The Runaway Princess, Page 38

  I couldn’t go and ask in economy. Too many people looking.

  “I’ll check for you, madam,” he said, and began rattling away at the computer.

  “What?” Jo hissed.

  “I’m coming with you.” I glanced across the airport concourse, still paranoid that Leo would arrive, or Sofia, or some minion I wouldn’t even recognize until it was too late.

  “But they need you here, for interviews and stuff. Rolf said you and Leo were launching your gardening for therapy charity tomorrow?”

  “I’ve got to get home.” I pried my credit card out of my purse and prayed it had enough credit left on it.

  “I have two seats in first class, madam,” announced the steward.

  “I’ll take them,” I said, without even bothering to ask the price. “She’s upgrading. Give them your ticket, Jo.”

  She slid it over the counter without taking her bewildered eyes off me. “What’s happened?”

  “I can’t tell you now. When we get home.”

  “Passports?” The BA steward had seen it all before; he didn’t even register our frantic whispering.

  “Is it something to do with those photos of your mum?” Jo asked, then her face clouded. “Leo doesn’t know you’re here, does he? What’s going on?”

  The steward coughed. “I’m sorry, madam, the card’s been declined. Do you have an alternative method of payment?”

  “You’re kidding!” Black spots danced before my eyes. I’d been paying it off! Had someone blocked my cards? Had Leo realized I’d gone, and pulled strings to stop me leaving the country?

  “Here.” Jo shoved a card at him. “My emergency card,” she explained. “Dad gave it to me. I was to use it only if I was about to be deported. This had better be a very good reason.”

  *

  I was on pins through passport control, and it was only when we were safely on board and taxiing down the runway that my legs stopped shaking and I sank into my seat.

  Jo kept glancing at me, but I was trying to order everything in my head and I couldn’t. I kept seeing hideous visions of Kelly chatting to a couple of seedy journalists, wringing her hands and pretending to look ashamed. Eventually Jo gave up and concentrated on getting full value from her upgrade; there wasn’t a lot of time on the flight to work through a mini bag of toiletries, but she did it.

  My butterflies of guilt returned as we went through UK Customs; I half-expected to see someone in dark glasses holding up a sign saying Amy Wilde: Runaway Princess among the bored taxi drivers or maybe a gaggle of tipped-off paparazzi, but the only familiar face in the crowd was Ted’s below his shock of dark curls. He was holding a sarcastic sign reading The Duchess of de Vere’s Chauffeur.

  “What’s he doing here?” I asked nervily.

  “He’s giving me a lift home.”

  “In the van?”

  “Well, yes. Unless he’s been out and bought that Ferrari while we were away. Is that a problem? It seats three.”

  “No, just that I’ll be driving around in a big van marked Amy Wilde Is in Here!” I squeaked. I was too stressed to add my usual concerns: that Ted didn’t use his mirrors enough for my liking and barely understood roundabouts.

  Jo pulled me to one side and grabbed my arms. “I don’t know what you’ve done, but can you at least keep the hysterical paranoia down until we’re out of here? Because right now you’re asking to get our bags—and very possibly our digestive tracts—searched by the nice men in plastic gloves.”

  She had a point. I tried to get a grip. I didn’t want Ted asking questions too.

  “Fine,” I said, breathing through my nose. “Fine.”

  Ted seemed surprised to see me, but gallantly shouldered my bag as well as Jo’s. “We are honored,” he said. “A duchess and a princess. I should have got a flag to put on the front of the van.”

  “Hello, Ted,” I said. My voice was very high. “How’ve you been?”

  “Busy. I’ve found a bee bloke in Clapham who wants to talk to you, and we need to fill in that sunken garden thing you designed in Eaton Place—it’s a magnet for urban fox orgies, apparently.”

  “Lovely,” I squeaked.

  Jo shot me a sidelong look and took over the conversation until we were in the car park, telling Ted all about the ball and the dinner, and how much she’d liked the palace gardens. If I was quiet, he didn’t seem to notice; he was more interested in whether Rolf had “made an arse of himself” and what sort of loo paper an actual palace supplied.

  We were pulling into Leominster Place when I caught sight of the photographer, drinking a coffee and making a call by the postbox opposite our flat. I saw the sun glint off his lens, and it went through me like a knife.

  “Can you drop me here?” I asked, grabbing Ted’s arm.

  “Get off!” The van screeched to a halt. “I’ve told you a million times before, you do not interfere with the …”

  But I wasn’t listening. I grabbed my bag from the footwell and slipped out, using the van as cover as I crouched down. I’d seen that guy before—he was probably the sod who’d got the photos of me wobbling around the park.

  I made a mental note to get a water pistol. How powerful would it need to be to wreck a digital camera from an upstairs balcony?

  Jo’s window buzzed down. “I’ve got to see Callie before she goes, but I’ll be back ASAP,” she said. “Do you need anything?”

  I shook my head, then walked as fast as I could without drawing attention to myself round the back of the house, where I climbed up the fire escape, just as Leo had done the night we met, and knocked on the kitchen window of a very surprised Mrs. Mainwaring.

  Badger, at least, was pleased to see me home.

  Thirty-two

  Jo came back from Callie Hamilton’s in under two hours, which, considering she’d had to get to Knightsbridge and back, was possibly the shortest appointment she’d ever had with her.

  She found me and Badger curled up on the sofa together like a woman and her dog from Pompeii, except I was whimpering involuntarily every so often, and Badger was snoring. He perked up when Jo arrived, though.

  “Right,” she said, dumping her bag on the coffee table. “That’s Callie packed off to Paris for three nights. Now you can tell me everything. And it had better be good, because I have nine—count ’em—nine missed calls from Rolf on my phone. That’s nine more than I’d normally expect.”

  That was nothing. I’d had so many missed calls from Leo I’d buried my phone at the bottom of my purse hours ago.

  I looked up from the sofa. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? I’ve called off the wedding.”

  Jo threw her hands in the air in mime-confusion. “Why? Because one newspaper prints some embarrassing photos of your poor mum?”

  “No, it’s more than that.”

  She rubbed her eyes. “Have you had any tea?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, I’m going to make you a pot of tea, and you’re going to start from the beginning, and we are going to work this out.”

  As Jo spoke, her phone rang, and my stomach lurched. Without saying anything, she turned it off, then went over to the big black old-fashioned telephone by the door and took it off its hook. It made a satisfyingly Hollywood clunk.

  Then she marched over to the window, swished the curtains shut, and locked the door.

  “Anything else? Badger, come here.” He trotted over obligingly, and Jo picked him up and pretended to talk into his furry white stomach. “Hello, journalists. Have you bugged this dog? Because the noises you can hear are mainly his gippy guts.”

  I managed a weak smile, and curled up on the sofa, hugging my knees to my chest. Badger jumped up next to me, and the familiar smell of his biscuity coat made me want to cry again.

  “You’ve got to tell me everything,” Jo called over the sound of the boiling kettle. “I know you’re a secret squirrel, but if we’re going to sort this out, I need to know all the gory details.”

  I flinched. Why was I so w
orried about telling Jo the truth? It wasn’t as if everyone in the whole world wasn’t about to know.

  It was because Kelly had the knack of wiping out my friendships, even now, even from a distance of God knew how many miles.

  “So, come on, out with it.” Jo put the tea tray down next to me and pulled the padded satin top off another of Rolf’s enormous boxes of chocolates. Tea and chocolate: Jo’s prescription for everything. “Unless,” she added, “Leo has some kind of weird sexual deviancy thing. You can mime that if you’d prefer.”

  I took a deep breath. “Sofia tipped me off that a couple of big newspapers have hired journalists to track down my sister, Kelly.”

  “I didn’t know you had a sister!” Jo’s eyes bulged.

  “Well, I do. I haven’t seen her for eight years. She left home under a big cloud and we haven’t seen her since.”

  “Why didn’t you say?”

  I could tell Jo was reining in her natural instinct to revel in the scandal, seeing how much it was upsetting me.

  “Because I didn’t want you to know! Kelly put our family through a living hell. She forced my mum and dad to sell the house we grew up in, she shamed my dad into taking early retirement. And then she vanished and left us to sort out her mess, and we never talk about her but she’s there every time I go home and …” I was aware my voice was rising and getting more and more thickly northern with each word.

  I stopped and covered my mouth with my hand. Where was this anger coming from? I’d never felt so angry about Kelly before.

  “So what did she do?”

  I pressed my tongue against the back of my front teeth. “It was awful.”

  “More awful than both parents remarrying spouses younger than you?” asked Jo seriously. “Worse than one uncle going to prison for setting fire to a different uncle’s collection of priceless Roman sex toys for the insurance money? I don’t think so.”

  “Yes, but it’s all right for you,” I protested. “You don’t care what people think! You don’t have to go to corner shops and know that conversations stop when you walk in, and hear the neighbors joking about nailing down their stuff when the Wildes come round!”

  Jo’s expression softened, and she pushed the sweet tea into my hands. “Whatever your sister did has no bearing on you. Every family has a black sheep or two.”

  My phone rang in my bag, and I cringed. I knew it would be Leo. We stared as it rang and rang, and then it stopped.

  “Start from the beginning,” said Jo. “And let me get a pencil and paper—family stuff is really complicated. I know.”

  *

  So I told her. Once I started, I couldn’t stop, and as the words spilled out of my mouth, the undermining little voice in the back of my head noted that it was the first time I’d actually told someone else. I’d rehearsed plenty—editing different bits in and out—but I’d never had a friend I’d wanted to trust with the whole unvarnished truth.

  “Kelly was the popular one at school,” I said into my mug of tea, “and she always had older boyfriends. Boys her own age were scared of her. She had that magnetic thing that cool girls have—you know, always wanting the next thing up, and getting it. She didn’t go to university like Mum and Dad hoped, because she messed up her exams, but Dad got her a sales job with a friend of his who ran a garage, and she met Chris there. He was buying a top-of-the-range BMW, for cash.”

  I remembered that detail. Kelly had told me so many times: “A cherry-red M6! I knew he had class, Amy. That car smelled of money. …”

  “Well, they started going out, even though Chris was nearly thirty. He was into property, doing up cheap terraced houses in Leeds and York, and renting them out to students. Even Dad was impressed with him—he wasn’t a spivvy type, he spoke nicely and he’d been to uni. And he was loaded—well, for round our way, he was. Kelly was living the dream, designer handbags, posh shoes, drinks bought for her everywhere they went. Chris even got her her own sports car, personalized plates and everything.”

  “Oh dear,” murmured Jo.

  “Anyway.” My face was flushing just thinking about it. “One day Kelly came home and said that Chris had been tipped off about a whole terrace up for sale near the university in Leeds. He’d come up with a business plan that investors could put money into an individual house in the row, so their return could be based on rental income—I don’t know exactly how it worked, but she wanted Mum and Dad to get in on it. And it looked great on paper, a good long-term investment.”

  Jo’s face said what I was feeling.

  “Yeah, I know. But it did. This was ten years ago, remember? Anyway, Kelly was a great saleswoman, and she persuaded Dad to invest a lump sum, and Gran, and a couple of our neighbors, and the guy she worked for … lots of people, it turned out later. Hundreds of thousands of pounds.”

  “And it didn’t work out? The market crashed?” said Jo, obviously trying to spare me the pain of saying it.

  I half-laughed. “No. I wish. There were no houses. It turned out that Chris was using all the money they were investing to pay off some other investments he’d made that had lost money. He’d done all right at first, but he got cocky and thought he could play the stock market, but he was taking bigger and bigger losses, and he couldn’t stop. One of our neighbors, Roy, started asking questions and tipped off the police, and it turned out the Inland Revenue had had their eye on Chris for a while as part of a big fraud sting, and of course that was linked to other stuff. Worse stuff. I think that was what finished Dad off.”

  I fell silent. There were some things I couldn’t say. I’d had nightmares for years about the police raiding our cottage at six in the morning with sniffer dogs, looking for evidence of tax fraud. Kelly had hidden forged deeds in our house for Chris, without telling Dad. I’d never forget the sight of Mum hysterical in her nightie, Dad angry but powerless to do anything—both of them lifelong upstanding citizens and supporters of the police, being treated like criminals.

  “The worst thing was”—I didn’t mean to say it, but I couldn’t stop it coming out—“that the police or a journalist found some dirty photos of Kelly that Chris had taken. One of them was her naked on a bed covered in fifty-pound notes. Grinning like a basketful of chips, covered in other people’s hard-earned cash. Of course, it was in every single paper. That was so typical of Kelly. She never thought. She never thought about anything.”

  Jo covered her mouth with her hands. “Oh, my God. But was she involved? Did she know what was going on?”

  I shook my head. “She isn’t the questioning type. As long as the champagne was flowing and all her mates were envying her tacky car, she wouldn’t care.” I knew I sounded bitter, but I was. “It went to court, and she pleaded guilty to some of the lesser charges and got off with a suspended sentence and community service, in return for giving evidence for the prosecution.”

  “And Chris?”

  “He got seven years for various frauds, but he was bankrupt—no one could recover anything from him. You know our old house that you saw, when we got the wedding dress?”

  Jo nodded.

  “Mum and Dad sold it to try to pay back some of the people Kelly had persuaded to invest. Dad said he couldn’t face seeing people he’d known all his life in hardship because of our family. He took early retirement—well, he had to, he worked for a bank—and Mum developed anxiety disorders, and put on all that weight.”

  I was shocked at the vividness of the memories. It was all coming back, not in mental images, but in the tightness in my chest, the acid taste of shame in my throat. “The trial was in all the local papers for weeks. I couldn’t move schools, because there was no room for me anywhere else. Dad and I dug up a whole allotment that summer, just to get away from everyone talking about us. Probably spoke about two words to each other, but our blisters were massive.”

  “Oh, Amy.” Jo’s eyes were wet with tears. “You poor things.”

  “We got through it. Mum and Dad blamed themselves for not spotting the signs,
or not protecting Kelly—you know what parents are like. I wasn’t allowed boyfriends, even if I’d wanted one, which I didn’t. I found it really hard to trust anyone. I still do.” I swallowed. “Apart from you.”

  Jo leaned across and took my hand without speaking.

  I rubbed my eyes angrily with my spare hand. “But what makes it worse is that Kelly didn’t even have the guts to stick around. She just took off one night and left a self-pitying note about how everyone was better off without her. We were the ones who had to deal with the whispers and the crummy new house. She’s twenty-eight now, and still hasn’t grown up enough to come back and help Mum and Dad.”

  But that was exactly what I’d just done to Leo. Left a note. Vanished. Left him to pick up the pieces. I pushed it away.

  “And you don’t know where she is?”

  “No idea. We get a Christmas card and birthday cards, and her writing’s just the same, but she manages to post them from really vague places so the postmark’s no help. Some are from London. That’s what’s so scary—maybe Sofia’s telling the truth and those reporters have found her. They know how to track down missing persons.”

  “Well, if she’s carried on her life of crime, she shouldn’t be that hard to find.” Jo slapped her thighs and reached for her trusty laptop. “My friend Dennis works for the Met Police, I’m sure he could do a quick check through their various systems. And there’s always prison?”

  I lifted my wet eyes to her. “Don’t.”

  She pulled an apologetic expression, then looked remorseful. “Oh, Amy, I’m mortified that I pointed out your house when I saw it. I told Rolf about it, what a gorgeous place you’d grown up in, how lucky Leo was to have a real English rose from a real English rose garden. I wish you’d said. It wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to me.”

  I squirmed. “I can’t bear the thought of Leo finding out—and don’t say, why didn’t I tell him. There was never a good time. And now it’s like a double whammy—not just the Kelly thing, but the fact I didn’t tell him.”