The Second Sister: The exciting new psychological thriller from Sunday Times bestselling author Claire Kendal

‘Do you have a headache, Auntie Ella?’

Luke doesn’t know he pronounces it ‘head egg’. I find this charming, but I worry that he may be teased.

Should I correct him? I didn’t imagine I’d be buying up parenting books when I was only twenty, and that they would become my bedtime reading for the next decade. They don’t usually have the answers I need, but I know that you would.

‘No headache. Thank you for asking.’ I smile to show Luke that I mean it.

‘I think Mummy would like me to live with you.’

I love how he calls you Mummy. That’s how Mum and Dad and I speak of you to him. I wonder if we got stuck on Mummy because you never had time to outgrow it. Mummy is the name that people tend to use during the baby stage. You were never allowed to become Mum. Or mother, perhaps, though that always sounds slightly angry and over-formal.

‘If I live with you part of the time, can we get more of her things in my room?’

‘What things do you have in mind?’

‘Granny put her doll’s house up in the attic.’

‘It’s my doll’s house too.’ As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I realise that I sound like a little girl, fighting with you over a toy.

Luke smiles when he mimics our father’s reasoned tone. ‘Don’t you share it?’

‘Yes.’ I lift an eyebrow. ‘So you’d like a doll’s house?’

‘No. Of course not. I’m a boy. I don’t like doll’s houses.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with a boy liking doll’s houses.’

‘Well I don’t. But why would Granny put it out of the way like that?’

‘It hurt her to see it, Luke.’

He scowls. ‘It shouldn’t be hidden away in the attic. Get it back from her.’ He sounds like you, issuing a command that must be obeyed.

Three crows lift from a tree, squawking. Luke and I snap our heads to watch them fly off, so glossy and black they appear to have brushed their feathers with oil.

‘Do you think something startled them?’ He takes a fire leaf from his pocket.

‘Probably an animal.’

He is studying the leaf, tracing a finger over its veins. He doesn’t look at me when he says, super casually, ‘Can you make Granny give you that new box of Mummy’s things?’

There’s a funny little clutch in my stomach. I am not sure I heard him right. ‘What things?’

‘Don’t know. Stuff the police returned to Granny a couple weeks ago.’

‘Granny didn’t tell me that. How do you know?’

‘I’m a good spy. Like you. I heard her talking about them with Grandpa.’

‘Did Granny open it? Did she look in it?’

‘Not that she mentioned when I was listening.’

‘Did she say anything about why the police finally returned Mummy’s things?’

‘Nope. Get the box too. Make Granny give it to you.’

Getting that box is exactly what I want to do. Very, very much. ‘Okay,’ I say, though I mumble secretly to myself about the challenge of making our mother do anything. Our mother gives orders. She does not take them.

‘Auntie Ella?’

‘Yes.’

‘She would have come back for me if she could have, wouldn’t she?’

I think of one of the headlines that appeared soon after you vanished, claiming you’d run away. I put my arms around him tightly. We have always tried to protect him from such stories. Since last week’s spate of new headlines about Thorne, we have been monitoring Luke’s Internet use even more carefully. But we can’t know what he might have stumbled on, and I am nervous that a school friend has said something.

I kiss the top of his head and inhale. We have only been out for forty minutes but already he smells like a puppy who has run all the way back from a damp walk. ‘She would have come back for you.’ It is not raining but my cheeks are wet.

Luke wriggles out of my arms. He wipes at his cheeks too. ‘Are you sure?’

‘One hundred per cent. Nothing would have kept her from you if she had a choice.’

He bites his lower lip and looks down, scrunching his fists over his eyes.

Was I right to tell him these two true things, one beautiful and one too terrible to bear? That you were driven by your love for him, and that something unimaginably horrible happened to you?

Another thought creeps in, a guilty one. Is it easier for me to imagine you suffering a terrible death than to contemplate the possibility that you made a new life for yourself somewhere, as the police have sometimes suggested? I think of Thorne and shudder, absolutely clear that the answer is no.

‘She wanted you so much.’ It is extremely difficult to get these words out, but somehow I do, in a kind of croak.

‘It’s okay, Auntie Ella.’ He has so much courage, this boy, as he takes his fists from his eyes and comforts me when I should be comforting him. He waits for me to catch my breath. ‘I found a picture of her holding me,’ he says. ‘It’s one I hadn’t seen before. At first I thought it was you. You look like her.’

‘I think maybe that’s more true now than it used to be.’

‘Because you’re thirty now.’

‘Thanks for reminding me.’

‘I know. It’s really old.’

I stifle a mock-sob.

‘Sorry,’ he says.

‘You look stricken with remorse.’

‘I’m just saying it because now you’re her age. That’s why you’re looking so much more like her. You can see it in that newspaper picture of you too.’ He clears his throat. ‘Did you really try everything you could to find her?’

Did I? At first we barely functioned. Mum didn’t leave her bed. Dad stumbled around trying to make sure we had what we needed, cooking and cleaning and shopping, trying to get Mum to eat. I lurched through the house, trying to care for a two-and-a-half-month-old baby. Mostly we were reactive, answering the police questions, giving them access to your things. But we got in touch with everyone we could think of, did the appeals.

I stuck pictures of your face to lampposts, between the posters of missing cats and dogs. One of them stayed up for a year, fading as rain and wind and snow hit it, flapping at a bottom corner where the tape came off, dissolving at the edges but miraculously holding on.

I tell Luke as much of this as I can, as gently as I can, but he shakes his head.

‘I need you to try again,’ he says. ‘I need you to. I need to know. Even if it’s the worst thing, I need to.’ His voice rises with each sentence.

I grab a bottle of water from my jacket pocket and pass it to him. He gulps down half.

‘Is this why you want me to get her things from Granny?’

‘Yes.’ He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘You have to. Tell me you will. You have to look at everything.’

‘The police already did.’

‘No they didn’t. I hear much more than you think after I’ve gone to bed. I’ve heard all of you say how useless they are. Except Ted.’

I inhale slowly, then blow out air. ‘Okay.’

‘You’ll do it?’

I nod. ‘I will.’ My stomach drops as if I am running and an abyss has suddenly opened in front of me. Because there is something I can do that we haven’t tried before. I can request a visit with Jason Thorne. I reach for Luke’s hand. ‘But only on one condition.’

‘What?’

‘You will have to trust my judgement about what I can share with you.’

‘If you mean you might have to wait a little while, yeah. Like, until I’m a bit older. But you can’t not ever tell me.’

Thinking about Jason Thorne makes it hard to breathe. The possibility of Luke knowing about him makes it even harder. But I manage to keep the pictures out of my head.

‘I need to do what I think is best for you, Luke. It’s going to depend on what I find out. And you need to be prepared for the possibility that this might be nothing at all – that’s what’s most likely.’

‘I guess that’s the best agreement I can get.’

‘You guess right.’

His forehead creases. ‘There’s something else that bothers me,’ he says.

I am beginning to think I may actually be sick. ‘Tell me.’ I realise I’m holding my breath.

‘Granny says you didn’t do well enough on your exams because you didn’t go back to University afterwards.’

Afterwards. He never says ‘after Mummy disappeared’ or ‘after Mummy vanished’. There is before. There is after. The thing in between is too big for him to name.

But at least he isn’t worrying about Jason Thorne. This is easy, compared to that. ‘I did go back,’ I say. ‘But they made special arrangements for me to do it from a distance so I could help Granny and Grandpa take care of you.’

‘But Granny says you should have done better. She says you wanted to be a scientist, but I heard her telling Grandpa that Ted was distracting you even before you moved back home. It’s not really Ted’s fault, is it?’

‘It’s nobody’s fault, and I wanted to be a biology teacher, not a scientist. But I don’t any more. The charity work is important – it means so much to me.’ I smooth his hair again, silky like yours, silky like mine. This time, I am not ambushed by an image of Thorne grabbing you by it.

‘It was my fault,’ Luke says. ‘You wouldn’t have messed up your degree if it weren’t for me.’

‘Luke,’ I say. ‘Look at me.’ I tip up his face. ‘Being your aunt is the best thing that has ever happened to me. That is definitely your fault.’

‘And Mummy’s,’ he says.

‘Yes. And Mummy’s. I miss her so much and you are the only thing that makes it hurt less. Looking after you taught me more than those lecturers ever could. I wouldn’t have wanted to do anything else. It’s what I chose.’

His head whips round. ‘There’s that coughing noise again.’ We both listen. ‘And that’s a different sound. Like somebody tripped in the leaves.’

‘Probably someone on their morning walk. Someone clumsy with a cold.’

‘Should we look?’

‘They’ll be gone before we get there.’ I take his hand. ‘If it’s really a spy, he’s not very good, is he?’

‘Not as good as me. Plus he won’t know what he’s up against with you.’

‘Let’s go in. Granny promised to make pancakes for breakfast.’

‘I’d better tell Granny and Grandpa about what we heard.’

‘We can tell them together. And you know that if anybody comes near the house, one of the cameras will pick him up. I’ll check the footage before I leave. You don’t have to worry.’

He nods sagely. ‘Can you stay for the afternoon and take me to my karate lesson?’

‘I’d love to. I’ll have to rush off as soon as you finish though. I promised Sadie I’d go to her party.’

‘Is it her birthday?’

‘It’s to celebrate moving in with her new boyfriend.’

Luke wrinkles his nose. ‘Ted says Mummy never liked Sadie.’

She thinks everyone is out to get her – she’s the most bitter person ever born.

She talks behind everyone’s back and it’s just a matter of time before she turns on you.

She’s always telling herself she’s a victim but she’s actually the aggressor.

These were your favourite warnings to me about Sadie. You made your assessment when she was four and never saw any reason to change it.

My friendship with Sadie has certainly lasted beyond its natural life. I try to explain why. ‘I’ve known her since my first day at school.’

‘Like Ted.’

‘Yes. But she doesn’t have many friends. She gets mad at people and drives them away.’

‘So you feel sorry for her?’

‘Kind of. I guess I always have.’

‘What if she gets mad at you?’

‘It’s probably only a matter of time before she does. I’m too busy to see her much – I suppose that reduces the opportunities for her to find fault with me.’

‘Don’t go. Stay here with me and Granny and Grandpa.’

‘That is tempting. But she’s really nervous about the party. She has hardly anyone of her own to invite and she’s scared Brian will think that’s weird. It’ll be all his doctor friends.’

‘Fun,’ he says. ‘Not.’

‘Definitely not as fun as your karate lesson.’

‘They’ll let you watch me. I’m getting better. You’ll be proud.’

‘I’m already proud. Can I join in?’

He shakes his head no solemnly, partly not wanting to hurt my feelings, partly amazed by my silliness. ‘It’s for kids, Auntie Ella. Plus I’d have to pretend not to know you because you’d show off. You’d execute a flying spin and kick my teacher in the face with a knockout blow.’

‘Never.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Well, maybe a little knifehand strike to the ribs.’

The Costume Party

Sadie is passionately kissing Brian. She is pressing her breasts against his chest. I am standing in front of the two of them in Brian’s crowded kitchen, trying not to appear disconcerted – only a few seconds ago the three of us were politely talking.

‘Autumn in New York’ is playing, telling me about how new love mixes with pain, making me think of you as Sadie cups Brian’s cheek with one hand and traces his lips with the index finger of the other. She stares into his handsome-in-a-geeky-way face and strokes his dark hair. ‘You obsess me.’ Her whisper is deadly serious.

‘And you obsess me.’ His whisper is a tease. She frowns, wondering where his eyes are darting to. The frown gets bigger when she sees they are darting to me.

I’ve never met anyone as sickly sweet on the outside and full of poison on the inside.

Your pronouncements on Sadie were endless.

Sadie is six feet tall, so perhaps one of the things she likes about Brian is his great height. I am only five feet five. You always said that the thing Sadie likes best about me is that she can literally look down, though you pretended not to hear when I said she could do that with most people.

Sadie adjusts the rectangular frames of Brian’s nerdy-cool spectacles, which have slipped down his nose. Brian is a dermatologist and I cannot help but imagine those spectacles falling off as he bends over a patient’s head, smacking them on the forehead and leaving a bad blemish or maybe even interfering with the performance of some vital instrument.

She turns from Brian to examine me, though she curves his arm around her waist and holds it there in a way that makes my heart twinge for her. ‘You’re actually wearing a dress!’ she says. ‘I didn’t think you owned any.’

‘It was Miranda’s.’

She motions me to turn around. I catch Brian watching me and I hope – though I am not quite sure – that he manages to tear his eyes away by the time Sadie glances at him to check.

Sadie has spent the last five years trying and failing to be in a serious relationship. She desperately wants Brian to be The One. She is sneakily buying wedding magazines already.

‘Is that DVF?’ She peeks at the label of your dress, scratching the back of my neck with a nail. ‘Christ, Ella,’ she says. ‘These are £500 a pop in silk.’

How could you have afforded this kind of thing on your nurse’s salary? This is a recurring question for me. The police wondered about it too. Like so much else, it remains unanswered.

‘Miranda had one in red as well,’ I say. ‘But red isn’t really my colour.’

I imagine how furious you would be at my letting out one of your shopping secrets to Sadie. It was bad enough that I told the police. But you signed the confidentiality clause, Melanie. The confidentiality clause never expires.

Only you were allowed to call me Melanie, as if you wanted to make me yours alone. To name somebody is a powerful act, and you like powerful acts. You extracted Ella from the middle of my name, adding an extra L. You commanded everyone else to use it. Even Mum and Dad obeyed you. They still obey you. Was it out of guilt that they’d been careless and spoiled your decade as an only child by saddling you with an accidental baby sister?

‘I’m not sure you’re right about red,’ Brian says.

My stomach tightens, but Sadie lets the comment pass. ‘Those wrap dresses don’t date,’ she says. ‘They’re classic.’

‘This one is a consolation prize, awarded by my mother.’

‘For what?’ Sadie asks.

For the box, I silently think.

Our mother actually grabbed me when I started towards the attic this afternoon to retrieve it. I was drawing strange men after me and Luke, she said. I was stirring up danger in my refusal to leave things alone, she said, especially after the newspaper article.

‘Ignoring things, hiding them from each other, that’s the real danger,’ I said.

She didn’t answer.

‘The difficult things aren’t going to go away because you pretend not to see them,’ I said.

Stalemate is the rose-tinted view of where the two of us were when we parted, the box still up in the roof space beneath the eaves. But our mother took this midnight-blue dress from her shrine of your things and pressed it into my hands, along with a pair of strappy sandals you never even wore. She was horrified by the prospect of my going to a party in the jeans and sweatshirt I’d been wearing all day.

Your dress flowed and swirled as I walked out their door in it. I even swished my hips like you used to, to try to jolt our mother into reacting, to try to shock her into giving me my way and handing over the box when she saw how like you I look.

Yeah, right. I imagine you rolling your eyes at the impossibility. Like that’s really going to work.

I shrug away Sadie’s question as if I am bewildered by it. I put a hand up to my neck, an unconscious reflex, near the place she scratched when she searched for the label. I’m startled when my finger pad comes away with blood. There is no doubt that she is being even spikier than usual, and that this heightening of her default state of resentment has something to do with Brian.

‘Don’t be such a baby, Ella – I was fixing your neckline.’

You follow me through this party like a sardonic ghost, whispering in my ear. Sadie’s perfect at the can’t-do-enough-for-you act. Every good deed is a little stab.

‘I have some extremely expensive overnight cream from a new line Brian recommends.’ Sadie runs a beauty clinic. She first met Brian a few months ago, to discuss the possibility of his doing some treatments on her clients, the kinds of procedures she needs a proper dermatologist for. ‘Would your mother like to try it?’

‘That’s nice of you. I’m sure she would,’ I say.

‘Evening, everyone.’ The voice is talk-show host smooth and charming, and vaguely familiar. When I turn to its owner and realise who he is I want to sink into the floor because I had the misfortune of being assigned to Dr Blossom when our mother dragged me for tests to investigate why my periods vanished at the same time as you.

Sadie does not know this, so she feels the need to introduce me and Dr Blossom feels the need to pretend he has never seen me before in his life and certainly has never peered at my reproductive organs and pored over countless tests of my hormone levels only to diagnose the fact that my ovaries are in a decade-long and extremely mysterious coma. Something I could have told him myself.

Sadie is more agitated than usual, at this party full of doctors she barely knows. She is making lots of self-mocking jokes, which is what she always does when she is ill at ease. She glances under each of her arms and says, ‘God, this room is hot. Good thing this dress is sleeveless.’

Dr Blossom says, ‘Get Brian to inject you with some Botox.’ He points under Sadie’s arms, in case there is any confusion about where the injections need to go. ‘That’ll stop the perspiration.’ He touches the top of his absurdly flaxen head, as if to check that his hair has not flattened. ‘Not sure it’s available on the NHS, though. You’ll probably need to do it privately.’ He thinks he is being very funny.

But Sadie is funnier. ‘Brian already injects me privately. Twice a day, morning and night.’

A laugh shoots out of me so fast I practically snort, and I am glad to be reminded of how quick and funny Sadie can be. But Brian flashes red, so I decide that this would be a good time to look for Ted.

I excuse myself and Dr Blossom nods understanding, making his shimmery curls bob.

Ted is not in the fake-gentleman’s club of a living room. Barely any time has passed before Brian follows me in with Sadie close behind him. She cuts in front of him and sits next to me, wafting jasmine.

‘Brian thinks you’re pretty.’ Sadie pulls him onto the sofa, keeping herself in the middle. ‘He said so after lunch last month.’

I am at a complete loss about how to react, because Sadie sounds as if she is reporting a murder confession and Brian looks as if he has been sentenced to hang by the neck until dead. But at least I have more insight into why Sadie is out for blood.

‘Does that please you, Ella?’ Sadie says. ‘Because you certainly looked pleased.’

‘I’m sure you were being kind, Brian,’ I say to Brian. ‘Your dress is beautiful, Sadie,’ I say to Sadie. It is jade satin, cut low without being too low, fitted at the bodice and slightly flared in the skirt.

‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Please don’t change the subject.’

‘I wasn’t. I’ve been wanting to tell you since I got here how elegant you look.’ I scan again for Ted, hoping against all reason for rescue, but his dark blond head and green eyes are nowhere to be seen.

Sadie notices me searching the room. ‘Ted’s not here,’ she says. ‘In case you were wondering.’

‘I was a bit.’

‘Have you and Brian ever met on your own?’ Her eyes flick between the two of us.

‘No,’ we both say at once.

Sadie bites her bottom lip. ‘Are you sure?’ she says.

‘Yes,’ we both say at once.

I decide to reduce the amount of time before my getaway. ‘Perhaps Ted is working?’ I say, hoping very hard that there is no risk of his turning up only to find me gone – for him to be on his own at this party would not be a happy thing.

‘He said he wasn’t,’ Sadie says. ‘But he was cagey when I asked why he couldn’t make it.’

Ted holding my hand in the playground when we were six, not caring that the other boys teased him.

She goes on. ‘I think he’s seeing someone. When exactly did he and his wife divorce?’

I inhale quickly, as if I have been kicked in the stomach. ‘A year ago.’ My voice is dull in my own dull head.

‘Didn’t last long on his own, did he?’

Stealing a kiss from me in the wooden playhouse on top of the climbing frame in the park when we were eight.

‘How do you know that?’

Weeping in your arms when I was ten because Ted had appendicitis and I’d been terrified to see him so ill.

‘From how he was when I asked him to the party,’ she says. ‘Definitely evasive. I wouldn’t have invited him if you hadn’t made me, Ella.’

Ted once told me that the antipathy between him and Sadie goes all the way back to reception class, when Sadie had a crush on him and couldn’t forgive him for his complete lack of interest in her and his extremely big interest in me.

‘Maybe he likes his privacy,’ Brian says.

‘Marrying one woman to get over another is never a good plan,’ Sadie says. ‘But you can’t expect him to wait for you forever.’

Falling asleep on the phone with him when I was twelve and waking the next morning to hear his breath through the handset.

‘I don’t expect that.’ This is a lie. I have expected exactly that. In recent months, since renewing what we both shyly call our ‘friendship’, I have thought that at last our time together would properly begin. I thought he felt this too.

Making love for the first time when we were sixteen.

We’d worried about pregnancy, then, like most teenagers. Not a worry I’ve needed to have for the last ten years.

As Dr Blossom knows. He is wearing his intelligent face as he studies me, posing by the chimney piece with every one of his gilded hairs in place, stroking his perfectly square chin. He looks as if he expects several cameras to go off. Is he following me from room to room?