by Vicky Jones
“Well, that doesn’t surprise me, Tina. Your cakes are amazing.” Rachel replied, smiling.
“I’ll second that,” Bradley chipped in as he munched on one of the cookies that Tina had brought in yesterday and wiped the crumbs of his tie.
“Did you want me?” Rachel asked Tina, realising that she had been waiting outside her office. She nodded at Bradley to get back to his desk.
“Oh, yes. I was going to ask if you wanted me to drop you some tea round tonight? I know you’re still settling into your new house, and I always make too much scouse. It’s no trouble.”
Rachel smiled and shook her head. “Thank you, Tina. That’s very kind. But I’ll be fine. You do enough by keeping me going with your cakes.”
“OK then, but you just say if you ever want a care package bringing in. Promise?”
Rachel looked at Tina, taking in her kind eyes and motherly aura. “I will. Now, let’s crack on, shall we?”
Katie sat in Mrs. Parker’s living room. She had been ushered to sit down in a worn brown armchair while the old woman came back with some tea. The room hadn’t been decorated since the mid-nineties. It had peeling beige wallpaper and dark oak wood everywhere. There was a dark green three-seater sofa, its armrests almost threadbare, along the longest wall in the room and through the archway at the far end was a small alcove room with a mahogany dining table covered in ornaments. At the back was a Welsh dresser stacked with plates of all different colours and patterns. The living room carpet was a greeny-brown colour with swirl patterns, worn away at the edges of the brass carpet grips in the doorway.
“Here we are,” Mrs. Parker said as she returned to the living room with a small brown tray laden with two chipped mugs of dark brown tea. “Sorry it’s dark. Milk’s on the turn.” She sat down and offered Katie a mug.
“When did he die, Mrs. Parker?”
“Oh, call me Pam. I can’t be arsed with all that formality.” She sipped her tea. “Four years ago now. I just assumed Jenny would have told you. I would have, but I didn’t have your address or phone number for where you’d be now. It was all very hush hush when you left all those years ago. One or two?”
Katie refocused her eyes on Pam who was holding out a sugar bowl and a teaspoon. “I don’t normally, but better make it two,” she said, letting Pam drop the heaped teaspoons of sugar in her mug. “I don’t understand. Why didn’t anyone tell me my father had died? Did they not think I deserved to know? I’m so confused.”
“I’m sorry, love. That must have been hard to just be told like that.”
“I don’t understand any of this. All I remember is my mum died when I was five and my dad couldn’t cope with me and Jenny, so sent me to live with my Auntie Joan in Brighton when I was seven. As I got older I kind of understood why he did it, and I didn’t blame him. But Jenny has been really weird with me for as long as I can remember, and then, as soon as I come back here and speak to a shopkeeper whose son I used to play with when I was little, he yells at me and kicks me out of his shop. What the hell is going on here, Pam?”
Pam took a deep breath and sipped her tea. “I’m sure Colin Porter didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just… Well, for a while after you left, businesses suffered with all the press poking around the area. This neighbourhood was all over the news back then. Gave it a right bad name, all that attention.”
Katie shook her head. “Bad name? Pam, you’re not getting to the point.” She leaned forward in her armchair. “Why?”
“Bleeding hell, queen. You serious that nobody’s ever told you?”
“Told me what?”
Chapter 12
Chloe Sharp burst into Rachel’s office clutching a piece of paper, her eyes as bright as the crisp white shirt she was wearing. Her blonde hair fell across her jubilant face as the breeze from Rachel’s open window caught it.
“I’ll let you off the lack of a good honest knock, Sharp, if you tell me what’s put that smile on your face,” Rachel said after looking up from her computer screen.
“I found him. Well, I found two candidates from all the ones on the database who fitted the age and description,” Chloe said, barely drawing breath.
“Who?” Rachel replied, trying to keep up.
“Callum Davies. I’ve spoken to one of them already, who pretty much told me to piss off as he didn’t have a clue what I was talking about, and the other one didn’t answer his phone. But, judging by the info I’ve got on the second one, I reckon he’s our missing person. We need to double check though.”
Rachel grinned. “Excellent work, Sharp. Well done.”
“Thanks. But, if I’m being honest, this wasn’t a particularly difficult case to crack. Just needed some good old-fashioned police work. Following up statements, reading between the lines, etc.…”
“Well, considering the calibre of who work here, hardly surprising,” Rachel muttered. She looked back up at Chloe who stood smiling down at her like a proud puppy. “Right, well, shall we go and see him then to tie up the case?”
“See who?” Supt. Jenkins piped up from the doorway. Chloe turned round.
“Callum Davies,” Rachel replied, looking round Chloe at her boss. “A young lad who’s been missing this past year. Sharp, here, has been like a dog with a bone trying to follow up leads to locate him. She’s got to the bottom of it and found him, so we think. We need to pay a visit to confirm, but it’s looking good. Right, Sharp?”
“Hopefully,” Chloe replied.
Jenkins reached over to slap Chloe on the shoulder. “Right, well, congratulations, DC Sharp. I knew you’d be an excellent addition to the team. Great to see you’re putting your training into action.” He looked back at Rachel with a mock frown. “I hope you’re utilising DC Chapman on this too? I’m not paying detective rates for her to sit on her behind all day playing Candy Crush.” He jutted his head to indicate over his shoulder, where Rachel could see Mags scrolling through her phone.
“Of course, sir. I’ll brief the team on our progress in a few minutes.”
Jenkins nodded. “Good, good. Otherwise she’ll only start complaining to me about feeling like we’re putting her out to grass already.” He thought for a moment. “Actually, I think she should go and follow up on this Callum Davies? No need for a DI to go, and Sharp, you’ve already done enough for the team.”
Rachel balked. Chloe looked at her with hopeful eyes. “Sir? If you’re sending a DC then I think Sharp should get the opportunity to wrap this up, seeing as though she was the one who did all the work,” Rachel said, adding the last sentence as Jenkins turned around and waved Mags over.
“Nonsense. Let’s share out the workload, eh?” Jenkins replied.
Chloe spread her hands but Rachel shushed her.
“Chapman, over here,” Jenkins yelled over to Mags, who trotted over. “Mags, DC Sharp has done some sterling work tracking down Callum Davies and because of the size of the case load, to help DI Morrison out, could you take down all the details from Sharp here and go and confirm it is the correct Callum Davies?”
Mags stepped back in surprise. “We’ve found him? I didn’t even know…”
“I was about to brief you,” Rachel replied. “I’ve only just this minute found out myself.”
“There we are then,” Jenkins said with a satisfied grin. “An excellent team result. Sharp, Morrison, onto the next case. DC Chapman, get yourself over to Davies’ place and box this one off, will you?”
“Yes, sir,” Mags replied, following him as he strode away from Rachel’s office doorway.
“Sorry, Sharp,” Rachel murmured. “That one should have been yours.”
“That’s OK,” Chloe replied in a quiet voice, her face downcast. “On to the next one, eh?” She walked slowly back over to her desk.
Katie had been staring at a damp patch on Pam’s wood chipped wallpaper for the last few minutes since the old woman’s bombshell announcement. She squeezed out her voice. “What?”
Pam reached forward and clasped her ha
nd over Katie’s. “I know it’s come as a bit of a shock to you. I’m sorry.”
“I have a little sister? Why wasn’t I told about her? Where is she now? Does Jenny know about her?” The questions tumbled out of Katie’s mouth as quickly as they’d flown through her brain.
Pam put her coffee cup down and shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Oh Jesus. I don’t know… I don’t even know how to say this…”
Katie glared at Pam. “Just say it, for God’s sake.”
“OK.” Pam smoothed down the creases in her lap and set her face as she thought of her next sentence. “There were three of yous. Jenny, you and your little sister. Her name was Mollie.”
Katie’s whole body shuddered. “Mollie? That’s the name of the little girl Jenny had a picture of in her phone case. She knew about her?”
“Well, of course she did,” Pam replied.
Katie sat back in her chair, trying to process what she’d heard. “What a cow. I’ve been calling her and sending her messages. I’ve been Facebooking her friends because she’s not returning my calls. For God’s sake, this shows how much of a complete idiot I am. I thought this Mollie was a child Jenny had lost or something, and that’s why she didn’t want to speak to me about her. We’ve never been that close as sisters, so I understood her feelings about that, but I never thought… I was trying to be really sympathetic, and all this time…”
Katie could feel her blood boiling as she went over and over in her head Jenny’s coldness towards her back in Brighton. She stood up and began pacing the room.
“I’ve got a little sister I never even knew about, kept from me for all this time by a sister that seems to hate me for some reason? Do you know how lonely I’ve felt all my life, being stuck down in Brighton all by myself? Removed from my family because my dad couldn’t cope with the two of us? And there were three of us? That means my dad kept Jenny and Mollie, and sent me away. Why? Why me? What did I do that was so wrong to be sent hundreds of miles away? And why don’t I remember Mollie? Why doesn’t Mollie contact me?”
Pam raised her palms. “Katie, please. Please try to calm down. I’ll tell you everything, but you have to calm down a bit. The neighbours.”
“Fuck the neighbours. I want to know why my dad couldn’t cope with three of us but could cope with two. And why my so-called sister never even told me my dad had fucking died. What the hell is going on here?” Katie punctuated the last part of her sentence with finger jabs down on the mahogany coffee table. Seeing Pam’s shocked face, she sat down slowly and tried to compose herself. “I’m sorry, Pam. It’s just…I feel all of a sudden I don’t know my own family anymore. Everything I thought I knew is a total lie.”
“I can understand how you feel. It must be a terrible shock.”
“That’s an understatement, Pam.” Katie locked eyes with the old lady. “Where is Mollie now?”
Pam pressed her wrinkly hand to her mouth and closed her eyes. “Oh, bleeding hell.”
“Pam?”
“I’m sorry. But Mollie’s dead.”
Her words hit Katie like a clutch of sharp stones.
“What? When? How?”
“When she was five. You had just turned seven and Jenny was ten. You and Mollie were playing together in the back garden, Jenny was next door and one day Mollie fell. She broke her neck on the wooden decking from height, bashed her head and died.”
“Oh my God. But why don’t I remember that?” Katie’s eyes filled up with tears. “What does that have to do with people being angry at me?”
Pam looked away and dabbed her eyes with a crumpled-up tissue. She looked back at Katie, her face set hard. “Because…you pushed her.”
Chapter 13
After negotiating her sky-blue Audi A1 around the grim, one-way streets of Kensington, Mags parked up just after a wide speed hump, outside a rundown three-storey red-bricked terraced house, in a street where several of the adjacent properties were boarded up. It was only four miles away from Callum Davies’ family home, but the surrounding area was worlds apart from the pleasant, leafy suburb of Aigburth where he’d grown up. Mags checked the address in her notebook and, confident she’d got the right house, locked her car and walked over to the dark green front door. She laid three heavy knocks on the paint-chipped wood, which opened.
“Yeah?” a hooded black youth muttered through the tiny crack in the door. A waft of sickly sweet air blew towards Mags from behind him.
Mags smiled. “Hi. Is Callum in?”
“Who’s askin’?”
Mags held up her warrant card, her fixed smile remaining on her perfectly made up face. “Get Callum for me, lad, and I’ll ignore the green I can smell on you.”
The youth rolled his eyes and leaned back to call over his shoulder. “Cal. Door. It’s the bizzies.”
Mags looked up and down the street waiting, but Callum didn’t appear. Impatient, she hammered on the door again. “Callum, I know you’re in there. You want your mate to get done for possession?”
Callum appeared at the door, frowning. He was unshaven, with dark circles around his dull blue eyes. He had a black sweatshirt on, with the hood pulled up around his head. His grey sweatpants were grubby, his trainers worn at the toes. “What?” he growled.
“Callum Davies?”
“Who are you?”
“DC Chapman, Merseyside Police,” Mags said, taking out her warrant card again and showing it to him before putting it back in her trench coat pocket. “You were reported missing. Quite a while ago, actually. I’ve been sent to check you’re alive and kicking.”
“So now you’ve seen, you can fuck off again.” Callum went to slam the door, but Mags reached up to stop it closing.
“No need to be like that, Callum,” she said in her most motherly tone. “Look, I’m just here to make sure you’re OK and to see if you need anything. There are a fair few people worrying about you, you know, disappearing in the middle of the night like that? Leaving your trainer by the dockside? And your baby’s really missing his daddy. I’ve met him. He’s beautiful. Got your eyes, he has.”
Callum sniffed and wiped his nose on the back of his grubby fist.
“We care about your welfare, Callum,” Mags continued. “There are people out there who haven’t given up on you. Courtney, for one. And little Tommy.”
“How did you find me?” Callum asked, his eyes nervously scanning the distance behind her.
“We’re good at our job,” Mags replied, to which Callum snorted. His stare hardened.
“Good at your job? That’s a fuckin’ joke,” he added in a mocking tone. “Piss off, pig.” He went to close the door again, but Mags held up a hand in annoyance.
“Callum, love. I’m not here for a row. You’re old enough to make your own decisions on your life. Our only concern was that you were safe and well, and not at the bottom of Canning Dock. Now I can see that, I’m obligated to ask you if you need any support or want us to put you in contact with anyone who can provide you with housing or counselling for the reason you left your family. Or, I could fuck off and say you declined support and you said you were fine. If that’s what you really want.”
Callum locked eyes with Mags, trying to weigh up whether her soft tone reassured or terrified him. “Yeah, that second one. I just wanna be left alone, OK? And I don’t want you lot telling Courtney or my dad where I am. I mean it.” He pulled the sleeves of his sweatshirt over his hands and wrapped his arms around his skinny body.
“OK then, Callum. You take care of yourself.”
Mags let go of the door, letting Callum slam it shut. She walked back over to her car and climbed inside. Opening up her notebook, she drew a bold cross over Callum’s name and snapped the notebook shut with a deep sigh.
Pam placed a fresh tray of tea and chocolate biscuits down on the coffee table. It had been twenty minutes since her revelation to Katie, and the air had been thick ever since.
“I don’t even know how I could have killed Mollie. I don’t even remember
her, let alone killing her,” Katie said in disbelief. She nursed the cup that Pam had handed her before taking a slow sip.
“It was years ago, Katie. Many years ago. I mean, I don’t know all the info myself really. The police’ll know that, but…between speaking to your dad, and his best mate, Bill Thompson, who was there and saw it happen, well, the general feeling was that you and Mollie just never got on.”
“Who told you that?”
“Your dad. Bill was over the house all the time and told the police and some journalists that you hated Mollie all along, and that’s why you did what you did.”
“They think I did it on purpose? Like, premeditated? Christ. No wonder everyone from here thinks I’m a monster. Pam, what did I do? How exactly did Mollie die?”
“You remember the cabin shed at the far end of your back garden?”
Katie shook her head. “Not clearly, anyway. I recognised the front of the house, vaguely. Enough to know it as soon as I drove up to it again. But I don’t remember the garden.”
Pam shook her head. “I’m not surprised, love. You’ve probably blocked it out. The trauma must have affected you too. Well, at the bottom of your garden is a cabin shed built on stilts. Your dad used to call it the ‘man cave’. Mollie was playing on the top step of the decking area which was quite a few feet off the ground. Apparently, you…pushed her off. She broke her neck on the steps on the way down and died instantly. Your dad saw you out the window standing next to her just before she fell. Said you pushed her. Bill witnessed it from inside the cabin looking out the window, saying he’d heard you shouting at Mollie seconds before she fell.”
“This is unreal. I don’t remember any of this. Where was Jenny when I supposedly did this?”
“She was next door and came running over with the neighbours when they all heard the commotion. I was walking back from the shops at the time. I followed the noise and saw everybody, the ambulance, the police. It was a horrible sight.”