Stephenson had a release date. She was due out in two months, a few weeks shy of her eighteenth. If she was disciplined for this, then she’d get at least another couple of years, and that would mean a transfer to prison. There was no talk of a release date for Katy. She was sure that when she left Ashdown, she wouldn’t be headed for home. This fracas would be water under the bridge by then. The screws hadn’t really believed it was her, which was probably why she’d got two nights instead of the five she’d been threatened with. With her, Stephenson, the boy and all the witnesses sticking to the same story, there wasn’t much the staff could do about it.
Two nights would be a walk in the park, if only it wasn’t for this heat, and the lack of air that went with it. She tried again to focus on her breathing. Tried to shake off the injured face of the boy, his eye already swelling up, gibbering for his mother. She wondered if Stephenson was thinking about him. Maybe they’d talk about it someday, in the future. She’d make sure to keep in touch with Maureen Stephenson, despite the rules. After all, Stephenson owed her.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Revenge.
Katy fiddled with the waistband of her work apron. At least they’d not bothered to take that off her. When she found the row of unravelled stitches and slipped her finger inside, the breathing became easier. Her nail glanced against metal. It only took her a little while to wriggle her blade out. It was the prong of a buckle. She’d managed to get it in the laundry room, from one of the staff aprons. The pupils’ aprons had buttons – no metal, no sharp edges. She’d tried to sharpen it over the weeks, on the brick walls of the dorm, on various tools in the gardening shed. When she got the chance, she stuck it in boiling water. That wasn’t often, though.
But needs must. She rolled up her sleeve, found a good spot on her upper arm. There was one way to stop the faces from haunting her.
Katy squeezed her eyes shut and dug into her skin.
*
The first time she had a chance to talk to Stephenson properly after getting out of the chokey was in an art lesson. They had amazing stuff at Ashdown – oils, pastels, even these new Cryla paints – and that was just in the painting room. The two of them were working on a swirly mural. Stephenson had done the outline. She had a much surer hand than Katy, and the two of them were now blocking out the main sections in purples, oranges and greens.
‘So I’m definitely getting out,’ Stephenson murmured. ‘Three weeks’ time. Robertson told me himself.’
Katy felt a pang of remorse at the idea of losing the closest thing she had to a friend in here. ‘That’s good,’ she managed. ‘I mean, it’s not like they could keep you anyway.’
‘Yeah, thanks to you.’ Stephenson paused, working some paint into a corner of the design. ‘We’ll keep in touch, yeah?’
Katy shrugged. ‘They won’t let us write while I’m still in. You know the rules.’
‘Don’t matter. I’m not going to forget you, Katy Clery. And you’d best not think you can forget me neither.’
‘Course not.’
Katy stared hard at the painting. Stephenson’s slim frame still imposed itself in the corner of her eye: her freckles, auburn hair and that creepily fascinating tattoo. Katy’s eyes pricked with the thought of how much she would miss her. She stepped away slightly, tightening her grip on the paintbrush and pursing her lips. Katy Clery was a survivor.
Stephenson’s hand on her arm made her jump. She turned to the other girl and could see the shine of tears in her eyes.
‘You should do it, you know.’ Stephenson’s voice was an urgent whisper. ‘Get the bastard that put you in here. You’re smart enough, God knows. And whatever I can do to help, you only need to say.’
Katy nodded, a thin smile on her lips and an ache in the back of her throat. Had she said or done something that had let slip to Stephenson that she planned to do exactly that? She didn’t think so. Stephenson wasn’t bright enough for subtle clues. It was just natural justice – that was all; even Maureen Stephenson could see that, by rights, Simon Gardiner had it coming.
August 2017
Neil
Neil had never been a brave man. Not like his father, who, for all his bigotry and bile, had undeniably staked his claim as a member of the greatest generation. Now, Neil found himself here, not facing a landing ground or a machine gun installation or anything like it, yet the cold sweat was sopping at the bottom of his shirt. He was all eye-twitching and finger-trembling and, like the coward that he was, he didn’t think he could trust himself to speak.
‘Like looking at pictures of kiddies, do you?’
He didn’t know this copper. He’d seen Nelson, the stony-faced inspector, as he was led through the station, but this was a sergeant, who introduced himself as DS Addison and his younger female colleague as DC Hemmings. Addison must have been in his fifties, with greying hair and a world-weary attitude. Hemmings’ role seemed to be confined to fiddling with the tape recorder. Neil found it hard to believe they still used tapes, but had been told at the outset there was a digital video recording too. Still, it was the tape machine, familiar from countless TV dramas, that filled him with anxiety.
‘Whatever you’re insinuating, you’ve got it wrong.’ Neil’s protest sounded weak, even to himself. For the first time in his life, he found himself envious of his son-in-law’s bluster.
‘Then how do you explain what was found under the floorboards of your home?’
Neil hadn’t put anything there, and from the glance that he’d had, the papers hadn’t looked like anything indecent. The words jumbled in his mind. If he argued on one point, would they take it as an admission on another? The tongue in his mouth was thick and useless.
‘Water, Mr Marsden?’ DC Hemmings finally spoke and pushed a plastic cup towards him. Her tone was solicitous, but a smirk threatened at the corner of her lips and Neil sensed a taunting undertone.
‘I didn’t put anything under the floorboards,’ Neil stated, making an effort to be plain and clear. ‘I don’t know what you found, because I didn’t put it there, and never saw it. You’ve not shown me any of it.’
‘You’re not telling us your wife likes looking at pictures of kiddies?’ It was back to Addison now.
‘Should you be asking these questions without a lawyer?’
The copper shrugged. ‘You tell me, Mr Marsden, do you need one?’
‘No,’ he said, praying that was the right answer.
He picked up the water. The kid had overfilled it, probably deliberately, and a few drips rolled down Neil’s chin. He swiped them away, a little shocked to feel the prickle of stubble on the back of his hand.
‘We’ve got guys checking your computers,’ Addison continued, ‘home and work, that old laptop from the attic, your phone. They get to every little thing you’ve ever looked at, you know. If you had a peek at some vintage postcards of seaside lovelies on eBay three years ago they’ll know about it.’ He leant closer and Neil caught a whiff of banana. He thought, distractedly, that he wouldn’t have pegged Addison as a healthy eater. ‘They’re all half our age, those techies, Neil, and fuck knows how they manage it, because most of the time they don’t seem to know their arse from their elbow. But they do manage it. So if there’s any little whisper of a guilty secret; any little peccadillo that’s weighing on your mind, you’ll be well advised to tell me now. It’ll give us a reason to go easy on you if you help us out. Get me?’
Before Neil could answer there was a sharp rap on the door and Addison was called out of the room, looking none too pleased about the summons. Neil and the young detective eyed each other silently, until eventually she muttered something about going to check her emails.
‘Look, love, before you go, could you point me to the gents’?’
The woman looked dubious.
‘Come on, I’m not under arrest. Even if I was, I’m not a likely candidate for a breakout, am I? The prostate’s buggered is all.’
‘Right. DI Nelson’s the same,’ she said, her frown lifting a
nd then clouding again as she realised the senior investigating officer might not be too happy about the revelation. ‘Come with me.’
By the time they returned, Addison was back in his seat, looking none to happy about being kept waiting. Neil only wished he could be confident that the urgency came from a desire to find Barney, rather than a desire to go home for his tea.
‘First sweep of your tech stuff was clean, so I’m told,’ he said, almost before Neil had had chance to sit down. ‘Surprisingly clean, in fact. Are you in the habit of using any specialist deletion software?’
‘You’d have to ask Barbara – she’s the techie. But I could have told you at the outset there was nothing to find,’ said Neil, truthfully, although that didn’t explain the giddy relief he felt at having it confirmed. If his precious, wonderful wife was apparently a child-killer, who was to say he couldn’t be a paedophile? The world had gone mad.
Addison now pulled a cardboard file from a bag by his feet and shoved it across the table. ‘But that leaves us no closer to understanding what the hell all this is about.’
‘This is what you found at the house?’
‘Yes, well almost. Those papers are being kept securely in our evidence room. These are copies, but all the little sticky tabs and cross-references have been reproduced too. It’s quite a little research project.’
Neil smiled in spite of himself. ‘That’ll be Barbara,’ he said. ‘She’s a journalist. Old-school. If a thing’s worth knowing, it’s worth its own index card.’
It was DS Addison’s turn to smile, although Neil couldn’t tell if it was genuine this time, or more of his self-serving camaraderie. ‘Sounds like a woman after me own heart,’ he said. ‘But this should have been more my bag than hers, don’t you think?’
Neil pulled the papers forward, slipped off the elastic band and opened the top flap of cardboard. The papers inside were separated neatly into bundles. Once he’d got through more elastic bands, he was able to read the first document. It was a report from a Sunday broadsheet supplement – fairly recent – about the trial of a white-van driver who’d been convicted of abducting, raping and killing a thirteen-year-old. The disappearance and then the trial had had huge publicity, and behind that report Neil found many more, as well as close-typed notes, full of acronyms, about the case. Beneath that, in other bundles of varying thicknesses, the familiar names continued. Child victims; child-killers; children who had been found and those who had been killed and those who remained missing. The names and the articles went back further: careful annotated notes of cases from the 1970s and 1980s, the dated hairstyles and pre-digital photography lending the pictures now giving those forgotten children a sense of the ageing that they had been tragically denied in real life.
At the very bottom, tucked into the expanding file, were a couple of true crime books. One was on a famous case of a staged kidnapping, where a family had grimly sought to capitalise on the exposure and money that a missing child case could generate. The second looked to be a ‘Greatest Hits’ of twentieth-century missing children cases. It had a pale cover, across which the word ‘bollocks’ stood out in black marker pen, clearly in Barbara’s hand.
‘She’s been collecting this stuff for years,’ said Neil, almost to himself.
‘Looks like it,’ agreed Addison, ‘although it’s pretty selective. You can imagine if you kept even a tenth of the guff that’s been printed about just one of these cases over the years, you’d have filled your entire house up, never mind the gap under the floorboards.’
Neil nodded. ‘It’s investigations, isn’t it? If you look at the focus of the articles, they’re all written in the aftermath, years later some of them. And the stuff she’s highlighted and annotated, it’s mainly about the police.’
It was Addison’s turn to nod. ‘Seems to be. Budding Patricia Cornwell is she, your wife?’
Neil felt a flare of exasperation. ‘No, she isn’t, no more than I’m a paedophile, even though you were quite happy to suggest it to my face fifteen minutes ago.’
Addison’s face tightened, his mateyness suddenly vanishing. ‘As my colleague has already stated, we’ve got to exhaust all possibilities.’
There were more sheets at the back of the pile, separated from the main chunk by a loose file divider. Neil pinged off the elastic bands and began to look through these too. There were a few press clippings, again, but more handwritten stuff this time. Addresses, dates, two black and white pictures: stiff, glossy prints, clearly of some quality. The same name kept appearing – Simon Gardiner, Simon Gardiner.
‘There’s no more kiddie stuff,’ said Addison, sliding the file back across the table out of Neil’s reach.
‘Yeah, well,’ said Neil. ‘I don’t think it’ll take long to exhaust this one. Barbara’s a journalist. No doubt she was doing a series of articles on this stuff. Or perhaps she planned it and it never got anywhere. That happens a lot. She probably stuck it out of the way when we had the kids visiting – it’s not exactly family-friendly, is it?’
‘You seem to forget that your wife has something in common with some of the people that feature in these articles.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, as you now know, Barbara Kipling, or rather Katherine Clery, is a convicted child-killer too, isn’t she?’
Neil was taken aback by his bluntness. Barbara had told him she hadn’t done it. He supposed the police couldn’t simply take her word for it, but what could it amount to, really? A child judged harshly in a harsh time over what, he was sure, could have been nothing more than a tragic accident. It hardly bore comparison with the child molesters or serial killers of this world.
‘It was nothing like this stuff, though,’ he protested. Again, Neil cursed his own meekness, Darren would have ripped into Addison by now, but that just wasn’t Neil’s way.
‘Of course not,’ agreed Addison. ‘But it’s strange all the same. She pleaded not guilty, didn’t she? Her lawyers spun some story about it being someone else?’
‘I wasn’t there at the time, as you well know,’ said Neil, stiffly. ‘But I’m sure whatever evidence Barbara gave it would have been the truth. I was told you were getting the papers out of archive, but exhausting that avenue doesn’t seem to have been anyone’s priority.’
‘Hmmm,’ said Addison, leafing through the papers, ‘maybe it’s us she was trying to get a story on. Dumb coppers mess it up again. Can’t deny it’s a classic.’
‘Well, as I said, I only found out about these when they were waved in front of my face earlier. If you want to know what Barbara was doing with these, then you’ll have to ask her, but I don’t see that it’ll be any help to you in finding my grandson.’
The interview fizzled out like a Bank Holiday barbecue when the rain starts. Addison had clearly been expecting something to show up on the computers – perhaps he worked on the premise that everybody had some dodgy internet history. But even if there had been anything, it was a big jump to make Neil responsible for whatever had happened to Barney. As if he’d do anything to his own grandson; as if he’d have time to hatch some sort of plan with his wife in hospital fighting for her life.
Addison’s handshake in the reception area was cursory, his mind already seemingly turning to other avenues. It was left to Hemmings to confirm that Neil intended to return to his home address, that he could be contacted and would return if requested.
He’d been told to hand his phone in when he arrived, and only just remembered to collect it from the unsmiling female constable on reception. He hurried outside before checking the screen, keen to be free of the place as quickly as he could be. It was a warm afternoon and he slowed his pace walking across to the pay and display where he’d left his car. Town seemed busier than usual. There were lots of kids and mums around with it being the holidays. The rush-hour traffic was just starting to pick up. Neil felt relief at being free of the police station, relief that whilst he seemed to have teetered on the edge of some Kafkaesque abyss, he had ma
naged to emerge intact.
Perhaps nothing was worse, nowadays, for a man of his age, than the suggestion of paedophilia. For one hour, Neil had seen the web of his whole life – his standing and reputation, his job and his relationships – for the gossamer structure that it was. How easy, it seemed, to destroy it all in an instant. For a moment, the world sang with the cleansing, life-giving freshness of relief. But, like a spring rain on dry ground, it faded almost at once, leaving behind the stony ache in Neil’s chest that was his fear for Barney.
Town had never seemed bigger. Neil recognised none of the faces that bustled past him. Any one of them could know who had taken his grandson, but the likelihood was that none of them did. They’d see the appeals and the headlines, shake their heads and pull their loved ones closer, and that would be all.
When he did look at his phone, there was just one message, from his old mate Alan Crookshank, expressing his shock at the local news report about Barney and the offer of a quiet pint if Neil needed it.
His first thought was to refuse, but he realised he’d no desire to see Veena, or any of her like, and the idea of escaping for even an hour or so was appealing. He called Helen quickly to check there was no news and let her know where he was going, then he set off.
Helen
16.00. Forty-eight hours. Two whole days. Eternity.
Helen wasn’t prepared to wait any longer to see Barbara. Although a clique of sullen reporters still huddled outside, the phone calls and knocks on the door seemed to have died down. Life, if you could call it that, was settling into a surreal routine of yet more tea, wearying bouts of verbal jousting with Veena and trying to keep things normal for Alys.
After the press conference debacle, Darren had stormed off to Chris and Adam’s, but he’d returned quickly with a couple of bags and his iPad, installing himself in Barbara and Neil’s back room, where he swung like a weathervane from scowling thunder at the police, to doting sunshine on Alys. Towards Helen, he was solicitous but careful. They stood close together to talk privately (out of a sense of intrusion, rather than because they had anything private to say) and his breath across her neck or shoulder was like the whisper of a sweet and longed-for breeze.
The Mother's Lies Page 19