‘Good. Wait up there. I bet you’ve got everyone in place, haven’t you? To trap the mad girl with the kid? To make sure you get the kid and the chems but who gives a fuck about what happens to me?’
I can’t help it. I’ve always wondered what makes people do it. What makes them do extreme things? I’m always looking for the reason that people have done things, the rationale. The human. But Tina’s said it herself. She was always going to make a bomb. It’s just that now her love for her daughter had got in the way. She’s like every other person who decides that they will, for whatever reason, take out another person, or people, to make a point, to highlight their cause. But it’s deeper than that. What I want to know is why Tina herself wanted to do it. Why does someone strap a suicide bomb to themselves? Why would Tina drive around in a car full of explosives? Not from the Magellan perspective, the plans, the group think. But from her point of view. I can’t help it. I have to ask.
‘Why, Tina?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why did you want to make a bomb? Why? What made you do it?’
There’s a long silence and my personal mobile rings. I know it will be Steve or Keith telling me to lay off. I cancel the call quickly.
‘Magellan. Glen and I. Glen’s a chemist and he knew what to get. He knew how to make it. We were going to do it together. Hit them where it hurts. In the pocket. Those businesses are worth billions.’
‘But what about the people, Tina? And what about you? You must have known you couldn’t get away with it.’
‘Yeah. The people. We would have warned them first. Course we would. We had it all planned. And I didn’t care back then. But like I said. Jennifer. And I couldn’t do it anyway now. I had her, didn’t I? And what would she do without me?’ She’s sobbing again and I wonder if I’ve pushed her too far. ‘But Glen would. He said he was still going to do it. He didn’t care about Jennifer, about what would happen if… well, not if, when. Let’s just say he wasn’t going to leave the car outside. We weren’t. We were going to…to…’
‘It’s OK, Tina. It’s OK. None of that’s going to happen now, is it?
‘I did it because of me. Because of whom I am. Was? Started off as just some kid from a broken home living in London, but then when I got more into it and met Glen it was a competition. Us against them. The big corps. And it seemed like the right thing to do. Sacrifice myself ‘cos who am I anyway? Just some girl. Glen didn’t even want me really. Wanted an open relationship. And when I couldn’t do the drugs and the rallies he dropped me like a brick. I nearly did it then.’
‘What? What did you nearly do?’
‘Drove the car up North and did it. Took the plant out. And me.’
‘Was that the plan, Tina? But you didn’t, and that means something, doesn’t it? So the chemicals have been there all that time? In the car? Outside Glen’s house?’
‘Yeah. Well, not all of them. We weren’t going to use a lot at first but Glen kept buying them bit by bit and eventually, well. Still. The more the better. For me, now, anyways. Not that any of you give a shit about me. All you want is the kid.’
‘I do, Tina. I genuinely do. I want everyone to come safely out of this. Maisie’s parents want their daughter back. You and Jennifer…’
‘My little doll. She’s my little doll.’
I focus now. Something in her voice makes me alert.
‘Dolls. You like dolls, don’t you? I saw the ones you made. The ones you cut out and wrote messages on. Did you use a template?’
She’s holding the phone close to her mouth and I can hear every breath. There’s a long pause. Then she laughs again.
‘No. It’s in my head. The shape’s in my head.’
Imprinted. I was right. I play it cool.
‘Right. I’m a fan of birds myself. I always buy tea towels with birds on them, because my granddad had an aviary. I used to talk to the birds.’
I look down the road. Lauren’s car is in the distance, speeding over the hill.
‘And did they listen?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe they did?’
‘My doll listened. Whenever I had a problem or Mum and dad were fighting I’d go and talk to her. Tell her everything. Most of the time it was the only place in the world I wanted to be.’
‘Is that why you’re here, Tina? To find your doll?’
She laughs again. The sound smashes against a little girl shouting for her Mummy and I’m finding hard to keep my patience. But I must.
‘I don’t have to find her. She’s right here. I’m here with her. Like I said, I always come here. But she’s not much help now. No answers today.’
None of it makes any sense. I can't for the life of me think of any dolls in Saddleworth. Not even a toyshop.‘Where are you, Tina? I can come there if you want. To fetch Maisie. Then you can talk. I’ll listen to you.’
She starts to cry.
‘But it’s too late, isn’t it? Even if I get Jennifer back it’ll be the same. I’ll still feel numb and keep crying and she won’t sleep. It’s just not meant to be. So what’s the point of me? Eh? Jan? You’re the one with all the answers. What’s the point of me?’
Lauren arrives and gets out of the car. She slams the door loudly and Tina hears it. I back away from Lauren slowly.
‘I thought you said you were there on your own? I just heard a car door slam. Away from you. You’re not on your own are you? You’re liar, just like everyone else.’
‘Tina. Please. Just tell us where you are and I’ll come and help you.’
She’s hysterical. I can hear her heavy breath and the pounding of her feet. She’s running again and the noise fades into the distance.
‘It’s too late now. Too late. I can’t keep this up anymore. It’s better like this.’
She ends the call. I lean against the dry stone wall, suddenly exhausted. Lauren looks over into the ravine to the left of us, down to the craggy rocks at the bottom. Only two things in the conversation remain with me, the doll and the end. I close my eyes and breathe in the damp air. Right from the start of this I've known that doll shape. I wrack my brains to find it in my memories of the area, but it’s just not there.
I know that Keith has scoured the internet and local officers have been asked about it, but not one person has any recollection of anything to do with dolls around here. But Tina had said that she’s right here. Lauren interrupts my thoughts.
‘Steve’s organising a search of the area now. I think he’s given up on this line. He’s properly pissed off.’
‘Me too. But I suppose it was a long shot.’
I get back into the car and Lauren drives up back along the road until we reach a turnoff.
‘Just pull in here, Lauren.’
I need to think. She gets out of the car and lights a cigarette, which surprises me because I never imagined that she smoked. I can still hear the Red Shoes, over and over again, on repeat in my head now as well as Tina's, and Maisie’s cries are echoing through me. My head hurts and I touch the scar hidden deep in my hair. I need to think fast.
What would I do? If I was coming back here full of fear and I was cornered with no support, what would I do? This is where Tina and I are different. I have a support network, albeit a little shaky in the form of old friends, and shakier still now with one of them giving birth without me being there as I promised. But I had them and my job to haul me out of the mire. I’d do exactly what I did, come home. Back to the place I lived as a child. Tina’s mother said she’d grown up in Uppermill. Behind Dovestones Reservoir. The area around the farmhouse has been searched extensively in the past couple of days but it might be worth another look.
I need to reach down into myself now, to put myself in Tina’s shoes. God knows I’ve been angry like her, demented with desperation, and that’s why I can do this now. That’s why I can mould my thinking into hers, here, in the place she’s come home to. Blind searching hasn’t helped; we’ve had half the Greater Manchester Police force out looking and no one ha
s stumbled across her. But she’s somewhere around here, somewhere close.
We get in the car and I tell Lauren where to go. When we arrive I see the farmhouse where Tina used to live, just as I had pictured it. Nothing changes much around here, particularly this far out. Lauren waits in the car as I walk around it and sit on wall at the side of a huge pine forest. So this is where she would hang out as a child. The other side of the narrow lane was a high dry-stone wall. Unlikely that she would go that way to roam on her own, as her mother put it.
There’s no obvious pathway into the pine forest as far as I can see, but she could have easily climbed over the wall and, once over, she would have had the run off into the huge forest and, in the centre, the reservoir. I’m split between exploring further or going into the village and asking everyone I see if they know anything about dolls or have seen the Range Rover. Or Tina. Although I’m fully aware that, at this exact moment, Steve and Keith will have arranged for resources to do just that. No. My job is to hone in, to find out where Tina is. She’s somewhere nearby and I need to find her quickly, more quickly than a search team.
So I focus. I summon up the blood. I blank out everything else and test my instincts. The doll. It’s where she goes when she is alone. Dolls. I didn’t need to phone Cat or ask Petra what dolls mean. They’re a confidant. Keep you safe from harm. You’re never alone when you’ve got a doll. I imagine Tina rushing out of the turmoil-ridden farmhouse to escape her parents and running towards the only place she felt safe. Running through the pine forest – she would have known every step like I know all of the moorland around my childhood home – and she would still know it now. Those things never fade.
Her own personal doll. A friend when she had no one. Something she could depend on, cling to when times were bad. Something good. By all accounts Tina was a handful her whole life. Maybe she’s always thought that she was less than, a little bad, and the doll represents her good side. Tina hasn’t had a good life. I was solitary by choice and I still am. Tina was forced away by her parent’s domestic situation, and then pulled away from the place she loved, and her doll, to the other side of Manchester.
But her heart was here, and it’s here she’s returned. When people are stressed and isolated they revert to coping strategies they have used before. At a previous desperate time in her life Tina wore her red shoes and went to her doll and told her all her fears. Now she’s back. She knows she’s always there for her. They’re with you always. This doll has certainly been with Tina all her life. Listening to her, at the forefront of her mind. She drawn it and made paper chains. Decorated her house with it. How would she have first found it? And why does no one else know about it? Is it hidden? Is it a doll at all? Or is it part of something else?
Chapter Twenty Four
I hurry back to the car.
‘We need to go into Uppermill. To the visitor centre.’
She puts a blue light on the top of her car and in minutes we’re there. I push past a couple of hikers and Lauren shows her warrant card. I skip the exhibitions of local flora and fauna and go straight for the old photographs. I scan each one quickly and Lauren asks people if they know of any local toy shops. I’m about halfway round when Steve calls.
‘Jan. Any luck? Steve patched me in on the conversation between you and Tina? Do you think…?’
‘Yes. I do think. My professional opinion is that she’s highly volatile and capable of anything. I’m in Uppermill now trying to find out what that doll is. Or symbolises. But to be honest I’m hitting a wall. We’re down to looking at photos in a museum now. No one’s heard of it or seen it or anything remotely like it. But she grew up round here and I’m certain it’s somewhere around where she used to hang out. It’s somewhere around the Dovestones area.’
Steve’s silent for a minute.
‘Bloody hell. That’s acres. We’ve been over it dozens of times with the helicopter. I’ve got people searching areas leading off the roads all around the reservoir. But the trees are dense in some areas. The thing is Jan, if she’s near water with that pure sodium…’
I remember Petra’s films of the effects of the ammonium sulphate and the pure sodium. Her repeated warnings about the combination of the chemicals. Her sad eyes following me when I last saw her, her concern for me.
‘I know. I know. Look. You carry on with the searches and me and Lauren will try to pinpoint her. Let me know if you find anything at all.’
I go back to the pictures. Lots of old artefacts from times gone by but no dolls. Eventually we go outside. I text Tina’s phone telling her to call me. I picture her running through the forest with tears streaming down her face while Maisie is strapped into the car with the story on a deafening loop. I’m lost. Lost for what to do next. Then I remind myself that it’s only because I come from the same area as Tina that I feel so guilty. Other people on the case come from Uppermill. Even Petra, who lives on the other side of the village, can’t make sense of it.
Lauren looks pale and despondent. She’s worked hard on this case and none of it is paying off.
‘Come on Lauren. We’ve done our best. We need to leave it to the search teams now. Problem is that forest is so big. She could have done something before they find her, or got away.’
‘So do you think she’d really do something like that?’
I look closely at her. This case is really getting to her. It’s getting to everyone. I know that grown men in the operations room would be fighting back tears at Maisie’s cries when the last call was relayed into the SMIT suite. We all know the bottom line and the closer we get to Tina now, the worse it will be if we don’t find her and something terrible happens.
From the first moment in Maisie’s bedroom to right now I’ve known that this was not what any of us thought it was. I didn’t buy the organised crime campaign Steve suspected because it was so messy. The problem with investigating serious crime is that when something comes along that doesn’t fit the box we try to force it in. We started with an abducted little girl being held for ransom by a gang of activists who were driving around a bomb.
Now the scenario is very different. A troubled young woman, on the edge of her sanity through her situation and mental state, tried to put things right and made a terrible misguided mistake in her desperation. Spiralling ever downwards, she’s now in a car full of water-explosive chemicals on the edge of a reservoir with a child she abducted by mistake. But she’s asking for help so there’s still a chance.
Lauren lights another cigarette and I go to take one, but don’t. Stay strong, Jan. What would you do? Follow her through every step. You need help but you’ve got no one to talk to. You’re blind with desperation and not of this world through fear. People have let you down and you can’t trust anyone. All you have are the depths of your own self and you’re not even sure if you can trust them. Where would you go? What deity would you consult? Beg for advice?
I’ve been there, awakened from forced sleep and suddenly all alone in a world where you thought you were supported. It dawned on me, like it will have dawned on Tina, that there is no one to help. In her case, no one to take Jennifer for a night while she got some sleep. No one to talk to about the problems you face. No one to tell you that you are doing a good job, regardless of a nagging demon inside that screams ‘Bad Mother!’ No one to tell you that you are acting strangely, never smile and cry all the time. With no audience it’s hard to see yourself.
In my case, no one to advise me what to do next, no sanity check, no reassurance that everything would be all right, because it wouldn’t be and it still isn’t. So when I found myself without a home for the first time, temporarily living in a hotel in London with two weeks to make plans to get the hell out and strict instruction not to discuss my predicament with a living soul, who did I turn to? I turned back time and had an imaginary conversation with my grandfather. He was never the most talkative man when he was alive, but in my visualisation of him he provided a perfect foil for the dilemma I found myself in.
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br /> I managed to convince myself that there was goodness in the world, and that I would be OK. That I could do anything because when you’ve faced what I had then there’s only up. I just hope that’s what Tina is doing now with her dolls. Making a deal with life that she’ll carry on and face everything that is a consequence of this. But until then it’s a battle of wits between Tina and I with this desolate moorland as the battleground. A war to survive.
But what is this doll that no one knows about? What the hell is it? Again, I wonder if it could be something else that she thinks of as a doll. Symbolised. How has she driven to it? She can’t be deep in the pine forest. It’s far too dense to have driven to it. Yet she must be near it, because I heard her running through the trees, branches snapping under her feet. She’s beside the forest. The huge fir tree plantation lies on the far side of the reservoir and that’s where I had assumed she was, because it’s accessible from the road. That’s where everyone’s been looking for her. But what if she’d driven across the moor? After all, no one was looking for her when she first arrived. What if she was on the other side?
The far side of the reservoir is mainly craggy rocks and has no roadway leading to it. There’s a stone pathway that was built for hikers to get from one reservoir to another, but it’s not wide enough to drive up. She could have driven across the moorland from the end of the sailing club entrance and hidden the car in the ravine beside a wide storm drain. There are huge overhanging rocks to shield her and she couldn’t be seen from the road. At the watery end of the ravine is a small plantation of trees, paid for by people whose relatives have been cremated and have no headstone or memorial, but they want something to remember them by.
The plantation was built on the ground of a huge now demolished Gothic mansion called Ashway House. I’d walked there as a child and seen it, and my father told me that it had been the location for a filming of Hound of the Baskervilles. He’d taken me out on the moor many times, and each time he’d told me stories of a mist descending and, if I ever stayed out here, how I could die of exposure. He was diagnosed with early onset dementia and he would repeat the same stories over and over again until I was the only person who would listen to him. But I loved walking with him, seeing the huge house that looked like a castle, nestled between the rocks.
What I Left Behind (The gripping prequel to the DS Jan Pearce Crime Fiction Series) Page 22