by Emma Rowley
“You know, for a moment, I thought it was you who took Sophie,” I said. “I saw that school photo, of you and Nancy, and realized—you’re Jay.”
He didn’t speak for a second. “I was Jay,” he said slowly. “After we left—my family moved down south—no one called me that anymore. It was supposed to be a fresh start. But I always liked it here.” He turned to me. “Heath would have been in that photo too, if you’d had time to look at it. He probably realized that.”
“If I’d had time . . .” I remembered, again, that wary look on Heath’s face when I told him it was Jay—Nicholls—who’d been keeping Sophie at Parklands, revealing that I didn’t suspect him. I think it was then that he changed his mind about what he was about to do to me. “I suppose it was safer to get me to that isolated building, rather than do anything there.”
But I did get one thing right: it wasn’t entirely coincidental that Nicholls was looking into Sophie’s case.
“It struck a chord, I suppose. That was partly why I got into policing. I felt like no one was looking out for her after she left.” He grimaced a little. “I mean Nancy, of course.
“Though I didn’t exactly advertise that part of my past. They said we’d argued—we hadn’t. But people talk.” I nodded. And I wondered if Heath, unnoticed, didn’t help it along a little.
“I transferred forces, back up here, a few years ago. I was on major investigations, working nearer the city center. I hadn’t really heard about Sophie, until all this. I moved to this division about a year ago now, working closer to Amberton and, well, where I grew up.
“So when Sophie’s call came through”—he rubbed the back of his head—“it felt close to home, in a lot of ways. I wanted to make sure there was nothing more we could do. But it seemed quite clear cut. And when the diary emerged, suggesting it was her pregnancy and her crappy boyfriend”—I smiled to hear him sound less than perfectly professional—“I thought, no wonder this kid doesn’t want to come home.”
“I could tell.”
He frowned. “I shouldn’t have communicated that. But I had wondered if something like that had happened to Nancy. That she was scared of what her parents might do, or say.”
“That’s what Heath wanted everyone to think. That we’d failed Sophie.”
“Yes. But still . . . something about it—it was too neat, that diary emerging when it did. So I kept an eye on it all. When you said someone had been in your garden, and I realized where you lived, I came and looked round Nancy’s house—”
“Where I saw you,” I interrupted. “I thought you seemed . . .”
“Shifty,” he fills in for me. “Maybe. I told myself I was just doing my job, but it was more than that. It made me think—what could I have done differently, after Nancy disappeared? Because it had never made sense to me. Anyway, I kept paying attention. When I saw the repeat caller records, it seemed like you were . . .”
“Losing it,” I said bluntly. “And you knew about my past.”
“Your husband had mentioned it, when he came in to discuss the diary.” He looked down. I could imagine the spin Mark put on all that. It’s easier to blame someone else than to look at your own failings.
And of course there was Heath, all the time, pouring poison in my family’s ears.
That’s another thing that’s come out. After I’d overdosed, I’d given permission for him, as my GP, to liaise with my family. He’d said it was a good idea. And I’d never rescinded it, I had never even thought. So he’d been hiding behind a veil of concern, updating them on my mental health, encouraging them to check in with me and him—in case, say, I reacted badly to Mark’s new girlfriend, had they heard about that, actually? Not to alarm them, oh, not at all, but he did have a few worries....
He was finding out what I was up to and, later, laying the ground. So if something were ever to happen to me . . .
Everyone trusts a doctor, after all.
People have suggested, tactfully, that I might have been mistaken: that I could be reading too much into my dreams. And maybe I’ll never know for sure. That dark figure I’d dream about, leaning over my bed . . . The police said that it would have been very unlikely, that it was too big a risk for him to take, to enter my house more than once.
But I know. I remember that night I woke up to find that presence, waiting, breathing, on the other side of my bedroom door—expecting me to be asleep. He’d told me to keep taking the pills.
Heath used to park up on that back road behind Parklands, they think, to go and see Sophie, using that cut-through that Nicholls mentioned that time I saw him outside. And if anyone did see the doctor’s car parked in a road nearby, well, nothing to worry about, GPs do house calls at odd times.
They think he cut himself a copy of the keys to Parklands long ago. Perhaps even when Nancy lived there: a teenage boy lifting his mum or step-dad’s keys from the dish in the hall one quiet afternoon.
“It was a strong cover,” said Nicholls, bringing me back to the bright morning. “But when I learned that you’d reported another break-in, I kept going—I told you I’d look into it. Finally, we got the phone records. It takes weeks, you see.”
“And?”
“And the call was untraceable, as I expected. It was just a mobile number that called you at the helpline, at the time that you said. The phone wasn’t registered to anyone, but that’s not surprising, if it’s just pay as you go. It had been used fairly locally—the call had gone through a mobile phone tower not too far from here. But they cover a wide area.”
“The coverage is bad out here,” I added.
“Still, something just felt wrong. You see, the phone had only ever been used that night: two calls, just a few moments apart.”
“The test call, to check I was there—”
“And then Sophie was on the line. I was thinking about it, actually, when your sister called me to say she couldn’t find you, and I came straight round. But I’m sorry. I was almost too late.”
“I felt like you were always warning me off,” I said.
“A bit. It’s easier to investigate without . . .” He trailed off. “But it wasn’t just that. I was uneasy about this one. It reminded me too much of the past. But I thought I was letting it distract me from the task at hand.”
I changed the subject. “And you hadn’t seen him—Heath—since school?”
“No. Even then I could barely have told you his name, to be honest, let alone where he grew up. I didn’t know about him and Nancy. No one did.”
Other stuff has started to come out now, sometimes in the papers, sometimes the police let me know. After medical school Heath went abroad, then he’d moved around, losing his soft Cheshire accent in the process, it seems. There were complaints filed, suggestions of inappropriate relationships with a couple of young patients. Overly friendly. But then he’d move on, to another short-term position. When he eventually settled back in Amberton, he had kept himself to himself. So no one at the surgery would have thought to check if one of the quiet young doctor’s elderly patients was his mother—and that was only an irregularity, anyway.
But then Heath learned that Nicholls was looking into Sophie: I’d told him myself. And I bet he remembered him. It must have felt like the threat of discovery was getting too close.
“How is Mrs. Green doing?” Nicholls asked, breaking into my thoughts.
“Lily’s OK, I think. It’s hard to tell, but she seems much brighter. Clearer.”
We don’t really know what Heath intended with the drugs he gave her. He’d said that whenever she felt a bit lost or forgetful, she should take a pill. They kept her confused, certainly. But perhaps she’d been harder to manage than Heath thought. Asking too many questions about the little boy, or maybe my friendship worried him—what might she let slip? How easy it would have been for her to get mixed up, and take too much of her powerful medicine.
Because he’d been putting out feelers, they say, about work outside Cheshire, they think he was going to sta
rt again somewhere, with Teddy. They searched his home, a neat little house on the edges of Amberton, and found some of the stuff from the attic: Teddy’s clothes and toys, in bags in the loft.
It took a while to find out who Lily thought Teddy actually was—I didn’t want to upset her.
“Such a good boy,” she’d said, a little wistfully. “A good boy, underneath.” She was talking about Heath. He’d told her that Teddy’s mother was a vulnerable patient, who just needed a little extra help looking after him. But she couldn’t tell anyone. “The authorities, you know,” she told me, her eyes owlish. “They might take him away.”
And it was the truth, in a way. Heath was hiding his secret in plain sight. She’d long ago learned not to talk about her son, who liked to keep his humble background quiet. Handy, too, when he returned to Amberton, that no one would ask awkward questions.
Yet I wonder how much she knew about him, or had guessed at over the years. I remember the way she pretended not to know who Nancy was, the first time I asked. Of course, a housekeeper would have learned not to gossip about the family she worked for, and later to dodge curiosity about the painful past. And yet. I know how far we’ll go to protect the people we love.
In the end, I let it drop.
They had her new social worker break it to her that he was gone, but I know she spared Lily exactly how. She seems to think that Heath got mixed up in a fight. She gets confused, even now, but she’s out of hospital, where they put her under observation. She’s been moved into a new flat, where she’s with people who can look after her if she needs it, and we come and see her, Teddy and I, and even Sophie’s been once. I helped set it up: Heath’s estate went to Lily, as it should have. He’s had to go away, I tell her if she asks, and once—and I hope she’d forgive me the lie—“Oh, he sends his love.” They found some of Sophie’s stuff, too, a bit later. He’d already taken it to the dump. If I’d done what he wanted, at the end . . . I don’t think he’d have kept her.
Suddenly I don’t want to think about any of this anymore. I get up and put the kettle on again.
“So. Got any more safety talks planned at the Grammar, then? Maureen will be delighted.”
Nicholls looks surprised, then laughs. “Maybe. You should probably be giving one too.”
CHAPTER 50
Sophie, they say, is making a remarkable recovery, all things considered. I hadn’t really understood how strong she is.
“Youth, maybe,” says the counselor, Sally. “Teddy. And hope, that you’d find her.” I’m seeing one again. I might as well, Sophie thinks it’s good for me.
And Teddy? He’s a little bundle of joy. We had to child-proof the house, of course. It is full of people now. Mark’s here a surprising amount. Sophie likes it, so it’s fine, and I feel bad for him. He’s struggled with the knowledge that he stopped searching—that he gave up on her. But maybe, I thought the other day, it was neither of our faults. It came out of the blue, but something’s loosening in me.
He’s still nervous around her. And he keeps trying to say sorry to me, too. I was trying to be magnanimous, but it got to the point when I just wanted him to stop. “Mark, I forgive you, all right. Just please—stop following me about like a wounded puppy and make us all a cup of tea.”
“Well,” he said, the wind taken out of his sails, “there’s no need to be so rude about it.”
Incredibly, I heard a little laugh from the doorway. We looked round, both red-faced. I hadn’t realized Sophie had come into the kitchen to catch us bickering. “You two don’t change, do you?” But she didn’t seem to mind. And the truth is, he doesn’t need to say sorry to me. No one does.
Ben’s been round again, too. Nicholls, I mean. He’s good company, actually—funny, in a deadpan way. Maureen at the school was right; he has got something about him, when you think about it.
I don’t know if it could be something more, one day. For now, a friend is enough. He knows what it’s like to have something dark in your past that won’t go away.
I’ve been so lucky. I almost can’t believe it.
When I’m alone at night, my big house quiet again, everyone else asleep, and I’m in that drifting space between wakefulness and sleep, I still feel it: that cold familiar fear rising up to clutch at me again.
Because close your eyes and you know in your bones: Sophie never came home. The questions you nursed—the wheres, the whys, the what-ifs—were never answered. It’s just you, alone, waiting. No change, no revelation, no daughter returned like something from a fairytale. Just more long years to endure . . .
And then I catch myself and realize that I am doing it again. Because if those dark years of absence came to an end, in a way they will never end for me. They showed me. They lifted the thin veil between the safe, normal world, the one most of us live in, and the world as I know it can be—a place of sharp edges and dangers, where bad people want to hurt my loved ones and me. So I hug my arms around myself, tight, and try not to think about that night in late summer, after the storm broke.
It’s easier to do than you might think. They have stopped asking questions now, the official statements done. There were some uncomfortable articles in the papers about the first police investigation, how they were hoodwinked by the notes, the postcards, the rest of it; whispers of an inquiry by the police watchdog into the lessons to be learned.
But weren’t we all deceived by Heath? That’s the question I ask, as I tell everyone that we, as a family, want to move on, that we will address it all once we’ve some distance from the past. Maybe. And everyone accepts it. It’s surprising what people will believe.
Most of them, anyway.
It was just something Ben said once, early on, when I still had to spend all that time at the station. I was sitting outside one of those little rooms, drinking sugary vending machine coffee. The duty lawyer who sat in with us had gone off to make a phone call, when he came by to say hello.
He asked how I was doing. “I’m fine,” I said. It was true. “I can cope with all this.” This, I didn’t need to say, this was a walk in the park after the last two years.
“Of course you can.” He stretched out his legs in front of him. “That was Heath’s mistake, really, wasn’t it. To underestimate you.”
“What do you mean?” I turned to look at him.
“Just what I said,” he said lightly. “To think that you would ever let her go. He didn’t understand, did he? That there’s nothing stronger than that tie. That there’s nothing that a mother wouldn’t do for her child. Her baby. Nothing at all.” It was something in his eyes that told me. Not just sympathy, but—a question.
“You’re right,” I said. I couldn’t look away. “There isn’t.”
The officer, Hopper, came back then, and told me it was time to go back in to continue with the interview, if I was ready. So we stopped there. I don’t think we’ll talk about it again.
We didn’t plan it, Sophie and I. She wasn’t in any state for that. They just assumed, from the start. My clothes were soaking, covered in blood. And I . . . let them. She was so young, so vulnerable, so traumatized. Of course it was me.
And I told them everything, just as it happened, until the very end.
“Then I saw the knife,” I said, so many times in the days that followed, as we went over and over what had unfolded. “It felt like it wasn’t really happening. There was no other choice, I couldn’t stop him.”
Because that’s what he taught me. Hide the lie under a little bit of truth.
I’d known what I had to do from the moment I decided to go back inside, afterward, to pick up the knife, wiping the blade on my jeans. I’d wiped the handle, too, before wrapping my fingers back around it, making sure my prints were all over it.
I tell myself that I did the right thing. That I had no choice, that I couldn’t fail my daughter. Not after what she did.
He was on me, his hands round my throat, when I got my hand free, scrabbling for something, anything. A rock, anything. Bu
t there was nothing, just bare floor. Nothing.
And then I saw her, over his shoulder; the knife held awkwardly in one hand, still tied to the other with tape. She didn’t leave. She didn’t leave—she went to get it, I realized with dawning horror. I’d thrown it away, as far as I could, with no thought of using it, just to get it off him. I couldn’t believe it was happening, I felt almost like I was removed, just watching her from outside myself, and so afraid—he’ll notice, he’ll hear her—but he doesn’t, he’s lost it, completely, so she just comes up behind him, and quietly, delicately almost, she slides it in, between his ribs, before he knows it.
He groans. He’s heavy; his fingers are still at my throat, but easing now, weakening. And suddenly I can roll him off; I can scrabble up from under him.
His blue eyes are glazed with shock, as he looks up at us both, standing there, our faces mirroring each other’s horror. He slowly puts his hand on the wound, finally understanding what’s happened: who did this to him. What he missed.
His blood is dark on the floor, already soaking into the earth.
Because she came back.
EPILOGUE
Today
In the car park, the woman struggles to find a space. It’s one of those glorious autumn days, the crisp air smelling of leaves and smoke. Eventually she does, and pulls in gingerly. She’s very young, not much more than a girl really, although—there’s something about the set of her shoulders, the tilt of her head—you wouldn’t call her a girl.
She’s still not that confident a driver, not yet, but she told her mother she wanted to do this on her own. After all, it wasn’t far. And she needs to do these things. She’s got a lot to catch up on.