Devil in Disguise (53 page)

‘Heathcliff’.’
cried Lilia, the velocity pushing her back in the passenger seat, her fragile
body shaken violently by the journey over rough terrain. Then, suddenly, they
were floating. ‘Heathcliff, it’s me!’

‘Whoooaaaeeeee!’
screamed Genita, in those final, free moments before impact.

It was five o’clock on
Christmas morning when the Kent Police knocked on Molly and Rupert’s front door
with the grim news.

With
Boris’s agreement Molly cancelled all engagements for a year. The story of her
double bereavement was front-page news for weeks, and the sympathy for Mia
Delvard was unprecedented. Her place in the hearts of the public as a
torch-song singer with an impeccable pedigree was firmly established.

With
the canker in the house gone, Molly and Rupert managed to recover their
relationship and re-establish their marriage, and they agreed tacitly never to
talk about those terrible months when they had nearly been driven apart. Life
became almost normal again.

No one
except Molly ever knew why Simon had driven Lilia to their deaths. At Simon’s
funeral, Roger said to Molly, ‘He knew something, didn’t he? I’m nobody’s fool.
I can’t sleep at night. This is like your TV breaking down halfway through an
episode of
Murder She Wrote.’

But
Molly, pale and grief-stricken, said nothing, except ‘I loved him, Roger. I’m
so glad he knew that.’

It wasn’t until several
months after Lilia had been buried in Northampton in the same grave as Joey
that Molly felt able to enter Lilia’s upstairs flat. She had just returned from
the official opening of the Mia Delvard Music Room at Goldsmiths, and her mind
was full of Lilia. It was time to face what the old woman had left behind.

Molly
went in and walked tentatively through the abandoned rooms, just as Lilia had
left them. In the bedroom, draped across the bed, was her famous blue silk
kimono, lying where Lilia had flung it on the last, carefree evening.

She
felt a throb of grief. Lilia might have wanted to destroy her at the end but
for years there had been real love between them, too. She was, after all, the
closest thing to a mother Molly had ever known. A sob rising in her throat,
Molly collapsed on the bed and buried her face in the soft, comforting folds of
Lilia’s mother’s robe, the one lasting connection the old lady had had with her
extraordinary past.

Once
the tears had subsided, she pulled away to inhale some cleaner, fresher air. It
was only then that she saw the label. It took half a second to read it, but
several moments to register the implications. The label on the kimono said
‘Dorothy Perkins’.

‘No,’
said Molly to herself. ‘How can that be?’

In a
daze, she opened the bedside drawer and pulled out a sheaf of documents.
Leafing through it, she came upon a crisp, yellowing bit of paper, which, when
she opened it, revealed itself to be a birth certificate with the following
information: ‘Name: Maureen Watkins. Date of birth: 20 April 1928. Place of
birth: Grimsby, Lincolnshire.’

She
stared at it, unable to take it in. She saw again the little German woman
opening the door to her, breathing,
‘Wilkommen,’
and spinning stories of
her magnificent heritage of Berlin cabaret and her heartbreaking past.

‘Well,
I never.’ Molly started to laugh. ‘The lying cow!’

A
moment later she glanced out of the window and saw a flock of migrating geese
on the horizon.

‘But if
Lilia Delvard never existed,’ she wondered out loud, ‘then who was Maureen
Watkins? And what on earth was
her
story?’