Cross Her Heart: A Novel

by Sarah Pinborough

  “How do you know it wasn’t planted?” Simon stands alongside me.

  “Jesus Christ, this isn’t an episode of Inspector Morse. Are you buying into this bullshit too?” She glares at him. “We spoke to all of Ava’s friends and their parents when she went missing. There was nothing suspicious about any of them, and for the last time, Katie Batten is dead. Marilyn, you’re coming with us to the station. We’ve wasted enough time and I need to know everything. You could have placed two further people at risk with this craziness: Amelia and Jodie Cousins.”

  I look at Simon, helpless.

  “I’ll send a lawyer down straightaway. Don’t worry.”

  I hug him, a sudden movement too fast for anyone to stop, and before he breaks away, I whisper in his ear, “Find Katie.”

  “Now, Mrs. Hussey.” Bray takes my arm but Simon gives me a tiny nod as they lead me to the door.

  “Can you tell me one thing?” he asks. “When you spoke to this woman, Jodie’s mother, and her daughter, was it face-to-face?”

  “No,” Bray says, after a pause. “It was on the phone. Amelia Cousins is in France and Jodie is on holiday in Spain.”

  And then I’m gone, my face burning as she leads me out through the building, sending men up to search my room as we go, and I feel naked and exposed and humiliated and I’m once again in the back of a police car. Simon. All my hope now rests on Simon. It’s only as the car moves away that I remember where Katie and Charlotte were running away to. The seaside. Her grandfather’s house. Skegness.

  63

  Lisa

  It’s gray and raining in Skegness, the kind of fine drizzle that comes at an angle and gets in every pore. It suits me fine. No one is looking up, all either head down against the water or hunched under an umbrella. The sea churns a dirty blue to my left as I walk briskly along the seafront and the air is filled with salty spray. I dreamed of this as a child, being here with Katie. And now here we finally are.

  The Crabstick Cafe isn’t on the main strip and I have to turn down three side streets before I reach Brown Beach Street, having flipped through an A–Z at the train station to find it, imprinting the directions on my lazy brain so used to having technology do this stuff for me. I sit at a table by the window and order a coffee. It’s the height of summer and the place should be busier, but the Formica tables are tired and chipped and the few customers look like broken, lonely people, reading papers and drinking tea because they can’t face the four walls at home anymore. Residents, not tourists. No one looks my way.

  There’s a TV on, up on the wall in the corner, a portable that must have been there for years, and behind the counter is a large hot-water urn. Farther over, beside a noticeboard, is a pay phone. This is like a café from decades ago. Did Katie choose this place on purpose because it’s so old-fashioned? Is this part of her bringing us back to that moment in the past? And I’m here, so what now?

  The waitress, a thickset woman in her midfifties wearing a housecoat, brings me over my mug of coffee and I stare out the window. There’s a games arcade across the road, with a small group of teenagers huddled, bored, outside. Where is Katie? Is she in there watching me? Where is the next clue?

  I feel sick with nerves. I need to find out where she’s got Ava and then call Marilyn. She can tell the police where to find me to get them. I don’t care if they shoot me on sight as long as they get Ava out safely. She’s the only good thing I’ve ever done in my life. They can do what they want with me.

  I’ve drunk half my coffee, my impatience with Katie rising with every sip, when the noticeboard catches my eye again. It’s the kind that used to be in every supermarket before the Internet took over, little cards pinned on them advertising everything from secondhand cots to gardening services. I stare at it. A message board. Of course. I get up and go over to it, mug in hand to try to look casual.

  “Turn that up, love,” a man grunts somewhere from a table behind me, and the waitress duly raises the volume on the TV. I’m not listening, but scanning the rows and rows of carefully printed ads. The fragile care in some of the handwriting makes me think of old people and my heart squeezes with an emotion I don’t understand. Lost people. I know how they feel.

  Finally I see it. Black ink on a blue card. My heart leaps to my mouth as I take it down.

  Clyde! Call Bonnie! Let’s catch up! And underneath, a mobile number. My hands tremble. I’m so close. Katie is a phone call away. Ava is a phone call away. I scrabble in my pocket for some change for the phone. I need to call—

  “. . . is believed to be Marilyn Hussey, a coworker of Charlotte Nevill’s . . .”

  Marilyn?

  I look up at the TV.

  “. . . the police have made no statement at this time but our source tells us Ms. Hussey was taken in for questioning from her place of work and has been harboring the missing child murderer Charlotte Nevill, although it appears no arrest has been made there.”

  A humming starts up in my ears as my heart races. Oh God, Marilyn. My lifeline. And now in trouble because of me. Will she tell them where I am? Will she even have figured out where I’ve gone from my message? As I stare at the screen and feel the blue card softening in my hand as I squeeze it, a calm settles over me. I have only me to rely on now. I could still phone the police. Once I’ve spoken to Katie and got some idea of where she and Ava are, I could ring them and they’d come so fast thinking they were going to arrest me. But how can I be sure of where they are until I’ve seen my baby? What if the police go charging in looking for me and she’s not there? Katie will kill her. I know it. One betrayal too many.

  My heart slows down to a regular steady beat and my skin cools. I can’t do anything to help Marilyn and I should never have involved her, but she’ll be okay. At worst, she’ll look like a fool, but I’m not sure how far they’ll want to go with prosecuting a woman just out of an abusive relationship. If this all goes wrong and they come for me, I’ll tell them I made her help me. They think I’m still the monster I used to be, they’ll believe it.

  Maybe this is how it should be. Me and Katie. Finishing what we started, one way or another. I go outside and light a cigarette in the rain. A few moments of quiet before making the call. The smoke is harsh and it makes my head swim but it feels like coming home. Everything does. The anger and fear simmering inside me, the smoking, the being entirely alone with no one to believe in me.

  It’s a perfect mood for Katie.

  64

  Her

  The thing with your generation is you’re all so needy. Narcissistic. Instagram or it didn’t happen. But even with all that it took me a while to find you. You’d be surprised how many Avas of your age there are in Elleston. But I worked my way through them, all those little details of life casually given away, making it so easy to track someone down, and once I saw you with your mother, I knew I’d struck gold. It wasn’t the way she looked—I defy anyone to recognize a woman they knew as a child, we’re all masters of disguise—it was the way she was. Nervous. Hunted. Edgy. Alone.

  The waiting was over. I bought the house, and brought passport number three to life. Let a new identity build, watched you both and slowly integrated. Placed myself in the perfect position for studying Charlotte. Easy as pie. Of course this was when I really needed Jon. Not him, obviously, but access to his life. I knew he wouldn’t have changed much—men are all creatures of routine, aren’t they, and he didn’t have the spine for reinvention—and he was so pitifully glad to see me again. Not for long, obviously.

  Once I’d got into your house it was so easy. I took fingerprints from glasses and stole strands of her hair from the bathroom and planted them at Jon’s so the police would think she’d been there. The same with the cottage I rented via his laptop and disposed of him in. I know he was your father, but don’t look at me like that. The man was both weak and a fool. You’d have been disappointed in him, trust me.

  I set up a Facebook account for him, liked some of the same pages as you, and, when I was re
ady, started messaging you. Dear God, you were easy. So needy for love, little Ava. So determined to be a grown-up. You wanted romance. Passion. All that crap.

  I wound your mother up too. Little surprises I knew would make her paranoid. Drive her to call her probation officer for reassurance while looking a little bit crazy. And then, when the time was right and the stage set, all it took was one shove of a toddler into the river and boom, a picture in the paper and an anonymous phone call saying I recognized her as Charlotte Nevill.

  And here we are. Still waiting. She’ll call soon, I know she will. So, let’s get you into position, shall we? Ready for the show.

  65

  Lisa

  “It’s me.”

  For a moment there’s nothing at the other end. I’m gripping the receiver tightly to my ear and I’ve pressed myself into the corner of the café so close to the glass that there’s instantly a mist of condensation across it from my hot breath, coating the grime.

  “Charlotte,” she says. “You made it.”

  “I want to speak to Ava.”

  “And you will. When you get here. To our hideout. Bonnie and Clyde, finally on the run.”

  “We’re not children anymore, Katie. I don’t want to play these games. Let me speak to my daughter. I want to know she’s safe.” I want to fucking smash your face in, you crazy cunt.

  “You sound like you’re in one of those terrible straight-to-DVD thrillers.” Her tone is light. Still so well spoken. So Katie. Pristine and perfect. “Lighten up. She’s fine. Looking forward to seeing me?”

  “It’s been a long time,” I say.

  “Not for me, I’ve been seeing you,” she answers. Her voice drops, becomes deeper, all humor gone. “I’m going to give you an address. If you come here on your own I’ll let Ava go. I promise you. She doesn’t interest me. But I swear to God, Charlotte, if you tell anyone else, she’ll be dead before they get through the door. Do you understand?”

  I absolutely believe her. Everything she’s put into this, she won’t fall at this hurdle.

  “I understand,” I say.

  “Don’t dawdle, Clyde,” she says, after she’s given me the address and told me the front door will be unlocked. “It’ll make me suspicious. And aside from that, I can’t wait to catch up.”

  “Oh, I’m coming, Katie,” I say. “You can count on it.”

  66

  Marilyn

  I feel like I’ve been in here for hours, the same questions, the same answers, going around and around in circles. I’ve given them everything I can tell them—about Lisa, at least. The lawyer Simon sent in said it was for the best and it probably is. I told them she got into my car and that I rented her a hotel room. I told them her thoughts on Katie. I haven’t told them about Skegness. If they caught Lisa there before she had a chance to find Katie, then Ava is dead. We’ve had ten minutes of peace while Bray was called out of the room, but now she’s back. What next, I wonder? What have they found?

  “My client is aware she made a serious judgmental error by not contacting you immediately when Charlotte Nevill approached her, but she fully intended to call you today. Ava Buckridge’s well-being is her primary concern and she acted with that at heart. I feel, given her personal situation—a woman who’s been through a serious domestic trauma as well as dealing with the fallout of Charlotte Nevill’s new identity being exposed—there’s nothing to be gained in charging her. She is absolutely remorseful for her actions, which were brought about by impaired judgment from emotional exhaustion and misplaced loyalty to someone she believed to be a best friend.”

  “She has seriously impeded my investigation,” Bray says. “Charlotte Nevill is a dangerous killer.”

  “It’s not her,” I say for the thousandth time, despite the glare from the lawyer. “It’s Katie. Katie isn’t dead. There was no body. She’s Jodie’s mother. I keep telling you. If you’d seen Lisa, you’d know. She’s convinced.”

  “I’m sure she is,” Bray says. “Perhaps she believes it to be true. Perhaps there are two personalities at work here. Perhaps she’s Charlotte and Katie now. But we’ve searched Amelia Cousins’s house thoroughly and there is nothing to raise suspicion. There is, however, evidence Charlotte has been there. A tape with her and Katie’s initials on it was found on Amelia’s bed, alongside a large seashell. Is Lisa headed to a seaside town, Marilyn?”

  “I don’t know,” I answer. Skegness sits on the tip of my tongue. “But maybe Katie left them there as a message for Lisa?” I won’t call her Charlotte. She’s Lisa to me.

  “Or Charlotte could have left them there as a false lead.”

  “Have you spoken to Amelia Cousins?”

  “Both her and Jodie’s phones are switched off or out of signal range. We knew they were both away. Amelia said she may travel to join her daughter in the finca she’s at in Spain. That’s hardly suspicious.” She leans across the table. “I’m trying to be patient with you, Marilyn, I really am. But you need to accept that you may have put Ava in danger with your actions. You need to help us.”

  “While my client believes this version of events to be true, she is doing everything she can to help you.” His voice is dry. Calm and measured against Bray’s irritation and my exhaustion.

  “Let’s go through it once more. From the beginning. Every detail. There must be something we’ve missed. Start the tape again.”

  I take a deep breath and sigh. It’s going to be a long afternoon.

  67

  Lisa

  I expected the house to be near the beach. In those long hours as a child when I’d fantasize about being there with Katie, my only lifeline in the shite of my existence, I’d always imagined the front door opening straight onto the sand with the sun blazing down as if on some tropical island rather than at an English seaside resort where the air smells of salt and cheap fried food. It’s not near the sea though. It’s not even in the town proper, but out toward the countryside.

  The drive up is more of a track and the house looms ahead of me. It’s stylish, large, and almost deco. More modern than it should look, given its age. I pause, and consider my options. The front door will be open. What’s she afraid of, that if I ring the doorbell and she answers, I’ll thrust a knife into her chest before she has a chance to speak? She wouldn’t be wrong, but I’m not planning on stabbing her fatally. I just want to disable her, to be sure I can find Ava.

  From where I’m standing, a little to the right of the building, still on the road, I study it for signs of cameras marking any movement. I can’t see any. Maybe she’s got one over the door so she’ll know when I’m here. The windows, black pools in the gloom, give nothing away. Perhaps there are closed blinds or curtains on the inside; I can’t tell from this distance. There’s no way around to a back door, the garden cut off by a high fence. She’s given me no choice. Go in, following her instructions, or go away and call the police. If I go in, she’s going to try to kill me. If I leave, she’ll kill Ava. Katie, the ringmaster. Katie the planner.

  My hands are sweating. Ava’s in there, I know it. Ava and Katie, waiting for me. She promised she’d let her go, I tell myself. It’s not Ava she wants. I think about Daniel. About what I did. About the weight I’ve carried all these years. Saving Ava is all that matters. If I have to die in the process and end all this, so be it. Still, I pull the knife out and grip the handle tight.

  It’s eerily quiet as I come up the drive, just the patter of rain in the bushes around me and the hushed whisper of my shoes on the gravel. My eyes dart everywhere, looking for something or nothing. A threat unseen. She won’t kill you straightaway, I tell myself. She wants to talk. She has catching up to do. This is my advantage. I know it. If I can rush her, get my knife in her, weaken her, then I have a chance.

  There are three pale steps to the bright white front door and I take a deep breath and reach forward to push it open. I tentatively cross the threshold, leaving the door open behind me. It’s cold inside and although the wooden floorboards are po
lished and sleek, the empty, abandoned scent of the building takes me straight back to the house on Coombs Street. A few pictures, some abstract modern art, are still hanging, and a dresser is pushed up against one wall, but they are forgotten items, uncared for. More expensive than the debris of the ruined house on Coombs Street, but the same. Time is folding in on itself. No, I correct myself. Time is always folded, the past like shadows we can’t shake off, and now I feel them surrounding me, wraiths drawing in to choke me. Katie, Daniel, Tony, Ma.

  It’s a large open hallway, a room of its own, made more vast by the lack of furniture. Up ahead, a staircase climbs into darkness. The windows are shuttered, only splinters of gray light coming in from outside. I can hear my own breath. What now?

  I take a step forward, and then another. No figures lurking in the corners. No one here with me. Should I go upstairs? Where’s the next clue, Katie? What are you expecting from me here?

  She appears so suddenly, a shimmering figure in front of me, that I gasp and stumble backward. Katie, but as she was as a child. A ghost of my Katie there on the bottom step. What is this? is all I have time to think before the floor somehow disappears beneath me.

  A magician’s house, remember? Katie’s voice whispers in my head. Full of tricks.

  I walked straight into it. Dumb, stupid Charlotte. I feel a web around me and then a sickening thud as my head hits concrete and the world goes black.

  68

  Marilyn

  They’ve kept my phone but at least I’m out.

  “Thank you,” I say. Simon Manning is there, waiting with the car. I wonder how much this afternoon has cost him for the lawyer. I could cry with gratitude. “They still may charge me, but for now, I’m a free woman. I’ve told them I’m staying at the hotel. That’s all right, isn’t it?”