by Kate Simants
And she reads the lot. Every sheet and transcript, every note, because she has to make sure. It takes hours, but by the time the moon has nearly finished its slow ascent into the night sky, she knows that she’d been right.
There is nothing in Paige’s records about having run away. There is nothing about ill health. Beech View had received a good inspection judgment, with almost no advisory improvements. It was James Yardley himself who’d signed off on the pastoral care elements – his report had been glowing, start to finish. There is a mention in there of the work that had been done with improving outcomes, the Care Ambassador programme. But, even though it happened in every children’s home in every town in the country, absconding was serious. If Paige had run away, as Melanie had insisted, it must have been recorded, however badly trained the staff were. It would have ascended the chain of command – right to the top.
She doesn’t get home until almost one. A note, written on the back of the one she’d left for Suzy that morning, sits waiting for her at the kitchen table: Where are you? Keep your bloody phone on. Tired, gone to bed. Beside it sits a gluey plate of beef stroganoff growing a skin.
Wren microwaves the meal and forks it mechanically into her mouth without sitting. Then, after washing her plate and checking Suzy is indeed asleep, she runs herself a bath and tries to piece it together.
There can be only one reason that there’s no mention of absconding in Paige’s file. Someone, at some point, must have removed it.
Why?
And if they removed that, what else is missing?
18
Before
Until he walks past it, he doesn’t even notice that they’ve cut down the tree. He was just thinking how nothing had changed on Dulverton Road since he was last here, and then he sees the stump, fenced in by four of those plastic orange barrier things the council use, so he knows they’re going to be coming back to dig out what’s left, too.
And he doesn’t know why but it really gets him. Right in the heart. Not that he climbed it or paid it any attention, back when they lived here. It was just always there. The roots are breaking through the pavement in about ten places. Luke touches the ragged surface of it, then straightens and walks on. His curfew is 9 p.m. – he’s got to get on with it.
Their old house is number 72, up where the road levels out. The red Polo that belongs to the woman who lives there now isn’t parked outside, but sometimes she parks around the corner. Once, there was no sign of it anywhere and then she just turned up out of the blue on a bike, so he doesn’t even bother looking for it now.
He stays on the opposite side, getting closer – number 65 where those two old ladies still live, 67 with that kid in a wheelchair. He doesn’t slow down as he passes 72, just glances over, long enough to do the check. Front room: dark. His mum’s bedroom: dark. From the window above the door he knows there’s a light on in the hall. He keeps the same pace right to the top, then goes left, and left again, down the alley.
The back gardens.
The gate for 72 is the sixth one from the top. He checks ahead and behind him before he stops, but there’s no one around.
The fences are too high to see over, but there’s the hole in that one panel where he once worked the loose knot of wood out, and he looks through it. The grass has been trimmed. There’s a new picnic table with a plastic highchair, and there’s a sandpit. But the plants are the same.
The peony, his mum’s favourite, should have big pink flowers. He scans the garden as best he can through the hole, but he can’t see anything the right colour. Maybe the flowers are small, or tucked behind something. He’s already got a vase waiting for them, found it right at the back of one of the kitchen cupboards at Beech View. He’ll only need a few of the flowers to make it look nice. The people in the house won’t even notice they’re gone.
He swings his bag off his back. Zipped up in the side pocket there is a pocket knife. It’s blunt as anything, can’t even do paper without leaving it all torn. But it’ll be OK for the stems. He flips out the blade and slides it under the latch. The gate opens without a sound.
He goes in, closes the gate behind him, then squints through the gloom at the flower beds until he sees what he thinks could be the right thing. But when he gets closer, the flowers aren’t right, they’re going brown. No – mostly they’ve gone brown. Only a couple of them have any colour at all, just a few petals. A gust of wind gets under his jacket and it’s freezing, and then he stops, realises what the problem is. It’s fucking November. Nothing flowers in November. Idiot.
It’ll have to do. Maybe he can pull off the brown bits; maybe once they’re in water they’ll be all right.
He gets to work. The stems are tough and he has to crack them against the blade to break them. He takes the two best ones that aren’t totally dead, and then he finds three more that are still tight buds. Brown on the outside too but maybe they’ll open up, who knows.
Stems in his hand, he looks around. There’s no light at the kitchen window, but it looks different somehow. They’ve changed the curtain. And the back door’s been replaced with a wooden one, no glass.
He gets to his feet.
When he thinks about it later, he can’t explain why he didn’t just leave. But he doesn’t just leave.
He pauses in the shadowy garden, with the very last daylight thinning into night around him, and he takes a look at the house. He’s so close, metres away.
None of their stuff is in that house. Rob’s said it loads of times – you can’t miss it, it’s just bricks; it’s not even our home if we’re not there.
But Rob’s forgotten something. There is something that’s theirs: the height chart. It’ll be painted over by now, he knows it will. But it was loose at the bottom, the wood. Maybe he could get it, maybe not. And what if this is his only chance?
He goes to the back door. Obviously it’s going to be locked. He pushes down on the handle and there’s a clunk.
It’s not locked.
The kitchen smells of something he doesn’t recognise, something it never smelled of when he lived there. Breathing silently through his mouth, he runs his fingers over the worktop – they’ve changed that too. Theirs was that plastic fake-wood stuff; this is the real thing, smooth and solid. The cupboard doors are cream now. His mum would shit: she hates cream, beige, anything boring like that. Calls them non-colours. On the wall there’s a thing hanging, blocks of pink-painted wood cut out to spell the word HOME over the top of a heart.
He puts the stems down on the worktop and goes into the hall. There’s no sound other than a clock somewhere and his footsteps on the carpet. The door to the living room is wide open, with the streetlamp outside making a big triangle of light on the wall. He touches the new paint on the inside of the doorframe, bends a little bit, getting up close, and he can just about make out some of the writing next to the lines that were drawn across it, marking his height. Luke 20 months. Robert – 8 years old today!
And it’s while he’s standing there with his fingers tracing the words in the wood that he hears the baby.
It scares the shit out of him to start with, that sudden gasp it makes like it’s just been underwater. But then he realises what it is. He goes over to the sofa, where it’s lying on the floor in a basket. Its eyes are open, one chubby fist waving above a stripy knitted blanket. He crouches down to touch it, and it opens its hand, grabs hold of his finger, so stupidly tight it makes him grin.
And then he freezes. It’s taken that long for what it means to hit him.
If there’s a baby in the house, there’s an adult as well.
Then everything happens very fast.
The light goes on, and he jumps to his feet, jerking his hand away too hard. The baby screams, and there’s a woman in the doorway, and she pauses like she can’t believe that there’s actually someone here, and then she starts shouting and she runs over and snatches the kid up out of the basket.
‘Get out! Get out of my house! Get out!’ she’s
yelling.
Luke steps backwards, puts his hands high in the air. And the woman’s eyes snap up to above his head, and her eyes go wide, and she shields the baby and turns away and screams louder than he’s ever heard a person scream before in his life.
And that’s when he realises he’s still holding the knife.
*
He cries all the way back to Beech View.
Mel’s driving, Luke’s in the back. She won’t even look at him.
At first he tried to stop, just bite it back, but after a couple of minutes he can’t do it any more and it just keeps coming out of him, massive juddering sobs like they’ve been growing inside him for weeks.
She says, ‘For fuck’s sake,’ under her breath for the hundredth time. ‘What the hell were you thinking, Luke?’ There’s another furious pause, and then she says, ‘You are one unfucking-believably lucky kid.’
He knows it’s true. He dropped the knife the second he realised what was happening, and he told the woman, shouted it, that he was Luke Ashworth, he used to live here, that Mrs Dias next door knew him. That he just wanted to get these flowers for his mum because she was in hospital. Bursting into tears probably helped, he thinks now, and the thought brings with it another wave of shame.
She made him wait outside the front door, did all the bolts, and talked to him through the letterbox.
‘Don’t even think about running away,’ she’d said, crying too, ‘or I’ll just call the police, all right? You understand me?’
She asked for the name of the home he was in, already knew he was in care somehow, probably from the neighbour. And twenty minutes later, Mel had arrived. She put him in the car, didn’t even talk to him, and went inside the house. She was gone half an hour, and the bloke came home too, the woman’s husband, and they were all in there talking about whether or not Luke was going to spend the next five years or whatever in Young Offenders. And Luke just sat in the back of Mel’s Clio, shaking, thinking about what was his mum going to say.
Or what she was going to do.
‘If you pull anything like that again, Luke, I swear to God I’m going to call the police my fucking self,’ Mel says now, eyeing him in the mirror, shaking her head. He’s never seen her so angry. ‘You were this close to a criminal record, do you know that?’
When they get back, he goes straight to his room and locks the door. He pulls the chest of drawers across it, and gets into bed without even taking his clothes off and pulls the duvet right over his head.
They come to the door about twenty times. First Mel, bringing food and drinks and saying things to him, saying he’s got to let her in. And then one of the bank staff after Mel’s gone home.
But he doesn’t come out, not that night, not all day the next day. Mr Polzeath turns up at one point saying he’ll have to break the door down but of course he fucking doesn’t because it’ll cost him to fix it. Luke won’t even go out to piss, just uses a Coke bottle. Doesn’t even answer when Paige tries to talk to him through the door. She comes back three times. But he stays curled up, facing the wall.
He doesn’t want her to know, but Mel must have told her. Because when he creeps out in the early hours of Sunday morning when he really, really needs a glass of water and some food, there’s a bunch of peonies lying on the carpet outside his door. Grown in South Africa, the label says.
19
Now
Something wakes her early, just gone four, and sleep is gone in an instant. She’s not meeting Yardley for hours yet but Wren gets up, showers and leaves quietly, knowing from years of experience the futility of trying to return to sleep.
There is a coffee bar in Cotham, up past the hospitals, that never closes. The warm scent of new croissants blooms out at her as she opens the door, but she sticks with her usual espresso.
The guy behind the counter is new. ‘Night shift? You a doctor?’ he says, handing it to her and laughing mildly at her lengthy yawn.
She sips at the scalding paper cup as he gets her change. ‘I work in probation.’
He makes a face like he doesn’t believe her. ‘At five in the morning?’
‘What can you do? Crime never sleeps,’ she tells him, and he laughs.
Back in the car, the radio mumbles benignly as she makes the familiar loop. Top of Blackboy Hill and out onto the Downs. She pulls over in the spot she always favours when she’s up and out early, near the Observatory.
Killing the engine, she sits back. But as she scans the view, something Melanie said comes back to her and makes her get out her phone: the Polzeaths, and the property they had in Clifton.
The search is swift and productive. The first hit on Oliver Polzeath is a profile article she’s already seen, published in Community Care. He’d originally trained in social work, and bought a near-derelict ex-hotel in Burnham-on-Sea to convert into a children’s home back in the late eighties, and the business grew from there. In terms of a current property portfolio, though, there’s nothing obvious. His ex, however, is a different story. She’s a director of Positano Residences, listed out of an address in Bristol’s most prestigious BS8 postcode. Wren digs a notebook out of the glovebox and scribbles down the addresses she finds associated with them on a property rental site. Then she buckles up, doubles back onto the Ladies Mile towards the zoo and enters the residential part of Clifton from the north.
Wren doesn’t come up here often. Her work rarely involves these kinds of neighbourhoods, and if she and Suzy have a night out, they’re more suited to what Stokes Croft or the Gloucester Road has to offer. When she does visit the opulent suburb, she’s always accompanied by a faint sense of resentment. It’s hard to stomach the comfort and wealth of the top of the pyramid when you’ve seen what it is to live at the bottom.
She finds the first, second and third addresses on her list within a few streets of each other. Each one is a penthouse in a different detached Georgian block, not dissimilar from the Lord Mayor’s pile. She looks up through open curtains at a gorgeous ceiling with a modernist chandelier the size of her bathroom.
Wren presses away the frown that has formed involuntarily. How had Melanie put it, about the stipend for Paige’s involvement in the Care Ambassador project? Pennies really, to them, but it went straight into their pockets. But it didn’t add up. Aggregate resale value aside, the rents from the three flats she’s just seen – enormous, luxury homes – must be netting the best part of five figures a month. So why would they bother pushing Paige into a scheme for the sake of a few quid of petrol money?
Wren finishes the coffee, remembering how unkindly she’d judged the Polzeaths before she’d met them. Can’t care be a business, like any other? Just because it makes a ton of cash, it doesn’t make it immoral.
Except her gut says it’s more than that. It’s not just about the money. Something is off.
It’s getting on for seven – time to go and meet James. She heads towards the centre, the roads getting busier by the minute now, and finds a space opposite the court. Christmas Steps is a five-minute walk.
Wren orders a decaf tea and spots him at the rear of the café, rigid concentration sectioning his forehead. He sees her and gets to his feet.
‘Look, maybe this isn’t a good idea,’ he says. He looks as if he’s had less sleep than she has.
‘It’s just a chat,’ she tells him, pulling out a chair.
He nods, sighs heavily and sits back down. ‘I just – I don’t know. I spent so long thinking how it would go, you know? Meeting him, talking it all through.’
‘And it wasn’t how you expected.’
He glances up, as if testing the waters, unsure of what he can trust her with. What he is safe to admit. He goes on stirring his flat white, four empty sachets of sugar at his elbow.
‘How about you tell me what you’ve been looking into, OK? If I can help, I will.’
‘I can’t share details of the schedule with you,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry. It’s confidential.’
‘You’ve seen the Polze
aths?’
Wren shakes her head with an apologetic laugh. ‘Honestly, I really can’t talk about it I’m afraid.’
James nods. ‘I can’t help you then.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I’ve done my bit. I co-operated with the police, I went to court, I went out of my way to find you, to help with your programme. I wanted to forgive him.’ He folds his arms. ‘If you want me to do something off the record to help you—’
‘This isn’t for me. It’s my job, it’s about justice for Paige.’
He tilts his head. ‘But is she part of your job?’
‘What?’
‘The answer is no. She’s not, not really. And look, I already know it’s personal. It’s personal for me. I want to know what happened to her. But what you’re requesting, what you’re about to ask me about Luke, and Paige – yes, I do know what’s coming, Wren, I’m not stupid – it’s privileged information.’
‘OK,’ she says, deflated. ‘Then I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted trip.’
‘No,’ he says, putting his hand out to stop her from getting up. Wren stays put. ‘I will share,’ he goes on. ‘But it’s quid pro quo. All right? I want to know what you know.’
He waits.
‘All right?’ he says again.
It’s either accept it as it is offered, or walk away. She looks at the door. It’s right there.
‘All right,’ she says to her tea. And she takes a deep breath, and tells him. Starting with Leah Amberley, the teachers, the girl at school. James listens intently.
‘OK. Who else?’
‘I spoke to a woman who worked at Beech View at the time. She had some things to say about the Polzeaths, who own the chain.’
There’s a pause. ‘Not Melanie Pickford-Hayes,’ he says archly.
‘You know her?’
‘To a degree.’
‘Meaning what?’ Wren presses. It hadn’t even crossed her mind that Melanie was anything other than honest.