Lydia
Lydia
Lydia waited until everyone was occupied with the rehearsal, then hid herself away in the little kitchenette. She picked up a knife and shaved off some of the coffee-and-walnut cake she’d baked that morning. It didn’t count as an actual slice, more just tidying up the edges. She squinted at the cake. It still wasn’t quite even, so she shaved off a little more. Which made it even more lopsided. What a shame.
Lydia ate all the tidied-up pieces of the cake, which was now significantly smaller, and sat down, feeling a little sick. She wiped the icing off her fingers, picked up her phone and Googled Delilah Jones.
The results showed page after page of entries, mainly from the nineties and early noughties. None at all after 2008.
Delilah Jones, it turned out, was a younger, terribly glamorous version of Daphne. There were photos of her at Ascot, Henley, and Wimbledon, at parties and clubs, wearing fabulous jewelry and lush furs, smoking cigarettes in a long cigarette-holder and drinking cocktails. Pictures of Delilah’s houses—a country estate in Essex and a grand Georgian town house on Blackheath. One image made Lydia gasp out loud: Delilah wearing the exact Dior jacket that Daphne had given to Lydia.
And always, right next to Delilah, his hand draped proprietorially around her waist or her shoulders, or clutching her at the elbow: Jack Jones. Her husband. Jack Jones, the notorious East End gangster and thief, who’d evaded the police for decades before they’d finally arrested him and his accomplices for emptying the safe of a famous jeweler in Belgravia. The gang had all gone to prison, but most of the jewelry had never been found.
And Delilah Jones, it seemed, had just disappeared.