The Darkest Evening

by Cleeves, Ann

  ‘Look who’s here.’ Helen’s voice was gentle. ‘It’s little Thomas come to see his grandma.’ She took a seat next to the woman. ‘Joe, this is Jill Falstone. Jill, this is one of the detectives looking into Lorna’s death.’

  The woman didn’t reply. She held out her arms and Joe put Thomas into them. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, ‘about your daughter.’

  She nodded her acknowledgement, but still she didn’t speak.

  ‘If this is too soon,’ Helen said, ‘there’s no pressure at all to take your grandson now. We can arrange for foster care for a little while. It’ll be a hard time for you both, coming to terms with Lorna’s death. Thomas could come to visit for days until you feel ready to look after him full-time.’

  ‘No!’ The answer was sharp and immediate. ‘No, this is where he belongs.’

  ‘And your husband feels the same way?’

  ‘He does.’ There was a pause. ‘He says we have a second chance with Thomas. We got everything wrong with Lorna. We lost her. Now we can give a better life to her son.’

  Joe thought of the man in the yard, hardly looking at the baby, turning his back on him. Perhaps he’d wanted to hide his grief from strangers, but it was hard to believe that he really wanted a second chance with a child. He thought Jill Falstone was talking for herself. Guilt was in there somewhere, and a longing to be close to the child when she’d grown apart from Thomas’s mother.

  ‘I need to ask a few questions,’ he said. ‘Just to understand Lorna a bit better, to understand what might have happened to her.’

  The woman nodded to show she appreciated that questions would be inevitable. ‘You’d best sit down.’

  ‘Would your husband like to join us?’ Joe thought they might get more out of the woman if they spoke to her on her own, but he didn’t want to alienate Falstone, to make him feel more excluded than he already seemed to be.

  ‘He’s busy,’ Jill said. ‘The farm won’t look after itself just because our daughter died. This weather, the sheep need feeding.’

  Her husband’s words, Joe thought. ‘What happened with Lorna? Why did you lose touch?’ Holly had explained about her conversation with Sophie Blackstock and the possibility that Lorna could have had an eating disorder, but surely, Joe thought again, you wouldn’t cast out your child because they were ill.

  There was silence, broken by the growl of a tractor. Jill Falstone sat on the other side of the table from him, Thomas on her knee. The child sat calmly looking around at them, then started playing with a couple of teaspoons.

  ‘We’d almost given up having children when I fell pregnant,’ Jill said. ‘He never said, but I think Robert was hoping for a boy, someone who might take on the farm. I know a girl can be a farmer too, but he’s old-fashioned that way.’

  ‘So, he was disappointed when you had a girl?’

  ‘No!’ The surprise Jill must have felt at her husband’s response showed in her voice now. ‘He doted on her. I was the one who found it hard after all those years of independence, of working with Robert to make a success of this place. I love farming. It’s in my blood. I took Lorna out with me as much as I could but she wasn’t an easy baby.’ Jill stroked Thomas’s hair. ‘His mother would never have sat like this. Lorna was always grizzling and demanding attention.’

  ‘So how did it go wrong?’ Joe asked. ‘If Robert loved her so much?’

  There was a moment of hesitation. Joe thought she was deciding how open she should be. She glanced at the social worker. He wished he was there on his own. Social workers had the knack of making the best parents feel anxious, guilty.

  ‘When Lorna was growing up, her dad spoiled her to bits,’ Jill said. ‘She was horse-mad from a tot and he bought her a pony, then a better horse, put up jumps in the lower field, drove her all over the county when she wanted to compete.’

  Joe heard the edge of resentment in her voice. Perhaps Jill had been the one to feel excluded, at least when Lorna had been a girl.

  ‘And later?’

  ‘It started going wrong when she was a teenager, thirteen or fourteen. She’d moved to the high school in Kimmerston then. It was a long day, eighteen miles each way in the school bus, longer if the weather was bad and some of the lanes were closed. She never really settled there. Of course there were other country kids, but she was an only child. She’d only known the bairns in the school in Kirkhill, and they were never very close. There were just a couple the same age as her and they were girly, you know, giggly. Not like our Lorna at all, though she was as pretty as any of them. Prettier, if anything. I think that made them jealous. And it must have been hard settling into the big school, all the noise, rough boys, strange faces.’

  ‘She was bullied?’ Joe asked. He’d worried about that when Jess moved on to the comprehensive. Sal said she’d give as good as she got, but still, the anxiety had kept him awake at night.

  ‘I don’t think they cared about her enough to bully her. Not at first. She shrank into herself. Later they noticed her, started with the names and the whispers behind her back. She didn’t come to us about it though. I only guessed later what had been going on.’ Again, Jill shot a look at the social worker before continuing, and again Joe thought there were things she wasn’t saying. ‘She’d always been a quiet little thing, but she turned nervy, withdrawn. She still had the horse but she wouldn’t go hunting any more and she didn’t bother with the other local girls who were into riding. She turned pale and skinny.’ Jill paused and tried to find the words. ‘Like a ghost. Like she didn’t want anyone to see her, to know she was there.’

  ‘And your husband couldn’t cope with the change in her?’

  ‘No!’ Jill raised her voice. Thomas turned and stared at her before squirming away onto the floor. He sat under the table banging the spoons on the quarry tiles. ‘It wasn’t that. He was just as worried as me. We tried everything to get through to her. We went to the school and tried to explain, but she was well-behaved and did her homework. They couldn’t see there was any problem. In the end I dragged her along to the GP. She was losing so much weight and we thought she might be ill. Cancer. Leukaemia. Something like that.’

  Joe nodded. He’d had those fears in the middle of the night too and his children had been fit and healthy.

  Jill was still speaking. Now she’d started, it seemed she couldn’t stop. ‘He said there was nothing physically wrong with her. Not the sort of thing we were imagining. But he thought she might have an eating disorder. He said he could refer her to the child and adolescent mental health services, but there was a waiting list. We couldn’t make any sense of it.’ She paused for a moment. Helen the social worker reached out and touched her hand. ‘That was when things really started going wrong.’

  ‘In what way, wrong?’ Helen asked. She shot a look at Joe, but he gestured for her to go on. This was her territory more than his and it was just as important for her to get a handle on the family.

  ‘Robert couldn’t understand it. Why would Lorna starve herself? It made him frustrated, angry.’

  ‘Had you noticed that she wasn’t eating?’

  ‘We were never the sort of family where everyone had their meals together. I’m not a domestic goddess.’ Jill allowed herself a small smile. ‘I’ve always been happier outside than in the kitchen. I suppose I thought she was helping herself to stuff from the pantry or the freezer, like we, Robert and I, did. She was spending more and more time in her room, becoming more isolated, and when she wasn’t there she was out walking. She walked miles. She said she needed the exercise, but I think that was all about losing weight too. She was always counting calories.’ There was a moment’s silence. ‘In the end she was so poorly that she had to go to hospital. We went for a private place in Cumbria. We thought she’d get better care there. They specialized in teenagers with an eating disorder.’ Another pause. ‘Lorna didn’t want to go, but they said if she stayed at home, she might die. That her heart might just pack up.’

  Now Joe could understand why
Robert Falstone had taken himself away to feed sheep, why he wouldn’t want to be here for this conversation. It would bring back the bad times, the anxiety that his daughter was starving herself to death, the helplessness that he could do nothing to save her. The guilt that now he’d always live with.

  ‘But she got better,’ Helen said. ‘She must have done if she was able to have a baby. That’s impossible if you’re anorexic.’

  Jill nodded. ‘She was months in hospital because she was so poorly. They had to get her weight up and for a while she was lying in bed, too weak to move. They put her in a wheelchair just to use the toilet. A nurse would sit by her at meals, to make sure she was eating, and still she couldn’t accept that she was ill. I visited from time to time, but there was no real response – some days she just turned her back on me – and I could tell all she wanted was for me to go. When she was well enough to leave the clinic, she refused to come home. Maybe she’d convinced herself that it was all our fault, that we were to blame for the way she felt about herself.’ Jill Falstone’s words were bitter. She turned to Helen Clough. ‘Your lot didn’t help. You egged her on, helped her make the break. You set her up in a house in Kirkhill. She was eighteen by then, isolated, vulnerable.’

  ‘I don’t know the details.’ Helen sounded defensive. ‘I haven’t been able to access her files. But if what you say is true, we couldn’t force her to live with you and she couldn’t stay in the hospital indefinitely.’

  ‘They said she’d have support!’ The words came out as a cry. ‘But nobody checked on her. Not after the first few weeks. I asked my doctor. She was left in that council house in Kirkhill on her own, day after day.’

  ‘But she stayed well,’ the social worker said. ‘Maybe that was what she needed – to stay in control of her own life.’

  ‘Who’s the baby’s father?’ Joe felt he had to break in. He was finding the recriminations unbearable and this wasn’t helping. Not now. It was time to move on.

  ‘She would never say.’

  ‘So, you did see her? You did keep in touch?’

  Jill Falstone nodded. ‘She’d been out of hospital for a month or so when I got a text suggesting we meet. Her choice. That made the difference, I suppose. We had coffee in a place in Kimmerston, out of the village, away from the gossips. After that, I went around to her house once a week. Fridays. Friday was my day for going into Kirkhill to stock up for the weekend. She didn’t want to see her dad and I never told him I was visiting. He’d have been so hurt that she was prepared to see me, but not him. Maybe she thought she’d disappointed him, I don’t know. By then she seemed to be holding things together. She’d got herself a little job, working in the pub in the village, and she’d got the house nice. It was one of the council places on the edge of the village and she was lucky to get it. Tiny, but it suited her. She even started having driving lessons – she’d never had the confidence for that before. I noticed that she was putting on a bit of weight. She was still skinny. It still looked as if her wrist would break if she picked up a cup of tea, but she was getting better. I was so pleased.’ She paused. ‘For the first time in years I was able to relax for a bit.’

  ‘And then you found out she was pregnant?’

  ‘Yes, that was later. A year or so later and by then she was well. I went one day and she was throwing up in the bathroom. That had never been part of her eating disorder. She’d never done the binge thing. She just starved herself. She was due to work that evening and I said they wouldn’t want her in if she had some sort of stomach bug. She said it wasn’t a bug.’ Jill looked over the table at them. ‘I didn’t believe her at first. When she was younger, she was given to fantasies. I wondered if she wanted to shock me, to make herself more interesting.’ Jill paused. ‘As far as I knew, she’d never even had a boyfriend. There was no one when she was at school. She’d never had the confidence, though she was a bonny little thing. And I thought I would have heard if she’d been seeing someone. A place like this, there’s gossip.’

  ‘She never mentioned a man?’ Helen asked.

  ‘No, but we didn’t talk much about her private life on those visits. That’s why she let me go every Friday. Because I didn’t intrude. She needed to be private to be healthy, she said. She held her small secrets to her like a kind of comfort blanket. She wrapped herself up in them. She knew her dad would want to pry, because he was so anxious about her, because he loved her so much.’

  ‘But you must have asked about the baby’s father,’ Joe said. ‘You’d have wanted to know.’

  Outside, the sun was already very low in the sky, red behind a windbreak of trees, throwing long shadows, showing the smears on the kitchen windows.

  ‘Of course I wanted to know!’ Jill Falstone had raised her voice. ‘When she told me she was pregnant, I had this dream, a kind of vision – that Lorna had found a man who’d take care of her and make her happy, that they’d be a real family in the little house in Kirkhill, that her dad and me would go some nights to babysit. That we could stop worrying about her because she’d have a man to do that. I saw myself sitting there, with the baby on my knee.’

  ‘But it never worked out that way?’

  Jill shook her head. ‘Lorna was always more complicated than that. I should have realized.’

  ‘What did she tell you?’

  ‘Only that she was pregnant, and that she was going to keep the baby. She made that very clear. She said she was an adult.’ Jill looked straight up at them again. ‘I wouldn’t have tried to persuade her to do otherwise. I was thrilled to have a grandbairn and I don’t care what people round here think. Besides, things have changed now. There are more kids in this village born outside wedlock than within it.’ She paused. ‘I told her I’d support her, whatever happened. And so would her dad.’

  ‘Would he have done?’ Again, Joe thought of the man they’d met briefly outside, closed and stern.

  ‘Of course.’ Jill Falstone sounded surprised. ‘I’ve told you – he loved her to bits.’

  ‘You must have asked about Thomas’s father?’ Helen bent down and gently tickled the child’s belly and made him chortle.

  Jill took some time to answer. ‘I did. But gently. It was as if I was walking on eggshells. The last thing I wanted was for her to think I was prying. I didn’t want to make her ill again, to get her anxious and stressed. I was worried that she might just run away. She was that jumpy.’

  ‘She didn’t tell you about the father?’

  Jill shook her head. ‘And so I stopped asking. I thought it must be a married man. Or maybe she’d had a fling one night. The bar where she worked could get a bit rowdy at weekends. She made it clear it would be just her and the baby.’

  ‘When did you tell your husband that Lorna was pregnant?’ Helen straightened and took her attention away from the baby.

  Jill flushed. ‘It never seemed like the right time . . .’

  ‘So, how did he find out?’

  ‘In the pub one night. Usually he never goes to the Pheasant, the pub just down the road from here. And never into Kirkhill at night. But he just fancied a drink on his way back from Hexham and he called into the Pheasant. One of the blokes who farms up the valley shouted across the bar to him, for everyone there to hear. ‘What does it feel like to be nearly a granddad, then?’ She paused. ‘He’s a proud man. How could he admit he didn’t know his own daughter was pregnant? When he came back, he was furious. I could hear it in the way he walked from the Land Rover, the footsteps, the slammed door.’

  ‘Was he angry with you?’

  There was a moment of silence. ‘I couldn’t tell him that Lorna had told me, that I’d been going to see her behind his back.’

  ‘You’re frightened of him?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Not in that way! Not thinking that he might hit me. He’s never been violent. But sometimes I’m frightened of hurting him even more, of his moods.’ Another pause. ‘Of his silences. I feel guilty when I see how much I’ve hurt him.’

  ‘Was tha
t when you stopped going to see Lorna?’ Joe could see how torn the woman was, her allegiance split between the man and the daughter.

  ‘I didn’t stop seeing her. I was there when the baby was born, in the hospital. She wanted me there so of course I went. It was a long labour and Lorna was so brave. Hardly a whimper. And then Thomas was born. Tiny and perfect. The midwife let me hold him for a moment while she tidied up Lorna. It was seven in the morning. Nearly this time of year. Just starting to get light and I carried him to the window to see the world outside. There were tears running down my face.’ Jill looked out of the window. ‘But I thought it was the happiest day of my life. Better even than the birth of my own girl, because then I was so full of painkillers that it was a bit of a blur. That morning Thomas was born, I was sharp and clear. I still remember it. Every bit of it.’

  ‘Had you told your husband where you’d be?’

  Another silence. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘Not before I went. He was out when Lorna called to say her waters had broken. I left him a note here on the table, but he’d been to Edinburgh to watch the rugby and it was late when he got in. He’d been drinking with his friends. He dumped his bag on top of the note without seeing it and took himself to bed. So drunk, he didn’t even notice I wasn’t there. Or didn’t care. The next morning, he got himself into a panic, wondering where I was because the car had gone and he still didn’t find the note.’

  ‘He thought you’d left him?’

  ‘Aye. He was probably wondering how he’d manage the farm by himself. Thinking what it would cost to hire in some help.’ She stared at them across the table, gave a little smile. ‘That’s not fair. I’d made him feel foolish. There are some men who hate to feel foolish. And it was my fault for not telling him that I was seeing Lorna, that she wanted me there for the birth.’ Another moment of silence. ‘I came home, so excited to tell him about the baby, but he didn’t want to know. “I don’t care about the bastard child. I never want to see it.” Of course he did, desperately, but once he’d said those things, it was impossible for him to change his mind. He’s stubborn. Afraid of seeming weak.’