The Promise You Made

by A J McDine

  ‘We’re not sure yet, the registration plates have burnt to a crisp. Looks like an old Audi.’ He pulled a notebook and pen out of his top pocket. ‘I don’t suppose you heard or saw anything suspicious?’

  ‘Last night?’

  He nodded. ‘No one saw the car on fire, but a couple of horse riders spotted what was left of it just after eleven this morning.’

  I tutted. ‘It’s lucky the whole wood didn’t go up in smoke.’

  ‘Absolutely. I don’t like this kind of thing happening on my patch.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not going to be much help. I didn’t see or hear anything.’

  ‘Ah, well, it was worth a try. Does Mrs George still live up the road?’

  ‘Mary?’ I glanced over my shoulder to check Eloise hadn’t appeared, then nodded. ‘She does, but you won’t get anything out of her. She’s as deaf as a post.’

  He flipped his notebook shut and was putting it in his pocket when I had a thought. I would never be the prime suspect for setting a stolen car on fire. As I’d reached my fiftieth birthday, I’d realised with a jolt that middle-aged women were so invisible to the rest of society we could get away with virtually anything. That being said, a little smoke and mirrors wouldn’t hurt.

  ‘I did see something you might be interested in, but it was the night before last.’

  The PCSO’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘I sometimes like to take an evening stroll. Just to help me sleep, you know. Anyway, I was walking past the pumping station at the bottom of Kettle Hill Road when I saw two boys in a car.’

  ‘Boys? You mean children?’

  ‘Sorry, youths,’ I said. ‘When you’re my age, everything is relative, Steve. Can I call you Steve?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Well, Steve, these youths were in a small red car. Maybe a Fiesta or a Corsa? They looked like trouble. You know the type. Hoodies and tracksuit bottoms.’ I tutted again. ‘Is it just me, or do the youth of today seem totally incapable of buying a decent pair of slacks?’

  ‘They were out of the car?’

  Too late, I realised my mistake. I didn’t want PCSO Sutton to know that the two boys had been about to break into Eloise’s car.

  ‘One of them was relieving himself against a tree,’ I improvised. ‘With total disregard to anyone else, I might add.’ I replayed the encounter in my mind. ‘He shouted something to the driver. Called him Jaden.’

  ‘Jaden,’ PCSO Sutton said, jotting the name in his notebook. ‘He shouldn’t be too hard to track down. Thank you, Mrs Barton. You’ve been very helpful.’

  ‘It’s Miss Barton,’ I said. ‘But I’m glad I could be of assistance. And if that’s all, I have something on the hob I should attend to.’

  I had barely closed the front door when Eloise appeared at the bottom of the stairs. She was playing with a length of her hair, twisting it round and round her finger.

  ‘Who was that?’ she said.

  ‘Just the local PCSO.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He was asking about your car.’

  A flicker of fear crossed her features and she folded her arms across her chest.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I soothed. ‘We knew someone would come across it sooner or later. No one saw the actual fire.’

  She frowned. ‘You said he asked about my car. How does he know it’s mine?’

  ‘Sorry, I meant he was asking about the car. They haven’t identified it yet. He was asking if I saw anything suspicious last night.’

  Eloise's arms dropped to her sides, and she walked slowly along the hallway towards me, her fingertips trailing along the wall. ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘That I hadn’t seen anything, of course.’ I smiled. ‘You don’t need to worry, Eloise. I’ve taken care of everything. You can forget all about Theo.’

  Her pale face tightened. ‘Don’t say that bastard’s name!’

  I blinked. ‘I’m sorry, I…’

  She shook her head and held out a hand. The sight of her nails, bitten to the quick, made me want to gather her in my arms and never let her go.

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ she muttered. ‘It’s just that I see his face every time I close my eyes.’ Her voice broke and a single tear trickled down her cheek. ‘I hear his voice when it’s quiet, telling me I’m a useless fucking bitch. He haunts my dreams, and he invades my every waking thought.’ She brushed the tear away with the back of her hand. ‘I can’t bear to hear his name.’

  ‘Then we won’t mention him ever again.’

  She nodded, apparently satisfied. A grief counsellor would have advised Eloise to talk about her ordeal, because sweeping everything under the carpet was like papering over a damp wall. The mould always found its way to the surface in the end. But I was happy to go along with her plea. Not just for her well-being, but because it suited me, too.

  Eloise seemed strangely shaken after her outburst, so I suggested a quiet evening in with a bottle of wine and the Scrabble board.

  ‘It sounds perfect, but you’ll have to teach me. I’ve never played it before.’

  ‘Everyone’s played Scrabble,’ I said, askance.

  ‘In your world, maybe,’ she said, sweeping a hand around the room. ‘Not mine. My foster families just watched the telly, and at the children’s home it was Call of Duty on the X-Box or nothing.’

  ‘Well, I shall consider it one of my duties as a godparent to teach you,’ I said, setting out the board and giving the letters a good shake inside their dark green bag.

  Eloise listened intently as I outlined the rules and grinned when she picked her seven letters.

  ‘You are so going to take a beating,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll see.’ I rearranged my letters a few times, wondering if it was possible to make a word with six vowels and a K. ‘Your mum and I used to play Scrabble when we were in halls together. Things got quite competitive at times.’

  ‘Tell me about her,’ Eloise said, a look of longing on her face. ‘I want to know what she smelt like, how she sounded. Do I have her eyes? Her hair? Her mannerisms? What did she want from her life? A husband and family or a high-flying career? Was she really as beautiful as I remember? Was she loved?’

  A hard mass was forming at the back of my throat as Eloise spoke, the words tumbling out of her like water from a fountain. I swallowed the mass down and forced myself to smile. ‘So many questions! Perhaps I’d better start with the last.’ I closed my eyes, picturing Juliet’s face. Those leonine eyes. Her flawless skin. ‘Yes, Eloise. She was loved.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘What can I say about your mum?’ I said, raising an eyebrow as Eloise spelled out “monster” for an impressive twenty-four points. ‘I know it’s a cliché, but she was the kind of person who lit up a room the minute she walked into it. She was the girl everyone wanted to be friends with.’

  Eloise took seven more letters out of the bag, her eyes never leaving my face.

  ‘It was 1988, the year fashion forgot, but somehow your mum even made a shaggy perm look cool. I have some photos somewhere, if you’d like to see them?’

  Her eyes shone. ‘I’d love to.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can find them. But no peeking at my hand while I’m gone.’

  She grinned and held her hand in a Girl Guide salute. ‘Promise.’

  I found the box of photos in the drawer under my bed where I’d stuffed it the day we buried Juliet. Over the years there had been times when her face threatened to fade from my memory, and I’d been tempted to retrieve the box, dive in and spend a couple of hours wallowing in self-pity. But I never had. What was the point? It wouldn’t bring her back. Nothing would.

  Before I retraced my steps downstairs, I opened the box and picked up the top photograph. I needed to know that I could control my emotions. It wouldn’t be fair to fall to pieces in front of Eloise. I may have lost my best friend, but she’d lost her mother.

  In the photo, Juliet and I were standing side by side
at the bar in the student union. I was wearing the emerald-green cotton top I’d bought in Snob and had taken time with my makeup and hair. Juliet was slightly blurry, as if she’d moved the moment the photo was being taken. But it gave the impression she was ethereal. Other-worldly.

  Looking at our younger selves with the clinical impartiality that can only come with a thirty-year interval, I could see that Juliet was beautiful. But she had the anodyne girl-band good looks that were universal and, dare I say it, a bit vanilla. Whereas I, with my serious green eyes and red hair that framed my face like a hoop of fire, had been unconventionally pretty. If only I’d known it then. Instead, I’d spent my late teens and early twenties thinking I was a carrot-topped freak.

  I touched Juliet’s face with the tip of my index finger, like a child might dip a toe into the sea, then closed my eyes and waited for waves of desolation to wash over me anew.

  Standing at Juliet’s graveside, grief had paralysed me. For one mad second, I almost threw myself on top of her coffin, because being buried alive with her seemed preferable to living without her.

  But life moved on. Although I felt a certain wistfulness, the anguish had faded. And as I gazed at Juliet’s face, so similar to her daughter’s they could almost be sisters, another emotion bubbled to the surface. Gratitude that Juliet had sent Eloise to me and I had someone to love again.

  As I waved goodbye to Eloise and drove into Faversham on Tuesday morning for a four-hour shift at Sisterline, I felt a lightness in my heart that I hadn’t felt for years. A heady cocktail of contentment, joy, and positivity that made me almost giddy. Spending time with her had been a revelation. The more I got to know my goddaughter, the more fascinating I found her, from her passionate views on global warming – “If we don’t start respecting the planet like, now, we’re all fucked” - to her binary opinions on politics – “All politicians are essentially corruptible because politics attracts the power-crazy and those who seek power can always be bought”. Having spent much of my life with people who sat on the fence, terrified to express an opinion on anything in case they were labelled sexist, or ageist, or racist, or fatist, or whatever else-ist, I found her arbitrary views strangely refreshing.

  The occasional twinge of guilt I felt when I thought of Theo locked in his concrete prison vanished as I watched Eloise sparkle. Freed from his controlling grip, she was gregarious and funny. It was as if someone had flipped the switch on a printer, turning it from grey-scale to full colour. Her hazel eyes sparkled, and her laughter filled the house. She was charming company and for the first time in years, I’d felt complete. Happy. Alive.

  The previous evening, replete after a bowl of spaghetti bolognese cooked by Eloise and fortified by half a bottle of cabernet sauvignon, I’d walked into the kitchen, reached in the cupboard for my vitamins, and chucked the entire bottle in the bin.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Eloise had asked in alarm.

  ‘I don’t need them any more,’ I’d said. ‘You were right. I’m getting everything I need.’ And I had Eloise to thank.

  Traffic was light, and I was soon pulling into the car park, relieved to see there wasn’t a single sports utility vehicle in sight. I locked the Land Rover, hooked my bag over my shoulder and walked the short distance to the office. A couple of volunteers were already in their booths, their headsets in place, the murmur of their voices as soft and reassuring as the babble of a brook. I headed for the small kitchen, making the T sign as I passed the booths, then poked my head around Eddie’s door. Her head was buried in her hands. I coughed discreetly, and she gave a start.

  ‘I was going to ask if you’d like a coffee, but you look as though you could use something stronger,’ I said.

  ‘What? Oh, no, just dealing with a tricky customer.’

  ‘Caller or relative?’

  ‘Relative.’ Eddie grimaced. ‘He’s threatening to go to the Charity Commission.’

  ‘But he’s supposed to complain directly to us first, isn’t he?’

  She sighed. ‘He already has. And he’s not happy with our response.’

  ‘Which was?’

  She beckoned me to come in and close the door. ‘That we were truly sorry to hear about his daughter’s death, but that all calls to us are confidential and we aren’t at liberty to discuss her case.’

  ‘Sounds pretty standard.’

  ‘It is. But now the coroner’s waded in and asked us to give evidence at the girl’s inquest.’

  I raised an eyebrow. ‘Can they do that?’

  ‘They can. And of course I’ll comply. I don’t actually have a choice. But I’m worried about the message it’ll send to the women who use our service.’

  I nodded in understanding. ‘They’ll think our promise to respect their privacy and maintain confidentiality at all times isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Eddie sat back in her chair. ‘The irony is that we have nothing of consequence to tell them, anyway.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Although his daughter called us the day she died, we classed the call as low risk.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. If someone was low risk, we didn’t consider them to pose a risk to life. ‘But she was?’ I asked. ‘At risk, I mean?’

  Eddie rubbed her face. ‘Put it like this: she drove to Graveney, parked her car by the level crossing, walked onto the tracks and straight into the path of an oncoming train. Died instantly.’

  ‘Well, you would.’ I shook my head, my heart going out not just to the girl, who at least had a choice, but to the train driver, who didn’t. ‘I don’t remember reading about it.’

  ‘It was back in the summer, but the phone enquiries have only just come back, apparently. According to the police, the last two calls made from her phone were to her father and Sisterline.’

  ‘And it’s easier for her father to blame us than himself,’ I said. ‘Who took the call to us?’

  Eddie’s face closed off.

  ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. None of my beeswax.’

  She picked up a fountain pen, unscrewed the lid, inspected the nib, and screwed the lid back on again. ‘No, you’re all right. It’ll be coming your way soon enough. It was Rhona. Rhona took the call.’

  Rhona Richards began volunteering at Sisterline a week before I joined and, having so much more experience, considered herself to be my superior in every way. She was a small, dumpy woman in her late fifties, with skin like bread dough and beady currant eyes. Slouchy, too, like a filled sack of potatoes. Despite her size, she had an uncanny knack of sidling into a room and listening in to a private conversation unnoticed, especially if she thought it might be about her. Which it often was, because she was about as popular as a fart in a lift.

  ‘Rose?’ Eddie said.

  ‘Sorry, I was miles away.’

  ‘You won’t say anything about the matter we’ve been discussing?’

  I smiled. ‘Of course not. And if there’s anything I can do…’

  ‘I’ll let you know.’

  I picked up Eddie’s cup and made my way to the kitchen. I was halfway through the tea run when the significance of what Eddie had said hit me. It’ll be coming your way soon enough. Did that mean the job was mine?

  Chapter Eighteen

  APRIL 1991

  * * *

  Danny crawled back with his tail between his legs in the first week of the new term. Apparently, he’d “seen the error of his ways” and had realised Juliet “was the love of his life”. My suspicions that his change of heart had more to do with the fact that the radio DJ had dumped him were confirmed when I bumped into John in the library a couple of days later.

  ‘She kicked him out when her ex turned up on the doorstep with a bunch of roses and an engagement ring,’ John said.

  ‘Serves him right.’ I gathered my books and shoved them into my bag. ‘Someone should tell Juliet.’

  ‘No, they shouldn’t.’

  I started to protest, but John shook his head.


  ‘She won’t thank you for it. You know what they say about shooting the messenger.’

  ‘I’d want to know if I was in her shoes.’

  ‘But you’re not, are you?’ He stared at the library ceiling, then back at me. ‘Leave them be. It’ll soon fizzle out, anyway. Danny has the attention span of a toddler. He’ll move onto someone else and you’ll have Juliet all to yourself again before you know it.’

  I fixed him with a look, then said grudgingly, ‘You’re surprisingly emotionally mature for a computer nerd.’

  He doffed an imaginary cap at me and shuffled off.

  For once in my life, I did what I was told, because I knew John was right. If I told Juliet Danny was a waste of space, she’d think I was jealous. And things were already strained between us. She’d been decidedly chilly with me the morning after the Snow Ball, and whenever I’d called over the Christmas break, her parents had informed me politely but firmly that she couldn’t come to the phone.

  So, I watched from the sidelines as Danny smarmed his way back into her heart, waiting to pick up the pieces when things inevitably imploded.

  I also had other things on my mind. My grades had been gradually slipping, and I’d been called in a couple of times by my tutor to discuss why. I couldn’t bring myself to admit I was way out of my depth, and that while my fellow medics breezed through topics, I was struggling to take even the simplest principles on board and, as a result, my confidence was at an all-time low.

  Lying was easier, so I told her my parents were going through a messy divorce and if she allowed me extra time to finish my backlog of essays, I would catch up. Even as I said it, I knew I never would. Because I was in over my head. All I was doing was prolonging the agony.

  I would’ve loved to have confided in Juliet about my grades, but with her obsession with Danny growing by the day, she barely acknowledged my existence. She stayed at his digs most nights, only coming home if he was out with his mates. When she was home, she avoided me. But I pretended everything was fine, because if I didn’t, I knew I would fall to pieces.