The Elephant Girl(96)

‘Well, she wasn’t very likely to cry on yours,’ said Helen, ‘if you resented her so much.’

‘I suppose not,’ Ruth replied mildly. ‘Turned out it had been going on for a while. Since around the time she got pregnant with you.’

Helen’s head jerked up as the possible implications hit her.

‘Your father was being treated for leukaemia before you were born,’ Ruth continued. ‘Cancer drugs are known for causing infertility. I thought you might be Jeremy’s child, because you were so blonde. It completely knocked me sideways. We’d been trying for so long, you see.’

‘Is that why you murdered her?’

Ruth gasped, and the gin went down the wrong way. Coughing violently, she turned puce as she heaved for breath, and tears sprang into her eyes from the discomfort. Helen crossed her arms and did nothing to help her.

Go on, choke on it, she thought. Just like my mother choked on her own blood.

‘I didn’t kill your mother!’ Ruth wheezed when she got her breath back. ‘What a preposterous idea. I might be an old soak, but … Good heavens! I was about to say that for a while I thought you were his child, but later I knew I was wrong. Your features are very much like Dmitri’s. Although—’ She stopped abruptly.

‘Although what?’

Ruth lifted her glass to take another sip, thought better of it, and put the crystal tumbler down on the desk where it made a ring on the polished wood. ‘Your father was seriously ill and receiving treatment. At that time, twenty-six years ago, IVF wasn’t readily available, if it even existed. Your parents could’ve arranged for his sperm to be frozen and kept, but whether they did that or not, I don’t know, your mother didn’t tell me. If they didn’t, he’s unlikely to be your biological parent.’

‘Then who is?’

Ruth sent her a tired look. ‘Do you really need to ask? Your uncle, of course. And that didn’t sit well with Letitia because she had her eyes on him.’

Because her headache was getting worse, Helen took a taxi home rather than the tube. The journey passed in a daze. Either Ruth had killed her mother in a crime of passion, or the murder weapon was still missing.

So Letitia had had her eyes on Arseni. Did they have a relationship back then? Did they still? she wondered, just as she had wondered when she first met her uncle. He never married, but that meant nothing today. If Mimi had come between them, could Letitia have lost her rag and had her bumped off? It wasn’t impossible, except Letitia was far too aloof to squabble over any man.

Then what about Arseni himself? Mimi may have used the next best thing to her husband’s sperm, his brother’s, in order to have a child. Enough to incense a proud man when he realised he’d been exploited, and it could explain why he was all over Helen now, with his peculiar mix of guilt and attentiveness.

Neither scenario painted her mother in a particularly positive light, and it left a bad taste in her mouth. She’d loved her mother, hadn’t she? Or had she merely loved the memory of having a mother, since she couldn’t remember their time together?

She rubbed her temples while trying to make sense of it all. Instead of having her questions answered, she’d been presented with a whole heap of new ones.

The taxi pulled up outside the house, and she climbed out to find her path blocked by a broad-shouldered and black-suited individual. A hard lump formed in her gut, and she took a step back to collide with a similar obstacle. Her legs began to shake.

The first man put a heavy hand on her shoulder, and before she could even squeak, his other hand clamped over her mouth. She found herself being lifted across the road, too shocked to struggle, and deposited by a dark car she hadn’t noticed when the taxi pulled up. Wordlessly the other man opened the door, and a light came on, revealing luxurious cream leather seats and a bar. Crystal decanters threw prisms of rainbow colours across the interior, dazzling her before she saw the guy inside.

He looked familiar, his voice was not. It was as smooth as a marbled egg and as alluring as the prospect of a viper’s kiss.

‘Miss Stephens, perhaps you’d be kind enough to step inside.’





Chapter Twenty-Three

It was an order, not an invitation. Jason’s father wasn’t used to being disobeyed.

She thought of making a run for it, but one goon had a firm grip on her arm, the other looked like he could give chase without breaking into a sweat. They would probably hurt her if she resisted them.

She allowed the first muscleman to push her inside the car while she clutched her rucksack to her chest. If Jason’s father was planning to do away with her, he probably wouldn’t do it in his nice, clean, posh car.