Piranha to Scurfy by Ruth Rendell

Tom in practicing the power of thought, and now all he had to do was wish for Frances to live. Only he had to offer someone else up in her place.
    “That was when he started to see her for what she was. A charlatan. But he played along, he said. He wanted to see what she’d do. Called her bluff, was what he said, but he was deceiving himself in that. He still half believed. Who would he offer up, she asked him. ‘Oh, anyone you like,’ he said, and he laughed. She was deadly serious. That day she’d met Tom’s elder daughter and the granddaughter Emma.Tom said—he hated telling me this, but on the other hand he was really past caring what he told anyone—he said Emma hadn’t been very polite to Davina Tarsis. She’d sort of stared at her, at the tight leggings and the sun on her tunic and sneered a bit, I suppose, and then she’d said it wasn’t Tarsis but the chemo that was doing her grandmother good, it stood to reason that was what it was.”
    I interrupted her. “What do you mean, he hated telling you?”
    “Wait and see. He had good reason. It was after Emma and her mother had gone and Frances was resting that they had this talk. When Tom said it could be anyone she liked, Tarsis said it wasn’t what she liked but what Tom wanted, and then she said, ‘How about that girl Emma?’ Tom told her not to be ridiculous, but she persisted and at last he said that, well, yes, he supposed so, he would give Emma, only the whole thing was absurd. The fact was that he’d give anyone to save Frances’s life if it were possible to do that, so of course, yes, he’d give Emma.”
    “It must have put him off this Davina Tarsis, surely?”
    “You’d think so. I’m not sure. All this was about nine or ten months ago. Frances started to get better. Oh, yes, she did.You needn’t look like that. It was just an amazing thing.The doctors were amazed. But it wasn’t unheard-of, it wasn’t a miracle, though people said it was. Presumably, the chemo worked. All the things that should get right got right. I mean, her blood count got to be normal, she put on weight, the pain went, the tumors shriveled up. She simply got a bit better every day. It wasn’t a remission, it was a recovery.”
    “Tom must have been over the moon,” I said.
    Penelope made a face. “He was. For a while. And then Emma died.”
    “
What?
”
    “In a road crash. She died.”
    “You’re not saying this witch woman, this Davina Tarsis... ?”
    “No, I’m not. Of course I’m not. At the time of the crash Tarsis and Tom were together in Tom’s house with Frances. Besides, there was no mystery about the accident. It
was
indisputably an accident. Emma was on a school bus with the rest of her class, coming back from a visit to some stately home.There was ice on the road, the bus skidded and overturned, and three of the pupils were killed, Emma among them. You must have read about it, it was all over the media.”
    “I think I did,” I said. “I can’t remember.”
    “It affected Tom—well, profoundly. I don’t mean in the way the death of a grandchild would affect any grandparent. I mean he was racked with guilt. He had such faith in Tarsis that he really believed he’d done it. He believed he’d given Emma’s life in exchange for Frances’s. And another awful thing was that his love for Frances simply vanished, all that great love, that amazing devotion that was an example to us all really, it disappeared. He came to dislike her. He told me it wasn’t that he had no feeling for her anymore—he actively disliked her.
    “So there was nothing for him to live for. He believed he’d ruined his own life and ruined his daughter’s and destroyed his love for Frances. One night after Frances was asleep he drank a whole bottle of liquid morphine she’d had prescribed but hadn’t used with twenty paracetomol and a few brandies. He died quite quickly, I believe.”
    “That’s terrible,” I said. “The most awful tragedy. I’d no idea.