The Good Girl Read Online Free Page B

waited to see if she would put on her seatbelt without being told and then felt perversely irritated when Rachel clicked it into place.
    ‘Because Dad will want to go in the front, won’t he? Is he coming down?’
    Ailsa ignored her questions and instead revved the car again.
    ‘Careful
or you’ll flood it,’ warned Rachel. ‘You need to wait a minute and press the clutch up and down to get everything flowing.’
    Ailsa glanced at Rachel in the mirror. She had a stripy scarf wrapped around her face and was wearing an oversized bobble hat that belonged to Luke. Her unruly brown curly hair poked out wherever it could. Apart from a few crow’s feet, as fine as lace, Rachel barely had a line on her face. And these just highlighted her startling grey-green eyes. Even her imperfections were beguiling: the tiny chip on her front tooth, the rabble of freckles on her slightly too wide nose and the gap across the outside edge of her right eyebrow, the legacy of stitches from a childhood accident. Her hands were deep in the pockets of the coat that Ailsa used for work. She winked at her older sister. Her eyes were their mother’s.
    ‘Are you wearing any of your own clothes?’ asked Ailsa.
    ‘I’m here. Isn’t that enough?’ asked Rachel. ‘And I’ve just fed Lucifer.’
    ‘I’m glad you’ve finally helped get a meal on the table,’ Ailsa teased.
    ‘You’re a much better cook than me, Ails. Always was.’
    Rachel always turned criticism of her into a compliment to Ailsa.
    ‘Harry does all the cooking now.’
    She put the car into gear again and tentatively pressed the accelerator. The wheels spun beneath her, digging
even deeper trenches, sending a new spray of snow over the windows. She pressed harder and the wheels wheezed disapproval.
    ‘You should have dug around the tyres,’ suggested Rachel.
    ‘That wouldn’t work. I’m going to sit here with the engine running for a bit longer so the heat from the chassis melts the snow,’ said Ailsa. She put Radio 4 on again. There was a severe weather warning for the south-east of England. Advice to stick to main roads. Essential journeys only. Freezing fog. Thundersnow. Not even the BBC spoke in proper sentences any more.
Stop noticing this shit
, Ailsa chided herself. It was so ageing.
    ‘We’ll be spending another week here if it goes on like this,’ said Rachel, echoing Ailsa’s worst fears. She felt guilty straight away. She loved her sister. And everyone said that grief was easier if you shared the different stages together. But they weren’t synchronized. While Rachel had been poleaxed by their mother’s death and had spent the funeral in a Valium haze, Ailsa had organized everything. By the time Ailsa gave in to the grief, Rachel had entered the angry phase.
    ‘Did I tell you the last time I went to see Dad, just before Christmas, I couldn’t find him when I went in the house?’ said Ailsa over the noise of the engine and the radio.
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Dad. The front door was open. I went upstairs. His
bed was broken. It was at a thirty-degree angle. His head was hanging over the edge like he’d been decapitated.’ Rachel didn’t say anything. ‘He could have had a stroke because of all the blood pooling in his head.’
    ‘But he didn’t.’
    ‘Didn’t what?’ asked Ailsa.
    ‘Didn’t have a stroke.’
    ‘He’d laid the table for lunch. There was a place set for Mum with those biscuits that she used to love. That’s all he’d been eating. He could have starved. Or got scurvy.’
    ‘KitKats?’
    ‘No, the Scottish ones she used to have as a child.’
    ‘Tunnock’s.’
    ‘Exactly.’
    ‘But he didn’t.’
    ‘Didn’t what?’
    ‘Didn’t starve.’
    ‘What’s your point, Rach?’
    Rachel unwound the scarf from her face and leaned forward until she was jammed in the gap between the two front seats so that she could see her sister more closely. ‘The trouble with you, Ailsa, is that you think you can control everything. You don’t