The Heights

by Louise Candlish

  ‘Have you told the police any of this?’ Justin asks. ‘Their file might still be open for all we know.’

  My answer is a tricky one to get right. Of course I haven’t told the police. I haven’t for the same reason I bought the second phone, currently zipped in my handbag with the power turned off: I need to keep myself under the radar for what might come next. A second attempt, if I can arrange it. ‘I wanted to tell you first, see what you think. Anyway, they might already know.’ A cold feeling presses down on me as I realize I have no idea whether or not Vic might have contacted the police, for exactly the reason Justin states. But no, he wouldn’t want the police reconnecting with Kieran again. Wrapping things up, interviewing him about the details of that tip-off Ratcliffe knows about. Asking who he thinks might have issued that death threat.

  Justin has his phone out. ‘When did you last check the Missing People site?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’ This is true. When Kieran was first reported missing, I googled his name constantly, the Missing People listing even claiming a spot on my most-visited list. Then, confident we’d successfully got rid of him, I’d had no need to continue with the ritual. After a month or so, I took a walk along Regent’s Canal and threw my iPad and second phone into the water (Lord knows I never imagined I’d one day be buying another). On the few occasions since that I’ve tortured myself by revisiting original reports of the car accident, I’ve passed over the old links to scan for fresh references.

  ‘Here it is.’ Justin shades the screen with his hand so I can read the message: ‘ “Page no longer available”. And look, when you put his name into the search box, it doesn’t come up. He’s no longer missing.’

  ‘Does it say when the page was taken down?’

  ‘No. Could’ve been any time.’

  He hands me his phone and I examine the matrix of faces, so many of them tragically young. Many of the ‘missing since’ dates pre-date that of Kieran’s case. ‘So the police do already know. Why didn’t they tell us?’

  ‘None of our business, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s totally our business!’ I cry. ‘Do you think Kieran asked them to keep this from us? To protect his new identity? Every step of the way, they’ve put his needs before ours.’

  ‘You want me to phone them and find out?’ Justin offers.

  ‘No, leave it.’ I’m trembling as I pass back the phone. I need to calm down. ‘So long as he stays away, it will be fine.’

  And the look Justin gives me then – like he’s proud of me, of how far I’ve come in my grief – is a new, terrible kind of heartbreaking.

  ‘Where was it you said he lives?’ he asks.

  ‘Shad Thames.’

  ‘Okay, so it’s not like it’s Oxford Street. I can’t remember the last time I went there. I think you should make a point of not taking new clients in that area. Finish the one you’ve got, then keep well away.’

  ‘Yes.’ I think fleetingly of the prospective client in The Heights with whom Selena has shared my number. I know that if I do not hear from her, I will follow it up myself.

  I should stay away, but I will not.

  We fall silent and I look out across the reservoir. I imagine stepping away from Justin and dropping into the water, sinking in the same spot Kieran’s car went under. Drawing my last breath exactly where Lucas drew his, scream for him as he did for me. Know the utter bleakness of death.

  I step back, seasick, heartsick, my vision blurring. ‘Let’s go.’

  Killing Time (cont)

  ‘I’m staggered by how courageous some of the women in my class are in confronting pain – theirs and other people’s,’ says Felix Penney, and it is true that Ellen Saint exhibits a forensic understanding of her own agony.

  ‘Since Lucas died, I’ve lived with pain every waking second of every single day,’ she tells me. ‘My life has mostly been an exercise in managing it. Right now, writing is a big part of that.’

  I ask her if she thinks men would gain as much from the course as she and her fellow female students have.

  ‘For me, this isn’t about being a woman,’ she says. ‘It’s about being a parent.’ She is pensive for a moment, before adding, ‘Actually, maybe it is about being a woman.’

  Sunday Times magazine,

  December 2021

  Chapter 28

  In the end, a work emergency keeps Justin at his laptop and so I visit Lucas’s grave alone.

  Though the light is almost gone, it’s the best time to come, I’ve found, not because dusk mutes the emotions, but because it frees them. It lets them breathe. Exposing your suffering in broad daylight can be… Well, that can be frightening for others.

  That Vic is not here with me feels grievous, even in spite of the forewarning. For the first time – perhaps inspired by that episode of death wish at the reservoir – I question whether I will survive this second round with Kieran Watts.

  ‘Ellen?’

  I’m so deep in thought, she has to repeat my name before I turn.

  ‘Prisca. Oh.’

  I haven’t spoken to her since the height of the campaign, when she appealed to me on my doorstep (‘Don’t do this to yourself, Ellen…’). She looks considerably better groomed. Her hair, a rich chestnut, is swept forward over made-up eyes. Her coat is well cut, suede boots pristine. It’s hard not to wonder if Kieran is back in touch, sending her funds from his Moodsmart windfall.

  ‘Did you know it’s his birthday?’ I say, and she turns to the headstone. Only the years are marked: 1995–2014.

  ‘I didn’t. But I come sometimes, I pass by on my way home from work. I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Of course not.’ I swallow. ‘Does he come here, as well?’

  She looks startled. ‘Who?’

  ‘Kieran, of course. I know he’s living in London. I assume you do too?’

  There’s an ambivalence to her expression that suggests she’s more shocked by my raising this than the fact of it. ‘I didn’t know he was in London, no. We’re not in touch anymore,’ she says, finally. But her fingers stray to the lovely fabric of her coat, an unconscious association that confirms my previous assumption. Let him help her out, I think. It’s not my concern.

  ‘But you’ve known he’s alive and well?’ I press. ‘You were the one who reported him missing back then, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ She lowers her eyes. ‘And yes, I knew he was safe.’

  ‘How? Who told you? The police?’

  ‘I had a call from Kieran’s old supervision manager.’

  ‘Marcus Flynn?’

  ‘That’s right. He told me Kieran had made contact and asked them to let the missing persons unit know he was fine.’

  ‘But you didn’t hear from Kieran personally?’

  She hesitates. ‘An email came. It wasn’t signed or from his address, but it was him.’

  Creating an untraceable email address would have been child’s play for Kieran. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Just that it was better for us not to be in touch because there was a risk it would put him in danger.’

  ‘What danger?’

  ‘I assumed he meant from all the haters. Your lot, the ones who couldn’t let go. He must have been worried they would track him down through me. He wouldn’t have wanted me to be in any danger, either. That really upset him.’ She cups her elbows and hugs herself in a defensive gesture and yet her expression is open, her words flowing. Perhaps it’s the setting, the bodies under our feet, but it’s as if she’s on the witness stand, telling the whole truth. ‘Before he went missing, when he was back living with me again, I sometimes felt like the house was being watched. I told the police that. Anyway, I thought he had a right to privacy, to a life without abuse, so I did as he asked and didn’t reply or try to track him down.’

  ‘You didn’t think to tell Vic and me?’

  ‘I didn’t have the authority to do that. Maybe if we’d been…’ She falters. On the same side, she means. ‘Maybe if we’d stayed in touc
h, but we’ve never really communicated, have we?’

  There’s a depth to the regret in her tone that stirs something reciprocal in me. I see now that there could have been a way for communication between us, maybe even for mutual consolation. I rejected it because I knew, subconsciously at first, then consciously, that getting close to Prisca meant compromising my commitment to revenge.

  And just as it would have then, so it would now. ‘When did you get this call from Flynn?’ I say. Exactly how long were Vic and I kept ignorant of Kieran’s survival?

  ‘I don’t remember the date, but it was a good few months after Kieran went missing,’ she says. ‘The posters were still up though. I took them down right after I heard.’

  I remember noticing they’d been removed and assuming this was standard practice after a certain period of appeal. ‘I wish you’d let me know,’ I repeat. ‘I’ve only just found out in the last few weeks.’

  She brushes her hair from her eyes, revealing deep lines of uncertainty in her brow. ‘You’re not going to…?’

  ‘What?’

  Make a fuss, she means. Demand some sort of investigation into the oversight or the lack of transparency towards victims’ families or whatever the hell other label crazy Ellen Saint chooses to give this.

  ‘Complain,’ she says, settling on the safer word. ‘To the police. The probation people.’

  I stare at her. The simplicity of her assumption shifts something in my reasoning of the situation: ever since rediscovering Kieran, I’ve been resolute in avoiding the risk of drawing attention to myself by contacting the police. But now I’m known to Kieran himself, not to mention his protectors old and new, isn’t it potentially more suspicious if I don’t? I helped build a campaign on moral outrage, so isn’t it peculiar if I don’t display a single shred of it now? It breaks the pattern of my behaviour and the police are interested when patterns are broken.

  I need to call them and complain, do exactly what they’d expect of the ones who couldn’t let go.

  After all, no one matches that description as fully as I do.

  Chapter 29

  I guess if you were kind enough to give me the benefit of the doubt, you could believe that, with time, I might have come to view the game as the rest of the players thought I should. James Ratcliffe and Vic; Justin and Freya; Sheridan and Jade; Prisca. And Kieran himself, of course, sending word of his ‘tremendous guilt’ through his mentor and trusting that the accompanying veiled threat would be the end of it.

  But I think you’ve followed my account for enough pages already to know that was never going to happen.

  I do not consult Justin or Vic before I phone the police the next morning. I do it after my only client appointment and right before I set off for an overnight trip to my mum’s on the coast. Since Dad died, I’ve visited weekly – until my detective work regarding Kieran interrupted my routine, that is. This afternoon’s trip feels overdue.

  The police officer I speak to is either genuinely unable to access the original notes or unusually eager to pass the buck, because I am referred to the Prison and Probation Service before I can even suggest it myself. They, in turn, insist that only Marcus Flynn can handle the query. Fine. He must have worked on dozens, maybe hundreds, of cases since Kieran, but I have no doubt he’ll remember his famous killer. He’s not available, so I leave a voicemail for him and hit the road. It makes little difference to me if my call is logged today or after the weekend. The point is only that it is done. I am acting in character.

  He surprises me with a prompt call back. I’m on the M20, about twenty minutes from Mum’s place, clear skies ahead. I settle in the inside lane to take the call hands-free.

  ‘You want to talk about Kieran Watts? I’ve got a couple of minutes before a meeting.’ He sounds as if he can think of pleasanter ways to spend his Friday afternoon, but, then again, they all sound like that when they speak to me. They all cite a meeting they’re late for, another caller on the line. Vic, too, now. Even Justin. The only person who’s levelled with me, shown no fear, is James Ratcliffe.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’ve been made aware that he’s back in London and living under a new name.’ Made aware: a nice passive form. No need to point out that I’ve been staking out his building and gathering intel of my own. ‘The last I heard, he was missing, so I’m wondering when it was that he re-established contact with you?’

  There’s a pause and I sense Marcus weighing up the pros and cons of engaging with me, a known agitator. Might it be easier to pass me on to the press office, with whom Roz Engleby, Vic and I liaised satisfactorily during Lock Up Longer? On the other hand, what harm can it do to co-operate, given that I now know what they’ve been keeping from me?

  ‘I don’t have the notes in front of me, Mrs Saint, but I remember he made contact with us about three or four months after he left. He’d seen himself on a missing persons site, he said, and wanted his foster carer to know he hadn’t come to any harm and we should close any investigation.’

  ‘So that was, what, October or November 2017?’

  ‘It would have been around then, yes.’

  Which tallies with Prisca’s ‘a good few months’ and with James Ratcliffe’s having established himself in Kieran’s life soon after as a force for good. An angel investor in more ways than one.

  In the distance, the traffic is bunching, and I ease off the accelerator. ‘He was up in Scotland for a while, I know that much, but when was he actually back in London? In the same city as his victim’s family, walking around with a new name, a new identity, when all the time we thought he was missing. My family should have been given the opportunity to take measures to avoid him.’ I allow my tone to grow more forceful. ‘Maybe it’s best if you just let me know the process for making an official complaint, please.’

  Flynn is rattled by the threat. ‘Hang on a minute, let’s talk this through. First off, I don’t know anything about a new name. That’s a private matter and nothing to do with us. The same goes for his current address. But we certainly let you know he was no longer a missing person.’

  ‘You certainly did not, that’s the reason I’m calling!’ There’s a choke in my voice. I’m starting to feel real emotions now. When it comes to Kieran Watts, I seem incapable of fraud; it is all true.

  Flynn takes pity on me and asks me to wait while he digs out the notes, after all. I hold for two or three minutes, trying to focus on driving safely, and then he returns. ‘Here we are. I’ve got a note here that my colleague Dina phoned you in late October 2017.’

  ‘That’s nonsense. No one phoned. I’ve never spoken to anyone called Dina.’

  ‘It was Vic she contacted. Vic Gordon. He was the primary contact by then. Actually, there’s a note that you were out of the country. Were you on holiday, perhaps? Late October is half-term, isn’t it?’

  He’s right, that must have been when Justin and I took Freya to the States. ‘Maybe,’ I concede. ‘But why was Vic your primary contact? I thought I was.’

  Flynn politely insists his facts are correct and the note is dated and initialled by this Dina. ‘There’s really nothing else I can add. But I hope that helps. It’s been good to speak to you again, Mrs Saint. My regards to your husband and daughter.’

  After he hangs up, I try unsuccessfully to steady my breathing. Mum’s turn is coming up on the left, but I ignore it and keep going towards Dover. Then I swing east to the car park for the Cliffs.

  I get out of the car and step into the unforgiving November wind that rises from the sea. The air tastes almost grainy with salt. I cross the cliff path, my body braced against the buffeting air, until I’m as close to the edge as my legs will allow.

  I have not done this since I was a small child.

  I lift my chin and open my eyes wide to the cold winter blue. I allow my vision to blur as I summon the ghost of Lucas: he’s a young boy again, in my parents’ garden, spraying a water pistol and laughing wildly. He loved spinning, I remember that suddenly. He’d spin and
spin until he made himself dizzy and crumpled to the ground groaning, his arm already reaching out for one of us to pull him back up.

  ‘Don’t do that too near the edge, you might fall off into the sea,’ my father would warn, playfully, for the coast was over a mile away and the ‘edge’ of the garden in fact a gentle bank, with robust hedging beyond.

  In spite of the wind, my blood is fever-hot, angry tears burning my eyes. Two years. Two years Vic has known that Kieran Watts is alive, that our plan to rid the world of him failed. So why the hell didn’t he tell me? Weeks, days, ago we stood together on St Saviour’s footbridge and looked up at The Heights, cursing Kieran, agonizing over his survival, and still he said nothing.

  Slowly, I allow my gaze to fall to the ground, to my own feet. I allow myself to visualize the short running jump that would launch me into the abyss of blue. I think of all the poor souls who’ve sailed through the void before me and I am one keen, deviant impulse away from going after them.

  And then, recharged by my own terror, I walk back to my car and prepare to start my story again.

  PART TWO

  Killing Time (cont)

  As you will probably have gathered, it is not possible to talk about Ellen Saint without also talking about Vic Gordon. Though frequently by her side in the aftermath of their son’s death and a partner in their Lock Up Longer campaign, he is said to no longer be in touch with her in any meaningful way.

  Theirs is an intriguing yin and yang: just as her fortunes have declined, so his have improved. While she has made questionable choices in handling the devastation of losing a child, so he has modelled best practice. Friends say he has redirected his energies into a craft microbrewery business with enough green credentials to satisfy the toughest eco warrior, and is rumoured to have found happiness with a new partner.

  ‘The media campaign was very much Ellen’s passion project,’ says a friend who knows them both well. ‘This book is a new way for her to make her point and express her grief. Everyone respects that and Vic is never not going to support her, not when it comes to Lucas. But if he’d been given any choice in the matter, I suspect he would have preferred to grieve in private.’