My Mother, the Liar

by Ann Troup

  There were two things she liked most about hotels: the anonymity that was afforded by them and the oodles of hot water that allowed a bath to be drawn in minutes. In the rare moments when she felt as though she might like to rejoin humanity, she would just book a room for the night and pretend she was a tourist. On a whim, she’d walk into a random hotel in London, get a room, and spend the time there watching TV, ordering room service, and having baths. For a night or two she could make believe that she wasn’t lonely, that she had purpose, that she had a life.

  It wasn’t that Lila’s flat didn’t have a bath – it did, a huge, deep, claw-footed cast-iron thing that emptied the tank at five inches and chilled the water within seconds. Maintaining personal hygiene at the flat was a puritanical experience, akin to self-flagellation with cold water and rough towels. Having the option of a proper soak in hot water was more than a small pleasure. With this in her mind she opened the taps in the beautifully modern bathroom, perched herself on the edge of her rented bath, and watched the steam rise with comforting anticipation.

  The epileptic fits of the day before had been an unpleasant surprise; it had been a long time since she’d had to face the humiliation of having a seizure in public, even longer since she’d experienced one so bad that she’d wet herself. The medication she took daily had kept them in check for years, and if she had one at all, it was when her defences were down and she allowed dark thoughts to run riot. More often than not, the fits were transient partial seizures, which to anyone else would look like daydreaming or drunkenness. A full-blown fit was so rare she could remember the exact day the last one had happened, but she didn’t want to think about it.

  Dwelling on that period of her life was something she actively avoided, doing anything she could to distract herself. Coming back had brought some things way too close for comfort already, but questioning herself about why she had come in the first place was pointless. It didn’t matter; she was where she was. What did matter was how soon she could get away.

  Soaking in the bath, she chose not to think about anything other than coffee and food. Fits made her hungry, and she needed caffeine before the headache that had begun to niggle at her turned into a full-blown howler. She bathed quickly and only half dried her hair before she dressed and went out of the door in search of breakfast.

  As she wandered up Westgate Street, towards the cathedral and to the only café she could remember, she thought of Stella and wondered where she had gone, and why. Perhaps Frances had finally managed to drive her out. As an accomplished escape artist herself, Rachel didn’t question why her sister had disappeared. Anyone who had known their family would have been able to answer that.

  However, she was utterly puzzled as to where Stella might have gone. To the best of Rachel’s knowledge, Stella had spent the last nineteen years looking after Valerie. She didn’t have friends or a social life, or a bolthole like the flat. She was hardly the type to reinvent herself in the way that Frances had. Besides, she was the quiet type – timid, nervy, and not the sort of person who could disappear easily. She was probably avoiding Frances, a motivation that Rachel could entirely understand.

  Once inside Café Milano, she immediately experienced a rush of nostalgia. The place had hardly changed since the days when she and Stella had lingered over their milkshake and coffee, pretending for an hour or so that they didn’t have to go home. She took a breath, filling her lungs with the scent of vanilla and fresh-ground beans, smiling as she recalled that she had discovered Italian coffee in this place, long before the big chains had flooded the world with their skinny lattes and pretentious chai.

  There was a seat at the back, half hidden behind a bamboo screen, a perfect place to people-watch without being seen herself. She ordered coffee and a bacon roll, then sat back and looked around at the other customers, soaking in the normality of them and hoping it would rub off a little. Then she saw him, a tall man striding across the room. The way he moved was painfully, heart-stoppingly familiar and the recognition sent a cold shard of fear slicing through her gut. He was heading straight for her and her only escape was the bad wiring in her brain and the way it could opt out of trouble whenever it saw fit.

  ***

  He was sure this time. He had caught glimpses before, the turn of a head, or the sound of laughter so painfully familiar that it induced a sensation of time grinding to a standstill. His heart flip-flopped and fluttered pointlessly like a moth battering at a light bulb. So many times over the years he’d found that it wasn’t her after all. Just some woman who thought he was a weirdo freak.

  Now he was holding up the queue at the cashpoint as he stared at the café door, one hundred per cent sure that Rachel had just walked through it.

  ‘You asking to be mugged?’ a woman said aggressively, pushing in front of him so that she could get to the machine.

  Charlie had been so rapt by the realisation that Rachel was back that he’d forgotten that he was standing in the middle of town with a hundred pounds in crisp twenties just sitting in his hand, looking ripe for the picking.

  ‘Arsehole!’ the woman hissed as he moved away, hastily pushing the money into his pocket ready to launch himself across the road.

  He got as far as the café door before chickening out and turning towards the newsagent’s instead. If he were going to go in and confront her, he needed to gather his thoughts. He would buy a paper, something to hide behind when he pretended that his being there was just an accident.

  A lot was at stake. If he had any sense he would walk away and make himself believe that he hadn’t seen her at all. He would pretend it was the same as all the other times he’d felt a faint glimmer of hope, only to see it fade and die as soon as he’d called her name and been given an odd look by a complete stranger. As his mother would say, only one good thing had ever come from dealing with the Porter family and that was Amy. Everything else that touched them always turned to shit.

  However, he’d been waiting a long time for this moment, and he was going to have his say now.

  The woman in the shop wanted to chat and he just wasn’t in the mood.

  ‘Comes to something doesn’t it?’ she said with a cynical shake of her head.

  Charlie hated random statements. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘In the paper. Bodies. Here, right on our doorstep and the woman who did it has gone missing. Not that they’re saying that, but it’s obvious isn’t it? If she’s done a runner, she must have done it. Doesn’t bear thinking about,’ she said, shuddering as she handed him his change.

  He didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, but accepted his change with a tolerant smile and glanced down at the paper. His eyes were immediately drawn to the left-hand column on the front page. The names stood out like two nuns in a brothel. Porter and Baxter. He scanned the article, and exhaled slowly.

  No wonder she was back.

  ***

  Rachel knew that he had come in looking for her. His movements were too purposeful for this to be a coincidence. She ought to have known that this would happen, but had stupidly hoped that she could avoid it. If the police hadn’t insisted that she stick around she would have been back in London by now, instead of sitting around and wondering why fate was such a relentless bastard.

  Of course Charlie had aged; they both had. She just looked old, but on him greying hair and lines around the eyes had enhanced the air of artless charm he’d always been blessed with. She watched helplessly as he ploughed an inexorable path through the crowded café towards her table.

  Had there been a back door, she would have bolted, but she was trapped. Stomach pitching and rolling, she could do nothing but wait for the moment she had been dreading for nineteen years.

  He had spotted her easily; she was only half-hidden behind the bamboo screen and he was moving towards he like a guided missile. Pushing past the other customers, he made his way to her table and slapped a newspaper down in front of her. ‘I didn’t think anything would bring you back, until I read this. I
t’s been a long time, Rachel,’ he said, his voice rank with bitterness.

  She forced herself to look down at the paper, the sea of words blurring underneath the stark headline – Two Dead in Local House of Horror.

  Until that point she had almost convinced herself that the events of the previous day had been a surreal nightmare, the kind that lurked and clung long after waking. The kind that left an unpleasant taint that was impossible to ignore. Every word of the headline sent a slug of reality into her brain. Each time a blurred sentence unravelled itself and landed in her grey matter, her senses began to fizz and pop like a damp firework, until the whole thing short-circuited and she felt herself going down.

  ***

  The whole café held its breath as Rachel hit the floor. Even the hiss of the coffee machine halted for a second or two. As she’d fallen she’d taken the tablecloth with her, dragging everything with it and sending a mesmerising cascade of sugar skittering across the floor like a million microscopic diamonds, which were swiftly crushed under Charlie’s feet as he rushed to move furniture out of the way. Someone shrieked as Rachel’s body began to twitch and jerk, and almost everyone panicked as Charlie dropped to the floor and started to yank at Rachel’s neck in an attempt to loosen her scarf.

  ‘Oh my God!’ the waitress yelled, trying to pull him off.

  Charlie shouted, and shrugged her off. ‘Get off me, you silly cow, and move the bloody tables out of the way. She’s having a fit!’ All his old, familiar instincts had kicked in as soon as he’d seen the warning in Rachel’s eyes before they had glazed over and rolled back into her head like a couple of milk-white marbles.

  Adrenaline surged through his body as he struggled to loosen her scarf while trying to ignore the chattering voyeurs. The waitress was twittering on about calling an ambulance, but he told her no, even though she shrieked again as blood began to dribble from Rachel’s contorted mouth. ‘She’s bitten herself – it’s nothing. She’ll be fine in a minute. Just give her some space will you, and tell those bloody people to stop gawping,’ he shouted.

  ‘Are you a doctor then?’ the terrified girl asked, only to have her question completely ignored.

  Rachel’s body began to relax and Charlie found himself trembling with relief. He hadn’t had to deal with one of her seizures in a long, long time. He sat back, stretched out his legs, and pulled her limp, exhausted body into his lap, propping her head against his chest, and stroking the damp hair away from her pallid face. He wasn’t sure which one of them was more traumatised. ‘Can you get her some water please?’ he asked the shocked waitress.

  The girl nodded and scurried off, briefly pausing to turn and ask, ‘Still or sparkling?’

  Charlie rolled his eyes. ‘Tap,’ he said impatiently.

  The girl returned with the water and the proprietor of the café in her wake, a sensible-looking woman who offered to pull the screen across and give them some privacy. Charlie accepted gratefully and took the water, holding it to Rachel’s mouth and making her drink though she was still disorientated.

  The café woman ushered the waitress away. ‘Can I do anything? Should I check her bag, call a relative or something?’

  Charlie shook his head. ‘No thanks, it’s fine. I’ll look after her.’

  The café woman frowned, looking unsure of him. ‘Not being funny, but do you actually know her?’ she asked, shifting her posture to demonstrate that she wasn’t to be trifled with if he turned out to be some random weirdo.

  Charlie closed his eyes for a moment and sighed. He supposed it did look somewhat strange. ‘You could say that I do.’

  The woman peered at him, suspicion rippling across her face. ‘Are you a relative?’

  He looked down at the pale, thin woman who lay against his chest giving everyone the perfect impression of a limp rag. To this day he still didn’t understand how they’d come to this. All those years and here she was, still able to hurt him with a single look.

  ‘I’m her husband,’ he said.

  Chapter 4

  When the doorbell rang, Delia Jones peered through the net curtains and smiled with grim satisfaction at the predictability of the police. Since reading the morning paper she’d been waiting for them to call with as much patience as a woman like her could muster. Which wasn’t much at all.

  On opening the door she smiled at them both, listened as they introduced themselves, and perused their warrant cards with unnecessary scrutiny. When she felt she’d annoyed them enough, she adopted an air of weary disinclination and said, ‘I suppose you had better come in.’

  ***

  Ratcliffe followed Angie into Delia’s cluttered sitting room and formed his first impressions while Delia lowered herself into a very fat armchair and took her time settling in. The whole room was stuffed to the gills with cheap china and whimsical little ornaments. It was the kind of room that could send a grown man slowly and steadily crazy over time. He looked at her smirking from her fat chair. Delia Jones struck him as the kind of woman who probably knew that and coveted her collection even more for that reason.

  ‘I know why you’re here – I read the paper. But if you’re looking for my son, he doesn’t live here any more. Besides, whatever you lot think he’s no killer, and Roy Baxter was alive and well long after he was locked up, so you’ll be barking up the wrong tree anyway,’ Delia said, offering the statement with smug satisfaction.

  So, she’d read the papers. Sometimes Ratcliffe hated reporters; they were way too quick off the mark with their speculation. He hadn’t even had confirmation that the body was Roy Baxter yet, but the paper had got hold of the name and run the story anyway. ‘There is nothing that we are aware of that would link your son to this case, Mrs Jones, but we will need to talk to him at some point. It’s you we’ve come to see,’ he said.

  The team had run some checks back at the station and had been surprised to find that there had been another body found at The Limes thirty years before. That one had been fresh though, not preserved in sand. Her body was still seeping blood when she was found complete with her killer, knife in hand, standing over her body.

  The victim was Patsy Jones, daughter-in-law of Delia. The case notes stated that Patsy had been having an affair with Roy Baxter, an error in judgement that had led to her death. The murder had been committed by Delia’s son, who had been found next to his dead wife holding the murder weapon. A kitchen knife, which he’d used to stab Patsy four times after he had bashed her over the head with a blunt object that had never been found or identified. It had been an open and shut case. Delia’s son had served ten years of a possible fifteen and hadn’t come to the attention of the police since.

  Delia was correct in saying that her son couldn’t have had anything to do with at least one of the bodies found the day before because he had been on remand when Roy Baxter had gone missing. For Ratcliffe there was no obvious link between the two cases other than The Limes appearing to be a popular venue for untimely and horrific deaths, but they did need to talk to Delia Jones – she had been the Porters’ cleaning woman thirty years before and was likely to be one person who knew more about them than anyone else.

  Uniform had completed some preliminary door-to-door enquiries, and from the little information they had gathered, Angie and Ratcliffe had concluded that the Porter family were not neighbourly types. Of those people interviewed who were aware of their existence, most described them as eccentric, standoffish and weird.

  The only real contact any of the neighbours had with them was on the odd occasion when someone had plucked up enough courage to complain about the run-down state of the house and the untamed jungle that may have at one time been a garden. All had been given short shrift and had not tried again. Consequently, the only person who might have any useful information on the family regarding the time that Roy Baxter had been a part of it was Delia Jones. An ornery old bird who was busy giving both he and Angie some seriously dirty looks.

  Scowling at him she said, ‘What do you want to ta
lk to me for? I didn’t bloody kill him, though if I had Charlie wouldn’t have had to pay for something he didn’t do. If you ask me, Roy Baxter got everything he deserved.’

  Angie stepped in, going for the ‘woman’s touch’, Ratcliffe guessed. It wouldn’t work – nothing did with Delia’s type.

  ‘How did you and your son know Mr Baxter?’ she asked.

  ‘I would have thought you already knew that. I was their cleaner and Charlie worked for Roy. He was a builder; he gave Charlie work, and only did it to piss Valerie off. She wasn’t keen on Charlie.’

  ‘Why not?’ Ratcliffe asked.

  Delia laughed and shook her head. ‘Valerie Porter didn’t like anyone much.’

  Ratcliffe didn’t buy it. He looked at Angie and by his guess, neither did she. ‘What do you mean?’

  Delia shifted in her seat. ‘She was a bitter woman, a dried-up old stick who liked to make other people miserable when she could. She was always the same, even when she was a kid: a nasty, spiteful bitch who thought she was a cut above everyone else. Put it this way, it takes more than a posh house and a good name to shift a reputation like hers.’

  ‘She must have liked you – she gave you a job,’ Angie said.

  ‘Huh! She gave me the job because I was the only person stupid enough to do it for the lousy money she paid. Liking didn’t come in to it. Besides, she enjoyed the fact that someone she knew worked for her, made her feel important,’ Delia said bitterly, obviously still suffering the indignity of her lot.

  ‘Why stay if she was so unpleasant, paid so little?’ Angie wanted to know.

  Delia looked her up and down, obviously taking in the smart suit and the air of self-assurance.

  ‘I don’t suppose a woman like you would know what it’s like to be left on your own to bring up a kid. I left school at fourteen, got married when I was seventeen, had Charlie when I was twenty, and was widowed at twenty-two. I had no money, and a roof to pay for. Wasn’t quite so easy to go to the social, cap in hand, then. I had to work and I had to go somewhere I could take Charlie with me. Needs must, Constable.’