by C. J. Tudor
So where was the scratch on the photo?
He turned the question over and over, wrestled and wrangled with it, but he still kept coming to the same conclusion: if there was no scratch, the photo must have been taken later. After the scratch had healed. After the day that Izzy had supposedly been killed.
Which meant…the picture wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.
So, what was he saying—someone had set it up? Faked the photograph—to convince him Izzy was dead?
But why? And if Izzy’s picture was fake, what about Jenny’s?
His throat tightened. He felt an ache somewhere in the region of his heart, or where it used to be. Gabe had thought about this before. Many times. In his long treks up and down the motorway he had had very little else to occupy his mind. So he would run through all the possible scenarios in which Izzy could still be alive. The ways in which a mistake could have been made.
It always came back to one answer. One painful, brutal truth.
The only way Izzy could be alive was if Jenny was dead.
There had to be no doubt, not one iota, that the female body in the house was Jenny. Only then would the police have assumed that the little girl was Izzy. Of course, she would have to be the same age, build, coloring. But it wasn’t actually that difficult to confuse one child with another, if you didn’t know them.
He remembered Izzy’s first school nativity (or, should he say, Jenny never let him forget) when Izzy had told him she was playing Mary. He had arrived late, so had to sit at the back, several rows behind Jenny. But he had spent the performance dutifully snapping away with his iPhone and applauding every mumbled line. Afterward, he told Izzy what a brilliant Mary she had been.
She had burst into tears.
“What?” he had asked.
“I wasn’t Mary. I was a shepherd!”
Jenny had hugged Izzy and hissed at him. “She was Mary last night. I told you. They take it in turns.”
The memory still burned. But the point was, if he could mix up his own daughter with another child, then so could strangers. So could the police. They would have no reason to believe that the little girl in the house wasn’t Izzy.
It’s about your wife…and your daughter.
And, of course, the real rub: Izzy had been positively identified by her grandfather. Harry. A respected retired surgeon. But also, the more Gabe thought about it, a man who was hiding something; something that was eating away at him.
He gripped the steering wheel tighter. Harry. Fucking Harry. All this time. Lying. Pretending to everyone that Izzy was dead.
But why?
Gabe was under no illusion that his relationship with Jenny’s parents had never been anything but “strained.” Or, to put it bluntly, Evelyn had regarded Gabe as something she might scrape off her expensive Louboutins, and Harry had tolerated him, like a vaguely unpleasant smell. He could just about accept that Harry had used him, deceived him. Evelyn would probably have got a perverse kick out of it.
But to lie to the police, to risk his precious reputation, perhaps even prosecution? To go through the charade of a funeral, to lay flowers every month on another girl’s buried ashes?
Jesus Christ. There had to be a damn good reason.
And who was the other little girl? It was the point he kept stumbling at. For Izzy to be alive, then there had to have been another little girl in the house. Another body to identify. To cremate. But if another child had been killed, why the hell had no one reported her missing?
The police had spoken to the parents from Izzy’s school. They had to, because of Izzy’s birthday party that weekend. With so many people coming in and out of the house, it had pretty much blighted any chance of the police recovering anything useful from DNA traces. But no one had said: “Oh, by the way, Officer, I seem to be missing my daughter.”
His head throbbed. He rubbed at his eyes. A horn blasted, loud enough to jolt him out of his stupor. He had let the van drift. He yanked it back, out of the path of a truck thundering down the inside lane. Shit. Breathe, Gabe, concentrate. Think.
Two little girls. Alike enough to be confused. Almost interchangeable.
“I wasn’t Mary. I was a shepherd.”
Why had no one reported the other girl missing?
And suddenly he had it. He felt the neurons fire in his brain, making the connection. He had been looking at it all wrong. Arriving late to the scene, sat at the back, snapping away blindly but not really paying attention.
If another girl could be mistaken for Izzy, then Izzy could be mistaken for her.
“She was Mary last night. They take it in turns.”
What if the other girl wasn’t missing?
What if Izzy was playing her part?
“That good?”
Alice nodded, stuffing an Egg McMuffin into her mouth. She was ravenous this morning, Fran thought, guiltily. Bad mother, her internal voice—which sounded a lot like her own mother’s—scolded. You’re neglecting the basics: food, fluid, rest—oh, and not letting her drown in the bath.
So far she had trodden carefully around the incident in the hotel room. Her first priority had been making sure that Alice was back up to body temperature, that her breathing and heart rate were normal. She couldn’t have been in the icy water for long (and, thank God, she had run the cold, not the hot tap), but this was a new and worrying development.
She took a sip of coffee. “Alice, can we talk about what happened in the bathroom?”
Alice glanced up at her from beneath her drapes of dark hair. Fran frowned as she stared at the roots. They needed retouching. Small things they couldn’t let slip.
“I don’t remember,” she said.
“Not anything?” Fran waited.
Alice sighed, looked down at her half-eaten McMuffin. “I saw the girl again.”
The girl. Fran felt her agitation increase. Who was she? Some kind of imaginary friend? A product of Alice’s mind, of the trauma? Or something else?
“Did the girl make you run the bath, get in the water?” Fran asked.
“No. She just wanted to show me something.”
Fran gritted her teeth, pushed her hair behind her ears. Try to stay calm.
“What did she want to show you?”
Alice fiddled with the rucksack on her lap. Clickety-click. Clickety-click. The sound made Fran’s fillings hum. She fought the urge to yell at her to Stop fucking doing that.
“Alice, you could have drowned, died of hypothermia. Do you think the girl wants to hurt you?”
Alice looked at her with wide eyes. “No. You don’t understand. It’s not like that.”
Fran put her cup down and grabbed Alice’s arm. The rucksack fell to the floor with a thud.
“Then tell me. Who is the girl? What’s her name?”
Alice wriggled. Fran held on tighter. Too tight, the internal voice tutted.
“I don’t know.”
“Try—think.”
Something vibrated on the table near her elbow. Alice yanked her arm away and rubbed at the red fingermarks.
“Your phone.”
Fran stared at it. Only one person had this number. And he knew never to use it unless it was important—an emergency. She snatched the phone up, stared at the text.
“He knows.”
Sleeping in the day was difficult, no matter how many years you’d been working nights. Katie had blackout blinds and ear plugs, comfy pajamas and memory-foam pillows, but it didn’t matter. You couldn’t fool your body clock. Your brain knew that it was daytime and it resisted sleep like an argumentative toddler.
Normally, a good book, some hot milk and cereal—and occasionally a couple of Nytol—helped to ease her off. Today, not even that was working. Her mind was too busy, too distracted.
Despite what she had told herself, she couldn’t sto
p thinking about the thin man. The Other People.
Why were those words written in the notebook?
She tossed and turned, thumped her pillow, kicked off the duvet, pulled it back on again and then, eventually, admitted defeat. She heaved herself out of bed and padded downstairs to her tiny kitchen.
She set the kettle to boil, plucked a couple of digestives out of the biscuit tin and pulled open a kitchen drawer. She fumbled among the detritus of takeaway menus, spare keys, paperclips and Sellotape and took out a postcard.
A view from a cliff overlooking a beach. The sun was shining, the sky was a deep azure, the waves tipped with white. Beneath the picture, swirly writing read: Greetings from Galmouth Bay.
They had gone there for a family holiday, their last one all together, staying in a whitewashed B&B run by an eccentric lady in her sixties with an alarming red wig and a snappy white terrier. They had eaten ploughmans at country pubs, built lopsided sandcastles on the beach and even had a photo taken on this very same cliff.
No such thing as a happy family, she reminded herself. She remembered standing there, clutching Lou’s pudgy hand as Mum wobbled on her heels, smile already blurred around the edges from one too many G&Ts at lunch, and how her elder sister had sulked and moaned about how she hated her picture being taken.
Only Dad had been genuinely happy and relaxed, wisps of his thinning hair caught by the breeze as he focused his old Kodak camera and tried to goad them all into saying, “Smelly cheesy feet.” The only solid, stable thing in their lives. The glue that kept them all together.
At least he was. And then, one day, he was taken away. Suddenly, brutally, violently.
And Katie was the one who found him.
* * *
—
NINE YEARS AGO. One of those bright spring mornings that fools you into thinking you don’t need a jacket and then whips up goosebumps on your arms with a bitter breeze.
Katie had arrived at her parents’ for Sunday lunch. It wasn’t something they did regularly—Mum was hardly the best cook, even when she was sober—but Katie appreciated that at least her parents tried to get them all together as a family every few months.
Out of her sisters, Katie was the one who had remained closest, the one who called when she said she would and visited regularly. She supposed they had all fallen into stereotypical sibling roles. Youngest—a little spoiled, always caught up in some drama or other. Oldest—the rebel, the one who endured the most difficult relationship with their mother and moved away as soon as she could. And middle. The dependable, dull one. Only Katie could be relied upon to turn up early to help with the cooking, clutching a bottle of wine and a plant for Dad’s garden.
This morning Katie had forgotten both, and even the smile was hard work. Sam had chicken pox and he’d kept her up most of the night, applying calamine and kisses. Craig, who never nursed Sam when he was ill, had opted to stay at home with him today rather than endure dinner with her family. She was actually relieved. Things weren’t great between them and she didn’t need the extra stress of his sniping.
She had felt on edge as she climbed out of her car and walked up to the front door. Her parents lived in a modern, detached house on an estate that had been bright and new when it was built thirty years ago. The houses were square and bland with identikit beige brick, UPVC windows and built-in garages. The suburban dream, or nightmare, depending on your point of view. It suited her parents, though. And every Sunday morning—as per the hidden clause in suburbia—Dad could be found out on the driveway, washing and polishing his car till it gleamed.
But not this Sunday. The garage door was half open. She could see the hood of his car just inside but no Dad waving his chamois. She glanced at her watch. Ten forty-five. She supposed Dad might have cleaned it already, but the driveway was dry. No remnants of foamy suds seeping down to the curb.
Something felt wrong. She walked up to the front door and rang the bell. She heard it chime faintly inside. She waited. Normally, her mum would be at the door straight away. She rang the bell again. Still no sign of movement, no shadow emerging behind the frosted glass. Concern started to nibble gently at the edges of her stomach.
She fumbled in her bag for her keys, unlocked the door and pushed it open.
“Mu–um. Da–ad? It’s Katie!”
The house felt heavy with silence. And there was something else. She sniffed. There was a smell. Not the usual scent of cloying air freshener her mum sprayed everywhere before visitors arrived. It smelled of sweat, she thought, and smoke, stale cigarette smoke. Her parents had never smoked.
She walked quickly into the living room. Her heart constricted. It was wrecked. Drawers had been pulled out of the sideboard. Books tossed from the shelves. Ornaments smashed. The patio doors gaped open.
Her mother lay beside the sofa, still in her dressing gown. Her always perfectly styled blonde hair was matted with dark blood. More blood caked her face, which was bruised and swollen.
“Mum.”
Katie ran forward and fell to her knees. She could hear her mother breathing, but it was faint and raspy.
And what about Dad?
“It’s okay. I’m going to call an ambulance, okay?”
She pulled out her mobile and ran back out into the hall. A cool draft brushed her bare arms. She turned. The door between the kitchen and the garage was ajar. Dad? She walked toward it, mobile clutched in her hand, heart thudding, and stepped into the cool, dark space.
The car was backed in as normal, but the driver’s door hung open, the keys still in the ignition.
The thief, or thieves, had been trying to steal the car. But something had stopped them. Something had made them panic and run instead…
“Dad!”
He was slumped over the trunk, almost like he was caressing it. Blood ran down the sides of the car, leaving streaks on the silver paintwork. He’d be so cross about that, a small voice inside her chided. Making his car all dirty.
She couldn’t see the rest of his body. Because it was crushed between the car and the garage wall. With such force the trunk had buckled and the rear windscreen splintered.
His face was turned toward her, bright blue eyes, crinkled around the edges with lines drawn by the sun, now as empty as marbles. A look of surprise caught there. That it could have come to this. That his life would end here, in this cold, dark garage, in his pajamas, as he attempted to stop some low-life driving away with his car. That he would not rise to greet another Sunday morning. That all Sundays, chamois and waxes were over, forever. She stared back into her dad’s empty eyes and she started to scream…
* * *
—
HER PHONE VIBRATED by her elbow, making her jump and splash hot tea all over the worktop. Shit. She picked it up. Marco, her manager at the coffee shop.
“Fancy an extra shift this afternoon?”
One of the Ethans or Nathans obviously hadn’t turned up again. She didn’t really fancy an extra afternoon’s work on top of a night shift. She was supposed to have a couple of days off. And she would have to ask Lou to pick up the children from school. On the other hand, Sam’s uniform was getting a little tight and she was never going to get back to sleep now anyway. In fact, it was probably better if she had something else to occupy her mind.
She typed back: “Okay.”
“Fine. See you later.”
Katie sighed. She looked back at the postcard. It had arrived on the anniversary of his death. She flipped it over. On the back, written in her elder sister’s familiar spidery writing:
Remember. I did it for Dad.
xx
But did you really? Katie thought. Or did you do it for you, Fran?
Gabe first met the Samaritan on a motorway bridge at two in the morning. He remembered the time because he had just checked his watch. He wasn’t sure why. He was about to kill him
self and you could hardly be late for your own suicide.
He had thought about killing himself before. Quite regularly over the last six months. Usually at around this time in the morning. That was when the bad thoughts came. The dark hinterland between midnight and dawn. The time when the demons would emerge, slithering and sliding out of the shadows, trailing mucous membranes of bitter bile and stinging misery and regret.
The thought of Izzy had always stopped him. The thought of finding the car. Hope, or perhaps persistent, dogged denial, had managed to ward the demons off. But they were persistent. They didn’t tire. They didn’t let go. Their claws just dug in deeper and deeper.
At some point along the drive tonight, the despair had overwhelmed him. He hadn’t slept in almost forty-eight hours. The nightmares wouldn’t let him. He couldn’t face sleep. He couldn’t face being awake either. He had pulled off the motorway, circled the roundabout off the slip and on to the bridge that crossed to the south side.
Halfway across, he stopped and pulled the car up on to the curb. He climbed out and walked to the railing. He stood there in the bitter cold, staring down at the speeding traffic below through eyes blurred with tears. White lights, red lights, white lights, red lights. After a while, it became hypnotic.
He swung one leg over the railing.
Somewhere, deep inside, he knew that this was a shit thing to do. That it might not just be himself he killed. But truthfully, that voice was a long way down. All he was really thinking was that he just wanted it over. The pain, the sheer exhaustion of trying to stay alive. It was too hard. Life itself had become an instrument of torture, every minute of every day bearing down on him like the spikes of an iron maiden.
He slung his other leg over the railing. Now he was perched on the narrow metal, gripping tightly with his hands. All he had to do was let go. Let gravity do its job. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes.