straight to her place; I was unceremoniously dumped on the road just before the gates, out of range of the security cameras. Left to make my own way back to Mum’s flat. I’d sent him a number of messages asking for an update since, but it wasn’t until the evening that he’d deigned to answer. Then he’d told me that he was at the hospital with her, that she’d fallen off a ladder and was concussed. Just like his first wife, I thought, weird coincidence. Although obviously there isn’t a first wife. I’m just saying. Others might see a pattern.

When Mattie finally arrived at the pub, he looked full of hell. His first words were ‘You’ve gone too far. The plan was to have her committed, not to kill her.’

‘What has this to do with me? I was with you.’

‘Where was your mum today?’

‘Isn’t it possible Emma just fell off the ladder?’ I asked.

‘I thought so at first, but the ladder was then thrown on top of her.’

Are sens

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