Page 195 of Guilty Pleasures

Stella felt a sinking sense of dread, thinking of Tom and how he would hate her if she was right. For a split second Stella was going to hold her tongue, but then she caught sight of the long scar on Emma’s arm from the accident. Her friend was a shadow of her former self. She had lost so much weight since the accident that her jeans were hanging off her around the waist. The elegant, polished, successful woman had gone and had been replaced by a thin, nervy shadow. No, thought Stella, the most important thing is the truth.

‘Did you ever see the back of this painting?’

Emma shook her head.

‘No. It was in a horrible old frame. I think it was one of the ones Julia took away to reframe.’

‘Well, this painting is by Ben Palmer, a Cornish artist and an old friend of Saul and my father’s,’ explained Stella. ‘Ben gave both of them some of his work as a gift when they helped him out financially. Apparently the paintings themselves are worth very little, however, on the back of Saul’s – yours – is a half-finished work by Francis Bacon. My father reckons it could be worth a lot of money, like maybe millions.’

Emma whistled.

‘Are you sure the painting is yours?’ said Stella, hoping that perhaps it was all a big mistake. ‘Maybe Julia had a similar one. Maybe she knew Ben too?’

But Emma wasn’t listening. She was staring out of the window into the darkness.

‘It was Julia,’ she said softly. ‘In the black car in Gstaad. And it was Julia who torched the Stables because she wants me dead. No one knew she had that painting except me, and with me dead, it’s hers.’

Emma fell silent, turning it over in her mind.

‘But why now? She’s had the painting for almost a year.’

‘Because she needed the money,’ said Stella quietly.

She stared down into the black liquid in her mug.

‘She used every penny she owned to bail Tom out of trouble. Apparently she’d scrimped and saved over the years to open a new gallery, but some gangsters were threatening to kill Tom because of the debts he’d run up at his bar in Ibiza. She needed money to save her son.’

‘She needed more money so she could save her son and get the gallery she wanted,’ said Emma. ‘So she thought she’d kill me, pocket all the proceeds from the painting and nobody would ever know any different.’

For the first time in weeks, Emma felt her anxiety and fear fall away, to be replaced by feelings of anger and betrayal. Her own aunt had tried to kill her, she felt sure of it. She looked at Stella suddenly.

‘I can prove she was the driver in Gstaad.’

‘How?’

‘Get the Swiss police to re-examine the Mercedes,’ said Emma. ‘There must be traces of hair, something that we can link to Julia.’

‘Em, I’ve watched enough CSI to know that it’ll be hopelessly contaminated by now.’

Emma closed her eyes and nodded, her mind flashing back to the scene at the side of the road.

‘You’re right. And anyway, it was weeks ago, the car will have been mended and valeted, maybe even sold by now.’

Stella shook her head sadly.

‘Money. It destroys everything,’ she said.

Emma intuitively knew what Stella was thinking.

‘Not everything, Stell. Tom can’t blame you for something his mum did, he’ll understand. If we’re right about this, Julia almost killed her daughter too, remember?’

‘God, this is going to tear the family apart.’

Emma nodded. She was right – and they were going to hold her responsible.

Ruby was scared. Far too late, she realized it had been a terrible mistake to come up to London. She knew she was going to be in dreadful trouble with school, with her mother, with her grandma, and what for? So far, it had been a miserable evening, nothing like Amaryllis had promised. Her glamorous older school friend – sixteen, she was practically an adult – had a new boyfriend called Wesley. He was apparently a famous jet-set

ting record producer which had impressed Ruby enormously, especially when he had promised he could get the girls into one of the exclusive after-show parties at the Brits. And of course Ruby had felt very grown up borrowing one of Amaryllis’s Cavalli dresses, sneaking out of school and getting a taxi to London. Best of all, they were going to a fabulous showbiz party that had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with her mother. But it had all gone downhill the second they had stepped into the Sanderson’s Long Bar, which was noisy and crowded and intimidating. Amaryllis and Pandora had blended seamlessly into the crowd and although they hadn’t exactly left Ruby to fend for herself, she felt completely out of her depth. She’d breathed a sigh of relief when Amaryllis had said they were leaving, but instead of returning to the girls’ parents’ house, or better still, back to school, they had gone to Wesley’s apartment in West London to carry on partying.