The Mother's Lies

by Joanne Sefton

  ‘You’d better believe it, Carter, she’s queen of the fucking child-murdering bitches, and if I were you, I’d think twice and think again before I decided to say anything about it.’

  Another girl had materialised at Katy’s shoulder, hissing venom towards her tormentor. Katy had been told there were only three of them in the forty-strong unit. This one was slim, with a scabby, hard-bitten face and big green eyes that might have been pretty elsewhere. As she glanced sideways to take in her possible rescuer, Katy couldn’t help but gasp. The girl had a tattoo of a climbing rose twining down her neck and across her shoulders. Katy had never seen a tattoo on a girl of that age before – rarely on any woman at all, for that matter.

  Carter’s paper-white face turned a shade paler, even the angry red on his throat seemed to fade a little, and it was his turn to edge back. The boys outside his immediate little gang were smirking with delight, but alert enough to shuffle carefully inwards, tacitly arranging themselves to best conceal Carter and the girls from the duty staff’s view.

  From somewhere, Katy found the nerve to curl her lip to a sneer, although her heart was still battering against her ribs. You didn’t grow up where she had without getting some idea of how to handle yourself if it came to a fight, even if in Katy’s case the knowledge was largely theoretical. She wasn’t stupid enough to think that this girl, whoever she was, would put herself in harm’s way for Katy without expecting something in return and she realised it was best to try to minimise her indebtedness.

  The world stopped for a moment. Then Carter’s hand flashed forward. His knuckles dragged across Katy’s neck, missing her face only by dint of her speed and instinct. Blood rushing in her ears, Katy bunched her fists and flailed out, spitting and stamping. The room roared its appreciation, the boys’ attempt at secrecy abandoned. Katy reeled from a blow to her kidneys from one of Carter’s gang, but she kept lashing out. Green-Eyes, though, was on a different level. She whirled around, gouging and shrieking like she was possessed. Carter rolled on the floor clutching his groin. Another of the lads was spurting blood from his nose, whilst the noise in the dining room had risen to a roar.

  The two nearest staff members might have loitered for a second or so, or it might just have been Katy’s imagination. Either way, she felt nothing but relief when a rough pair of arms finally jerked her away from her opponents.

  ‘Maureen Stephenson, no surprise to find you in a ruckus. And the new girl, Clery. Well, you’ll both be down in the cellar for the rest of the night. And you, Jonathan Carter. Anderson, go and get some extra hands and we’ll shift these idiots downstairs.’

  The cellar was split into separate isolation cells, so Katy had no chance to find out more about her new ally. Her head was spinning, but she saw little opportunity for comfort or rest when she took in the damp cubicle with the wooden bench against the wall, too short to lie down on.

  In fact, sleep took her immediately, almost as her limbs were still curling up to fit the cramped space. It might only have been early evening, but Katy had barely slept in days, and her body simply had nothing more to give.

  When she woke, every part of her ached stiffly from the cold and the odd sleeping position and most of all from the beating she’d taken upstairs. But there was daylight seeping in through the murky slit of a window at the top of the wall and, as far as she could judge, the sun was well up in the sky.

  Katy didn’t have to wait long before the thump of boots on the flags and the clang of metal announced the arrival of the wardens. Apparently she’d missed breakfast; a sanction – or a blessing, depending on how you looked at it – that was part and parcel of spending the night in chokey.

  The warders who came to get them – day shift this time, new faces to Katy – marched the pair of them off with little fanfare. Katy was to join a group weeding in the smallholding. Green-Eyes was going elsewhere.

  ‘Maureen Stephenson,’ Green-Eyes whispered to Katy as they walked, then she winked. ‘Carter’s a knob. You’re all right, though, you are.’

  ‘Katy Clery,’ Katy replied. ‘Yes, I think I will be.’

  August 2017

  Helen

  When Helen and Veena got back, Alys was sleeping, so the police were able to speak to Helen, Darren and Neil together. DI Nelson was there, along with DS Addison.

  ‘The first thing is, we’ve got the papers out of archive on Katy Clery’s trial.’ Nelson was speaking, but it was Addison who placed a slim bundle of photocopies on the table.

  ‘A homicide trial would be twenty-odd lever-arches’ worth these days, thanks to bloomin’ email. But the gist of it’s there. The headlines are that Katy was in a sexual relationship with a married man. He’d been her teacher at primary school, and it seems to have started shortly afterwards.’ Here Nelson paused, looking uncomfortable, and Helen wondered if he was deliberately calling her Katy, trying to make it all seem a bit more distant. ‘Looking at it now, she was clearly a victim of grooming and sexual exploitation. I’m afraid they didn’t quite see things like that in the early sixties.’

  Helen glanced anxiously at her father, but he didn’t meet her eye. ‘Go on,’ he said gruffly, nodding to the DI.

  ‘The man was called Simon Gardiner. He and his wife had young twins, just about nine months, Jennifer and Mary. One night, after the wife had been away from home, Mary was reported missing. It didn’t take the police long to establish that Katy had been there that night – some of her school friends had twigged roughly what was going on and it came out in the door-to-doors. Once the investigation was onto that, Katy quickly confessed to taking and hiding Mary’s body.’

  ‘But she hadn’t killed the girl?’ asked Neil.

  Nelson tapped the documents. ‘She said not. Her version was that Gardiner got frustrated and shook her. The death was an accident.’

  ‘He said otherwise?’

  ‘He claimed to know nothing about it. He said that Katy had been pressuring him to leave his wife and kids. He tried to end the affair; she broke in with the keys he’d given her and killed the girl in cold blood out of spite or jealousy.’

  ‘And a jury believed him?’ Helen felt her stomach heave.

  Nelson shrugged. ‘She’d already pleaded guilty to the Coroner’s Act offences – hiding the body and so forth – and she’d gone to some lengths to do it. His defence made a lot of that – why would she involve herself if it had had nothing to do with her? He was an upstanding pillar of the community, big noise in the church, all that stuff. They paint her as quite the Lolita. It makes a pretty hairy read to modern eyes, I’ll be frank with you.’

  ‘If they’d found the body, and been able to tell the cause of death, that might have backed up her case,’ put in Addison. ‘If she was telling the truth, then the irony was she carried out her part too well. Without any evidence of cause of death, it could well have been murder, but the jury went for diminished responsibility, so the conviction was manslaughter instead.’ He paused to flick through the pages. ‘“An underdeveloped mind crazed by infatuation for her lover” – that’s how it was put in court.’

  Neil swiped his eyes with the back of his hand and Helen felt a catch in her own throat watching him. He’d been living with Barbara’s demons almost his whole life, she suddenly realised, and only now was he finally getting to see them for what they really were.

  She thought back to what Barbara had said in the hospital. It was clear she blamed this Gardiner character for how her whole life had turned out. For not being the mother to Helen that she thought she should have been. Did her mother even love her at all, or was it all just a twisted act? Was that why so much of their relationship felt ‘almost there’, why there was always that slightly off note? The doubt opened up in Helen’s heart like a sinkhole.

  But then what about Barbara herself? What about that fourteen-year-old kid abused and tormented and hung out to dry? Amidst the hurt and self-pity, here was anger, too, on her mother’s behalf. Where had her family been? Where was the protection
that she was entitled to expect?

  ‘Anyway, that’s not the only news.’ Veena was speaking now, in her bright, moving-things-along voice that gave little quarter to the seismic aftershocks of what they’d just been told. ‘We continued to pursue the “Jennifer” line of enquiry whilst the archive search was ongoing. As you know, Jennifer Rutherford – Gardiner as was – has been ruled out of any direct involvement in Barney’s disappearance, but we looked into other members of the family.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Darren, the only one of the three of them able to speak.

  Here, DI Nelson took the lead again. ‘Simon Gardiner himself is still alive. He’s old now, going on eighty, but he’s still with it.’

  ‘Right,’ said Darren.

  ‘It was him that Barbara was keeping that file on, wasn’t it?’ said Neil, quietly.

  Nelson nodded and filled Helen and Darren in that there had been information about Gardiner in the papers found under the floorboards. ‘Gardiner separated from the twins’ mother, Etta, and married again in the 1980s. Younger woman, you know how it is.’

  Helen felt Darren bristle, but this was too important to worry about whether there was any side to the DI’s remarks.

  ‘Go on,’ she urged.

  ‘Well, Etta moved to Scotland, nursing her broken heart and, most nights, a whisky bottle, from what we can tell. But Simon Gardiner’s current wife, she’s called Sue, works in one of the labs at the General.’ He paused. ‘The lab where they carry out the breast cancer gene testing.’

  ‘Gene testing,’ Helen echoed. ‘She would have had access to Mum’s identity details when she supplied them to the hospital?’

  Nelson nodded. ‘That’s the theory we’re working on. We brought Gardiner in for a bit of a chat, and he acted perfectly innocent, all ancient history, he said. Very sad and difficult at the time, but life moves on and all that. The second wife said she knew he’d lost a child from his previous marriage but claims she wasn’t told the details at all.’

  ‘Right,’ said Darren.

  ‘Well,’ continued Nelson, ‘I got the lads to look over his computers.’ Here he glanced at Neil, who remained impassive, although Helen noticed the young DC coloured slightly. ‘As soon as we told him we had a warrant to seize his equipment, he coughed to possessing a large number of illegal images of children.’

  ‘You mean kiddie porn?’ said Darren.

  Nelson nodded.

  Helen found her heart was hammering. She groped for Darren’s hand and he squeezed hers hard.

  ‘We’ve charged him on several counts. He seemed to be singing like the proverbial canary.’

  ‘Seemed to be?’ Darren’s voice was a whisper. Helen didn’t think she’d have been able to speak at all.

  ‘The boys have found something new, just an hour ago – we came straight here. There’s a cache of emails Gardiner didn’t mention in his interview, from an email address set up a couple of months ago.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It looks like—’

  ‘Although we can’t be sure of anything yet,’ put in Veena.

  ‘No. But it looks like Gardiner was very recently in touch with certain known criminals to procure a young boy.’ He took a deep breath. ‘The emails are written in quite veiled terms, presumably to stop any triggers appearing if they were digitally scanned, but reading them as a human being it’s quite easy to interpret what’s going on. They seem to say that the boy was found and arrangements are being made for Gardiner to make a payment and receive the child. The message, which we interpret as saying that Gardiner’s contacts have got the child, was sent at 16.35 on the 6th of August from an IP address within half a mile of Julie Hendricks’ address.’

  ‘Barney!’ Helen felt herself begin to shake almost immediately.

  ‘That’s our fear.’ Nelson looked more awkward than ever. ‘I’m afraid that’s not the end of it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, from references in the emails, it looks possible that your son was specifically targeted. That Gardiner identified and, um, requested that it should be him.’

  ‘You mean this bastard ordered my son, like a fucking takeaway?’ Darren’s voice was a whisper no longer.

  Nelson, Veena and Addison nodded like a trio of gormless dashboard toys. The living room that Helen had known all her life, that she’d grown up in, was suddenly unreal and insubstantial. She wanted to push down the walls like a stage set and find Barney waiting in the wings.

  Her little flight of fantasy was shattered by Darren smashing his fist through the glass of the coffee table.

  June 1962

  Katy

  It wasn’t hard for Katy to sneak some clothes into her school bag and then skive off as the others headed their separate ways to registration. Remembering the brambles, she’d packed jeans as well as thick gloves, the kitchen scissors and a rusty old trowel that was kicking around at home.

  She saw a few people searching the edges of the wood. Her stomach fluttered with nerves, but she’d just say she was searching herself if anyone asked. The kids had been told they couldn’t miss school to help to look for Mary, but she’d spotted some of the older ones – fourth- and fifth-formers and a few third years like herself – doing it anyway.

  It was easy enough to find the place – the patch of toadstools that she’d destroyed the night before gave it away – although the area seemed even more trampled. When she examined them closely, the brambles had a battered look about them from her efforts, but they’d held their secret well enough. With the scissors and the gloves, she was able to deal with the thorny, twisting stems much more efficiently. After only a few seconds, she glimpsed the white of the sheet and felt a powerful mix of relief and horror. But she could hear the call of voices and the crunch of feet on the ground; she knew there was no time to waste.

  Quickly, more easily than she expected, she extracted the bundle from the thicket. She could still sense how stiff and cold the body was even through the fabric. The feel of it made her shiver.

  Trying to be gentle, she eased the body into her backpack. She was proud of the army-style bag that she’d got for her fourteenth birthday a few weeks before. After today, she realised, she’d never want to look at it again. She’d always feel the weight of Mary when she carried it. Carefully, she exited the woods onto a ginnel, and then out into one of the streets.

  Simon had told her to go to Lime Street station. She had money for the bus, but she decided it would be safer to walk and stick to the quieter streets. After she’d gone about half a mile or so, the tension started to drop out of her shoulders. Now she was reaching less familiar, busier roads, where an unknown face wouldn’t seem out of the ordinary.

  Despite her meandering route, she was at Lime Street before ten o’clock. The station was quiet. The commuters would have cleared out and only a few well-dressed women, probably coming into town for a day’s shopping, strolled through the ticket hall.

  Katy had only been here once or twice. The grandness of the building awed her a little, but she knew she had to keep focused and finish what she’d started. There was a stopping train to Blackpool leaving in fifteen minutes. She looked at the list of stations on the timetable and jabbed a finger at the middle of the list, rehearsing the unfamiliar name with a quick whisper. It sounded like a small place, probably rural. Hopefully there would be a peaceful hedgerow or copse that she could find and do what she had to do, decently, before it was time to get the train back home.

  She made her way to platform 3, almost retching when the smell of cooked meat caught her off-guard passing the station cafeteria. She thought of the times they’d gone to Blackpool as kids. It seemed so long ago; how had her life become so lonely, so burdened, in a few years? The Blackpool of her memories was a happy place, and for a moment she thought of going there. But the journey would take too long. Besides, it wasn’t as if Mary could appreciate the lights or the beach or the trams.

  In the end, Katy got off exactly where she’d pla
nned. It was a small station, just one platform on each side of the tracks, as she had imagined. She was the only passenger to alight, and the lady in the ticket office had her nose stuck in a Woman’s Weekly and didn’t seem to have noticed Katy slip by at all.

  There was a little signpost indicating which way passengers should head for the town centre. Katy turned the opposite way, and within moments the gaps between the buildings had stuttered wider. She found herself striding down a street of big detached and semi-detached houses, their long front gardens neatly separated by beech hedges and dotted with mature trees of all kinds. After two or three minutes, she came to a junction where a smaller lane met the main road she was on. Down the lane she could see rolling fields; it looked like a promising place to find a ditch or a hedgerow.

  It went well at first; she walked out of sight of the road she’d been on and found a spot that looked promising behind a small copse of trees. But as soon as she unpacked her trowel and started to try to dig, she realised she was doing little more than scratching at the earth. The soil was dry and packed, with tree roots crowded together below the surface.

  It was hopeless. She threw the trowel down and it clanked off a tree stump. The only thing for it was to walk further and see if she could find a better spot. A doubting voice in her mind niggled that all the soil would be hard-packed after a dry spell, that a fourteen-year-old girl with a garden trowel was never going to be able to adequately bury a body, even a small one like Mary. She was smart enough to realise that she was in this up to her neck now, and she’d better do it right, for her sake as well as Simon’s. Fighting to keep it together, she walked on.

  Then she noticed a change in the landscape across the fields. There was a farm gate off the lane that led onto a large field, which then dipped away into a shallow valley. Beyond the second rise of the land, she could see the brown of fresh earth. It wasn’t a ploughed field. There were a couple of cabins and some vehicles, although they all looked stationary. It was some sort of building site.