by GJ Minett
But getting them down from the tree turns out to be easier said than done. The branch is far too high for him to reach, and even with the stick to help him he’s still a few tantalising inches short every time he jumps. Then, while he’s looking desperately around for a longer one, the sound of a dog barking just beyond the entrance to the wood sends him darting back through the undergrowth to his hiding place, from where he watches as two women come into view. And for the first time he’s starting to realise just how cold it is now the sun’s gone.
February 2008: Kate’s voicemail
Hi! You’re through to Kate. Sorry I’m not here at the moment. You know what to do.
Hi Kate. I was hoping I’d maybe catch you before you set off for work . . . never mind. Just wanted to let you know . . . she’s gone, love. Last night. While I was sleeping, would you believe? Isn’t that just . . .? Ah . . . Jesus! Anyway, I’m OK. Promise. And everything’s under control here. You know Sam. He’s probably got the funeral and memorial services for the next ten years all booked and sorted. Not a lot here for me to do really. Anyway . . . give me a ring if you like or come round once you get off work . . . whatever. Speak to you soon. Bye.
November 1966: John Michael
He lies to his father. Tells him he lost the money on the way to school – he was running and thinks it must have fallen out of his pocket. He’s crying as he explains what happened and he’s not sure why. He went over this version of events so often in his head while crouching in the bushes that he’s almost persuaded himself this is what actually happened. He’s not sobbing because he thinks it’ll add weight to his story and he’s certainly not looking for sympathy. He doesn’t deserve it – he’s a liar. A liar and a coward. He knows what she would have expected of him in just that sort of situation and he’s fallen so far short it’s embarrassing. Even so, he can’t seem to hold back the tears once they’ve started to flow and his heart’s still racing as if he’d just run to the shops and back.
His father isn’t angry. He’s disappointed, frustrated probably. He’s always saying they’re not made of money. They have to watch their pennies so something like this is the last thing they need. But he doesn’t shout the way she would have done. She’d have seen through his lies the moment he opened his mouth because she could always tell when he wasn’t being honest. And she’d have found a way of punishing him to put things right, to wipe out the wrong he’d done, even though it always hurt her so much afterwards to see him in such pain. She would have known.
But his father’s too easily swayed by the tears. All he does is ruffle his hair and tell him not to worry. No point crying over spilt milk. They can always go and buy what they need in the morning. But maybe he’ll do it himself, eh? Bit cheaper that way. Then he goes through to the bathroom to clean up from work so he can make a start on dinner. And it’s just like any other evening, as if nothing’s changed. Nothing’s happened.
He goes to bed early and lies there in the dark, hugging the blankets because he still hasn’t quite managed to shake off the cold from earlier. He wonders if he’s caught a chill. He has no idea how long he stayed there in the bushes, trying to decide what to do. He’d pulled his sweater over his head and tied it round his waist so that even if he looked ridiculous he’d at least be half-decent if anyone walked past. And twice he peered out from his hiding place and watched as strangers passed through, totally unaware that he was there. Both times he almost plucked up the courage to call out and ask for help, but the words died in his throat the moment he opened his mouth and he ducked back down at the last moment, staying out of sight.
In the end it was the cold that forced his hand. On a warmer evening he might still be there now, agonising over how to get his clothes back, but even sheltered as he was from the worst of the wind, he was defenceless against the frozen fingers creeping up from the earth beneath his feet, which clutched at his legs and hands until he could hardly feel them any more. In desperation he’d taken a chance on a man in a suit who looked respectable, even if he was walking an Alsatian. He wasn’t tall enough to reach the clothes either, but he was strong enough to break off a longer branch and managed after several attempts to shake them free. He turned out to be a very kind man. He didn’t ask lots of questions about how the clothes had ended up there. He just offered to walk home with him and make sure he got there safely, an offer which might have been tempting if not for the fact that his father was due home any minute. As it was, he barely made it through the front door in time.
He gives the blankets another tug and buries himself inside, doing his best to ignore the stinging sensation in his legs. He knows the worst thing he can do is scratch them. Once he starts that, they won’t give him a moment’s peace all night. He’s rubbed some vinegar on them when his father wasn’t looking but it doesn’t seem to have done a lot of good. Again he can feel the tears prickling at the corners of his eyes and has to work hard to keep them under control.
He tries not to think about it but can’t stop his mind from straying to tomorrow and what he can expect in the playground. Everyone will know by break time. Carol will make sure of that. They’ll all be trying to find him, whichever little hiding place he picks out for himself, and he’ll be the target all day for their stupid jokes about how he was stripped naked by Carol Bingham and how she’s not only seen his JT . . . she’s played with it. It’s going to be the worst day of his life. He knows all about sticks and stones and is usually pretty good at ignoring others when they start to tease him but this feels different somehow. Very different.
He wonders about pretending to be ill. He’s never done this before but if it means he doesn’t have to be there and listen to the chorus of laughter and jeers it might be worth it just this once. But he knows, even as the idea is forming inside his head, that it won’t solve anything in the long run. He can only put it off for so long – eventually he’s going to have to face up to this, whether he likes it or not.
He buries his head in the pillow and tries to imagine what she would have advised him to do in a situation like this. She was a fighter – he can remember that much. She was never one for sitting back and keeping her thoughts to herself if she knew someone was in the wrong. He could remember her running out into the street on more than one occasion and giving a piece of her mind to neighbours she thought were gossiping behind her back. If she was here now, she’d be telling him to stand up to Carol and Julie, he was sure of that. Never let evil have its way, Johnny, she’d be whispering to him. Let the wicked prosper and some of their evil becomes a part of you. She’d expect him to fight fire with fire.
But how? he wondered. How do you do that?
February 2008: Ellen
There was no logical reason why she should have chosen her mother’s bedroom as the first room to clear. If she had been looking for the diary and books, it would have been far more logical to start with the attic, which was where Sam thought they might be. And not only were they in the bedroom, they were under the bed, the first place she looked. It was, she reflected, as if it was meant to be, as if she was being guided to them. As if they were actually looking for her.
The moment she slipped the catches on the suitcase and lifted the lid, all thoughts of clearing out the house went out of the window. She plunged her hands into the treasure trove, lifting out the books and checking the titles: A Matter of Convenience; The People versus John Michael Adams; A Question of Intent; Every Parent’s Nightmare; A Miscarriage of Justice. Then there were the papers, some of them letters, most of them articles cut from newspapers or photocopied from psychiatric journals – hundreds of individual sheets, few of them stapled and none collated into coherent bundles, a chaotic sprawl of evidence reflecting the disorderly workings of an obsessive mind. When exactly had Barbara found time to gather all this, let alone read it? And more to the point, how had she herself failed to notice any of it? How had she managed to know so little about her own mother?
After a few minutes
of indiscriminate rummaging, she realised she couldn’t work like this. She needed to impose some sort of order before she could hope to make sense of these papers, let alone follow the labyrinthine workings of her mother’s mind and understand exactly what it was she was looking for. Putting the books to one side for the moment, she concentrated on sorting the documents into piles, grouping them chronologically or by subject matter or by author . . . anything that would make it more accessible.
It was getting on for eleven before she was finally ready to start reading. First up was Peter Vaughan’s diary, a simple black notebook, untitled even inside. There was just a starting date – June 2nd, 1970 – written in scratchy blue ink in an untidy sprawl which suggested that this sort of thing didn’t come easily to the writer. That impression was further reinforced by the lengthy gaps between entries. They covered a period of nearly four years in total but were often several months apart and clearly prompted by specific events: visits to spend time with his son, fell-race competitions, birthdays. There was little in the way of introspection or soul-searching – even on paper it was easy to recognise the intensely private person the villagers in Ashbury had come to know and respect. He might hint here and there at problems in his relationship with John Michael or reflect wistfully on his diminishing levels of fitness but he was clearly not one to agonise over life’s imponderables and bare his soul on a nightly basis.
Most of it would have made fairly turgid reading, were it not for the fact that anything – anything at all – that opened up her father to her was automatically rendered more exotic than would otherwise have been the case. She was particularly intrigued by the later pages when the name of Barbara gradually began to feature more prominently. At last she had something she could get her teeth into. Even here the writing was spare and unemotional but at least it afforded occasional glimpses of the mind guiding the pen and the strength of his feelings for both his son and this soul mate, who had come so late into his life. Reading it a second time, Ellen was forced to agree with her mother’s assessment – there was little room for doubt that Peter Vaughan would have opened up and told her everything at some stage, if circumstances had only permitted it.
After the diary, she turned her attention to the papers, starting with the earliest articles dating from immediately after the trial. By mid-afternoon, when it was time to pick up the children, she still felt as if she’d barely scratched the surface. She quickly gathered all the papers together, now safely secured with paper clips and elastic bands she’d found in a drawer, and placed them with almost reverent care in the suitcase before dashing off to school. Only once the children were tucked up in bed several hours later was she was able to take them all out again and pick up where she’d left off.
She finally fell into bed around one. As she lay there she reflected on what she’d read so far. Apart from the diary, she hadn’t had a chance to open any of the books but suspected she knew what they would contain if the articles were anything to go by. Impartial they were not. Taken individually, she supposed, they might have seemed objective enough but several hours of reading the same arguments from a number of different perspectives was a little like being hit repeatedly with a mallet. For these were the conclusions . . . more than that . . . the convictions of like-minded people who knew enough about the subject to declare unequivocally that the treatment John Michael Adams had received, from the courts initially and subsequently from the general public, amounted to a gross miscarriage of justice and an abuse of his human rights. There were no dissenting voices. Ellen knew well enough that another side to the argument existed, a powerful one which had been trotted out ad nauseam in the media and which would have informed the thinking of the vast majority of people. But Barbara had found no place for any such articles here. Her criteria for inclusion were selective to the point of censorship.
It occurred to Ellen that as a general rule she would have reacted against such a lack of balance and gone out of her way to find reasons for embracing the other side of the argument. As she lay there in bed though, she found herself if not totally convinced by what she’d been reading then at least sympathetic to the point the articles were trying to make. Perhaps it was that same gut reaction she’d experienced in Oakham, when she’d realised that the boy in the photo was barely any older than her own children. And maybe, on a much simpler and altogether more human level, it was simply a case of wanting desperately to find common ground with someone she’d lost and wasn’t yet ready to release. Whatever the reason she felt engaged, committed to something as if somehow a relay baton had been passed to her. And she knew already how she would be spending the following day.
She woke at twenty to six and tiptoed to the bathroom to avoid waking the children so early. Then, unable to get back to sleep, she switched on the bedside lamp and reached for the first of the books, which she’d brought to bed with her. She’d chosen it because she had heard so much now about Carl Holmbach and was curious as to whether she would find him as convincing and inspirational as Barbara had. The front cover carried the obligatory scowling photo with the title Every Parent’s Nightmare emblazoned across it in lurid red capitals. Somehow the boy looked even younger than she remembered.
A number of pages were dog-eared and, when she turned to each of them, she found sentences and even whole paragraphs marked with vertical double lines in red biro. Instantly she was back in the university library, late-night sessions in pursuit of her Business degree, marking interesting paragraphs for future reference. She wondered what had prompted Barbara to choose these particular passages and decided to read them first.
In some sections Holmbach was intent on highlighting the failings of Mr Justice Lawson, whose errors of judgement, not least his failure to step back from the proceedings, had made it impossible for the boy to receive a fair trial. In others the focus was on the behaviour of the media who immediately seized on this as a story which would grab the public’s interest and were determined to sensationalise it at every opportunity, at the expense of the truth if need be, in order to keep it alive.
But Ellen’s attention was drawn in particular to the third category, the relationship between John Michael Adams and his mother. Here the professor was able to draw upon hours and hours of exclusive interviews with the boy over a period of years and shade in the background that everyone else had been content to leave empty, because it interfered with the stereotype they were hell-bent on perpetuating. His privileged access had enabled him to establish a rapport which no one else had enjoyed. As a result the boy had opened up, giving him an insight into his early life which Ellen found fascinating. She wasn’t remotely surprised that this section contained more marked passages than any other.
And one incident in particular made her pulse quicken just a fraction. She actually read on for two or three sentences before the possible significance of what she’d just read sent her backtracking for the relevant quote. It was enough to cause her to put the book to one side and sit bolt upright in bed as she thought things through. It stayed with her while she washed, dressed and woke the children, while she made breakfast and bundled them into the car for the start of another school day. A day like any other.
And it wouldn’t go away, even though she knew it was all so unlikely and that she was probably letting her imagination run away with itself. But she couldn’t help thinking back to the break-in at Primrose Cottage and the fact that neither she nor Kate had managed to come up with a convincing explanation as to when or even how O’Halloran had managed to wipe Eudora’s documents off the laptop, even though both were convinced he’d been responsible.
Probably nothing, she told herself. A few hours from now she could be sitting down with Kate and having a good laugh about how easily she’d allowed herself to get carried away. You watch too many films, Missy. But she also knew the thought wasn’t going to go away. Not until she’d at least checked it out.
And she knew exactly how to go about it.
* * * *
Webster’s Grocery Store was no more than a mile from Calder Vale, an easy cycle ride for the return journey but more than demanding on the way out because of a couple of steady inclines which would have more than tested the delivery boy’s legs. Mr Webster himself was a cheerful man with a florid complexion and enough surplus pounds around his waist and thighs to suggest that he might have benefitted from doing the deliveries himself.
Ellen had tried phoning several times from home but either there was a fault on the line or no one at the store had time to answer. In the end she’d given up in exasperation and made the half-hour journey herself rather than wait. She hoped the speed cameras she passed on the way weren’t in operation.
Long way to come for a two-minute conversation, she told herself. Especially one which might easily amount to nothing at all. She did her best, as she waited for Mr Webster to serve a queue of customers, to keep it all in perspective. This was probably a wild goose chase, another dead end. Every chance she’d end up feeling very silly. About time she got a grip on herself and her overactive imagination.
In the event, she left feeling more pumped up than ever.
Forty minutes later she swung in through the gates at Langmere Grove, tapping her feet impatiently as she waited for Des on Security to raise the barrier. Most mornings she’d wind the window down and exchange a few words of greeting before driving through but this time she made do with a wave and a forced smile. She suspected he’d find it difficult to come up with the right words of sympathy and she wasn’t ready to receive them anyway. More importantly though, she didn’t want any further delays.