by Tudor, C. J.
Sometimes, when Izzy couldn’t get to sleep, he would curl up next to her and sing lullabies or read her stories until they both dozed off. He never admitted to Jenny that this was as much for his comfort as hers.
After Izzy vanished, the nightmares worsened, shredding his nights into sweat-soaked fragments of terror. Again and again their black claws tore him from the edge of oblivion and he’d be screaming so hard that, come the dawn, his throat would be raw and his eyes speckled with burst blood vessels.
Gabe didn’t really believe in karma. But there had been times in the last three years when he had wondered. Was this it? The world’s way of keeping balance? Taking away the most precious thing in his life to remind him that he didn’t deserve to be happy, not after what he had done. Except, Izzy wasn’t dead. Despite what everyone believed, he knew there had been a mistake. A terrible, terrible mistake.
The Samaritan was right. He couldn’t go to the police. Not yet. First, he needed to speak to someone else. Someone he had avoided challenging, had tiptoed around, unwilling to inflict more pain. But this changed things.
He had to know for sure. He had to speak to Jenny’s father.
Gabe lifted his arm, checked his watch. Dawn was creeping around the camper van’s thin, pull-down blind. Six thirty a.m.
Still early. But he had a feeling that Harry didn’t sleep much either.
He sat up, swung his legs off the narrow bunk and pulled out his phone. After the funeral, Jenny’s mother, Evelyn, had changed the home phone number to stop him calling. But Harry had taken pity on him and given Gabe his mobile.
“If you ever need to talk.”
Surprisingly, Gabe had found he did. Although, on one occasion, he didn’t talk, he just wept.
He typed out a text: “Harry, it’s Gabe. Could we meet today?”
His phone almost instantly pinged with a reply.
“8am? Usual place.”
It wasn’t a question. With a heavy heart, Gabe typed, “Okay.”
* * *
—
FARNFIELD CEMETERY WAS an hour’s drive away, not far from the home he had once shared with Jenny and Izzy in Nottinghamshire. It was as pleasant a space as somewhere like this could be. The Garden of Remembrance had plenty of green, neatly mown grass. Smart wooden benches. Trees to provide shade and lots of flowering bushes and evergreens.
Gabe appreciated the sentiment, but he wasn’t sure if it was here that people really remembered their loved ones. Memories were entwined with the everyday minutiae of life. The scent of a certain perfume. Writing a shopping list and still including Marmite because your wife loved it. Finding a mug with “Best Mum in the World” on it in the cupboard. A song on the radio. The smell of food drifting from a restaurant where you once shared a ridiculously expensive bottle of wine that neither of you really liked. Those were the memories that seized you out of nowhere, grabbed you by the heart and squeezed until your chest felt like it would explode. Raw, visceral, uncensored.
Here, memories were filtered through rose-tinted glasses. You selected the things you wanted to remember and put aside those you would rather forget. You left bright bunches of flowers to disguise the fact that all around you was death, your loved ones just a small pile of milky ashes in an ugly pot that Gabe was pretty sure Jenny would have stuffed at the back of a cupboard or “accidentally” dropped if she had received it as a present.
He smiled. A real memory. Jenny was a woman of taste and limited tact. She knew what she liked and what she didn’t and wasn’t afraid to say so.
He sat down on a bench and stared at her small headstone, beneath which the offensive pot was buried:
JENNIFER MARY FORMAN
13 AUGUST 1981–11 APRIL 2016
WIFE. BELOVED DAUGHTER. DEVOTED MUMMY.
IN OUR HEARTS, MINDS AND MEMORIES ALWAYS.
“Wife.” That was all they had given him. The tiniest of gestures. He hadn’t been involved in choosing the headstone. Just like he had been excluded from most of the funeral arrangements. At the time, he was relieved. And, of course, at the time, he was still under suspicion of murder.
“Gabriel?”
He started, looked around. Harry stood beside the bench. Always a well-preserved, fit-looking man (a respected doctor and surgeon in his day), today he looked every one of his seventy-nine years. The thick white hair was still perfectly styled, combed back from a face bronzed by regular winter sun. But there was a slight sagginess around his jaw and eyes. The lines on his forehead carved deeper. One hand leaned heavily on a stick. In the other, he held flowers. Two bouquets.
As Gabe watched, he bent and placed one in the vase beside Jenny’s headstone. Then he turned. To the other headstone. The one Gabe had carefully avoided looking at since he arrived. Because, despite what he believed, despite what he had discovered, the sight of it still filled him with a grief that was almost too much to bear. A black, swollen tide that threatened to drag him down and engulf him.
ISABELLA JANE FORMAN
5 APRIL 2011–11 APRIL 2016
CHERISHED DAUGHTER AND GRANDDAUGHTER.
BORROWED FROM HEAVEN, RETURNED TO THE ARMS OF ANGELS.
Jenny. Izzy.
“It’s about your wife…and your daughter.”
Harry sat down heavily next to him. “So what do you want to talk about?”
The estate where Lou lived was a cramped quadrangle of pebbledashed houses on the outskirts of Barton Marsh village. Sustainable, affordable housing. Translate as: cheap, small, ugly.
Katie squeezed into a space a few doors down from her sister’s mid-terrace. The small square of grass outside was uncut. A trike lay on its side, weeds poking through the spokes. The rubbish bin by the front door overflowed with bulging black sacks. She tried not to tut.
She loved Lou. God knows what she would do if she couldn’t have Sam and Gracie overnight. But she hated that she had to leave her children with her. She hated how she couldn’t be sure that Lou would put them back to bed if they woke up in the night, rather than letting them stay up and watch TV. She hated that Lou’s own little girl, Mia, always looked a bit dirty and hastily dressed, often wandering around in just a T-shirt and a nappy.
She knew it wasn’t up to her to tell her sister how to live her life. She knew that, as the youngest, she had been hit hard by what had happened. But then they all had. You couldn’t use that as an excuse for the rest of your life. Eventually, you had to grow up, take responsibility. Lou didn’t seem to want to try. She was only twenty-seven and it felt like she had already given up on life.
Katie walked up the short front path, stepping over an empty McDonald’s wrapper and a packet of half-used wet wipes. She let herself into the hall with the key Lou had given her. It smelled of stale food and dirty nappies.
“Hello?” she called quietly.
No sounds from upstairs. She wondered what time they went to bed. Waking up grumpy, tired children when she was feeling grumpy and tired herself was the last thing she needed.
“Sam? Gracie?”
She traipsed upstairs, shoved open the door to their bedroom. Sam and Gracie were already sitting up sleepily in the bed they shared. Mia rolled over and blinked at her from her cot bed, a pacifier hanging out of her mouth.
Sam yawned. “Did we sleep late?”
“No, no. It’s okay. I just wanted to come in and surprise you!”
From next door, she heard her sister’s sleepy grumble: “For God’s sake.”
She smiled grimly.
“Okay, well, up you get. I’ll start breakfast.”
* * *
—
LOU EMERGED DOWNSTAIRS just as Katie was dishing up toast and cereal. She managed to clear a space at the cluttered table for Sam, Gracie and Mia. She had stuck the television on to keep them happy, although there had been a brief dispute over w
hether they should watch Clone Wars or PJ Masks.
“Christ—can you turn that down a bit?” Lou yawned.
Her blonde hair was a tangled haystack, makeup smudged beneath her eyes. She wore a grubby dressing gown knotted loosely at the waist.
Katie picked up the remote and deliberately nudged the volume up. Then she gathered up the pile of rubbish she had picked up from the floor and went to stick it in the bin. She flipped open the lid and paused. The bin was crammed with Guinness cans.
“Has Steve been round?”
“Oh yeah. Just for a bit, last night.”
Steve. The latest in a long line of useless boyfriends that Lou seemed to pick up like other people pick up chewing gum on the soles of their shoes. The only difference being that Lou’s boyfriends didn’t stick around as long.
It was probably giving Steve too much credit to even call him a boyfriend, really. The relationship seemed more off than on. He wouldn’t call for weeks on end, then he’d turn up, out of the blue, whenever he felt like it. And it was pretty obvious what he felt like. Katie knew that he was just using her sister. But Lou refused to see it, trotting out all the usual excuses: he worked shifts, he was busy, he had a demanding job.
Katie supposed that at least he had a job, which was more than could be said for some of the walking disasters Lou had dated, like Mia’s dad, who had disappeared faster than you could say “unpaid child support” once he knew she was pregnant. But ultimately, none of that really mattered. Steve could have been a millionaire entrepreneur or a saint. The point was that Katie had one firm ground rule in the babysitting arrangement with her sister: no boyfriends stopping over when her children were here.
“When did he leave?” she asked now.
“Last night. He had to be up early for work.”
“Right. So, how did he get home?”
She saw Lou hesitate.
“He drove, didn’t he?”
“He doesn’t live that far.”
“Of all people—”
“Oh, here we go.”
“Here we go what?”
“You—being all judgmental. You never like any of my boyfriends.”
“That’s because they’re all idiots.”
“Yeah, well, at least I have boyfriends.”
“Yeah, well, at least I have my self-respect.”
“You’re such a—”
“Mum, Auntie Lou, can you stop arguing?”
Gracie stood behind them in her My Little Pony pajamas, hair full of morning static, hands on her tiny hips. “You always tell Sam and me not to argue.”
Katie forced a smile. “We’re not arguing. We’re just…”
“Discussing,” Sam said, spooning cornflakes into his mouth. “That’s what you always say. Sounds just like arguing, though.”
Katie glanced at Lou. Her sister offered a small shrug.
“Little ears hear big mouths,” she muttered.
It was what Dad used to say to Mum when they were kids and overheard something they shouldn’t. “Told you to be quiet—little ears hear big mouths.” Her mum would mock-scowl and whip at Dad with a tea towel. “Who you calling Big Mouth?”
Right on cue, Gracie giggled and pointed at Katie: “Ha—Big Mouth.”
Katie poked her tongue out and tried not to feel irritated that her kids always took Auntie Lou’s side in an argument.
Still, the moment was deflected. Mia banged her spoon on the table and started to wail. Sam screwed up his face: “Eurgh. Mia stinks. She’s done a shi—…a poo in her nappy.” Then, in the same breath, “I’ve finished breakfast. Can I play Super Mario?”
“No,” Katie and Lou said, for once in unison, and then smiled tentatively at each other.
“I’d better deal,” Lou said, bending to pick up Mia.
Katie nodded and sipped at her cup of tea. Even though she rarely drank, right now she wished it were something stronger.
* * *
—
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, she was loading Sam and Gracie back into her car. She waved at her sister, who stood in the door, still in her dressing gown, a cigarette in one hand and Mia clinging to her leg.
Katie sighed. What was the point? she thought. You do your best. You try. But you can’t force people to change. Maybe they never will. Not unless something drastic happens to shake them out of their apathy.
Or maybe that was the problem. Something drastic had happened. Something terrible. Something that had splintered their already fragile family into pieces.
Someone had murdered their dad.
There are many things you don’t consider about death. Especially bloody, violent death. For a start, you don’t consider that it will ever happen. Not to you. Not to someone you know. Not to someone you love.
We live our lives in a state of denial. A blinkered belief that we are different, special. Protected by a mystical force field that deflects all the bad stuff.
Terrible things happen, of course, but they happen to other people; the ones you read about in newspapers. The haggard, tear-ravaged faces you see on the television.
We sympathize. We shed tears. Maybe we even light candles, leave flowers, create hashtags. And then we get on with our lives. Our special, safe, protected lives.
Until one day, one phone call, one sentence.
It’s about your wife…and your daughter.
And you realize it’s all an illusion. You’re not special. You’re just like everyone else, skipping across a minefield, trying to pretend that your whole world can’t, at any moment, be blown apart.
You never consider how that will feel. Not really. Because you have spent a lifetime not imagining it, as if to do so might tempt Fate to turn his ravaged face your way and see something he likes.
You never consider that you will have to drive for miles, the resonating aftershock of those words ringing in your ears, desperate denials still raging around your head. You never consider that you will arrive home not to a home but to a crime scene. Your personal mementoes now evidence. Men and women in uniforms and white suits shuffling around silently while you are shut outside. You never consider that you will have to explain your actions to strangers; lay your secrets bare before people you do not know, in a situation you still cannot understand. You never consider that you will need an alibi or a lawyer.
And you never consider that, amidst your grief and terror and confusion, you will be asked to identify the bodies.
The bodies. No longer people, full of warmth and hope and fears and dreams. No longer living, breathing souls. No longer Izzy or Jenny or Bubs or Mummy. Those wonderful, frustrating masses of human contradictions were gone. Forever.
Except he had seen her. He had seen Izzy.
* * *
—
GABE HAD STARED at the detective, DI Maddock, through eyes that felt lined with grit and swollen with grief.
“Identify them?”
“It’s standard procedure, Mr. Forman. Based upon photographs obtained, we’ve no reason to doubt the bodies are those of your wife and daughter—”
Photographs, he thought. They hadn’t taken any new ones in a while. There just hadn’t been that many happy family moments recently, he thought bitterly. The ones up on the walls were old. Izzy when she was two or three. They had talked about putting some new ones up. So many things we talk about doing, he thought. Always thinking we’ll have another day, another week, another year. As if our future were a certainty. Not just a fragile promise.
Gabe shook his head. “I told you. There’s been a mistake. I saw my daughter. In a car. Someone has taken her, maybe my wife, too. You need to be out there, looking for them.”
“I understand—and we have your statement, Mr. Forman. That’s why I think it’s even more important for you to provide a formal identification.”
; Gabe let the words sink in. “Formal” identification. Gentlemen must wear a tie. If you’re wearing trainers, you’re not coming in. He choked down a hysterical giggle.
The police didn’t believe him. Fine. He would show them. It wasn’t Izzy lying cold and still in some damn morgue. She was alive. She had only just turned five. And he had seen her. In that rusty wreck of a car. Honk if you’re horny. Two blonde pigtails. Real men love Jesus. One tooth missing in the front.
“Fine. But you’re wrong. I saw my daughter being taken. She’s alive.”
DI Maddock had nodded, something Gabe couldn’t quite decipher flitting across her face. “Once you’ve seen the bodies, I’m sure we’ll have more questions for you.”
* * *
—
THE IDENTIFICATION WAS scheduled for the following afternoon. Gabe felt frustrated by the lack of urgency. But he also felt too shell-shocked and exhausted to argue.
The house, which a couple of days ago had hosted Izzy’s fifth birthday party, was now a crime scene. Gabe couldn’t stay there. In the absence of any friends who could put him up, he booked a room at a nearby Premier Inn. A stout woman in a white shirt and black trouser suit arrived and introduced herself as: “Anne Gleaves, your family liaison officer.” She drove him to the hotel and, uninvited, accompanied him to his room. She sat with him for a while and talked. Lumpen words that had no meaning. He stared at her kind, sensible face and wished she would jump out of the window. When she asked if there was anyone he would like her to contact, he thought of Izzy’s parents and, reluctantly, refused. He should do it. After she had gone, he called Harry and Evelyn, destroyed their world with a single sentence, and then sat up, staring at old photos of Izzy and Jenny on his phone, crying himself hoarse.