The Unravelling: Children can be very very cruel (A gripping domestic noir thriller)

by Thorne Moore

  A child had been murdered. As soon as she’d said it, I knew it was true. I’d always known it. Why hadn’t I thought about it, the moment I remembered Serena, back in January? This was the explanation of the dread that had been haunting me. I’d been so obsessed with finding Serena again, searching, searching, finding nothing. Why had it had never occurred to me that I could never find her. Because she was dead.

  *

  There are policemen standing, legs apart, hands behind their backs, helmets on, all across Aspen Drive. When people come too close, they stretch out their arms to keep them back. People want to get by, though. Adults. They’re huddled in the street, some of the mothers looking shocked, pulling their cardigans tight around them, some of them angry, shouting at the police. The men are all angry. All shouting. Some of them are trying to get round, through the part-demolished prefabs. A gang of them, holding sticks, shouting that they’re going to string him up and suddenly there are panda cars, bumping over the concrete after them, lights flashing. There’s a police van and Alsatians straining at the leash under a nightmare wintry sky.

  I am terrified. I watch it all out of the car window…

  The car window…

  ‘Tell me about the car. Listen, girl, just tell me. You saw the car!’

  *

  Tell me about the car.

  I could hear the words being shouted at me, but I couldn’t see the car. What car? I could feel my chest tightening, my throat sealing itself shut so I couldn’t speak. Wouldn’t speak. Not to anyone. Not to the man looming over me, shouting at me…

  Serena turned and smiled at me, her dark eyes pleading.

  ‘Tell them, Karen. Tell them.’

  I felt sick.

  I nearly missed my stop. Sanity surfaced just as carriage doors were being banged shut. I looked out of the window and realised I was home and the train was just about to start up again. I flung myself out onto the platform. The train jolted and moved on, and I realised I’d left my coat in the rack. It was raining.

  I caught the bus, getting soaked in the process, and leapt off again after two stops, because I decided I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to go to Gem’s. The bookshop wasn’t quite in the town centre. It was tucked away in a side street, relying on regulars who knew where it was, and students from the university who had a nose for anything cheap, and passing bookworms who could instinctively tell where a bookshop might be.

  I needed to talk to someone. That was a good sign, that I recognised the need to talk. At least, that’s what Miles would have said. But I didn’t want to talk to him, or to Charlie. Not to anyone who had a file on me at their fingertips. I wanted to talk to someone who was just a friend. Malcolm.

  ‘Look at you! Like a wet dog,’ he said. ‘Come in and dry off before you turn into a fish.’ He switched on an electric fire, shifting boxes of books out of the way.

  ‘I left my coat on the train.’ My teeth were chattering. The fire bars were beginning to glow but I wasn’t feeling the heat yet.

  Malcolm fetched me a towel. ‘On the train, eh? Where have you been gallivanting off to?’

  ‘Lyford.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I found the friend – one of them. Ruth. I went to see her. She said things.’

  ‘What things? Nothing very pleasant, by the look of it. I can see she’s upset you.’

  ‘She said things that made me remember…my friend Serena. I know now why I’ve been so obsessed with finding her. Why she meant so much to me. Why I’ve blocked it all out. It’s because she was murdered.’

  ‘Good God.’ He rocked back in shock.

  ‘And I think – I don’t know – I can’t remember. I have this terrible guilt. I think I should have said something. I saw something and I should have told people about it.’

  ‘Oh Lord, Karen. What makes you think that?’

  ‘I keep seeing her, telling me to tell them. She’s asking me why I didn’t speak up. If I did, maybe she’d still be alive. I don’t know. Ruth got so angry. Said I of all people should know. But know what? I don’t know what it is she thought I’d know.’

  ‘And she wouldn’t tell you?’

  ‘She threw me out. Refused to talk about it. It really upset her. What if it was all down to me?’

  ‘No, don’t think that!’

  ‘But if I’d spoken up—’

  ‘Listen, if your friend Serena was murdered, then it’s the murderer who’s responsible. Not a little girl who probably couldn’t understand how important her words might be.’

  ‘But she keeps looking at me! Serena. She keeps turning to look at me. I hear her saying, “Tell them.”’

  ‘Karen.’ He took my hands and looked at me with overflowing sympathy. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘If only I could remember.’

  ‘I know. And I do understand, it’s impossible for you to let this go, now you’ve got this far. You can’t just leave it hanging, can you?’

  ‘No!’ I felt so relieved that he understood, that he wasn’t telling me to get a grip and stop fantasising, or was I taking my medication? He wasn’t shuffling papers and taking notes and assessing my rambling revelations in medical terms.

  ‘I need to find a lawyer,’ I said. ‘How do I do that?’

  ‘Do you really need one? Whatever this Ruth implied, no one’s accused you of anything, have they?’

  ‘No, it’s not that. It’s another friend. One of the gang. Barbara Fulbright. She’s a lawyer. I thought, if I could find her…’

  ‘Solicitor or barrister?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I tried to remember what Ruth had said, before she tried to unsay it and claimed to know nothing. ‘Solicitor, I think.’

  ‘I’ve got a directory somewhere.’ Malcolm mooched off among his tightly packed shelves in the second-hand section and returned with a hefty tome so dark and dire it could only be a directory of lawyers. ‘It’s about five years out of date. What did you say her name was, again?’

  ‘Barbara Fulbright. Oh God. Of course that’s her maiden name. I suppose she’s married and she’s called something completely different.’ I shut my eyes, thinking of another trip to the Family Records Centre, another trawl through marriage indexes, but this time without a clue of the date.

  ‘Don’t despair,’ said Malcolm. ‘Let’s look, first. Hm, hm, hm. F. Fo. Fu. Fulbright. Barbara. Yes! There you are.’

  I looked, not daring to believe. Refusing to believe. There were probably dozens of Barbara Fulbrights around. How would I know if this was mine? She didn’t live in Lyford. According to the directory, she was in Carlisle, which was about as far from Lyford as you could get.

  But Ruth had said she was a lawyer.

  ‘You going to try and speak to her?’ asked Malcolm, jotting down the details for me.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Would you like me to come with you?’

  ‘Oh.’ I was taken aback by the offer, far beyond my expectations. But it was the wrong moment. It had been good to talk to him ‒ just what I’d needed. My panic on the train had subsided. But now I needed to deal with this alone. Serena, my lovely Serena, had been murdered, and my overwhelming sense of guilt, despite Malcolm’s reassurances, convinced me that I bore some of the responsibility. I was ashamed of what I might discover and I didn’t want to share that shame with anyone just yet, even with Malcolm.

  Especially with Malcolm.

  — 8 —

  ‘So. Hello. How are you, Karen?’ My sister sounded crisp, as she always did. She had a special tone for speaking to Karen. It was a let’s get this over with tone.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, automatically. ‘And you?’ Family courtesies, ruthlessly maintained. Fortunately for her, we didn’t have to maintain them very often. She only wasted good money on a phone call from Sydney on birthdays and… Oh God, it was her birthday. I should have phoned her two hours ago, at nine o’clock. Which would be six o’clock in the evening, her time. That was our standard arrangement. ‘Have you had a
good birthday? Hope you got my card.’

  ‘No. Did you send one? You probably forgot to post it.’

  I was preparing to argue, constructing a massive and detailed lie, but what was the point? She knew me. I hadn’t just forgotten to post it. I’d forgotten to buy it. My mind was in 1966 Lyford, not in Millennium Oz. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘And you didn’t phone, usual time. If you can’t be bothered, fine by me, but I thought I’d better check to make sure that you’re all right – hadn’t done anything stupid.’

  ‘I’m fine. Sorry I didn’t phone earlier, but I was out.’

  ‘Oh yes? Where?’ Meaning she couldn’t believe I had a social life.

  ‘Oh, just Gem’s. I’ve been helping with a display.’

  ‘On a Sunday?’

  ‘Well, you know. It’s the only quiet time.’ It was true that I had been helping with a display, though not this morning. A while back, I’d done a dozen sketches of assorted aliens, spaceships and futuristic dystopias for Malcolm when he’d put on a sci-fi promotion and now he’d asked if I could do the same for a fantasy week. I wasn’t having any trouble sketching monsters…but Hilary wouldn’t want to know about that. ‘So how has your birthday been?’

  ‘Great so far. Dave’s booked us a table at this new Italian place. The kids are joining us there.’

  ‘How are they doing?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Shaun and Hayley.’

  ‘Ah, you remember their names. That’s an improvement.’

  I held the phone away, so she couldn’t hear me sigh. Yes I could remember the names of her children. They probably couldn’t remember mine, though.

  ‘They’re fine.’

  They were fine, she was fine, I was fine. Great. ‘Do you remember Serena Whinn?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Serena Whinn. She went to school with me. In Lyford. Do you remember her?’

  ‘Well I’m hardly likely to forget the name Whinn, am I?’ Her hiss whistled down the phone. ‘Look, Karen, I didn’t phone to chat about your old school chums. You know how much this call is costing me?’

  More in effort than in money, I suspected. ‘I just wondered—’

  ‘Please let’s not start reminiscing, for God’s sake. The less said about all that, the better. It was bad enough at the time. I’m not going to wallow in it, all over again.’

  ‘I don’t want to wallow, honest. But she was… I just want to know what happened. Before my, you know, my accident.’

  ‘Karen…’ She stopped. I could hear her drawing a deep breath. ‘Let’s stop this charade, shall we? You and I know perfectly well it wasn’t an accident. Mum may have wanted to believe you just slipped out of that window, but we both know you bloody jumped.’

  I was silent. She’d said this before. She believed it. I suppose she was right. But I didn’t know it, because I couldn’t remember anything about it at all. Nothing about the fall from a fifth floor, whether it was an accident or deliberate. I’d been over it a thousand times with Miles, but I could only remember waking up in hospital, in pain, physical and mental. Pain that never went away.

  ‘Sorry,’ I whispered.

  Hilary sighed. ‘Look, let’s forget it, shall we. I don’t want to get hung up on the past. I’ve got to go. Dave’s in the car.’

  ‘All right. Well, enjoy your meal. And, like I said, happy birthday.’

  The thing about siblings, is that sometimes they’re loving and sometimes they’re not. I’ve known brothers and sisters who’d do anything for each other, and I’ve known some who won’t speak, who find cause for quarrels and bitterness in every quarter, who compete for everything with ferocious jealousy. I’d come to take it for granted that I and my sister were just siblings who couldn’t quite get along. Never had and never would. But it wasn’t true. There had been a time, long, long ago and far, far away, when we’d been the best of friends.

  *

  ‘I want to paddle!’ My sister jumps up. Enough of sandcastles. She turns to run, and I laugh because there are two patches of sand sticking to the buttocks of her ruched swimsuit, and a trail of sand all down the back of her sturdy little legs.

  ‘Best go and keep an eye on her, Karen,’ says Mummy, adjusting her straw sun hat and gathering up our buckets and spades.

  So I run after Hilary, which would be easy because my legs are longer and stronger, but I stop, seeing a crab begin to wriggle out of the sand. I want to see him come out properly, but he looks at me and changes his mind, sweeping the sand up to cover himself again. When I run on, Hilary’s already at the foamy line left by the last wave and she charges on, straight into a big churning breaker that knocks her right off her feet.

  She’s squealing with cold and fright, struggling as the wave pushes over her, then hauls her back. I race, as fast as I have ever run, to grab her out of the water, jumping her up as she splutters salt.

  ‘Don’t let go!’ She throws her wet, sandy arms around me, and buries her face in my shoulder. ‘Don’t let go…’

  …This one.’ Hilary hands me a bauble. It’s like a raspberry, all bobbles and each bobble catches the light.

  I reach up to hang it on a high branch.

  ‘More!’

  Three more balls, and then the glass icicles.

  Daddy looks round from the football on telly. ‘Finished yet, girls?’

  We step apart, to let him see.

  ‘Not bad. Not bad at all.’

  We think it’s better than not bad. We come together again and gaze up at the glory of our Christmas tree, and we grip hands, sharing the build-up of excitement that’s so huge, it will never end. Christmas is the best time in the whole world.

  *

  We’d been the best of friends. Perhaps, in time, as we’d developed our own interests, gone to different schools maybe, discovered boys, argued over music, we’d have grown apart anyway, in a gentle, organic way. But there wasn’t any growing apart. There was just a short, sharp full stop, because I had my accident.

  I was egocentric, of course, as children and invalids invariably are, but it wasn’t as if I’d actively craved to be the centre of attention. I just was. I’d been in hospital, in crisis, the focus of concern, everyone flapping around me, worrying over me, the whole family revolving round me. Hilary must have felt utterly excluded. She wasn’t neglected, not in any normal sense, but in her eyes I had it all, because I was ill, and she was ignored, because she was healthy. All that infant affection turned to resentment. I was aware of it, while locked in my own revolving world of treatment and fuss, but I didn’t realise how deep it ran until our mother died.

  I’d had a two-edged relationship with my mother, ever since the accident. She devoted herself to me, so much so that I sometimes think she barely registered my father’s death, of a heart attack at fifty-nine, except when it raised financial complications. She busied herself with me, fussed over me and let my care rule her life, but it never stopped me feeling that she disliked me. Maybe it was because she knew, despite her adamant disclaimers to the last, that Hilary’s story was right. It hadn’t been an accident. I’d tried to kill myself and she could never quite forgive me.

  I don’t know what she imagined Hilary’s role was to be. Hilary left home, got married, had children, but she was still expected to be there, on call, to help, to listen to my mother’s complaints. To share the martyrdom, I suppose. Hilary did what the world expected of her, seething with silent resentment, but when our mother died, the silence ceased.

  ‘I’m giving you warning now, I don’t give a toss about last requests and deathbed promises. She’s gone and she doesn’t have any say in it any more, so don’t expect me to step in as your long-suffering nursemaid for the rest of your demented life! I’m off; so far away you won’t be able to screw up everything for me, any more.’

  She was upset, of course, letting her grief out as a burst of anger. Her husband Dave had calmed her down, but then he confirmed that they were off to Australia in a month. By the time they fl
ew out there, she was ready to smile and give me a big hug, for appearances’ sake, if nothing else, and promise to keep in touch. Which she did, every birthday and Christmas.

  She’d forgotten all those Christmases and holidays before the Fall. Of course she had. I wasn’t the only one who’d wiped out the past when the world changed. But she remembered the name Whinn. The name of a child who was murdered. Yes, she’d remembered that, but it could hardly be productive to nag her into saying more. She’d only been seven at the time. Too young even to appreciate the full horror, let alone absorb the details.

  For those, I would need to speak to Barbara Fulbright, and I couldn’t call her office until Monday, so I’d have to sit and endure the rest of Sunday in anticipation.

  Such intense anticipation that I only remembered at the last moment that I was supposed to be having lunch with Charlie. She’d booked us a place for a Sunday roast, the full monstrous affair – part of her monitoring attempts to coax me into normal appetite. If I could cope with a roast potato, she’d be convinced I was okay. I didn’t want to eat. The gnawing monster that had me back in its grip was telling me I couldn’t eat, or drink, or swallow. Much better to simply close down and disappear into a black hole. This was a feeling that had accompanied me for years, sometimes walking a few paces behind, sometimes invading my body and mind to the exclusion of all else. But if I let on to Charlie that it was beginning to get a stranglehold again, she’d step in with one of her interventions and my plans to speak to Barbara Fulbright would be put on indefinite hold.

  So I went to lunch, and made a fine show of loading my fork with roast chicken and peas, and sat there looking sane and innocent.