“I’m serious, Cyrus.”
“OK. OK.”
His beer arrives. He centers it on a cardboard coaster and waits for the barman to wander out of earshot. A shaft of sunlight is slanting through a window. Full of floating specks, it gives the pub the ambience of a church and that I’m hearing Guthrie’s confession.
“Evie is the girl in the box.”
“Who?”
“Angel Face.”
Immediately, I understand the reference but want to argue. “That can’t be right.”
“It’s her.”
“But that was . . .”
“Six years ago.”
I remember the story. A girl found living in a secret room in a house in north London. Thought to be eleven or twelve, she weighed less than a child of half that age. A mop-headed, wild-eyed, feral-looking creature, more animal than human, she could have been raised by wolves.
Her hiding spot was only feet away from where the police had discovered the decomposing body of a man who had been tortured to death, sitting upright in a chair. The girl had lived with the corpse for months, sneaking out to steal food and sharing it with the two dogs that were kenneled in the garden.
Those first images were flashed around the world. They showed an off-duty special constable carrying a small child through the doors of a hospital. The girl wouldn’t let anyone else touch her, and her only words were to ask for food and whether the dogs were all right.
The nurses dubbed her Angel Face because they had to call her something. The details of her captivity dominated the news for weeks. Everybody had a question. Who was she? Where had she come from? How had she survived?
Guthrie has been waiting for me to catch up.
“She was never identified,” he explains. “The police tried everything—missing persons files, DNA, bone X-rays, stable isotopes . . . Her photograph went around the world, but nothing came back.”
How could a child appear out of nowhere—with no record of her birth or her passage through life?
Guthrie continues. “She became a ward of the court and was given a new name—Evie Cormac. The Home Secretary added a Section 39 Order, which forbids anybody from revealing her identity or location or taking any pictures or footage of her.”
“Who knows?” I ask.
“At Langford Hall—only me.”
“Why is she here?”
“There’s nowhere else.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She was placed in a dozen different homes, but each time she either ran away or they sent her back. She’s also had four caseworkers, three psychologists, and God-knows-how-many social workers. I’m the last one standing.”
“What’s her mental health status?”
“She passed every psych test from Balthazar to Winslow.”
“I still don’t understand why I’m here.”
Guthrie sucks an inch off his pint and looks along the bar.
“Like I said, Evie is a ward of the court, meaning the High Court makes all the important decisions about her welfare while the local authority controls her day-to-day care. Two months ago, she petitioned to be classed as an adult.”
“If she’s deemed to be eighteen, she has every right.”
Guthrie looks at me plaintively. “She’s a danger to herself and others. If she succeeds . . .” He shudders, unable to finish. “Imagine having her ability.”
“You make it sound like a superpower.”
“It is,” he says earnestly.
“I think you’re exaggerating.”
“She clocked you straightaway.”
“Being perceptive doesn’t make someone a truth wizard.”
He lifts his eyebrows, as though he expected more of me.
“I think you’re trying to fob her off,” I say.
“Gladly,” he says, “but that’s not the reason. I honestly thought you could help her. Everybody else has failed.”
“Has she ever talked about what happened to her—in the house, I mean.”
“No. According to Evie, she has no past, no family, and no memories.”
“She’s blocked them out.”
“Maybe. At the same time, she lies, she obfuscates, she casts shade and misdirects. She’s a nightmare.”
“I don’t think she’s a truth wizard,” I say.
“OK.”
“What files can you show me?”
“I’ll get them to you. Some of the early details have been redacted to protect her new identity.”
“You said Evie broke someone’s jaw. Who was it?” I ask.
“A member of staff found two thousand pounds in her room. He figured Evie must have stolen the money and took it from her, saying he was going to hand it over to the police.”
“What happened?”
“Evie knew he was lying.”
“Where did she get the money?” I ask.
“She said she won it playing poker.”
“Is that possible?”
“I wouldn’t bet against her.”
3
* * *
ANGEL FACE
* * *
I enjoy the mathematics of smoking. Every cigarette takes fourteen minutes off my life, according to a poster I read in a doctor’s office. When I add the six minutes it takes to smoke each one, it makes a total of twenty minutes. An hour for every three. I like those numbers.
Unfortunately, I’m allowed only four a day, which I have to smoke outside in the courtyard while a member of staff watches over me, ready to confiscate the lighter afterwards in case I try to burn the place down.
Sucking hard on the filter, I hold the smoke inside my chest, picturing the toxic chemicals and black tar clogging my lungs, causing cancer or emphysema or rotting my teeth. A slow death, I know, but that’s life, isn’t it—a long, drawn-out suicide.
I’m sitting on a bench where I can feel the coldness of the concrete through my torn indigo-colored Levi’s. I slip a forefinger through one of the frayed holes and widen the tear as far as the seam. I press my thumb into the skin on my thigh, watching how the blood rushes back into the pale blotch. Although barefoot, I don’t feel the cold. I’ve been in colder places. I’ve had fewer clothes.
Pulling my foot into my lap, I begin picking off my toenail polish, not liking the color anymore. It’s too girlie. Dumb. I should never wear pastel colors—pinks and mauves. I once experimented with black, but it made my toenails look diseased.
I think about the group session. Guthrie brought a guest—a shrink with a strange name: Cyrus. He was handsome for an old guy—at least thirty—with thick dark hair and green eyes that looked sad, as though he might be homesick or missing someone. He didn’t say much. Instead he watched and listened. Most men talk too much and rarely listen. They talk about themselves or give orders or make decisions. They have cruel or hungry eyes, but rarely sad eyes.
Davina knocks on the window and shakes her dreadlocks. “Who are you talking to, Evie?”
“Nobody.”
“Come inside now.”
“I’m not finished.”
Davina is one of the “house mothers,” a title that makes Langford Hall sound like a boarding school rather than a “secure children’s home” by which they mean a prison. Secure because I can’t leave. Secure because there are locks on the doors and CCTV cameras watching over me. Secure because if I kicked off right now, a three-person “control and restraint” team would arrive within minutes and truss me up like a Christmas turkey.
Davina knocks on the glass again, making an eating motion. Lunch is ready.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You have to eat.”
“I’m not feeling well.”
“Do you want another red card?”
Red cards are given for misbehavior and swearing at staff. I can’t afford another one, or I’ll miss our Sunday excursion. This week we’re going to see a movie at Cineworld. The world always seems better when I’m sitting in the dark with a warm tub of popcorn
between my thighs, watching someone else’s life flash before my eyes.
Nobody ever gets a green card. You’d have to cure cancer or bring peace to the world or let Mrs. Porter look at you naked in the shower—girls only, of course; she doesn’t look at boys the same way.
Crushing the cigarette against the brickwork, I watch the sparks flare and fade, before tossing the butt into the muddy garden. Davina raps on the window. I roll my eyes. She jabs her finger. I retrieve the butt and hold it up, mouthing the word “satisfied” before popping it into my mouth, chewing and swallowing. I open wide. All gone.
Davina looks disgusted and shakes her head.
Back in my room, I brush my teeth and reapply my mascara and foundation, hiding my freckles. I won’t earn another strike unless I’m fifteen minutes late for a meal. When I arrive in the dining room, most of the other kids are finishing because boredom makes them hungry. The room smells of baked cheese and overcooked brussels sprouts. I take a tray and move past the hot food, collecting two pots of yogurt, a banana, and a box of muesli.
“They’re for breakfast,” says a server.
“I didn’t have breakfast.”
“Whose fault is that?” She takes back the muesli.
I look for a place to sit down. Whenever I spy an empty seat, someone moves quickly to deny me the place. They’re all in on the game. Eventually, one of the girls doesn’t react swiftly enough and I get to a chair first.
“Freak!” she mutters.
“Thank you.”
“Dyke!”
“You’re too kind.”
“Retard.”
“You’re welcome.”
I peel the top from a tub of yogurt and spoon it into my mouth, turning the spoon upside down and pushing my tongue into the hollow. I’m aware of people moving behind me, so I keep one arm braced across my tray, preventing anyone from flipping it over.
I can’t stop them spitting or putting boogers in my food, but it doesn’t happen so much these days because most of them are frightened of me. Most of the staff keeps their distance, especially Mrs. Porter, who calls me “that devil child.”
I don’t mind the name-calling because I’m harder on myself than any member of staff. Nobody can hate like I can. I hate my body. I hate my thoughts. I am ugly, stupid, and dirty. Damaged goods. Nobody will ever want me.
The bully barks. The bully laughs. The bully wins.
4
* * *
CYRUS
* * *
Sun sinking. Autumn cold. I run along Parkside, zigzagging through the entrance into Wollaton Park, where a sign warns me that I’m entering a deer calving area and that no unleashed dogs are allowed. The sky is streaked from edge to edge with pale trails of jets that have passed in the stratosphere.
I have spent my entire life in Nottingham apart from six years studying in Oxford and Stanford. When I lived overseas, people would ask me where I came from and immediately mention Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest and the Merry Men. They’d seen the movies or watched The Simpsons, although some didn’t realize that Nottingham was a real place. They thought it was like Camelot or Hogwarts. “It’s in the geographical heart of the UK,” I’d explain. “And yes, there is a Sherwood Forest and a Nottingham Castle.” Sometimes I’d say that my mother’s maiden name was Locksley and I had outlaw blood in my veins, which was complete bollocks but a great chat-up line.
I jog through a tunnel of bare trees as the asphalt path moves like a conveyer belt beneath my feet. Things come and go—park benches, garden beds, walkers, and cyclists. I run twice around the lake before climbing a rise towards the Elizabethan country house that gives the park its name. Wollaton Hall once took my breath away, but I’ve grown tired of its grandeur because it seems to be showing off.
Deer raise their heads, pausing from their grazing, as I ghost past them along an avenue of lime trees towards the eastern entrance to the park. My right hip twinges, but I like the pain because it helps me focus. Wearing jogging shorts, a quilted red windbreaker, woolen hat, and lightweight runners, I move in an easy rhythm, turning back at Middleton Boulevard and retracing my route through the park.
Running is many things to me. Calmness. Solitude. Punishment. Survival. In a world beset by problems that I cannot control, I can tell my body what to do and it will obey for as long as it can. When I run, my thoughts become clearer. When I run, I imagine that I’m keeping pace with a planet that turns too quickly for me.
I think about Evie Cormac. More of the details have come back to me. She was discovered hiding in a secret room behind a false wall at the back of a walk-in wardrobe in an upstairs bedroom. The house, in north London, had been rented by a low-level crim called Terry Boland. It was his body police had found in the same bedroom six weeks earlier. He had been strapped to a chair with belts around his neck and forehead before being tortured to death. The killer or killers had used an eyedropper to put acid into Boland’s ears, slowly burning through his eardrums, destroying his cochlea and auditory nerves. Once he was deaf, they heated a metal poker with a blowtorch and used it to burn through his eyelids and his corneas, until his pupils boiled in their sockets. I remember this because the tabloids seemed to revel in every prurient detail.
The murder was still under investigation when Angel Face emerged from her hiding place. Having cleaned off the muck and washed her hair, the nurses discovered a pale, pixie-faced thing with freckles and dirty-brown eyes, a child too small to hold her own history.
In the days that followed, she dominated the news cycle. The entire nation seemed to adopt her, discussing her fate over dinner tables, in hotel bars, across backyard fences, and in supermarket queues. There were public appeals, newspaper rewards, and offers to adopt her.
I know what it’s like to be at the center of a media storm. I was once the survivor—the lost little boy, whose parents and sisters were murdered. I have been there, done that, seen the movie, and stayed for the closing credits. Is that another reason Guthrie turned to me?
Speeding up over the last mile, I check my watch as I reach the front gate, holding my wrist steady because I’m breathing so hard. I’m forty seconds outside my best time. I’m happy with that.
Lifting the latch on the gate, I walk up the front path to a tall narrow house. My ancestral home. It once belonged to my grandparents who retired some years ago to the south coast, preferring a modest bungalow in Weymouth to a seven-bedroom period house that looks like it should be haunted, or at least have a madwoman in the attic. It was crumbling then; it’s falling down now—a masterpiece of urban decay.
The ground floor has two large bay windows and a handsome carved doorway with fluted half columns and leadlight glass panels on either side that throw red and green patterns onto the hallway rug when the sun is angled in the right direction. To one side, a garage is almost completely overwhelmed by ivy, and to the rear, beyond a stone wall, an uncut meadow, guarded by ancient trees, makes up a quiet corner of Wollaton Park.
As a child I knew every cubbyhole, nook, and odd corner of this house. I explored them with my brother and sisters. We played hide-and-seek or other games that involved make-believe guns or swords or dungeons or dragons. We practiced jumping from one piece of furniture to the next, never touching the ground, which was molten lava or covered in spiders. Now the house is mine. My inheritance. My folly. My last link to the past.
Periodically property developers or Realtors knock on the door or push their business cards through the mail flap, trying to convince me to sell. I once made the mistake of letting one inside. He began talking about morning rooms and secondary kitchens and conservatories, offering quotes and discounted terms.
“You’re sitting on a gold mine,” he said. “But we have to act quickly, while the market is hot.”
“Before this place falls down,” he should have said.
I reach under a pot for the spare key. As I straighten, I notice an unmarked police car is parked opposite the house. I know it’s a police car because tw
o-way radio antennae are sticking from the roof and a square-headed figure is sitting behind the wheel.
Unlocking the door, I walk to the kitchen, a big, high-ceilinged room with a scrubbed wooden table and mismatched wooden chairs. I get a glass of water from a spitting tap.
The doorbell rings. Water spills down my chin. I want to ignore both things, but that’s not going to happen.
The shadow behind the stained glass is a detective in a misshapen suit, or maybe it’s his body. Medium height, with short arms and spiked hair.
“I’m sorry to bother you. I tried to call ahead, but nobody had your phone number.”
“I don’t have one.”
“What sort of person doesn’t have a phone?”
“One with a pager.”
He sneaks a glance at me as though I’m mentally challenged.
I turn and walk down the hallway. He follows, introducing himself.
“I’m Detective Sergeant Alan Edgar. Lenny sent me to collect you.”
“You call her Lenny?”
He looks at me sheepishly. “Chief Inspector Parvel.”
I drink another glass of water. The silence plays on his nerves.
“We’ve found the body of a teenage girl who went missing last night.”
“Where?”
“In Clifton . . . beside a footpath.”
I rinse the glass and put it in the drainer.
“I need a shower.”
“I’ll wait in the car,” he says, glancing at the ceiling, as though the house might collapse at any moment.
In the upstairs bathroom, I strip down and turn on the tap. The pipes clank and shudder as I wait for the water to arrive, spitting and hawking from the showerhead. Some days it remains cold as though testing me, or scalding hot as though punishing me, but whenever I call a plumber he recommends ripping out the entire heating system and installing a new one, something I can’t afford.
Hot water arrives. I’m clean for another day.
Dressed in old jeans, a flannelette shirt, and an olive-green army coat, I fill the pockets with a ChapStick, keys, chewing gum, and my money clip. I have no pets to worry about, no plants to water, no other appointments to keep.
Good Girl, Bad Girl Page 2