I am used to the North Yorks coast, but there’s something different about this Scottish coastline. It’s dark and rugged and mean. I don’t like how close the road gets to it. How easy it would be to fall off the edge, without anyone knowing we were ever here.
The bandage across my face is loose and dirty. I slip it off and touch the wound underneath. Sore but healed enough not to worry about it too much now. There are more important things at stake.
“Take a left,” I say, looking at the dot on the map.
The campervan judders along the road, the wipers repetitive in front of my face. They annoy me, like flies buzzing around my head. I want to swat at them but the glass is in the way.
“Faye, are you all right?”
I turn to the voice and panic floods through me, adrenaline spiking my veins. There’s another me and she’s driving this van.
“Faye,” she says.
I grab the woman’s arm.Myarm. “How do you know my name?”
She frowns.
I blink. “Why am I so tired?”
“Oh, Faye,” she says. “I’m so sorry. This must be hard for you. You’re just tired. You’re okay. Everything is going to be okay.”
“Claire?”
She nods.
There’s relief but also sadness. It comes rushing back. Magnus Blackburn and Penny in the silky nightdress. The threatening message. All of it. I look to Claire. My sister, my partner in crime, my mirrored mime. I need her and she needs me.
I lean forward and open the glove box, checking the knife is where we put it.
CHAPTER 71
THE SISTER
Hello, sisters.
I always knew what Magnus was capable of, the evil that resided within him. I just never knew that he had the capacity to use his dark heart against me. After the first few blows, I played dead and he soon stopped, presuming he had done enough.
Because you see, he always underestimated me, just like everybody else. And now I have taken the car along with the rest of the money and left him in the middle of nowhere.
There’s very little petrol in the car. I have no food. My body aches all over and I suspect I have some internal injuries, beside my broken heart.
But I’m free.
Do you hear that, sisters?
I’m alive and I’m free.
I’m not turning myself in and I’m not going to the hospital. I intend to survive this alone. That’s what Lacey girls do, isn’t it? We survive.
The Lacey Girls. Maybe that will be the name of the documentary about us. Or maybe it’ll be a TV series. You can write the screenplay, Faye.
I’m not sure why I’ve always hated you more, Faye. But I do. Maybe it’s because I met Claire when I was a teenager and saw her life wasn’t as perfect as I’d thought. The pressure in that house, the faint echo of a bruise on her wrist. When you grow up with violence you see the traces of it in other people’s lives.
She was always a fully formed person, stuck in a life almost as miserable as my own. Whereas you, Faye, were a legend. A famous author, a mythological creature. Something to mould in my imagination.
But you’re not that anymore, are you? You’re real now. And your pain is real.
He’ll kill Penny eventually, you know. Claire and I were the warm-ups. He won’t mess up again.
