Surrogate – a psychological thriller

by Tim Adler

  "You are still a significant witness in a murder investigation," said Syal. "You cannot contact the victim's family." She always sounded so aggressive. Then again, perhaps as a woman, and as an Asian woman at that, she'd had to fight harder than a man to get where she was.

  "What about the black Range Rover?"

  "I'm afraid that's a dead end. It's a common car. We lost it on CCTV."

  "Surely you could identify the number plate?"

  "Even if we find the car, there's nothing that ties it to the murder scene. Whereas you, on the other hand ..."

  Well, if she was going to shake me about, I was going to damn well push back. "By the way, the press have started calling me. One of them asked if I'd had an affair with Helen Noades. That could have only come from you."

  "I absolutely deny that. They must have found out from somebody else."

  "But only four people know that I had a one-night stand with Alice. And one of them is dead."

  "We live in a democracy, Mr Cox. A free press is part of it. I might not like what they say about us, but I defend their right to say it."

  Thanks for the lecture, I thought. You're not the one who's being crucified.

  Once back home, it took me only a few seconds to Google the name "Helen Noades" and "fraud". Sure enough, she had been sent to prison for six months for embezzling from a recycling company in south London. There was even a photo of her: younger, slightly out of focus. Scribbling down the name of the firm, I read deeper. One newspaper account said that Alice – or Helen as I kept reminding myself to call her – had moved down south from Morecambe. So all that stuff about her never having been to London before had been a lie as well. I wondered how many families called Noades were living in Morecambe. A few keystrokes on the computer revealed just one, apparently. Taking a deep breath, I picked up the handset and prepared to dial.

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  "Hello? May I speak to Mr Noades, please?"

  "He's not here. Can I take a message? Who shall I say is calling?"

  "My name is Hugo Cox. I was a friend of his daughter Helen's."

  Pause. I pictured the phone in the hall of a tight council house; one of those old-fashioned telephone tables and wallpaper the colour of nicotine-stained fingers. "We know who you are," she said finally. "You've got a bloody nerve ringing here. How did you get this number? Did the police give it to you?"

  "No, I found you online. You're the only Noades listed in the Morecambe area. Listen, don't hang up. I need to speak to you."

  "We told the police everything we know. Helen hasn't been in touch since she came out of prison. Me dad didn't want to have anything to do with her. Now leave us alone." The voice was older than Alice's. Harder. But with the same northern accent.

  "Are you her sister? I have information," I lied.

  "If it hadn't been for you, she wouldn't be dead. She had no business having another woman's baby." There was a pause, and I could tell she was intrigued. "Go on then, I'm listening."

  "Not over the phone. I need to see you face to face. It's complicated."

  "The police said they questioned you ... that you were the one who found her."

  "Yes," I sighed, "but it's more difficult to explain than that. Please. I really don't want to talk over the phone. It would be easier if we met in person."

  Another pause while she weighed up what I'd said. "The funeral is next week. You can come and tell me there."

  Alice's sister was slipping away from me, about to put the phone down. "Have the police told you about the car outside her house, the black Range Rover?"

  Silence. "No, the police said nowt about that."

  "There was a car spotted outside Helen's cottage. Before I got there. I think I know who the driver was. Just tell me where I can find you. I could come up today." My pleading voice sounded unnaturally high.

  "Me dad's in Prince Albert Hospital. You can meet me there. Visiting hours are between four and six. He's in intensive care."

  "When, tonight? You're not giving me much time."

  "You're the one who wants to come here."

  Watching the concrete ugliness of Euston slide past the train window, I reckoned it would take me three hours to get to Morecambe. Just enough time to get to the Prince Albert Hospital if I got a taxi from the station. Mole had not returned a single one of my calls, and now two days had gone by without a word. I had spent last night pacing round the flat drinking and thinking, thinking and drinking and the more I drank, the less sense I made to myself. On the face of it, my wife had taken my daughter because she was punishing me for having an affair. What she had really taken, though, was my heart. And heartbreak was the one thing you could not insure against.

  The woman sitting opposite me on the train was wearing headphones and watching something on her iPad. She must have lost connection as we went into a tunnel because she rested her head against the glass, her face reflected in the dark. A mirror image. Two Emilys. Good Emily and bad Emily. I still could not understand why my wife had lied to me throughout our marriage. What was it about her childhood that had been so shameful, and, more important, what was her link to Alice?

  There had to be a connection, there just had to be.

  So, the police still had not traced the Range Rover, which meant I remained their only suspect. Eventually they would charge me with murdering our surrogate; the noose was tightening around my neck, I could feel it.

  At Lancaster station, the connecting train had been cancelled, and passengers huddled for warmth in the waiting room. Pacing the platform in the biting wind, I reflected on how grim train travel could be. As far as the police were concerned, I was the only person at the scene of the crime. Sure, another car had been spotted outside, but that could have been anybody.

  Walking out of Morecambe's tiny station, I had no idea where I was going. Thankfully there was a taxi rank to my right with a line of saloon cars. The taxi driver grunted when I told him to take me to the hospital. As we drove past rows of bed and breakfasts facing the seafront ("Colour TVs, en suite, stair lifts"), I saw people in their front rooms watching TV, looking as if they were waiting to die. The recession had hit hard here. A sandwich board offered to cash benefit cheques, and everybody looked so beaten down, as if they'd had enough.

  Prince Albert Hospital resembled a higgledy-piggledy collection of outbuildings that had grown out of a Victorian insane asylum. Some were just Portakabins. I searched in vain for the reception area until I found a porter, who pointed at a sign marked X-Ray. "Just keep going," he said. I tramped down seemingly endless corridors while somewhere a mournful alarm sounded.

  Eventually I found Alice's sister in a single-occupancy room. She was sitting in an armchair, and she got up when she saw me. A man I guess was her father was lying in bed wearing a hospital gown. His skin was a greenish-grey colour, and one eyeball had rolled up to the ceiling. The sweetish smell of death was palpable in this hospital room, hovering above us.

  "Susan Noades?" I asked, pushing the door further open.

  "That's right. You must be Hugo Cox."

  "I was wondering if there was somewhere we could talk. You know, without–" I glanced towards the bed.

  "It's all right. He can't hear you. I don't think he knows we're here."

  "All the same. Perhaps you'd like a cup of tea." Alice's sister put down the gossip magazine she had been reading, and we set off in search of the cafeteria.

  "Cancer," said Susan Noades, reading my thoughts. "At first Helen paid all the bills for the chemo. She said she had a good job down in London. We didn't ask where the money was coming from. The bills were expensive, and Helen kept paying all of them. The cancer went into remission, and we thought Dad had beaten it. Then, after Helen was arrested, it all came back again. Dad got worse once he found out. I don't think he ever got over it."

  The teenage girl behind the counter handed me two cardboard cups with teabags floating in them. I gingerly carried them to the table where Susan Noades was seated. She w
as the elder sister, heavier, with startlingly blue eyes blinking behind thick, unfashionable frames.

  "There you go," I said, fishing out a soggy lumpish teabag with a wooden stirrer.

  "You've come a long way. I don't think I can tell you very much."

  "Tell me about your sister. When did you realise she was in trouble with the police?"

  "She were always in trouble. Shoplifting. Drinking. It got worse after Mum died. In the end, Dad couldn't cope. That's why he packed her off to boarding school. She were thirteen. Did she tell you that she won a scholarship?"

  "No, she didn't. A scholarship for what?"

  "Sports scholarship. She were always good at netball, stuff like that. Down in the Lake District. There were a couple of good years, and then the money ran out. Dad got ill, and he couldn't afford to keep her there. Couldn't even afford the uniform. Anyroad, she were about to get kicked out. They said she was a bad influence on the other girls."

  "Bad influence in what way?"

  "Getting them into trouble, egging them on. The other parents wanted her out. Do you believe in evil, Mr Cox?"

  I had never really thought about it. I suppose I'd had an adolescent hankering after evil, doing cocaine and going to lapdancing clubs with Currie, but now, having encountered the real thing, I saw it for what it was: what could be more banal than evil compared to the infinite and subtle varieties of good?

  "No, I don't. I think some people have an unhappy childhood that makes them do bad things, but evil, no."

  "Well I do. There were something wrong with her right from the start. Sometimes I think it was her that gave him cancer. He couldn't cope when she was a teenager. She were in trouble with the police, shoplifting, older men. She once told me that she enjoyed fucking with people. Who says summat like that?"

  "Am I right in thinking that your mother died when you were small? Wouldn’t that explain her behaviour? Lashing out because she felt she hadn’t had a fair deal? Angry because your mother passed away when you were so little?"

  Susan Noades looked dubious. "I was even younger than she was, and I didn’t go around smashing up people’s lives. There was this married fella she was seeing, even though he had a wife and kids. They ran away together. Helen had this cat she were mad about, yet the moment they ran away together she just left it on the side of the road. Who does summat like that?"

  "When she was living here, did she have a regular boyfriend?" I kept thinking there had to be somebody behind her pulling the strings.

  "Not especially, no. Blokes were mad about her, though, which was funny because she were a big girl. So go on then, didya?"

  "Did I what?"

  "Sleep with her."

  The more people I told, the better I felt. Then I remembered Nigel Rosenthal's warning about keeping my mouth shut. When you're in a hole, stop digging, he said.

  Alice's sister noticed my hesitation. "I knew it. That way she would have had you over a barrel. It was the way her mind worked." She sat back in her plastic stacking chair. "You said you knew who might have killed her."

  "A black Range Rover was seen outside her cottage just before I arrived. My theory is that Helen had a boyfriend telling her what to do. The ransom was paid into a bank account in Central America. Complicated stuff. I don't believe Helen knew how to do that. Maybe when the time came, she didn't want to give the baby back. Or the boyfriend got greedy and wanted to keep the whole lot for himself."

  "Have they found the car yet?"

  "No, not yet."

  "And you've come up all the way to Morecambe to tell me that?"

  I leaned forward across the Formica. "Listen. My wife has left me because she found out about the affair, and the police are desperate to pin your sister's death on me. Right now I'm their only suspect. I swear on my daughter's life that I had nothing to do with the murder of your sister. There's something else going on here, something deeper–"

  "Deeper in what way?"

  "Did Helen ever mention my wife's name to you? Emily Givings."

  "I told you. We haven't seen her for over a year– I mean, we hadn't seen her," Susan said, perhaps remembering that her sister was waiting in a local undertakers. "I'd better go upstairs and say goodbye to Dad," she said, unhooking her old woman's coat off the back of the chair.

  "I could give you a lift if you want. I've got to get a taxi to the station."

  "That'd be better than the bus."

  The taxi pulled up outside a house in a bleak housing estate facing the bay. So this was where Alice grew up. Two boys playing football in the street stared at us as if they had never seen a car before, and the front door shuddered a little on opening as we stepped into the front hall to an overpowering smell of cat piss. The walls of the hall were painted bilious green, the colour of a cascading hangover. In fact, it had to be the ugliest interior I had ever seen. Every colour clashed, every single angle was wrong.

  "Sorry for the mess. I've kind of let things go since Dad went into hospital," said Susan, leading me into the kitchen, which was filthy. The work surfaces were covered with dirty crockery, and the cooker was spattered with congealed food. The place stank, and you didn't want to touch anything. Susan asked if I wanted another cup of tea, as her shift didn't begin for another hour.

  "Where do you work?" I asked, gazing out of the kitchen window into the back garden, a cemented-over patio strewn with chunky dog turds.

  "Local Tesco. I work on one of the tills late nights."

  "Oh, that must be nice."

  "Not really. It's dead boring."

  "You don't seem very upset about what's happened to your sister."

  "I never liked her. She was always playing us off against each other. Manipulative, like. Because she was the youngest, she got away with everything."

  "Listen, do you, um, mind if I have a look round? Helen's room, perhaps."

  "First floor on’t landing. It used to be my room. You won't find anything, though. Dad cleared it out."

  I poked my head around the sitting room door on my way upstairs. I saw a plasma TV bolted to the wall and a squashy three-piece suite, too big for the room. Posed photographs of the sisters on the walls, with Susan looking pimply and awkward in a graduation gown.

  Alice's room was directly opposite when you stepped onto the landing. The cold teenager's room had been stripped of possessions, although a poster of Liam Gallagher still glowered from one wall. The skylight had been left open, and there was a soggy wet patch in the middle of the mattress where rain had got in. I almost began to feel sorry for her. No wonder she had been so desperate to get away. A sports trophy had been left behind on the cheap pine dresser, and I picked it up. It was an imitation brass statuette of a female athlete, the kind of thing you find in a shoe repairer. A floorboard creaked behind me as Susan came up the stairs.

  "I s'pose we should have given it back. Never got round to it," she said, standing in the doorway.

  "What did she win it for?"

  "School sports prize. We went to the prize-giving. Dad was so chuffed. He said it was the first time anybody in our family had won anything."

  I weighed the trophy in my hand, and it was heavier than I expected. The Ashurst College netball prize with winners' names inscribed on a plaque on the base. "Helen Noades 2005." I was just about to put the trophy down when my eye caught the name of another winner.

  There, right at the top, was inscribed "Emily Givings 2001."

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Susan watched me from the doorway. "The woman I was telling you about, my wife, her name is right here," I said. Susan moved closer. "It proves the two of them must have known each other before."

  Alice's older sister shrugged. "So they went to the same school. It doesn't mean they knew each other."

  "It's too much of a coincidence. Are you sure Helen never mentioned my wife's name, Emily Givings? Perhaps you know where her parents live."

  "I told you. She were only there for a couple of years. And she never stayed with anybody
's family."

  "Does the school still exist at least? Do you have an address?"

  "Oh yes, they keep sending us begging letters. As if we've got any money to spare."

  All the way down to London I kept turning over the revelation that Mole and Alice had gone to the same school. Even if they had known each other – and, at that age there was a big difference between years – did that mean Mole had put Alice up to blackmailing me? And if so, why? What was it about me that my wife hated so much? More important, my wife must know something more about Alice's murder, something she had not told the police. I was coming to the appalling conclusion that my wife was involved in Alice’s death. And if she had not told the truth about that, what else had she not told them? An important piece of the jigsaw had been pushed into place, and my instinct was to rush to the police and tell them everything. Yet another voice urged restraint: softly softly, catchee monkey was another of Dad's sayings. I could picture DI Syal looking defensive and folding her arms while I laid out all my evidence before her. "All of this is circumstantial," she would say. "There is nothing to connect the dots."

  The idea of getting in touch with the recycling company Alice had stolen money from came to me on the way back to London. Once at home, absolutely done in from the journey, it took only a few seconds to Google Alice's fraud conviction again. Even though every fibre of my being was stretched to breaking point, I had to keep pressing on. In my mind, police dogs were snapping at my heels. I was the wrong man, running down an alley towards a dead end.

  I got through to the recycling company's customer service line when it opened the next morning and was put through to the head-office switchboard. I told the managing director's assistant that I worked for an insurance company investigating a fraudulent claim by one of their ex-employees. Which was kind of true. The hesitant-sounding managing director came on the phone.