Read Online The Cradle in the Grave by Sophie Hannah - Free Book Online Page B

Tell her the truth. Tell her why you can’t make Laurie’s film. You have nothing to be ashamed of .
    â€˜Bollocks to that!’ Tamsin bangs her fist on the table. ‘If you’re going there, I’m going to the Science Museum instead as a protest at your . . . dickery. Fliss, people dream of things happening to them like what’s happened to you today. You’ve got to take it. Even if you decide to leave me to rot in the gutter while you stock up on diamonds.’
    â€˜I’m being serious.’
    â€˜So am I! Think of all the time you’ll get to spend with Laurie, him helping you unofficially – hah!’ She gurgles with laughter. ‘It’s so obvious you’re in love with him.’
    â€˜It can’t be, because I’m not,’ I say firmly. Maybe it’s not such a huge lie. If I’m aware of all the reasons why I shouldn’t love Laurie, which I am, then that has to mean I don’t, not wholly. At the very least, I’m halfway in and halfway out. If I’m in love with him, how come I can so perfectly inhabit the mindset of thinking he’s a git and the bane of my life?
    â€˜You spend hours staring out of your window at his office, even when he’s not in it.’ Tamsin chuckles. ‘I’m not going to waste my breath saying no good can come of it. Some good’s already come of it – a hundred and forty grand a year for us to split between us.’ She gives me a narrow-eyed grin to let me know she’s been winding me up about the money. ‘You’ve been rewarded for your good taste. Laurie might be a freak, but he’s a shrewd freak. He’s seen the way you babble like an idiot in front of him, crazed with lust. You’re his perfect pawn: he gets to distance himself from the film in public while retaining control in private.’
    â€˜Why would he want to distance himself?’ I say, determinedly ignoring everything else Tamsin’s just said because if I allowed myself to take it in and believe it, I would have to devote the rest of my life to muffled sobbing. ‘He’s obsessed with it.’
    â€˜In case it goes tits up, which it might very well, now that Sarah’s pulled out.’
    â€˜Sarah?’
    â€˜Jaggard. Oh, my God! Laurie hasn’t told you, has he?’
    My phone starts to ring. I snap it open. ‘Hello?’
    â€˜Is that Fliss Benson?’ a woman asks.
    I tell her it is.
    â€˜This is Ray Hines.’
    My heart leaps, like a horse over a fence. Rachel Hines . I have the oddest sensation: as if this moment was always going to come, and there was nothing I could have done to avert it.
    She can’t know how significant she is to me, how it makes me feel to hear her voice.
    â€˜Why is Laurie Nattrass leaving Binary Star?’ She doesn’t sound angry, or even put out. ‘Does it have anything to do with Helen Yardley dying? I’m assuming she was murdered. I heard on the news that her death was “suspicious”.’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ I say brusquely. ‘You’ll have to ask the police about that, and you’ll have to ask Laurie why he’s leaving. I’m nothing to do with anything.’
    â€˜Really? I got an email from Laurie saying you’ve taken over the documentary.’
    â€˜No. That’s . . . a misunderstanding.’
    Tamsin has found a pen in my bag and written ‘Who?’ on a beer mat. She shoves it towards me. I write ‘Rachel Hines’ beneath her question. She opens her mouth as wide as it’ll go, flashing her tonsils at me, then scribbles furiously on the beer mat: ‘Keep her talking!!!’
    Even if I don’t want to?
    I heard two women on the tube discussing Rachel Hines, the day after she won her appeal. One said, ‘I don’t know about the others, but the Hines woman murdered her children, sure as I’m born. She’s a drug addict and a liar. You