The Mirror Bride

‘All right,’ Drake said calmly, ‘exactly how did you come to be looking after Simon? Why didn’t you go on to university as you planned?’

She finished the milk and looked down at her hands. The sandwiches intruded into her line of sight. Firmly ignoring their seductive appeal, she said with enormous reluctance, ‘I couldn’t leave my mother.’

‘Why not?’

‘She—relied on me. She needed me. She was ill.’

It told the relevant details; it hid so much more.

Eyes the wind-driven grey of an arctic sea scanned her face. ‘Your mother told you that I was the boy’s father?’

‘No,’ she said stiffly, holding herself erect. ‘I overheard her tell my stepfather.’

Drake’s eyes were fastened on hers, as though he could chisel out the truth by merely looking at her.

She had washed her hair and put on lipstick for this interview, and something had driven her to don her one reasonably good skirt and blouse and put up her hair in a French knot. Disgust at the realisation that she was primping for him had made her brush her hair out of the knot so briskly that tears had stung her eyes, and tether the long locks into their usual ponytail.

When he spoke it was in a voice that was cool and dispassionate. Yet she sensed steel beneath the judicial words—the leashed strength of emotions held rigidly in check.

‘You seem to do a lot of overhearing. Why are you so convinced that your mother was telling the truth about Simon’s father?’

‘Because she was my mother,’ she retorted, angry at the slur on her behaviour. She had overheard one quarrel of many. ‘Don’t you believe your mother?’

He gave her a sardonic look. ‘I’d believe my mother if she said I was born an alien on Mars—but then, she has an obsession with the truth. I’ve never known her to perpetrate even a white lie, whereas your mother had a fund of pleasantries she didn’t expect her listeners to believe. How did your stepfather react when your mother flung this bombshell at him?’

‘How would you react?’ she asked bleakly, hating him for his merciless assessment of Elizabeth Harley—an assessment that was, alas, almost true. Her mother had been a superb hostess, eager to make sure that everyone enjoyed themselves in her home. Sometimes that had meant she’d welcomed people she’d disliked. Yet her sincerity had never seemed forced.

‘Badly,’ he said.

A note in his voice sent a shiver chasing across Olivia’s skin. Brian Harley had shouted and blustered and hit her mother with his clenched fist at least once before Olivia had rushed into the room, but at this moment she was more afraid of Drake Arundell than she had ever been of her stepfather.

Contempt cut through the slight roughness of his voice. ‘I wonder why she hated me so much.’

Fire gleamed beneath Olivia’s dark lashes. ‘Perhaps because you abandoned her,’ she said between her teeth. ‘You left her to my stepfather’s tender mercies—’

‘Why the hell did she stay?’ he interrupted, looking at her with an oblique, shuttered watchfulness. ‘Why didn’t she go home to her father?’

Olivia had asked herself the same question a hundred times. But when Drake had abandoned her something had gone out of Elizabeth Harley; it had been as though she’d embraced her life with her husband as a penance.

Shaking her head, Olivia said, ‘My grandfather was ill—he died a couple of months after Simon was born. I don’t know why she stayed at Springs Flat. She just—withered away, lost the will to live.’

‘So what made you run? And the truth this time.’

She sent him a fleeting glance. There was no softness in his face, nothing that gave her any hope that she might be able to fool him.

‘I think my stepfather killed her,’ she said baldly. ‘And I was afraid he would kill Simon.’

The words resounded with ugly significance in the spacious, elegant room. The last time she’d said them had been when she’d asked for refuge with her best friend in Wellington.

She had expected to shock him, but no muscle moved in the harsh, austere face. ‘What makes you think he killed Elizabeth?’ he asked.

‘Two nights before she died he—he came home slightly drunk; I wanted to stay up, but my mother made me go to bed. I heard them quarrelling downstairs and then she came up alone. She was crying and I didn’t go into her—she hated me to see her cry. In the morning I found her unconscious on the floor. She died a couple of days later. At the post mortem it was decided that she’d fallen and hit her head on the bedside table.’

‘You didn’t tell anyone about the quarrel?’

She said, ‘No. I didn’t think then that he’d killed her, otherwise I would have. And the doctor said that although the blow had been enough to send her into a coma, he was surprised that it had been bad enough to kill her.’

‘But—?’ he prompted.

She swallowed and drank a little more of the milk. ‘After the inquest I cleaned up her bedroom and found his tie—the one he’d worn that night—curled up under the bed. I remembered he’d had it on that night because it was his school tie. So I knew he’d been in her room.’

‘There are a hundred different reasons why he could have taken his tie off in her room,’ Drake said.

‘Not the way things were with them,’ she said, knowing that it was hopeless, but compelled to continue.

Her belief in her stepfather’s viciousness was based on much more subtle evidence than the brutal results of a blow, or a tie in the wrong place. But a look, an expression, wouldn’t stand up in a court of law. And it wouldn’t convince Drake.

Nevertheless, she had to try. ‘Anyway—about a fortnight after the funeral, I went in to check on Simon, and my—stepfather—he—’ She stopped, her throat working as she tried to get the words out.

‘Go on,’ Drake said mercilessly.

She looked down at the hands writhing in her lap. It took considerable expenditure of willpower to stop their involuntary movement.

In a remote, brittle voice she said, ‘He was standing by the cot with a pillow in his hands. I said, “Was he restless?” And he said, “Yes. I thought he might like a pillow.” But Simon was never restless; he slept like a log every night. He still does. And there was a look in my stepfather’s face... I knew he didn’t like Simon, but I never knew he hated him. A little boy, and he hated him...’ With an effort she kept her voice steady. ‘So I took him and ran away.’

‘Did he follow you?’

She shivered. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘To a friend—my best friend from school. She was going to Victoria University. In Wellington.’

‘I know where Victoria is,’ he said, smiling lethally. ‘I didn’t go to university myself, but I do read newspapers. And some of my best friends graduated from Victoria.’

‘Yes, well,’ she said, feeling exactly the way he wanted her to—as though she’d tried to patronise him. ‘Emma has a brother, Neil. He was there that night. They didn’t believe me at first, but Emma knows me; she knew I wouldn’t lie. So she suggested that I hide in Neil’s house-truck with Simon while we went across Cook Strait on the ferry. That way my stepfather wouldn’t know we’d left the North Island.’

‘Where did you go then?’

‘I decided to stay with Neil,’ she said. ‘He wanted someone to look after the house and cook meals while he made jewellery.’

It had worked perfectly. For two years she and Simon had wandered with Neil, a kind, gentle man who had made no demands on her. He’d taught her how to cook and she’d earned a frugal living by picking fruit and doing other seasonal jobs. Gradually she learned how to survive legally in a world where she couldn’t risk claiming any benefit other than unemployment for fear of having Simon returned to the man who hated him.

‘And what ended this idyll?’

She flashed him a suspicious glance, but he looked merely a little bored. ‘Neil wanted to go to Australia,’ she said stiffly. ‘I couldn’t go—I didn’t dare get Simon a passport.’

And she had longed for a settled home. Here, in New Zealand’s biggest city, she’d been sure they’d be safe. The flat had been her dingy little haven.