Who Killed Ruby

by Camilla Way

  Cleo cannot move. She’s lying on the floor of what seems to be a transit van, her arms and legs bound tightly, her mouth taped shut. It’s very cold, and she has cried so much that snot and tears have dried itchy and sticky on her face. Her eyes are two raw slits. She doesn’t know how long she’s been lying here, only that when she woke with a pounding head and racing heart the van was in motion. About ten minutes later they’d come to a halt and after that there’d been silence. She doesn’t know what she’s most scared of: the thought of him returning or the thought of him leaving her here forever in the dark.

  She wants her mum, she wants her mum so badly; to curl up on her lap like she did when she was little and breathe in her smell and feel her warmth and tell her how sorry she is – for believing that Daniel was real, for bringing this on herself, for the worry she must be feeling. She’s so frightened of her kidnapper, of the hatred and violence that radiated from him before he knocked her out, that when something thumps against the side of the van she screams against her gag, her heart nearly bursting from her chest. But still he doesn’t come. And as she lies there, cold and frightened, she thinks about the danger her mum is in, of how Viv doesn’t realize that the man she thinks she knows is someone else entirely.

  As soon as she sees Stella, Vivienne begins to cry. ‘He’s got her, Mum,’ she says. ‘Jack, he’s got Cleo.’

  ‘We don’t know that,’ Stella replies, her face pale. ‘We don’t know Jack was involved.’

  ‘It’s him! I know it is. She would never ever run off like this.’ Viv’s eyes search her mother’s face. ‘Why is he doing this, what is it for? Revenge? He always said he was innocent. What if he didn’t kill Ruby? What if I got it wrong back then and he’s going to hurt Cleo to punish me?’

  ‘Of course he killed Ruby! He was found guilty!’ Stella’s voice rises in distress.

  ‘But that’s exactly it. What if we were wrong?’ Viv sits at the kitchen table and puts her head in her hands.

  ‘Vivienne,’ Stella says firmly, ‘the police agreed he was guilty and so did the jury. He was there in the house when she died! And what about the other witnesses? Declan from up the lane, and that Morris boy? They both saw him running from the house after she’d been killed.’ She takes hold of Viv’s hands and holds them tightly. ‘You know what Jack was like, what a horrible violent bully he was. Surely you remember how he treated your sister! Nobody but Jack was responsible for her death.’

  Viv stares mutely back at her, knowing that she’s right. And now he’s got my daughter too, she thinks.

  There is nothing left to say and so the two sit silently together, through minutes that feel like hours, until Vivienne tells her quietly, ‘I think Alek was involved.’

  Stella looks at her aghast. ‘What?’ she says. ‘Why?’

  ‘I think he drugged me. He was behaving so strangely last night. I think Jack paid him to get Cleo away from me. And it’s all my fault. Alek used me to get to Cleo. Oh God, Mum, what have I done? What the hell have I done?’

  13

  Cleo hears the doors to the van open and suddenly there he is, towering over her as she blinks in the sudden shock of sunlight. Panic-stricken, she shrinks from him, but he takes hold of her arms and pulls her roughly up to a sitting position. He doesn’t speak until he rips the tape painfully from her mouth and passes her a bottle of water. ‘Drink,’ he says.

  ‘Please,’ she begs, her voice a croak, ‘please let me go home.’

  But he only pushes the bottle closer to her mouth. ‘Drink.’

  She shakes her head, whimpering in fear.

  When he hits her across the face it is so sudden and violent that she falls backwards with a cry, smacking her head on the side of the van. He hauls her back up and forces the bottle painfully into her mouth until at last she drinks. She’s crying so hard that the water spills down her chin but his eyes are expressionless as he watches her. When she’s finished he stoops to put the bottle down and she catches a glimpse over his shoulder of the world beyond the van’s door. It looks as if they are in some sort of vacant lot or builder’s yard, with high corrugated-iron fences, two cranes in the distance. She has no idea how far from home she is; how long they were travelling before she woke.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she asks and almost chokes with terror when he grabs her by the throat.

  ‘You open your mouth one more time, you spoilt little cunt, and I will slice your face off,’ he says. ‘Do you understand?’

  She nods and he puts the gag back on her, then tightens the rope that binds her arms and legs, before pushing her backwards into the van. Slamming the doors shut, he leaves her alone.

  Vivienne stands at Stella’s kitchen window staring unseeingly out at the street for a while, before noticing Shaun loading a box into a large red van. ‘So he’s going, then?’ she asks without much interest.

  Stella comes to stand beside her. ‘Yes. It was all very sudden.’

  They continue to watch him as he throws in a bin bag after the box. ‘Why does he need such a big van?’ Viv asks, remembering the sparseness of his room.

  Her mother shrugs, ‘He borrowed it from a friend, it was the only vehicle he could get hold of.’

  Shaun shuts the van door and pauses to light a cigarette. It strikes Vivienne then that he must know about Cleo’s disappearance, after all he could hardly have missed the police coming to question Stella earlier, or the car that dropped her outside an hour or so ago. And right at that moment he glances around and sees them watching him and for a second or two his eyes meet hers, his expression unreadable, before he turns and gets into the driver’s seat, starts the engine and drives away.

  The hours pass. Again and again Viv tries Alek’s number, but she’s met with silence. No matter how hard she tries to banish them from her mind, memories keep appearing; the two of them in bed together, the touch of his hands, the expression in his eyes as he’d undressed her, the taste of his skin, and she feels a piercing shame.

  She remembers too how he’d said, ‘War changes you, it turns you into someone you never thought you’d become.’ She thinks about his daughter, her refusal to see him, and how he’d once said, ‘She is angry because she believes something about me that isn’t true.’ What had he meant by that? Viv’s thoughts jump from one possibility to the next, but each time draw a blank. She wonders if he’s given Cleo to Jack yet, and horror courses through her.

  How could she have missed Cleo talking to strangers online? What sort of mother lets that happen to their thirteen-year-old child? When she had bought Cleo her first phone, aged twelve, it had been with the strict caveat that Viv would check her internet use at regular intervals. She would not be allowed to take it up to bed with her, and she wasn’t allowed to use social media. At first she had upheld these rules. But gradually, bit by bit, as Cleo had grown older, she’d taken her eye off the ball. Cleo was so sensible, so honest and innocent, more interested in sports and computer games than Snapchat or boys. When Viv had talked to her about online safety, her daughter had been more clued up about it than she had. Each of her spot checks had proven entirely unnecessary. And so, over the past six months or so, she’d let her attention slide. And as a result her daughter had been groomed and lured from her home right under her nose. Self-hatred spills through her, biting and acidic.

  When the doorbell rings, Stella and Viv stare at each other fearfully before Vivienne rushes to answer it, certain that it must be the police. Please, she thinks to herself, please, please have good news.

  But it’s Samar and Ted who she finds at the door. ‘Oh love,’ Samar says as he hugs her. ‘I’m so sorry, darling. How are you holding up?’ He releases her and gazes back at her. ‘I can’t believe it. I just can’t fucking believe it.’

  Wordlessly she turns and they follow her into the house. ‘What have the police said?’ Ted asks her when they’re sitting down.

  ‘I think Alek had something to do with taking Cleo,’ Viv says. ‘I think he drugged the wine and th
e water he gave me.’

  ‘What?’ Samar stares back at her, horrified.

  ‘But … why on earth would he …?’ Ted asks.

  She shrugs helplessly. ‘I think Jack paid him. Remember how strange and quiet he was last night? I thought there was something weird going on with him. Who else could it have been? Someone drugged me, I’m certain of it. Let’s be honest, I barely knew him. Oh God!’ she pounds her forehead with her fist. ‘Oh God, what have I done?’

  ‘Jesus,’ says Ted, staring back at her, aghast, and even through her panic it strikes Viv how incongruous he looks here, mild and stolid amidst such gut-wrenching chaos, dressed in his brown, freshly pressed chinos, his plain, metal-rimmed glasses perched upon his shiny round face. ‘But, I mean … that can’t be … what do the police think? Have they talked to him?’ he asks.

  ‘He’s completely disappeared. They searched his flat and said it looks like he left in a hurry.’

  Samar gapes at her. ‘Shit.’

  ‘The last thing I remember is him handing me a drink of water, then I just … fell asleep. I usually wake up at anything without my pills, but I didn’t even hear Cleo leave the house.’ She presses the heels of her hands to her eyes to try to stem her tears. ‘I’m such an idiot! I’m such a fucking stupid idiot! My little girl, my poor little girl.’

  ‘No, sweetheart. No. They’ll find her,’ Samar says, reaching across and taking her hand. ‘They’ll find her, I know they will.’

  ‘But what if they don’t?’ she cries. ‘What if they don’t, Samar?’

  Over the following hours Ted and Samar stay with Viv and Stella, picking over the lunch Stella makes them without enthusiasm, the four of them waiting in tense silence for news. It’s not until three p.m. that they get a visit from DS Marshall.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Viv says anxiously as he walks into the kitchen. ‘Is there any news?’

  Marshall takes the seat Stella offers him. ‘Aleksander Petri didn’t arrive at work today. He left a voicemail with his department secretary saying he’d had a family bereavement and would need time off.’

  Vivienne’s heart sinks: even though she knew she was right about Alek, a small part of her had clung to the hope that she wasn’t. ‘You haven’t found out anything else?’

  ‘I’m afraid we’ve been unable to locate Cleo on any local CCTV, nor on any bus or train station security cameras,’ Marshall tells her. ‘Which indicates that Cleo was probably taken away by car or some other vehicle.’ He pauses. ‘Unfortunately, the messages from “Daniel” were sent from a pre-paid phone and are untraceable, as are his log-ins to the gaming forum where he and Cleo first made contact. The photos he sent of himself are from a stock photo library, easily found from a Google image search.’

  At this Vivienne puts her head in her hands. ‘Oh Cleo.’

  ‘I want to assure you,’ Marshall continues evenly, ‘that we’re doing everything in our power to find her. We’ve issued a high-risk missing person report, circulated her picture to every force around the country and we’re watching every station and port. We’ve issued a child rescue alert across social media and passed Cleo’s picture on to national news agencies. We’ll be organizing a television appeal later today.’

  As Vivienne listens to him talk, she desperately tries to derive some comfort from his words, some sense that through his efforts her daughter will be brought home to her, but the seriousness with which they’re treating Cleo’s disappearance only makes her terror keener. Jack has got her, of that she’s sure. The man who killed her sister has taken her child.

  When Marshall has gone, promising that a family liaison officer will be in touch, Samar puts his hand on hers. ‘Vivienne?’ he says, looking at her with concern, and it’s only then that she realizes he’d been talking to her for some time.

  She stares at him. ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘I was just saying that they’ll find her, I’m sure they will. She’ll be back home in no time …’

  ‘Sammy’s right,’ Ted says. ‘They’ll catch this bastard, no question.’

  Though she smiles dully at their attempts at comfort, she feels an overwhelming exhaustion roll over her, a desperation to be alone, and she gets to her feet. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I need to lie down for a bit.’ She looks at her mother. ‘Is it OK if I …?’

  Stella nods. ‘Of course. Use my room.’

  And when she sinks onto Stella’s bed, though she’s sure that she won’t sleep, her tiredness nevertheless gets the better of her and oblivion falls like a heavy cloak.

  She wakes an hour or so later to the sound of her name being called and groggily she gets up and goes down to the living room to find Stella, Samar and Ted sitting in front of the TV. On the screen a newsreader is speaking in a voice of urgent gravitas. ‘Police have launched a high-risk missing person’s report following the disappearance of thirteen-year-old Cleo Swift from her home in Peckham, south-east London.’ The newsreader’s face is replaced with a picture of Cleo; she looks so pretty and happy it makes Viv’s heart hurt. ‘Cleo went missing from her house sometime between eleven last night and three thirty this morning. There was, according to her neighbour, a dinner party held at the address last night and we understand that police are talking to guests to try to ascertain when she was last seen. Police say that her disappearance is out of character and they are very concerned for her welfare. They are urging anyone with information to phone the number at the bottom of the screen.’

  The report ends and Stella switches off the television to absolute silence. Vivienne finds she has scarcely breathed throughout the newsreader’s words and takes a gulp of air. They are not talking about her girl, her child; they can’t be. They are talking about an unloved, unnoticed girl, surely, because that is the type who might go missing. A child whose mother doesn’t notice that she’s in danger, a child so uncared for that she’s groomed and taken from under her nose. It doesn’t matter if Vivienne herself was drugged. She had put Cleo in this position, she had not protected her. Instead she had let a man into her house who had planned all along to give her to a murderer, and she had been so blinded and giddy with sex and flattery that she’d let him.

  ‘Viv?’ Samar says. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘What time is it?’ she asks, registering that it’s already dark outside.

  Ted checks his watch. ‘Five thirty.’

  Which means that, if Cleo went out to meet ‘Daniel’ after his text at 12.30 a.m., she has been missing for seventeen hours. ‘I want to go home,’ she says.

  Stella looks at her anxiously. ‘I think you should stay here. The police said they’ll contact you if there’s—’

  ‘No.’ Stubbornly she shakes her head and gets to her feet, desperate to be surrounded by her daughter’s belongings once more, to be able to smell and touch her things.

  Sam and Ted exchange a glance. ‘Well, at least let us drive you,’ Ted says.

  She shrugs, already putting on her coat. ‘Fine.’

  She sits next to Ted as he drives the short journey home, Samar in the back, the three of them staring grimly ahead, lost in their own thoughts. She thinks about when Cleo was first born, how, when she cried in the night, Viv would wake from her own violent nightmares of Ruby and Noah to tend to her. As she held Cleo in her arms during those long, lonely midnight hours it was as much to gain comfort as to give it, her own baby a reminder of what had been lost, and what should have been. Now she clenches her hands into hard fists. She cannot let Jack take Cleo from her too.

  When they arrive at the house it’s to find a small crowd of reporters outside who surge forward as they pull up. ‘Vivienne?’ they call. ‘How are you bearing up? What do you think has happened to Cleo? Is it true that she had an online boyfriend? Is there anything you’d like to say?’

  Viv freezes, struck dumb by this sudden assault, but Ted and a police officer firmly hold the reporters back while Samar takes her elbow and leads her to the door. ‘Is it OK to go in?’ he asks the policewoman st
anding there, and when she nods he steers Viv inside.

  ‘Let me make you something to eat,’ Ted says when they’re standing in the eerily still and silent kitchen, the curtains drawn against the melee outside. ‘You hardly touched your lunch. How about some eggs or something?’ When she doesn’t answer, he murmurs to Samar, ‘I’ll make her some anyway.’

  After she’s pushed her food listlessly around her plate, Samar and Ted sit with her for an hour, but she barely notices they’re there, their attempts at comfort or distraction falling on deaf ears. Instead she stares out at the police and reporters, holding one of Cleo’s jumpers on her lap, the same questions running endlessly through her mind. What does Jack want? What will he do next?

  ‘You should go,’ she says dully, when she sees Samar glance at his watch.

  ‘No way. Or if we do, you’re coming with us.’

  ‘Yes, good idea,’ says Ted. ‘Come and stay with us.’

  ‘Or how about I spend the night here with you?’ Samar suggests when she makes no response.

  But Viv shakes her head. ‘I want to be by myself.’ She needs to think, and having people in the house, even Samar and Ted, makes her more on edge. She wants to do nothing, to sit quietly without anyone telling her that she should eat or sleep, or trying to make her feel better: she doesn’t deserve to feel better.

  When she’s finally persuaded them to leave she goes upstairs to Cleo’s room and stands in the doorway, surveying the untidiness the police have left behind. Taking a seat on Cleo’s chair, she picks up a framed photo from the windowsill and gazes down at it. It’s of Cleo and Layla, their arms around each other’s shoulders, each grinning widely at the camera. They must have been about eleven and look so joyful and innocent it pierces her heart. When her phone bleeps she pulls it hurriedly from her pocket, but seeing that it’s only a text from the gas board lets it drop to her lap, leans back and closes her eyes.