The Mother's Lies

by Joanne Sefton

  If she thought about it at all, she must have assumed it was nostalgia for the place where Barbara and Neil had met. Perhaps for the freedom of a first job and first pay packet – especially one that came with a sprinkling of glamour that seemed difficult to associate with the services these days. It wouldn’t surprise Helen either, if her mother was attracted to the liminality of it, to a place where no one stayed, where everyone was a stranger.

  Now she knew that it was far more than that. Was Barbara simply drawn to be near Mary, as a type of penance perhaps, or did she actually hope to find her one day? Helen wondered if that was what had brought her to Moreton Chase in the first place. Without Mary, perhaps she would never have met Neil. Was Mary, ultimately, the reason why Helen existed? Would Barbara answer that question? Would Helen ever have the chance to ask her?

  The road they were on took them onto the northbound site, which was the bigger of the two. All the locals used this as an unofficial junction, but what felt odd was slowing up, pulling into the car park, rather than joining the steady flow of traffic heading for the slip road.

  They looked at each other. Now they were here, what could they do? They could hardly barge into the motel and start demanding to see in the bedrooms.

  ‘Let’s just look around,’ said Darren. ‘We won’t be too obvious because we’re parked away from the hotel. We can skirt round the back, to that wooded area. We might be able to see in some of the rooms, or at least get a sense of how many are occupied. Whoever is keeping him must be coming out for food and stuff.’

  ‘Okay.’ Helen unbuckled a sleepy and complaining Alys from her car seat. Darren would carry her with them. There was no way either of them would leave her alone.

  They didn’t get far. There was a dog-walking area, but most of the woodland that Barbara used to walk in was sealed off now with wire fencing. It didn’t look much from the car park, but close up it was clear they wouldn’t get through in broad daylight without attracting attention.

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ suggested Darren eventually, motioning away from the motel and towards the main services building. ‘Maybe we can see more from the bridge.’

  A few minutes later they stood together on the bridge, gazing at the flow of traffic below, deflated and morose. They had a good view of the flat roof of the motel building, but that didn’t give them any clues as to whether Barney was inside.

  Helen started to talk, thinking out loud, about trying again to speak to Barbara. What they could say to make her realise that she had to bring this thing to an end. After a few moments, she realised that Darren wasn’t listening to her.

  ‘Darren?’

  ‘What jacket did Barney have on, Hels?’

  ‘The dinosaur one. Bright orange.’ She didn’t have to think – the details tripped off her tongue.

  Darren nodded, and shifted Alys’s weight to point with a finger. Helen followed his gaze to the edge of the carriageway, to the high mesh fence that separated the southbound service area from the motorway verge. Crumpled at the bottom of the fence, caught against one of the concrete fence posts, was a bundle of orange. Her heart started hammering. Even at this distance she could see that the fabric was identical. It wasn’t Barney himself – whatever was there was no bigger than a carrier bag. But it might get them closer.

  They both hurried down to the southbound car park and tried to get their bearings, to pinpoint the spot where they’d seen the fabric. They picked their way across the HGV parking area, ignoring the questioning looks of a few of the drivers taking breaks in their cabs. When they got to the fence, they could suddenly see the vivid flash of the orange again. Helen started to run. There was a tideline of litter against the fence, a foot or so wide in places. She could feel the wind pushing her up to the fence and it was clear that the microclimate of the site meant that this was where any discarded detritus would end up.

  Helen grabbed at it, and as she plucked it from the ground it opened up just as she knew it would. The green dinosaur on the back winked at her. Instinctively, she buried her face in the fabric, desperate to smell her boy. All she got was diesel and leaf mould. She coughed and Darren gently eased the jacket from her fingers.

  ‘It’s his, Hels, look!’

  In faded biro, because she knew what she was looking for, Helen could just make out her own writing. Barney H. Of course, they’d bought this whilst he was still at nursery. Thank God, thank God, thank God. Unlike so many of his other out-of-school clothes, the place for his name had been filled in.

  ‘Should we be touching it?’ She was suddenly worried. ‘What about forensics and stuff?’

  Darren shrugged. ‘The main thing is we’ve found it. I don’t think touching it’ll make much difference – it’s been here for a while. Let’s go straight to the station. We’ll insist on seeing Nelson. He’ll get men into the motel before Barbara knows anything about it.’

  Helen nodded, and they turned back towards the car park, but she couldn’t tear her eyes from the motel building. What had been a hunch a moment ago now seemed a certainty. She paused, ready to duck into the passenger seat, as Darren secured Alys in the back. She gazed at the portico entrance with flags fluttering and concrete planters. She gazed at the rows of windows made blind by gauzy curtains.

  She gazed and saw a woman carrying a child.

  The entrance was cast into shade by the portico. At first, she saw only a movement, a glint of light as the glass doors opened, a shift in the shadows as the burdened figure emerged. The boy was big to be carried; his head flopped drowsily. As they emerged into the sunlight, Helen was already moving towards them. A toy rabbit dangled from the boy’s hand.

  She ran.

  Without noticing the traffic in the car park, without any thought but to get to Barney. Her mouth was open, gulping air, but she had the presence of mind not to cry out to him. She had to get there before the woman knew she was coming.

  As she got closer, Helen could see the woman glancing around. She looked quite old. She had sallow, wrinkled skin with some sort of birthmark or tattoo blotching her neck. But there was a smoothness to her movement, no sign of frailty or uncertainty, quite the opposite. There was a lone silver car at the far end of the parking area reserved for the motel. Family-sized. Helen pushed herself harder, forcing her lungs to burn. An irate driver blasted his horn. The noise drew a glance from the woman, though she didn’t break her step. Their eyes locked and Helen knew that the other woman knew exactly who she was.

  ‘Barney!’ She could scream it now. She could let him know that she was coming for him. But there was no movement from the boy. The woman broke into a run. Where was Darren? He must have seen what was going on. The pair were only metres from the car now. Helen knew she couldn’t reach the woman before she got to it. How quickly would she be able to get in and lock the doors?

  Helen pushed through the scraggy bushes that bordered the parking area. She slipped on dog shit and something thorny scratched her face. She kept running.

  She got there just as the woman wrenched open the driver’s door and was bundling Barney across into the passenger seat. Hauling on her shoulder, she tried to pull the woman back from the car, to put herself between her son and his captor. There was a torrent of abuse flooding into the air. Helen recognised her own gasping, exhausted voice, giving vent to words she barely realised she knew.

  The woman was silent, her body was tight and hard. Caught off balance, she turned in Helen’s grip, but as Helen tried to grapple she found no purchase. Her opponent seemed to push her back easily, taking control with sparse, economical movements, using Helen’s flailing to her own advantage. Helen felt the panic rising. This was wrong. She was fighting for her child; she couldn’t let him down. The words had stopped. There was only her and her opponent. Then there was a pain in her stomach like an explosion, swiftly followed by a shove, which sent her sprawling to the ground.

  ‘Your ma never taught you to fight then.’

  Those were the only words the woman said
. Helen heard the sound of the door slam and the engine rev, then a crunch of pain as the edge of a back tyre rolled over her wrist and thumb.

  For a moment the world was black. It may as well have ended. She had failed her son. But almost immediately the footsteps and commotion flooded in. She tried to push herself up, testing the damaged hand, and opened her mouth to shout at the bewildered receptionist making her way across the car park to go back and call 999.

  Her words were taken from her by the screech of brakes and the metallic thud of impact. She turned towards the noise. At the entrance to the slip road two silver cars were pushed up onto the banking. Noses crushed together – they could have been kissing. The woman was out as quick as a snake, using a back door because hers was jammed against the other car. A moment later, the driver’s door of the other car opened and Helen watched Darren stumble out and run after the woman. He only took a few paces before realising it didn’t matter; she didn’t have Barney.

  Helen limped towards the crash site. The car park was full of people staring now; they backed away silently as she passed, letting her through.

  Darren had Barney in his arms by the time she reached them, blood from a cut on his temple mixing with the tears streaming down his cheeks.

  ‘He’s alive, Helen. Oh God. He’s okay.’

  August 2017

  Barney

  At first, Barney had missed all his toys and wanted them, but later he wanted a picture of Mummy and Daddy so he could think properly about what they looked like when they smiled. He tried to think about Mummy’s smile and how she had big lips that were a funny pink colour and she always wore lipstick every day so only him and Daddy and Alys knew the secret of what colour her big lips really were. He was thinking about that when the dragon-lady gave him more sleepyhead medicine and hissed at him to drink it quickly because they had to go.

  He wasn’t in the room any more when he woke up. He was in a funny metal bed in a room with bright white lights on the ceiling and Mickey Mouse painted on the walls. Sitting beside the bed was Mummy, with no lipstick on and proper-coloured lips. She hugged him tight and he could smell her Mummy smell. He thought that maybe he was dreaming because of the medicine, but he didn’t think he could dream her smell so good and then she started crying.

  ‘Don’t be sad about Daddy, Mummy. Do you want me to get you a tissue?’ he said, because that was what he always said when she cried.

  He didn’t know where the tissues were, though, and his legs were too heavy to go and get them even if he did. But then Mummy started laughing and crying and telling him they were happy tears and Daddy and Alys had been crying happy tears too and Barney was her precious, precious brave boy.

  ‘Yes, I am brave and can I have a sweetie?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mummy. ‘You can have lots of sweeties and I will never ever let you go again.’

  Helen

  Forty-nine hours and sixteen minutes. How sweet it was to be able to count the length of time she’d had him back for, rather than the time he’d been gone.

  Everyone had been keen to keep the hospital stay as short as possible, and, after lots of checks, she’d carried him out of the General in her arms just before eleven p.m., meaning he didn’t have to spend the night there.

  Rebecca Evans had dropped in on Helen and Darren whilst they were sitting round his little bed, waiting for the sedative to wear off. She didn’t say much, obviously in the dark as to how Barney had come to be taken, never mind how he came to be recovered. But it was clear she felt that being there was the right thing to do. It seemed like a million years since Helen had sat in that office listening to this woman explain how her mother had been the victim of an overdose. Both of them had been taken in. They’d been fencing each other, prickly and suspicious, whilst Barbara had lain elsewhere, the serene victim of her own machinations. Well, not any more – Veena had texted to say that Barbara had been arrested at St Aeltha’s and taken into custody.

  Now – after one blissful day yesterday with her children and Darren where they hugged and watched cartoons and she fought back all the thoughts of ‘what next?’ – Nelson was coming over to bring them up to date.

  The atmosphere in the house shifted as the expected time drew nearer. Adam and Christine arrived to be with the children while Helen and Darren spoke to the police. Helen had been adamant that she was not going to let them out of her sight. The arrival of the grandparents, laden with sweets and new toys, was the compromise. Even yesterday they’d been texting Darren about coming over sooner. In fact, the whole glorious day had had the air of a Christmas truce, with the old battles very much waiting in the wings.

  Neil, who had hidden himself away like a hermit in his own home since Darren, Helen and the children returned from the hospital, also came down from his bedroom as Nelson’s appointment drew closer. Grey and broken, he lurked like a spectre, barely managing to raise a smile for the children and ignoring Christine’s strained greeting altogether. By the time the doorbell rang, the air was already thick with tension.

  After the pleasantries, Nelson cut to the chase. Barbara had admitted everything in the course of several long interviews over the last two days. In fact, she explained the whole thing with remarkable relish, the DI told them (with none).

  ‘The plan was for there to be an anonymous tip-off to the police, and as a result of that information Barney would be found in a lock-up garage, tied up with strips from a bed sheet that would link the crime to Gardiner.’

  ‘Link him how?’ asked Neil.

  ‘They’d stolen the sheet years before from Simon Gardiner’s house and kept it wrapped in plastic to preserve the DNA.’

  ‘What do you mean “they”?’ Even as Helen asked the question, her eyes were locked on Barney’s rumpled hair. The top of his head was just visible over the back of the sofa, where he was cuddled into Christine watching Octonauts. She could never thank her stars enough.

  ‘Barbara had two accomplices, a woman called Maureen Stephenson who she’d met in the reform school and Stephenson’s son, Dean.’ Nelson paused to flick through his notebook. ‘Stephenson persuaded Barney to get into her car and was the one you chased down at the services. Dean was backing her up. He’s been known to the force locally for years – small-time burglary, that sort of thing. According to your mother, he placed a keystroke reader on Gardiner’s computer and stole the sheet a number of years ago.’

  ‘She’s been planning this for years?’ Neil’s voice was choked.

  ‘Yes, everything from the kidnapping, right down to the notes. She wrote them herself, although Stephenson kept the materials – that’s why we never found them in the search. The cancer diagnosis meant they had to push the button. It also gave her the chance to come up with the gene-testing story to push us in the right – or wrong – direction. I suppose we’ll never know what would have happened otherwise; maybe it would have remained a fantasy that they plotted but never carried through on.’

  Helen’s mind flashed back to that first phone call with Neil – Barney trying to comfort her and the feeling that her stable world was slipping away from her. Little had she known then just how true that was.

  ‘So they did hack his emails? That’s what the keystroke reader was about?’ Darren remained pragmatic, still trying to understand the mechanics of what had happened.

  ‘Yes. It wasn’t watertight. A specialist technical forensics team might have spotted some irregularities if they’d looked closely. I’ll be straight with you – I wouldn’t have backed my team to figure it out if they’d not had the heads-up that the emails weren’t kosher. Simon Gardiner came pretty close to spending a good time behind bars over this – very possibly longer than he’s got left.’

  Helen couldn’t muster much sympathy for Gardiner and wasn’t particularly inclined to try. Nelson’s shrug suggested he felt the same way.

  ‘So what will happen to him?’ she asked.

  He shrugged again. ‘Too early to say. He can’t be retried over Mary Ga
rdiner’s murder. The CPS could look at offences in relation to your mother, but there’s her health to consider and …’ He left the fact that Gardiner’s victim was herself likely to face trial in relation to the kidnap of her own grandson hanging in the air. Helen could see it might not play well with a jury.

  ‘But what about the stuff you found on his computer?’ asked Darren.

  ‘Well … looks like he was basically telling the truth over that. Most of it’s legal. There might be a few dodgy sites he’s downloaded from, but normally that’d only get him a talking-to and possibly a caution. Given what we know about these people, it’s highly unlikely that Katy Clery was his only real-life victim. We’ll be going over his history and associations with a fine-toothed comb. But I don’t want to make you promises I can’t come good on.’

  Helen sipped at her glass of water. Nelson’s words left a bad taste in her mouth. She’d never accept that Barbara was right to do what she had done; she knew it would take a long time to even get to grips with what had happened, never mind start thinking about rebuilding a relationship with her mother. But however much blame Barbara should shoulder, Helen could see already that she wasn’t the only one at fault. As Barbara saw it (and it was hard to argue with her on this), Gardiner’s actions had wrecked her life – and Barbara’s own crimes were consequences rippling out from the horror that he’d bestowed on her. Why should he walk away with a ‘talking-to’ when he was the cause of so much damage and heartache over so many years?

  Nelson was still speaking, reminding an irate Darren of the newspaper coverage and how Gardiner could hardly think that everything was going to carry on as before even if there weren’t any charges brought against him. In the eyes of the great British public, Simon Gardiner would be a paedo from now till the day he went to his grave, never mind the legalities. A few weeks ago, the old Helen would have railed against trial by tabloid. Now she wasn’t so sure.