When She Was Good

by Robotham, Michael

  Cyrus

  We’re sitting in the car, opposite the allotment, with the windows open, breathing air that feels gritty and damp and second-hand. I wonder how many lungs have recycled it before now.

  ‘I wanted to give him a hug,’ says Sacha.

  ‘You believed him, then?’

  ‘Didn’t you?’ She lifts an eyebrow and studies me so intently that I can feel her gaze upon my skin. ‘A lot of people must have wanted Eugene Green dead.’

  ‘Possibly, but did they want to punish him or silence him?’

  Nearby, a group of kids are playing football on the grass using sweatshirts as makeshift goalposts. I know this area. I played football at a park not far away. Dad would watch me from the sidelines, yelling encouragement and advice, but not in a boorish way. Afterwards, we’d buy meat pies and soft drinks and discuss the highlights of the game. Dad could put on a voice like a football commentator and breathlessly describe every goal, ‘… and Cyrus Haven cuts back inside, jinks, accelerates, there’s only the goalkeeper to beat. He shoots! Goooooooaaaal! The crowd has gone wild …’

  The memory triggers a desire in me that is so palpable it feels like a stone is crushing my chest.

  ‘I want to stop somewhere. Is that OK?’

  ‘You’re the driver,’ says Sacha.

  I start the engine and navigate our way back to Nottingham. Reaching the outskirts of the city, I take familiar roads towards Beeston. Soon the landmarks become personal. I had my first kiss behind the Methodist Church on Chilwell Road and touched my first breast in the bus shelter near Beeston Football Club. (Her name was Mandy Oliphant and she pushed my hand away when she saw the bus coming.)

  There were other firsts associated with Beeston: sporting, academic, sexual and tragic. A few streets away, I pull up and park outside an ordinary-looking semi-detached house that isn’t dissimilar to others in the street.

  I knew everybody on this road when I was growing up, and everybody knew me. The Robinsons were in number twenty-two. The Brennans in number eighteen. The Flicks lived opposite. They were a wild family with hot-and-cold-running children, eleven in all, who were forever getting into trouble for breaking windows or shoplifting or skipping classes or stealing bikes.

  ‘Is that the house?’ whispers Sacha.

  I nod.

  ‘They didn’t tear it down?’

  ‘No. It looks smaller than I remember.’

  ‘You were smaller,’ she says.

  I can picture every one of the rooms, upstairs and down. The open-plan kitchen and the sunroom and the loft extension that we added when the twins were born. A side path leads to a gate and the back garden, which has a huge willow tree that had the perfect branches for making bows but not the arrows they fired. Elias insisted on being Robin Hood and I was Will Scarlet and we fought King John and his army of rose bushes.

  In summer, we used a hand-mower and roller to make a cricket pitch running from the back fence to the clothesline. We played with a tennis ball to protect the neighbours; and adopted our own scoring system. Over the fence was six and out; anything hitting the house was four runs and into the rose bushes was a time-out with no running allowed. I hated those thorns.

  If I close my eyes, I can still hear Esme playing the violin in the room she shared with April, sounding like she was torturing the cat. April was the only person who could recognise what Esme was playing. My father is practising his golf swing in the garden, hitting plastic balls into a blanket draped from the clothesline and pegged to the ground. Meanwhile my mother has locked herself in the bathroom and drawn a bath, after announcing that nothing is to disturb her for the next hour, not bloodshed, stitches, famine or pestilence. It was her ‘quiet time’. Her ‘me time’. Her ‘wine o’clock’.

  The house looks so ordinary now. So boring. So nondescript. There was talk of knocking it down after the murders, but someone eventually bought it for a bargain price and had the place redecorated. They gave it a new name, Willow Tree Cottage, and planted window boxes with pansies.

  ‘Where are they now?’ asks Sacha, meaning my family.

  ‘Southern Cemetery in West Bridgford.’

  ‘Do you ever visit?’

  ‘Once a year.’

  ‘On the anniversary.’

  ‘Mother’s Day.’

  Why did I choose that day? Maybe I miss my mum more than the others. She loved that day. The twins would argue outside her bedroom door until allowed to enter, clutching their handwritten menu for breakfast in bed. Toast. Jam. Coffee. Tea. Juice. Boxes had to be ticked and I had to carry the tray.

  Strangely, I don’t remember most of my teenage years after the murders. Adolescence became something to be endured. The sooner I grew up, the further I’d be from the tragedy that defined my life. I went straight to university when I finished school. I didn’t backpack around Asia or romance a pretty Swedish girl in Bali, or go fruit picking in Australia, or overlanding in Africa. I was always looking ahead, never behind, which is why I made so few friends and bedded so few girls and I didn’t fall in love. I thought I was getting a head start on life, when I was missing it completely.

  My pager buzzes on my hip. Nagging me. The small backlit screen has a message from Jack Bowden, Hamish Whitmore’s son-in-law. He’s written: I found something. Call me.

  ‘I have to find a phone box,’ I say.

  Sacha reaches into her pocket and hands me her mobile.

  ‘I thought you didn’t have one.’

  ‘For emergencies only,’ she replies. ‘I rarely turn it on.’

  Because it can be tracked, I think, as I take the phone from her.

  Jack answers quickly, mumbling that he has to go somewhere quiet. I hear voices in the background. A public address system is paging a doctor.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ I ask.

  ‘Couldn’t be better,’ he says excitedly. ‘Suzie went into labour last night and had a baby boy this morning. I’m a dad.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘He’s perfect. Small. Beautiful.’

  ‘How is Suzie?’

  ‘Happy and sad at the same time, you know, but now we have something else to focus on.’

  He gets to the point.

  ‘When I drove Suzie to the hospital last night, I found one of Hamish’s notebooks tucked between the seats. Suzie remembered lending Hamish her car because his Maserati had to be serviced.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Ten or eleven days ago – she wasn’t sure. The satnav has a couple of new addresses. I’ve written them down for you.’ Jack pauses, before umming and ahhing. ‘What should I do with the notebook?’

  ‘The police will want to see it.’

  ‘I figured as much, but I thought you might want to see it first. There’s a reference to Eugene Green and that girl you were interested in.’

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘Angel Face.’

  I feel my pulse speed up. ‘I could give the notebook to the taskforce,’ I say, as casually as possible. ‘Save you the trouble.’

  ‘My thoughts exactly,’ he replies.

  Saint Mary’s Hospital has been around for more than two hundred years at various locations in central Manchester, adding new buildings as required. The entrance to the maternity wing looks like a retail mall with shops, cafés, a pharmacy and an atrium with potted trees.

  Jack meets me at the lifts, breathless and beaming. He grips my hand firmly, almost painfully, and eagerly shows me photographs on his phone: the baby being weighed; the baby being cleaned; the baby nestled in Suzie’s arms.

  ‘Any names?’

  ‘Suzie is leaning towards Hamish.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  Jack hands me the notebook, which has a blue cardboard cover ringed with coffee stains and what could be pasta sauce.

  ‘I’ve been asking myself why Hamish needed to borrow Suzie’s Subaru. He told her that his Maserati was being serviced, but it spent that day parked outside the flat. I wondered if maybe he
thought he was being followed and wanted to switch cars.’

  ‘That makes sense.’

  Jack scratches his cheek with a thumbnail. ‘Have you heard any news?’

  ‘I’m not really part of the investigation.’

  ‘I know … I just thought …’ He begins again. ‘They promised to keep us informed, the police, but we’ve heard nothing. We can’t even plan a funeral until they release his body.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ll see what I can find out.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  We hug as though we’re old friends. Adversity will do that.

  Sacha has waited in the Fiat in the maternity drop-off zone. We find a quiet place and I pull over so we can examine the notebook together. The handwriting is an old-fashioned cursive, and the notebook is dotted with dates, names and a personalised shorthand.

  Hamish Whitmore has listed the details of Eugene Green’s movements in the months before his arrest, investigating the missing weeks, clearly searching for where he might have kept his victims.

  A separate page is folded and wedged into the back of the notebook. It’s a photocopy of some sort of ledger or logbook with columns and headings such as POD, POA, Make and Model.

  ‘This is a flight log?’ asks Sacha. ‘POD is point of departure and POA is point of arrival.’

  One entry is circled – a flight left LPL (Liverpool John Lennon Airport) and landed at the code OBN. I don’t know what airport that refers to. The date on 7 December 2012. The call sign of the aircraft, a private jet, is G-BRDT. Under the column for passengers, someone has written the number 7, and the entry: 4 males. 2 females. 1 minor. Alongside is a list of initials: F.M., B.W., D.A., S.K., M.C., R.M., P.

  Hamish Whitmore had scrawled in the margins, writing the name of a company called Forthright Holdings with an address in Douglas on the Isle of Man. Beneath, he’d listed a series of phone numbers that have been crossed out, as though he was searching for the right one. Finally, at the bottom of the page, he had circled a name in red ballpoint, pressing so hard on the paper it left a teardrop of ink like spilled blood: Phillip Everett.

  Sacha speaks first. ‘Isn’t he a politician?’

  ‘In the House of Lords,’ I say, pulling details from my memory.

  At university, when I was studying criminology, I read a report Lord Everett wrote about overcrowding in British prisons and the lack of mental health services. He was one of the few voices that pushed back against the ‘hang ’em and flog ’em’ brigade, who were always calling for tougher sentences.

  On the same page of the notebook, Hamish had written the name Out4Good, alongside an address in Manchester. It’s the same location that Jack found on Suzie’s satnav.

  ‘Worth a visit,’ I say.

  ‘Who are we visiting?’

  ‘Whoever answers the door.’

  33

  Evie

  Ever since I barricaded myself in the broom cupboard, I’ve been confined to my room, except at mealtimes.

  I miss going outside. I miss seeing Poppy. If I stand on my bed, I can press my face up to the gap in my window and feel the breeze on my cheeks and smell the freshly mown grass. Someone, somewhere, is cooking curry. Children are playing in a garden. A dog barks. Another answers. A third joins in. Maybe they’re talking to each other.

  Ruby has been walking back and forth along the corridor for the past ten minutes, sneaking glances into my room, acting like I might be contagious.

  ‘Hello, Ruby,’ I say.

  She edges inside.

  ‘What happened to your eyebrows?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t have any.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  She touches her forehead. ‘Edwina and Sophie told me they were going to dye them darker, but they shaved them off.’

  ‘Edwina and Sophie are bitches.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘You have to stop trusting people. Particularly in this place.’

  ‘I trust you.’

  My heart lurches. Ruby sits next to me on the bed and produces a half-eaten packet of chocolate biscuits from under her sweater.

  ‘I stole them from the pantry. I’m on kitchen duties this week.’

  ‘Who ate the rest?’

  ‘Davina. She said it was a “theft tax”. Is there such a thing?’

  ‘No.’

  Ruby has also brought me an apple slice wrapped in a paper serviette. It has fluff from her sweater, or her navel, but I eat it anyway.

  ‘Are they sending you away?’ she asks.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Home?’

  ‘I don’t have a home.’

  ‘Where, then?’

  ‘Some psych hospital.’

  She licks the chocolate off a biscuit. ‘You’re not crazy.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s open to interpretation.’

  I’m sitting with my back to the headboard, hugging my knees. The silence gets to be too much for her.

  ‘Evie?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do you have a family?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you did have one.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I bet your mother was pretty. I bet you look like just like her.’

  I want to tell her that pretty is bullshit! Pretty is an accident of nature. Pretty is for girls who live next door and fairy stories about magic mirrors or glass slippers. Pretty is for tourist paintings pinned to railing fences and postcards of castles on rocky headlands. Pretty isn’t for the likes of me.

  Ruby chews on a hangnail and says, ‘I wish I were pretty.’

  ‘You’re the prettiest girl in here, with or without eyebrows.’

  She grins and spies the deck of cards on the bedside table.

  ‘Will you teach me to play poker again?’

  ‘You never remember the rules.’

  ‘I try.’

  I pick up the deck of cards and begin to shuffle.

  ‘Who taught you to play poker?’ she asks.

  ‘Terry.’

  ‘Was he your boyfriend?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your brother?’

  ‘I don’t have any brothers.’

  ‘You can have one of mine,’ laughs Ruby, who has four of them.

  I run through the basic rules again, but I know that Ruby won’t remember them. She has a brain like a goldfish swimming in a bowl. She reacts to every piece of information like she’s hearing it for the first time.

  I deal the cards and remember Terry teaching me to play and how he started to make up new rules because he said I was ‘a freak’ and couldn’t lose.

  Slowly, as the weeks went by, I began moving more of my things out of the secret room. First it was my toothbrush, then my clothes, then books and toys. Terry complained but he didn’t make me hide everything because we had the dogs by then. Two Alsatians (he called them German Shepherds) a brother and a sister. Not puppies. Not adults. Teenagers.

  ‘What are their names?’ I asked, when he brought them home.

  ‘They’re guard dogs, they don’t need names.’

  ‘We have to call them something.’

  Terry thought about this for a while and came up with Sid and Nancy, after Sid Vicious of The Sex Pistols, which was his favourite band.

  ‘Who was Nancy?’ I asked.

  ‘His girlfriend.’

  ‘Was she in the band.’

  ‘She was a tragic heroine.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Someone who makes a mistake and it costs them everything.’

  I still didn’t completely understand, but I liked the idea because it made me think of Mama.

  Terry told me to hold out my hand so the dogs could sniff me and ‘learn my smell’. Later, he put a sign up on the front gate, warning people to BEWARE OF THE DOGS but Sid and Nancy wouldn’t hurt anyone. They were big softies, who wanted to be cuddled.

  When Terry went to work, I would bring them into the house to protect me, but mostly to keep me company
. We’d lie on Terry’s bed and watch TV and eat biscuits, making sure to brush the crumbs away before he came home. When I heard his car, I would scurry into the secret room, pretending to be asleep.

  Terry would put his hand on the bed and feel the warmth left by our bodies. And in the morning, he’d scold me for having broken the rules and I would promise not to do it again, which was a lie.

  Occasionally, Terry came home with a woman. Never the same one, but they all seemed to wear the same clothes: tight dresses and high-heeled shoes. I’d hear them giggle drunkenly or talk too loudly, while Terry was shushing them, trying not to wake me. He didn’t bring these women upstairs, but I heard what they did … the sex stuff. The moaning. The wet sounds.

  I asked Terry what he liked about them and he went quiet. Did he think they were pretty? Were they going to get married?

  ‘Enough of the bloody questions,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you got spellings to do?’

  I didn’t go to school, but he gave me homework because I had to keep learning, otherwise I’d fall behind, he said. I wasn’t sure who I was falling behind, but I liked doing the sums, although I couldn’t see the point of long division, since a calculator could do it quicker. And why did people make such a fuss over prime numbers? What’s the big deal about a number being divisible by one and itself ? People can be like that and nobody cares.

  34

  Cyrus

  Trafford Park is a former industrial area on the southern side of the Manchester Ship Canal. Most of the original warehouses and factories have been bulldozed or converted into office blocks, apartments and retail hubs, but the area is still dominated by Old Trafford Stadium, the home of Manchester United, which has been modified and upgraded so often that Bobby Charlton and George Best wouldn’t recognise the place now.

  I park the Fiat outside a red-brick office building in Lyons Road and check the address in Hamish Whitmore’s notebook. A discreet-looking sign on the glass doors says: Out4Good, with a stylised ‘g’ turned into a key.

  The lights are on, but nobody answers the bell. There are voices inside. Sacha tries the door, which opens inwards and we follow the sound to a large room with high ceilings. Trestle tables are lined up in rows and piled high with clothes, blankets, towels, coats and socks. A dozen people, mostly young black men, are sorting them into boxes. Loud music blares from a portable speaker. Hip hop. It’s why they didn’t hear the bell.