by Ann Troup
‘Affected how?’
‘Just the kitchen I think, the rubbish in the yard caught and it spread to the back of the house.’
‘What did they find?’
It seemed an odd question, surely she should be more worried about her son and Edie? ‘I’ve no idea, I think they’re still looking into it. So, you have no idea where Sam might have gone? I’m assuming they’ve tried him at home.’
‘Home, here, there, every bloody where. I told you, he’s not answering.’
‘And you have no idea where he might have gone?’
‘How the bloody hell should I know, I’m not his keeper!’ In that moment something seemed to pop in her face and it sagged, ageing her ten years in as many seconds. In front of Matt’s eyes this loud, brash ornery woman seemed to diminish.
Her hands were agitated, fluttering and twitching like dying birds, and her already grey skin had paled further. Matt looked at the woman who had essentially killed his father and who had made his mother into a hollow shell. She looked gravely ill but he had no sympathy and no feeling for her. He watched, impassive, as she clutched at the sheet, her other hand groping for the call button. Matt could see it, and he could have pressed it, he could have called out and summoned help at any moment… but he didn’t.
‘Call the nurse’ she gasped.
Matt looked her up and down, considered her demand and considered the kind of man that he was. Could he really walk away and leave her like this? It would make him as bad as her – a callous, selfish lowlife only concerned with his own wellbeing. He suspected that having her potential death on his conscience wouldn’t bode well for him, and called for the nurse.
He stayed for a moment watching the staff rush around dancing attendance on the woman who had stolen his life. They had pushed her bed table out of the way and it sat there in the middle of the ward looking faintly ridiculous with its cargo of tissues, water jug, teacup and handbag. The accoutrements of living, assembled into an incongruous still life. In a moment of sheer opportunism, Matt grabbed up the bag just as the crash team arrived providing him with the perfect diversion.
Completely unnoticed he slipped out of the ward, found the nearest visitors’ toilet and locked himself inside. The bag was what he considered a typical woman’s handbag might be, a repository for every potentially useful item that a woman might consider would come in handy one day. Unable to face rifling through it he tipped the contents into the sink, fished out the house keys and a small, worn floral notebook that he hoped would hold addresses and phone numbers. There was also a mobile phone, but she had activated the pin code and rendered it useless to him. Her purse was of no interest for its monetary contents, but the discovery of a small lock of hair and a worn and faded photograph was intriguing. Two children, very young, posing by a duck pond. He didn’t have time to worry about it, but something made him want to hang on to the picture. He pushed it between the pages of the notebook, put that and her house keys in his pocket and shovelled the rest of her junk back into the bag. He left the bag sitting on the back of the toilet where someone would find it and hopefully do the honest thing.
Waiting for the lift took an age, seconds felt like minutes and the minutes made him feel as though he was radiating an obvious guilt. He had robbed a dying woman and it seemed that his culpability must have been glowing like a neon sign. If it was, people were choosing to ignore it – including Sophie, who stepped into the lift right behind him looking battered, bruised and defiant.
‘What are you doing? You should be in your bed.’ he said.
She tilted her chin up, fixed him with her bloodshot eyes and peered over the dressing that covered her nose. ‘Fuck dat. I’m coming wid you.’
She had her rucksack with her, and looking at her crumpled state had raided it for clothes. Given her obstinate stance (arms folded, feet set apart) and the steely glint in her eyes, Matt saw no point in arguing. Besides, she had as much vested interest in finding Edie as he did. ‘I thought they’d sedated you.’ he said, eyeing her and wondering if despite her grit she might go and faint on him again.
She held out her hand and showed him two blue pills, sticky and leaching colour onto her palm. ‘Didn’t swallow.’ If her face hadn’t been in such a mess, he could have sworn he’d detected a smirk. ‘Ab I goid to ged in trouble for walkid out?’
Matt shrugged. ‘No idea, but we’ll soon find out. I might be in trouble myself for aiding and abetting you.’ To his satisfaction she had the grace to look worried. ‘But since when have either of us bothered about getting into trouble?’ he added with a wink.
Outside, fate intervened and allowed them to hail a taxi that had just dropped off a passenger. As Sophie clambered in, her face causing a look of shock to flicker across the driver’s features, Matt gave their destination. ‘Coronation Square mate, quick as you can.’
From the garden side the square looked the same as it always had, the devastation of the fire hidden by the façade of houses. The only sign that anything might be different was the unusually large police presence and the sense that everyone who was out and about was behaving in an equally unusual civilised manner. The police were in pairs, stopping people as they went about their business, and from what Sophie could see, knocking on doors and asking questions of the square’s dubious and reluctant residents. They were wasting their time in her opinion, even if anyone did know that Johnno and Sam had been absolute bastards, not a one of them would let on. The square looked after its own.
Matt paid their fare and turned to her. ‘I was hoping to get into Lena’s house and poke around, but there are too many coppers about. We’ll go to mine and try and figure this out there.’
Sophie nodded, her relief tangible. The last thing she needed, or wanted, was more attention from the police. They might not be interested in what had happened to Edie, but she was. It had irritated her beyond belief that her story had been dismissed by everyone but Matt as the ramblings of a morphine addled mind. She might have been off her face, but she still knew what she knew. Edie had been in that house.
On the way to the bedsit Matt stopped to buy a paper, news of the fire was plastered all over the front page under the banner of “Three Dead in Devastating Arson Attack”. The headline made her blood run cold, and had her face not been so swollen she might have cried from the fear that Edie was one of the three.
They made their way to the seedy building where Matt lived and climbed the stairs in contemplative silence. Sophie had no idea what Matt was thinking, but she felt as if her whole world was being torn apart. Edie had been the nearest thing to a friend she’d ever really had and the prospect of losing her was creating a sense of loss that was both horribly unfamiliar and threatening to overwhelm her. She didn’t know how to begin to stem the feeling and followed Matt like a lost and terrified lamb.
Once inside he pressed her into a chair, gave her a look of sympathy and handed her a small notebook. ‘You need to take your mind off it, the only thing we can do is try and work out what this is all about, and the only way to do that is to work with what we have. I found that in Lena Campion’s bag. Have a read through and see if there’s anything that might help, an address or a phone number that might tell us where Sam might have gone.’
She took the book. ‘Should we just gib it to da police?’
Matt frowned at her. ‘Given that I stole it from an old lady’s handbag, I’d rather not. But if we find anything they need to know we’ll pass it on.’ he said, making what Sophie considered was a fair point. ‘I’m going to read the paper and see if there’s anything in there about who they found.’
‘She’s deb, isn’t she?’ Sophie said, tears welling up behind her swollen eyes and finding no outlet, just causing pain. ‘I shoulbn’t hab left her.’
‘Then you would both be dead. The only thing we can do to help her now is find the person responsible and make sure he gets everything he deserves.’ He sounded angry and bitter, and though Sophie shared his feelings, she was surprised t
hat he felt so strongly. She had thought that Edie was just a means to an end for him, the person who could give him access to evidence that would clear his father’s name. He was sitting at his desk, eyes focused on the newspaper; the map on the wall and its satellite clippings looked like a huge halo of information swirling about his head. It made him look so sad and lonely, a stark figure in a landscape of misery. As sorry as Sophie felt for herself in that moment, she felt even sorrier for him. With nowhere else for her feelings to go she turned to the little book and opened it, expecting to find a diary or a list of addresses. It was a diary, but not the kind that had records of dental appointments, meetings and reminders, but the kind where someone had poured their heart onto the page. The writing was tiny and at times had been penned with a shaking hand. The entries were sporadic, and spanned decades, a fact evidenced by the age and fragility of the little book. The words told a story that shocked Sophie to her core and frightened her no end, but faced with mounting realisation she was forced to read on.
When she reached the end she discovered a photograph, two children about a year apart in age, standing by a duck pond. One a girl, one a boy. The boy looked like a confident little thing, a cheeky, knowing smile on his face and a cocky stance. The girl was different, shy and diffident, her stance one of a child who preferred to neither be seen nor heard. If Sophie’s deductions were right, the picture showed a sister and brother, and having read the diary she was fairly sure her thoughts were correct. Reluctant to confirm her worst suspicions, yet compelled to do so, she turned the picture over. In the top left-hand corner, in the same hand that had written the diary, were the words ‘Edie and Sam – 1969’.
Matt looked over at her, ‘Found anything interesting in there?’
Profoundly shocked, she passed him the diary. ‘Yeah, bud nod whad you mide fink.’
A puzzled look on his face Matt took the book and started to read. Sophie watched his face, looking for the moments of revelation that she had experienced to show in his expression. As he read, she went back over the words that began the diary, words that seemed indelibly burned into her mind…
Today I paid my debt to the woman who you will come to call Mother. It is the hardest thing I have ever done and amongst my many regrets and sorrows will be the one that haunts me the most. You will most likely never know why I gave you away, and as I sit here wishing you the best of lives, I’m not sure you ever should. The fact that I loved your father with all my heart means little now. Though I’ve loved him all my life, he never loved me. I’m not sure he loved any woman other than his mother and what she did made him hate us all. I thought I’d been a comfort to him, and him to me, but it didn’t turn out that way and Shirley did what she did to save us both… but the price was you. Funny bird is Shirley, you never know what she’s thinking but having seen what she’s capable of I’ve not got the guts to argue with her, not even for you. Not sure which of us will be the worst mother.
Sophie watched the emotions flicker across Matt’s face as he took in what the diary had to say and waited impatiently for him to reach the end and know what she knew. She knew he’d got there when he looked up, eyes wide with realisation and began to read aloud.
You came back today for the first time in thirty years, and it broke my heart to see your face again. Shirley is gone, Dolly is gone and I’m the only one left who knows the truth. I ache to tell you but I can’t, you’ll find him soon enough and I wish I could save you from it. He’ll be right where we left him, hidden away where he can’t do any more harm. It had to be him you see – he killed those girls. But by the time we realised, a man had been sentenced to hang that day and I was pregnant with you. It was the scarf that did it – Shirley found it and thought it must be mine but I knew who it belonged to. He caught us, Shirley railing at me because I was pregnant and she wasn’t, she hated me for that alone in spite of the fact that you were his. I suppose he panicked that we’d found him out. I remember it now as clear as day, the way he hit her, the look on his face when he came at me. He was an evil man, a cruel man, and he would have done for both of us if he’d had the chance. Shirley never gave him that chance and I suppose I should be grateful that she saved us both. There are only so many secrets a person can bear, they come back so often to haunt you. You have haunted me all your life and everything I have ever done and ever been is going to haunt you now and I can’t even tell you that I’m sorry. She should have let him kill me then and I wouldn’t be facing this now, watching you flirt with a man who is your brother, too scared to tell the truth, too scared not to. I know my son is not a good man, there are no good men and when I look at myself in the mirror I know that there are no good women either. We’ve left you quite a legacy Edie, but you can’t hate me as much as I hate myself.
Matt tailed off. There was more, Lena had rambled on using words that spoke of self-pity and fear and ended the diary in a spiral of confusing motivations that painted her as mad, bad and sad in equal measures. ‘Cad you bloody belieb it?’ Sophie said as she looked at Matt’s dropped jaw and raised eyebrows.
He closed the book and stared at it. ‘I’m not entirely sure that I want to.’
Sophie thought she knew exactly what he was thinking, because it was probably the same thought that was going through her mind too, may God forgive them for it. He gave it voice when she couldn’t. ‘Should we be grateful that Edie never has to know this?’
Sophie’s heart lurched, thinking it was one thing, speaking it another. ‘We dode know she’s deb yet!’
Matt picked up the paper. ‘I think we do – according to this, one of the bodies was a female. If what you say is true, it has to be her. I think she’s gone Sophie, I’m really sorry.’
He looked it too, and as Sophie absorbed his words she started to understand the true meaning of sorrow. For such a hollow, simple little word it carried the power and force of a punch and lingered like an acid fog. Thinking it had hurt, knowing it… well, that was devastating.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Alice Hale felt thoroughly defeated. Her return to the hospital had yielded the news that Sophie Hedley had done a runner and Lena Campion, a woman whom she sorely wanted to speak to, had suffered a fatal cardiac arrest. Sam Campion was still at large, as was his known associate – a nasty piece of work by the name of Johnno. According to her current intelligence neither of them had been seen since before the fire, and the officers who’d called at Campion’s home address had found the door breached and the apartment turned over. Something much bigger than a spot of arson was going down and there were familiar names popping up all over the place, names that were linking more than one crime. That they were all connected wasn’t the question, but how they were connected was.
She drove back to the office at a more sedate pace than normal, her driving reflecting her subdued state. A breakthrough was needed, something that would tie everything together into a neat little package and make her life easier. Wouldn’t it be nice if life worked out that way? In Alice’s experience it rarely did and she had no choice but to go back and carry on picking through the paperwork until something turned up that would connect the dots into something recognisable. Preferably a bloody great CCTV blow up of Sam Campion’s face, or a reliable witness who’d had the good sense to record something on their bloody mobile phone.
The office was buzzing when she got back in, everyone agog with the news that two of the bodies had been identified. Susan Protheroe, a known sex worker, and Andrew Garvey, a petty criminal and all round pain in the arse. It was sad to say that neither of them would be considered a great loss to anyone and some of her less sensitive colleagues were muttering that their loss was Winfield’s gain, especially as Garvey’s fingerprints had been a match for those found on the petrol can that they believed had been used to fuel the fire.
Personally Alice thought that back patting and celebrating was a little premature, the case was hardly a wrap. The identity of the dude in the other house was still outstanding, Edie Byrne was
missing and they might have nailed the culprit, but they hadn’t remotely come near to guessing the motive. Besides, what was a two-bit dodger doing with a not-so-cheap whore? Alice had been reasonably familiar with them both, Garvey had certainly not been a customer and the two of them would hardly have been a love match made in heaven. In fact, Suse Protheroe wouldn’t have pissed on Andrew Garvey if he’d set himself on fire. Alice felt a smile begin to brew at the pun, then kicked herself for being such a callous bitch. Suse had been all right in her way, and there but for the grace of God went Alice.
With her disapproving scowl back in place she sat down at her desk and noticed that the red light on her phone was flashing, letting her know that she had voicemail. By rights she should have linked the phone to her mobile and would have received a slapped wrist if anyone had realised she hadn’t. Still, nobody was perfect, least of all her. She picked up the receiver, casually pressed the message button and swung round in her chair, turning her back on the room and her chattering colleagues lest they realise she had been remiss in missing the call. Matt’s message galvanised her into action and sent her scurrying back out of the office to hoots of laughter and shouts of ‘Hey Alice, where’s the fire?’.
Still smarting from their sarcasm she launched herself into her car, and drove it away in her own inimitable, if demonic, style.
Everything about where Matt Bastin lived was surprising – from the building’s shabby exterior to its worn interior, not to mention the virtual incident room, which looked all too familiar, except that it contained a bed and a kitchen. While he looked on, embarrassed by her perusal of his “collection”, she surmised that the man either watched too many detective shows, or had better skills than half her colleagues. The girl was equally surprising; a battered, bruised specimen who looked even more diminished in this crazy room than she had when Alice had first seen her in the hospital.