flickered across Rhiannon’s face at that. She recovered herself quickly, her expression back to bored indifference almost instantly. However, I had seen it and I couldn’t stop a triumphant smile from spreading across my own face. “Oh yes, didn’t he tell you that? I rang ‘Cass.’ Obviously the first thing I’m going to do is call your mum and explain that you sent that email, and the second thing I’m going to do is tell her about this Craig person and explain that you propose waltzing out with this guy I’ve never met, in a top that barely comes to your navel, and see what she has to say on that subject.”
I don’t know what I had expected—perhaps a show of temper, or even for Rhiannon to start crying and begging to be let off.
But her reaction was neither of those things. Instead, she smiled, rather sweetly, in a way that was totally unnerving, and said, “Oh, I don’t think you’ll do that.”
“Give me one good reason why not!”
“I’ll do better than that,” she said. “I’ll give you two. Rachel. Gerhardt.”
Oh fuck.
The silence in the kitchen was absolute.
For a second, I thought my knees were about to give way, and I groped my way for a barstool and slumped down on it, feeling my breath catch in my throat.
I was cornered. I realized that now. I just didn’t know quite how tight that corner was going to get.
Because this is where it gets very, very bad for me, doesn’t it, Mr. Wrexham?
This is where the police case on me shifted from being someone in the wrong place at the wrong time, to someone with a motive.
Because she was right. I couldn’t ring Sandra and Bill.
I couldn’t do that, because Rhiannon knew the truth.
It will be no surprise to you, Mr. Wrexham, not if you’ve read the newspaper pieces.
Because you will have known right from the outset that the nanny arrested in the Elincourt case was not Rowan Caine but Rachel Gerhardt.
But to the police, it was like a bombshell. Or, no, not a bombshell. More like one of those exploding piñatas that showers you with gifts.
Because I had handed them their case on a plate.
Afterwards they focused very hard on how I managed to do it, as if I were some kind of criminal mastermind, who had plotted all this in exhaustive detail. But what they couldn’t seem to understand was how temptingly, laughably simple it had been. There had been no forgery, no elaborate identity theft or manufactured papers. How did you obtain the fake identity papers, Rachel? they kept asking, but the truth was, there had been no fake papers. All I had done was pick up my friend Rowan’s nannying paperwork from her bedroom in our shared flat, and show it to Sandra. Background check, first aid certificate, CV, none of it had any photographs. There was absolutely no need for me to fake anything, and no way of Sandra knowing that the woman standing in front of her was not the person named on the certificates she was holding out.
And, I tried to tell myself, it wasn’t much of a deception. After all, I really did have those credentials—most of them, anyway. I had a background check and a first aid certificate. Like Rowan, I had worked in the baby room at Little Nippers, albeit not quite as long as she had, and not as supervisor. And I had done nannying beforehand, though not as much, and I wasn’t sure that my references would have been quite as gushing. But the basics were all there. The name thing was just a . . . technicality. I even had a clean driving license, just as I had told Sandra. The only problem was that I couldn’t show it to her because of the photo. But everything I had told her—every qualification I had claimed—it was all true.
Everything except for my name.
There was luck involved of course too. It had been lucky that Sandra had agreed to my request and hadn’t contacted Little Nippers themselves for a reference. If she had, they would have told her that Rowan Caine had left a couple of months back. Lucky that she never pushed me on the driving license.
And it had been lucky too that she used a remote payroll service, so that I never had to present Rowan’s passport in person and could simply forward the scan she had left on her computer desktop along with our shared bills.
The biggest